Idealistic tendencies aside, there is a time and place for most styles of music.

Within the last two months, I’ve played two very out-of-place gigs. On both occasions, I definitely felt like a whore in church. One was a couple months ago, and I was performing with a rock-oriented group. However, the gig was as background music for a fundraiser; we were not at all to be the focus. Because of the music’s intensity, the group crossed the threshold from background to foreground on multiple occasions. And recently, this same group performed as part of a concert series that features many accessible rock bands, yet our set was almost exclusively instrumental and featured many long improvisations. The music was good, but the venue was completely wrong and the audience fluctuated as a result.

While both gigs theoretically went well for the band, I considered our performances rather inappropriate. Now, there is a school of thought that encourages performances of any style in any setting, intentional (i.e., pirating the performance) or otherwise (as the two above). While I can often hold that view, I also know that the music should cater to the event in some capacity. Regarding the fundraiser, our performance was completely functional, and in such cases the musicians are no different than the waitstaff. We were simply offering a service, only it’s not what the patrons may have been looking for. In the second case, we simply weren’t performing in a venue that would have been conducive to our building a following or exposing a (mostly) ready and open audience to something new.

This “appropriateness” is yet another one of the many extra-musical considerations a musician must take into account when promoting him/herself.