A friend of mine recently told me she doesn’t like her own music, as she finds it stale, predictable, and boring. My first reaction was to immediately argue, that in my eyes I think the songs she writes and plays are some of the most interesting and engaging pieces of music I’ve had the pleasure of interacting with. But it also got me thinking: what does she see that I don’t? Many musicians, when asked how they came up with a musical idea, might simply say “it came to me.” Or “it just happened.” As if the idea was given to them by some mysterious third party, that knows exactly what melody would perfectly encapsulate the emotion that they were trying to convey. The interesting thing about this is to the musician, the basics of playing their instrument is akin to walking or maybe even breathing. As shown by Kosut and Moore in the introduction to their book Just the Reflexive Reflex, actions like walking that don’t necessarily need to be thought about shouldn’t be considered purely mechanical. Why do people walk the way they walk? Perhaps some of it is biology, or habit, or that one ankle injury in 4th grade, or perhaps it is some combination of all of that. In this case, it would be safe to say that the musician’s musical ideas are the fruit of the seeds planted every time that they have practiced, every song they’ve analyzed, and every show they’ve been to. So what my friend sees is simply what is intuitive to her ears and fingers, which is incredibly interesting to me yet very drab to her.