In the East there is a tradition (quickly dying down) that in order to be a good artist you need to be a good human being.
What this means is that there is an assumption that your art is a reflex of your inner self. A good human being is defined as someone who has put a lot of work in oneself. It means not only that one tries to better oneself, but that one observes oneself, one’s behaviour and the effect such behaviour may have in others and in the environment.
According to this tradition, if you do not do that kind of work on yourself your art will come from superficial layers of your personality rather than from a deeper essential part of oneself.
This of course is too brief an explanation to do justice to this idea, but it is not uncommon in Japan, for instance to find the most accomplished craftsman and artists happen to be Zen Buddhist masters, or zen Buddhist monks (potter, garden designers, cooks, martial artists, painters, calligraphers). The art they produce bears witness that this is a sound tradition.
However I must emphasize that in this tradition “good” human being has no moral connotations whatsoever. The connotation is simply one of work on oneself. So it follows that many of these “good “men are frequently at odds with the social morals of their times (the poet Bassho was ordered to commit ritual suicide because he displeased the shogun. The same happened to the master of the Tea ceremony Sen no Rikkyu. Both men were artists of the greatest calliber, and had spent a lifetime working on themselves and perfecting themselves in order to perfect their art and yet were regarded as bad men by the authorities of the time and society they lived in).
So you could say that in this sense – and if you agree with this tradition – then , yes, one needs to be a “good man” if one is to produce good art.
In the West on the other hand we seem to have adifferent sort of tradition. In the West rather than a complete, selfless and forever perfecting individual, artists are expected to be eccentric, debauched, live dissipated lives, have enormous egos and more or less behave badly.
So most composers and musicians lived dissolute lifes. Beethoven was often drunk, resorted to prostitutes, had terrible social manners and made a mess of his relationship with his nephew Karl and his mother. And yet at the same time he was clearly forever searching for something. He often talked of becoming a better person, and seemed to think that this would result in better music. Schumann was also a heavy drinker, had syphilis and was a vagabond according to his father in law. And yet in his copious writings and diaries, one finds the same yearning for wanting to be better. Even J. S. Bach was considered a troublemaker by the authorities and spend some time in jail. And yet is there a composer more introverted and more seeking of self-perfection? The list goes on and on, and the surprising result seems to be that in spite of appearances, these Western artists were pretty much inserted in that Eastern tradition.
Of course, if one’s definition of a good human being becomes moral or religious, then even if it was possible to agree on such a definition, no one would probably live up to it. The problem here is that no one close up is a good human being in this sense. So it becomes a matter of degree.
Yet there is probably no musician or composer who willingly and intentionally caused harm to another human being for purely personal profit (I may be wrong here). Someone like, say George Bush. Or an arms dealer.
So, like everyone else they had their very human weaknesses, but all of them were seekers after something. So maybe that makes them good human beings after all. Most importantly they left a legacy of joy for all of us. Unlike er, George Bush. (and my bank manager
)
So I would say that to be a good musician one does need to be a good human being in the sense of constantly seeking for self perfection, and that one also needs to experience much intense emotional upheaval, and be able to relate such experiences to music and music making.
Best wishes,
Bernhard.
Topic: Good human beings vs. Good musicians