The other day, in a conversation with a friend, I mentioned the various countries I’d be visiting on my upcoming (now current) European trip. Her response, apparently free of irony, was “you are becoming a global brand.”

(Through a series of free-associative gymnastics, my thoughts quickly turned to a summer evening, perhaps fifteen years ago. I was in a small Dutch town, walking with a few friends, when we came upon a field filled with cattle. Separated from the herd was a sweet and slightly forlorn looking calf, sporting an enormous tag with a number, on its ear — a sort of postmodern dollar-store earing. It was the first time it had occurred to me that a living being could be a marketable item, and it led to a brief flirtation on my part with vegetarianism.)

In fact, not only was the remark irony-free, it seemed not to have occurred to her that reducing a person to an item for sale might be deeply insulting. I stared at her dumbly for a moment (I was free-associating in my head, see) and then, rather than start an argument, changed the subject.

Upon further reflection, though, I realize that this was not the first indication I’ve received that the demeaning aspect of the person-as-brand concept might not actually be self-evident. About a year ago, shortly after this site went live, I had a meeting with one of my managers. She was uneasy with the site — the blog in particular — because it was “at odds with the image that we have tried to create for you.”

(She went on to say that any professional person — no matter how public, or not, the profession — inevitably had a public and a private persona, and that my blog had crossed the line from one into the other. This definitely struck a chord with me. I completely agree with the concept in principle - it would be difficult not to - and my primary purpose in starting this blog has been to flesh out aspects of my musical life that might be of interest to a reader who has some familiarity with my playing, but not with me. I never would want to introduce my personal life into the blog. [This is not simply a question of being a private person: I am a musician, and I fail to see why my extra-musical life should be of any interest to anyone. This is an area where I am steadfastly old-fashioned. When a musician seeks attention for non-musical activities, it seems to me, it will inevitably lead to focus being taken away from his or her music-making. Worse still, the implicit message is that music, on its own, is not sufficient to hold the listener’s interest.] However - and this is where the question becomes difficult - the line between the musical and the personal in my life is extremely blurry. My relationship to music is not merely, or even primarily, professional — it is tactile, psychic, visceral, and social. Because of this, I’m constantly re-evaluating what is legitimate blog fodder, and what is best left private, and the manager’s remark troubled me.)

And shortly after that, I received stronger evidence still that my antipathy to being trademarked might be far from universal. While a guest on a radio program, I was asked how I “construct my image.” My response (probably at least somewhat less coherently put than it is here) was that I don’t consciously do any such thing: I simply do the things that I find interesting and rewarding, and hope that there is an appreciative audience for them. This was met with a slightly smirking incredulity: so certain was the host of the show that what I was suggesting was impossible, that I left wondering if I was in fact naively kidding myself. Every time I step on stage, I am, it is true, making a statement through what I’ve chosen to play and how I choose to play it. (Not to mention what I’m wearing, how I walk on stage, how much of my hair is standing on end, etc.) Have these decisions been more pragmatic - not to say mercenary - than I was willing to admit?

The thought is very, very troubling to me. I’m not naive enough to think that the concept of imaging is new (even though the grotesque word itself probably is). Think back to the great artists of the past century –Heifetz, Horowitz, Schnabel, Rubinstein, Menuhin, Toscanini — and you will probably find that you are easily able to attach a distinct set of adjectives to each. This surely is not an accident. The business of music has always found it useful to create personas for artists, and it strikes me as possible that when we refer to an artist as “larger than life,” it may not simply be a question of personality, but a reflection of the feeling that the artist represents, in an archetypal way, certain qualities. It probably goes without saying that any great artist — any ordinary person, really — is more complex than a set of adjectives can suggest, which means that these brandings were, in part, the creation of marketers - long before the term, or perhaps even the profession, existed.

Still, in recent years, the profession of music — and, let’s be honest, our society at large — has taken a distressing turn in the direction of everything being about branding. There are some very concrete reasons for this: modern media has made it possible for information to travel the world instantaneously, and modern travel has made it possible to play one hundred and fifty concerts on six continents in one year. I’m not entirely sure if the cart or the horse leads here, but surely if a musician is to be famous world-over, it’s useful for them to be identifiable in a way that is neither complex nor culturally specific.

One big problem with this, it seems to me, is that it does nothing to encourage artistic experimentation or growth - in fact, it is anti-growth. By this model, the artist has a product, which the audience comes to the concert (or buys the record) expecting, in a fairly specific sort of way. Moving away from this product, in the interest of challenging oneself, might then be professionally risky.

But there is another aspect to this, which is more troubling still: if everything is branded, then everything is also for sale. Again, I am perfectly aware that art has been sold for as long as it has existed. However, there is a very important distinction to be drawn here: while it is perfectly OK for art to be for sale, it is emphatically not OK for the artist to be for sale. I know that I am hardly unique, or even unusual, in that I became a musician because I have very, very strong feelings about music — feelings that I cannot entirely explain, and which are as much a part of me as are my ears or my nose. Put another way, one very important reason that I play the way that I do, as opposed to some other way, is that I feel compelled to do so.

This is why I find it very hard to imagine that the way I play has been driven by commercial considerations. There have been moments when I have sensed that altering my repertoire or certain elements of my playing in City X or Y might be professionally beneficial, and I did not do so. Artistic courage did not come into play: I simply could not see an alternative, just as I could not see cutting off my nose. But in a musical model in which one “creates an image,” would it not simply be expedient to make artistic decisions based on public tastes? After all, for what other reason does one create an image?

These are big questions (and, not incidentally, I would be thrilled if this post started a dialogue around them), and I’m well aware that the modern values that I am decrying here are closely related to other modern ones — equality, access to information, respect for other cultures — that I could and would not live without.

But I am equally aware that I’m not a brand: I’m Jonathan. For the foreseeable future, I will continue to be Jonathan, and hope, for better or worse (or, most likely, for better and worse) that it works out OK.