Cynthia Cathcart wrote:
Traditional musicians can sound dead-wooden as well, but luckily they tend to be fewer and farther between. Does anyone have theories on why this seems to be so?Not just traditional, but self-taught in general, or informally taught. I don't think that people with no musical talent (or interest) try to learn informally, meaning that people who learn that way are likely to be expressive. On the other hand, plenty of children are put through formal musical tuition and if they have advanced motor skills and a mathematical approach to reading symbols on paper, they may be surprisingly successful despite no innate 'musicality'. This is a bit hard because I think all human beings are innately musical.
It does not help that many trained orchestral musicians actually hear traditional techniques as 'wrong' and that's the end of it. Once you are taught to consider one approach wrong and another right, you're pretty much locked in.
In a way, trained musicians are more traditional than traditional musicians...
David
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