I struggle with this question often, because it’s the most difficult one to understand.

When people say the word ‘purpose’ they often mean something that is useful in any way to people, the world or basically anything. When something is created for a certain use it is purposeful.

If I would follow this reasoning, music is very purposeful. Music is created for the purpose of pleasure. It is created for relaxation, studying, to combat boredom and so on.

I have a few problems with this set of thinking about music. Just to name a few:

.        Musicians put a lot of effort into their work and get very little appreciation for it.

.        Music is always redirected to the listener and not the artist. People don’t really care about how an artist feels making music, they just care about the quality of the music.

So that’s where this question gets difficult. The overall population is never going to respect music the same way they respect doctors. Or people will always think that music is nothing more than a hobby (I’ve personally heard this one a lot).

In my opinion, jobs that are deamed as purposeful like politics, science, etc. all require a very big cognitive capability. Those are jobs that are very purposeful and demanding. Music isn't as important as a doctor saving someone's life, but there is as big of a cognitive and physical labour to it.

Musicians become musicians for the love of the game. We like this challenge, even though it's often seen as a less than job.

The fact that it's difficult, broad has a bright history and very difficult theory attached to it, makes it respected and worth it to learn and perfect.

Perfectionism. I don’t think it’s important to play something perfect.

The tradition is often:

It’s always good to play perfect when the rhythm is perfect or when the intonation is perfect; it’s also always okay to play the phrasing and dynamics imperfect.

I think this is a really bad mentality of music. Why is phrasing and conveying musicality not as important as getting the right notes? I remember music more when I get emotional during a concert opposed to music I hear played by a robot.

Humans are not robots and that’s a good thing. We can convey things on our instruments robots can’t.

This is interesting for me, because I don’t know for sure.

I am intuitive when thinking about phrasing, but not when I'm practising or performing.

I am very intuitive on where to phrase certain things in the music. I don’t think a lot about harmony; I also don’t do any musical analysis on my pieces. From my experience I never really have to do that, because it’s obvious most of the time. My intuition is sometimes wrong according to my violin teachers. In that case, I still don’t analyse the music, I just listen to recordings most of the times. I will also just think about the music. When I am on the train, when I am walking my dog. I am just going thru the music (the violin part or together witht he orchestral/piano part) and think about where the music tends to go the most; this is a musical analysis in some way, but still more intuitive than an actual analysis. I never think about any technical jargon while thinking, I just try to imagine how it could sound the best. I do that very often (with/ without teacher or recordings).

The thinking part is intellectually very formulated; the violin technique is intellectually formulated. So I would say that 90-95% of my music is intellectually formulated.

The question is when is it intuitive? It’s intuitive when I forget what I have thought about before. It has happened to me that I am performing something and forgot how I practiced a certain phrase and just go with the flow. 

This is very easy for me to remember.

I was scrolling through youtube at around 10 years old or so, I found a recording made by Arthur Grumieaux (Belgian classical violinist) who played Bach sonatas and partitas for solo violin. I watched the video, it wasn’t the original album though, it was a ‘reuploader’ who took the recording and put the sheet music to follow with as the video while listening. The first piece I heard from the album was Bach sonata no.1, movement 1: Adagio. This was a very interesting listening experience, because it had so many chords in it. I didn’t know violinist could play chords like that. It was so beautiful that I was scavenging the whole internet to find more recordings by this musician. Ultimately I fell onto multiple violinists and other instrumentalists (like orchestras, etc.).

This had a meaningful impact on me, because it started my interest in classical music.