Page 42 - How to Shine on Stage

transcendent. The Italian humanists saw the melancholic temperament
as the essence of artistic personality, since melancholy was supposed to en-
able the supersensory imagination necessary for creativity. Philosophers
of the 18th century considered depression a condition for a happy ar-
tistic experience. Even Freud stated that a happy man does not dream,
from which it could be deduced that an artist must be unhappy in or-
der to dream and create (de la Motte-Haber, 1990). From these beliefs,
we could conclude that artists need to be melancholic, depressed, in or-
40 der to create.

The 20th century saw a shift in the study of musicians’ personality,
namely from temperament to motivational characteristics. The signifi-
cance of self-actualization in particular came into focus; the artist was
How to Shine on Stage having a very positive assessment of one’s own spiritual abilities was con-
believed to have a strong desire for it. Knowing one’s own giftedness and

sidered to be the integral part of such personality.
As already stated, most of the research on musicians’ personality in
the last twenty years has been performed by Anthony Kemp, whose work
was consolidated with the publication of his book titled Musical Temper-
ament (1996). Kemp (1981; 1982, in Kemp, 1996) observed that the most
strongly expressed personality traits in musicians are introversion, sen-
sitivity and imagination, intelligence, and anxiety. However, in a later
study (Kemp, 1996), he found that the most strongly expressed personal-
ity traits in musicians were:
1. introversion
2. independence
3. sensitivity
4. anxiety
He also observed differences between different profiles of musicians
(Kemp, 1982, in Kemp 1996), with violinists being more introverted
than pianists and singers, brass players less sensitive than other groups
of musicians, and music educators more extroverted than other groups
of musicians. Among the musicians, string and brass players are con-
sidered to have the most dissimilar personalities (Kemp, 1981, in Butk-
ović & Modrusan, 2021). String and woodwind players are considered
to be more introverted, while brass players, pianists, and organists are
considered to be more extroverted (Kemp, 1996). Singers are more ex-
troverted compared to instrumentalists (Butković & Modrusan, 2021).
Cameron et al. (2015) (2015) also confirmed in popular musicians that
singers were the most extroverted and also the least emotionally stable. It