Do Orchestral Musicians Actually Like Classical Music?
- Gökçe Kutsal
- Jun 10, 2025
- 6 min read
Updated: Jun 16
* Where I describe clients in my blog posts, I've changed names, instruments, and other identifying details to protect their privacy. Sometimes I'm describing one person, sometimes a pattern I've seen across several. The essence of the experience and what we worked on together remain true.
It's the question almost no working musician asks out loud, because the answer feels like it has to be yes, obviously.
You spent two decades training for this. You've built a career on it. The idea that you might not, actually, love the music you've devoted your life to feels like an unsayable thing — somewhere between heresy and proof you've been faking it all along.
So most musicians don't ask.
But they notice, deep down, that they don't listen to their own repertoire at home. They notice that what they actually want to listen to in the car is something completely different. They notice that the colleagues who seem to genuinely love the rep make them feel slightly fraudulent. And they keep going, because the alternative — admitting any of this — feels worse than the discomfort of not.
Here's what I've seen in my coaching work with hundreds of professional musicians.
The Short Answer
Some do. Some don't. Many used to and don't anymore.
A surprising number never did, and have been carrying around a borrowed love for thirty years without realizing it.
The longer answer is more interesting, and it depends a lot on what got you into the music in the first place... and on what's happened to that relationship over the course of a career.
The Borrowed Love
I work with a pianist in her forties who came to me because of a pattern she couldn't explain:
She'd been preparing for major auditions her whole adult life and somehow, every single time, she'd self-sabotage in the run-up. Not practicing enough. Getting "sick". Choosing repertoire she half-knew.
By the time we started working together, she'd done this so many times she was convinced she had some deep performance anxiety block.
So we worked on the surface stuff for a while... and nothing changed. In her words, the "excuses" kept piling up.
Then, in one session, we got talking about what music she listened to outside of work. She paused. She didn't really listen to classical, she said. She'd never enjoyed it much. She loved film scores, jazz piano, certain singer-songwriters. Classical was just… what she'd trained in. What the proper path was. What her teachers and her family had said a serious pianist did.
Can you believe it??
She'd spent thirty years grinding toward a career in a kind of music she had never, at any point, actually loved.
And just like that, the self-sabotage made complete sense. Her mind and body had been trying to tell her something for two decades, and it had run out of subtler ways to say it. The auditions were a body refusing to keep going.
What's interesting isn't just that this happens. It's how quietly it happens.
(I know, 'quietly' is an AI tell these days, but I don't have a better word for this... believe me, I tried to find an alternative!)
She wasn't lying to herself or anyone else. She'd just absorbed an idea — early, from people whose authority she didn't think to question — that the legitimate version of being a pianist was a classical one. And she'd built thirty years of professional life around an assumption she'd never examined.
She still plays. She just plays film score arrangements, and jazz, and the occasional accompanying gig for a singer-songwriter friend. By her own account, she's happier now than she's been since she was a teenager.
This pattern isn't unique to piano, by the way, though pianists carry it more often than most. There's an opera singer version of this where the person actually loves musical theater or pop. There's a classical guitarist version where the player's real ear is for rock or singer-songwriter material. There's a cellist version where they originally loved fiddle music and got tracked into orchestral playing because they had the technique for it.
The instrument might change, but the pattern is often similar.
The Genuine Love
In contrast, I worked with a brass player who, when this question came up in passing, just looked at me like I'd asked something faintly bizarre.
Yes, of course he loves it. He loves the rep. He listens to Mahler symphonies for pleasure. He gets actively excited when a hard piece comes up in the schedule. He talks about specific recordings the way other people talk about favorite restaurants. When a colleague complains about playing the same excerpt for the eighth week, he genuinely doesn't get it.
This is a real and common pattern I notice with brass and woodwind players in particular. Many of these musicians came to classical music through the rep — they fell in love with the instrument by hearing what it could do in the orchestral context, and that love has stayed largely intact. The relationship between the player and the music feels uncomplicated to them, and they're slightly mystified when colleagues describe falling out of love with it.
So when you ask the question do orchestral musicians actually like classical music?...
The honest answer is: A lot of them really do.
Not all. But the ones who do are not faking, and the music genuinely feeds their lives.
The Career Arc
For most of the people in between (you know, the ones who genuinely loved it once and aren't sure where they stand now), what's usually happened isn't a falling out of love so much as a gradual erosion under the conditions of professional work.
You were drawn in by the music... and then the music became your job. The job came with auditions, judgments, hierarchies, criticism, repetition, schedule chaos, financial precarity, comparison to peers, and the constant low-grade pressure to be excellent.
The music itself didn't change, but your relationship to it did. The thing that used to be a refuge became the thing being judged. The piece you used to put on for pleasure became the piece you have to nail by Friday.
A lot of musicians who think they don't love classical music anymore actually still do — they've just lost access to that joy. The professional conditions buried the relationship under years of evaluative pressure. Sometimes a long break, or a serious illness, or burnout, returns the music to them. They come back from forced rest and find, to their surprise, that they want to put on the recording again. The love hadn't died, it had just been impossible to feel underneath everything else.
If parts of this resonate, the perfectionism post covers what perfectionism does to the joy specifically, and the imposter syndrome post covers the I'm a fraud feeling that often shows up alongside it.
What This Question Is Actually For
Okay I won't dance around the thing the question is really asking:
If you've quietly wondered whether you still love classical music, you've probably also wondered what it means about you. Whether you're a fraud. Whether you wasted your training. Whether you should have known earlier. Whether the answer makes you a worse musician.
But loving the music you play is not a prerequisite for playing it well. Some of the most committed musicians I know are people who respect the music deeply without being in love with it. Their playing isn't worse for it. And some of the most exhausted musicians I know have been trying to manufacture a feeling they don't have, on top of doing the actual job, for years... and the cost of that performance is real.
The useful version of this question isn't do I love classical music (which would imply a yes or no answer).
It's:
What's my actual relationship with this music, right now, honestly?
Has it changed? Why? What got in the way? Is anything recoverable?
If the love I had at fifteen is gone, what's there in its place — and is that enough?
And if I genuinely never loved it, what was I doing this for, and what would I want to do with the rest of my career?
These are bigger questions than a blog post can hold, and they tend to land more clearly with someone in the room. If you'd want that, private coaching is where I do it.
The relationship you have with the music you play isn't supposed to be static. It's allowed to change, and it's allowed to be complicated, and you're allowed to be honest about it without that meaning anything about your worth as a musician.
About
I'm Gökçe Kutsal, a music performance coach for professional orchestra musicians and opera singers, with an MA in Voice Pedagogy, plus coaching and teaching experience since 2017. I work with orchestral musicians, soloists, and audition candidates across Europe, the UK, North America, and Australia — and I write about performance anxiety, audition preparation, and the craft of practice for musicians who already have the technique and are trying to work out why it doesn't always hold up under pressure.
