4 ms·

The problem with perfection

88 points by ciconia 10y ago

hammock 10y ago
This hits home for me as a musician myself. I have often lamented overly prescriptive scores, for example something from Eric Whitacre. Granted, they are often intended for high school choirs where you have an inexperienced director directing inexperienced singers, so the composer is trying to exert some (needed?) quality control over the end product. But a good director, or even better a good singer, doesn't need every single phrase punctuated by a crescendo and decrescendo, for example. It's patronizing. Similarly, in a given song you may find an ascending line marked/not marked with a decrescendo. What this means is simply "fight the natural tendency to get louder as you approach a higher tessitura." Sometimes this is marked and sometimes it's not. If it's not marked, a bad singer will plow through thoughtlessly (or worse, misinterpret and get even louder as if it were a great big cadence). If it is marked a bad singer might take it too literally. Experience, critical thinking and good, well-rounded musicianship can help you make these performance decisions. But those skills and qualities are becoming rarer. Not just in the field of music, either.
m_mueller 10y ago
My wife who played 4th part viola in an orchestra told me yesterday that Mozart was always the most joy to play - because every part of the score is actually a nice little melody, and that this is pretty unique to Mozart. Maybe that's related to him also being a virtuoso?
- llamaz 10y ago
  Bach was also known to have interesting melodic lines not only in the bass and soprano, but also in the middle voices.
- Synaesthesia 10y ago
  Mozart is such a pleasure to play, he really is a perfect composer, andnclearly a hyperactive mind - when you're paying it the 100th time you're smiling because of all the little details - he invents countless little melodies, and all very satisfying. From an outside perspective people might not understand because his sounds kinda like generic classical music, if you don't listen carefully.
djaychela 10y ago
It's interesting reading this, particularly in terms of the specialisation - musicians not improvising and not composing; I come from a background of having learned much of the guitar by ear, improvising and working out much of the material I learned to play. This enabled me to learn a number of important skills, but my reading is TERRIBLE. I started trying to do it when I had been playing maybe a year or two - my main teacher knew it was an important skill - but I never got on with it and it's always been something I've shied away from; Just about every year I will try to improve the situation, but it's still "The cat sat on the mat", in terms of my reading level - massively behind my playing level, and I find it really mentally demanding to read when playing, and I think this comes from not persevering with it early enough. Many of the musicians I play with come from the other side of this - they are excellent readers (some unbelievably so), but they can't improvise in many cases, and a great deal of them aren't happy playing unless everything is written out for them; many can't simply learn a riff or parts and the overall structure of the song, and then know when to come in; I've had to score some horn section parts with hundreds of bars of rest for them to count before coming in - something I initially thought they were taking the mickey with - and without this they are just as stuck as me trying to read. Different schools of music stress different skills, when really all of them should be practiced, as mentioned in the article; while my reading is still BAD, what I have learned has made me a more rounded musician, and also helped me understand what I'm doing from a different angle; in the same way having played lots of styles of guitar-based music means I am much more rounded and capable than if I'd just stuck to one style. However, the author's voice is not one I've heard much in music education; it's still fairly ghetto-ised.
- midgetjones 10y ago
  I've definitely found it true for myself. My biggest strides as a musician have come from times outside traditional study, where I've just taken an interest in another facet of music. Whether it's recording, reading, listening, transcribing, improvising or just trying to become more technically proficient at my instrument, I always find it helps my playing and understanding as a whole.
- zwieback 10y ago
  So true, almost every musician I've met assigns themselves to one or the other camp. Apparently it's very difficult to cross the chasm on this. I've tried to cross from reading to playing by-ear by forcing myself to perform without any score (admittedly simple tunes) and it's been a difficult transition but I think it can be done with lots of practice. The other direction is probably harder because it feels constraining rather than liberating.
girzel 10y ago
I grew up with classical piano training (though I was never all that good at it), and a few years after moving to China started taking lessons in the guqin (古琴[1]). The main challenge there (apart from the fact that the instrument puts most people to sleep) is that the traditional tabulature simply doesn't give you that much to go on -- the earliest "sheet music" doesn't even indicate rhythm. Not only that, but the contours of each piece are really only meant to be a guideline for playing: there is tempo and rhythm, but it's meant to be very flexible, subject to the mood and expression of the player. The most difficult thing in the beginning was letting go of strict time signatures, and allowing in some elastic silence. My Hanon-trained figures kept wanting to keep the beat, and they told me I sounded like a robot playing... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guqin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guqin
ethan_g 10y ago
This is why I still enjoy listening to recordings from the earlier half of the 20th century, despite the reduced sound quality. Musicians seemed a lot more adventurous back then. Today, many of the top performers sound very similar.
matchagaucho 10y ago
While many Jazz standards can loosely be written on a paper napkin, "perfectionism" exists when a band leader insists on using particular scales or harmonies for improv, or a specific swing feel. This is where sight reading, academic, musicians tend to struggle (considerably).
tomcam 10y ago
The Beatles' recorded music is chock full of little mistakes, as anyone who's tried to learn their music by ear can tell you. Their backup vocals are often quite imperfect. Yet the songs as a whole are irresistible.

88 points by ciconia 10y ago

This hits home for me as a musician myself. I have often lamented overly prescriptive scores, for example something from Eric Whitacre. Granted, they are often intended for high school choirs where you have an inexperienced director directing inexperienced singers, so the composer is trying to exert some (needed?) quality control over the end product. But a good director, or even better a good singer, doesn't need every single phrase punctuated by a crescendo and decrescendo, for example. It's patronizing. Similarly, in a given song you may find an ascending line marked/not marked with a decrescendo. What this means is simply "fight the natural tendency to get louder as you approach a higher tessitura." Sometimes this is marked and sometimes it's not. If it's not marked, a bad singer will plow through thoughtlessly (or worse, misinterpret and get even louder as if it were a great big cadence). If it is marked a bad singer might take it too literally. Experience, critical thinking and good, well-rounded musicianship can help you make these performance decisions. But those skills and qualities are becoming rarer. Not just in the field of music, either.

m_mueller 10y ago

My wife who played 4th part viola in an orchestra told me yesterday that Mozart was always the most joy to play - because every part of the score is actually a nice little melody, and that this is pretty unique to Mozart. Maybe that's related to him also being a virtuoso?

llamaz 10y ago
Bach was also known to have interesting melodic lines not only in the bass and soprano, but also in the middle voices.
Synaesthesia 10y ago
Mozart is such a pleasure to play, he really is a perfect composer, andnclearly a hyperactive mind - when you're paying it the 100th time you're smiling because of all the little details - he invents countless little melodies, and all very satisfying. From an outside perspective people might not understand because his sounds kinda like generic classical music, if you don't listen carefully.

djaychela 10y ago

It's interesting reading this, particularly in terms of the specialisation - musicians not improvising and not composing; I come from a background of having learned much of the guitar by ear, improvising and working out much of the material I learned to play. This enabled me to learn a number of important skills, but my reading is TERRIBLE. I started trying to do it when I had been playing maybe a year or two - my main teacher knew it was an important skill - but I never got on with it and it's always been something I've shied away from; Just about every year I will try to improve the situation, but it's still "The cat sat on the mat", in terms of my reading level - massively behind my playing level, and I find it really mentally demanding to read when playing, and I think this comes from not persevering with it early enough. Many of the musicians I play with come from the other side of this - they are excellent readers (some unbelievably so), but they can't improvise in many cases, and a great deal of them aren't happy playing unless everything is written out for them; many can't simply learn a riff or parts and the overall structure of the song, and then know when to come in; I've had to score some horn section parts with hundreds of bars of rest for them to count before coming in - something I initially thought they were taking the mickey with - and without this they are just as stuck as me trying to read. Different schools of music stress different skills, when really all of them should be practiced, as mentioned in the article; while my reading is still BAD, what I have learned has made me a more rounded musician, and also helped me understand what I'm doing from a different angle; in the same way having played lots of styles of guitar-based music means I am much more rounded and capable than if I'd just stuck to one style. However, the author's voice is not one I've heard much in music education; it's still fairly ghetto-ised.

midgetjones 10y ago
I've definitely found it true for myself. My biggest strides as a musician have come from times outside traditional study, where I've just taken an interest in another facet of music. Whether it's recording, reading, listening, transcribing, improvising or just trying to become more technically proficient at my instrument, I always find it helps my playing and understanding as a whole.
zwieback 10y ago
So true, almost every musician I've met assigns themselves to one or the other camp. Apparently it's very difficult to cross the chasm on this. I've tried to cross from reading to playing by-ear by forcing myself to perform without any score (admittedly simple tunes) and it's been a difficult transition but I think it can be done with lots of practice. The other direction is probably harder because it feels constraining rather than liberating.

girzel 10y ago

I grew up with classical piano training (though I was never all that good at it), and a few years after moving to China started taking lessons in the guqin (古琴[1]). The main challenge there (apart from the fact that the instrument puts most people to sleep) is that the traditional tabulature simply doesn't give you that much to go on -- the earliest "sheet music" doesn't even indicate rhythm. Not only that, but the contours of each piece are really only meant to be a guideline for playing: there is tempo and rhythm, but it's meant to be very flexible, subject to the mood and expression of the player. The most difficult thing in the beginning was letting go of strict time signatures, and allowing in some elastic silence. My Hanon-trained figures kept wanting to keep the beat, and they told me I sounded like a robot playing... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guqin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guqin

ethan_g 10y ago

This is why I still enjoy listening to recordings from the earlier half of the 20th century, despite the reduced sound quality. Musicians seemed a lot more adventurous back then. Today, many of the top performers sound very similar.

matchagaucho 10y ago

While many Jazz standards can loosely be written on a paper napkin, "perfectionism" exists when a band leader insists on using particular scales or harmonies for improv, or a specific swing feel. This is where sight reading, academic, musicians tend to struggle (considerably).

tomcam 10y ago

The Beatles' recorded music is chock full of little mistakes, as anyone who's tried to learn their music by ear can tell you. Their backup vocals are often quite imperfect. Yet the songs as a whole are irresistible.