Artist's statement, anybody?

I'm curious about why, aside from composers, it's not common practice for a cellist or a clarinetist or a pianist to have an artist's statement. Why is creating a written statement about your unique identity as an artist an unusual exercise for Classical musicians? Is it because these artists are primarily focused on being the conduit for expressing the artistic intentions of other people, rather than creating original work? Maybe it's due to the fact that artist's statements didn't become popular until the 1990s. Still, I want to know--and I don't believe that I'm alone in thinking this way--what artists are thinking about, even if they are representing someone else's work. 

I enjoyed discovering this one, courtesy of a quick Google search, by an Oakland-based composer/performer: 

"...My most significant touchstones are contemporary concert music, avant-jazz, and noisy post-punk rock. But I’m wary of genre, and far less wedded to style than to the productive limitations of my materials (principally oboe, English horn, and cobbled-together electronics) and to process (which foregrounds collaboration, improvisation, and a healthy dose of bricolage). I tend to think of the skills inherent to the act of playing music – attention, intention, flexibility, mindfulness – as the real compositional materials that melody, harmony, rhythm and the like are employed to realize, rather than the other way around..."

Interesting to see a very successful musician from another genre (recently profiled in The New Yorker) sharing not exactly an artist's statement, but rather a personal statement about what she doesn't want to be associated with any longer.

Interested in making your own? Good thing that Andrew Simonet wrote this little book, freely available for downloading, to assist you.