“As a performer, one has a mission, like Coltrane, to take your solo out to talk to God.”
That’s from Patti Smith, a great and uncategorizable artist, describing the saxophonist John Coltrane’s influence on her. In my head, I hear it in Ms. Smith’s South Jersey twang, the delivery blasé and slightly weary. To her, it is a self-evident statement.
Classical musicians are not trained to talk to God. We are trained not to make mistakes.
There are many reasons for this. Few of today’s classical music performers have written music; ideally we strive to be creative in our interpretive work, but primary creation is a thing we’ve only studied, not experienced. That can lead to paralysis. If you don’t understand how something is made, you fear you might deface it merely by engaging with it.
The problem is made worse by the vast recorded history that precedes us. Marketers like to use the word “definitive” to describe venerated recordings, turning them into part of the canon, as much as the pieces themselves are canonical. For young musicians, it is tempting to sidestep the complicated work of discovering and internalizing these works, blood and guts and all. It’s simpler to declare a specific performance sacrosanct and aim to reproduce it.
Playing an instrument well is phenomenally difficult. It takes a lifetime of arduous work and can become all-consuming, making it easy to forget that technical mastery is a means to an expressive end, not the goal. Mastery is a prerequisite if one is to communicate the essence of a piece of music. In and of itself, it is uninteresting.
This fetishization of perfection might not be surprising, but that doesn’t make it any less damaging. You cannot learn or grow while trying to appear as if you have everything figured out. You cannot talk to God by trying to avoid doing something wrong. Perfection is stagnation.
It is not only musicians who are stunted by the search for perfection. The need to be, or seem to be, perfect is harming many aspects of our lives and sectors of our society.
Take education. The debate over grade inflation usually centers on whether today’s students are working hard and performing well enough. More worrying to me is the notion that a G.P.A. of less than 4.0 represents a failure — that the purpose of an education is to accumulate credentials, rather than to learn. The realization that there is more to know about a particular subject should inspire excitement and curiosity; instead, for the performer or student who wants to seem invulnerable, it might inspire shame.
Social media might well be ground zero for this phenomenon. The obsessively curated and controlled Instagram profile has become so ubiquitous that it has birthed a new profession: the influencer. Like just about any societal development, this has some upside. Some voices social media have elevated are genuinely interesting and would have struggled to make themselves heard in an earlier era.
More often, they peddle a lifestyle without the messiness of life. We see idealized homes, idealized bodies, idealized dinners on idealized tableware. What we do not see is the struggle that forms the core of the human experience, that forces us to think in new ways and encourages us to forge connections with people who might see the world in ways we so far have not.
Predictably, this attitude has affected our politics as well. In a culture in which erring is unforgivable, inaction is incentivized. Our society faces serious, complex problems that cause real suffering and that pose serious threats. Finding solutions to those problems will involve imagination and courage, qualities that flourish only when we embrace uncertainty and acknowledge all that we do not, and perhaps cannot, know.
True perfection is an illusion, just as true safety is an illusion. Seeking perfection keeps us from exploring, even when we sense that we would be happier and more fulfilled if we did so. It makes us live smaller lives and stymies our creativity, both as individuals and as a society. It is the enemy of art.
I am a musician, so it is in the musical arena that this phenomenon disturbs me most. The point of a concert is for performer and audience to share something genuine and unrepeatable. A great performance is one in which the player has absorbed the music so deeply that their choices seem not like choices, but inevitabilities. This inevitability can and should change from performance to performance. The preparatory work should be freeing, not constricting, revealing and making accessible the music’s limitless possibilities.
The player should discover the work anew in each performance, and make the listener feel the full wonderment of that discovery. I have been to many such concerts. Each has included wrong notes, or other events that the performer might rue the next day; each has been exhilarating, consciousness-altering. I have been to many more concerts where I felt that the player’s primary goal was to avoid mishaps, to play the piece exactly the way it went in the practice room the day before. I remember little to nothing.
You can hear the virtues of imperfection in a live recording of Alfred Cortot playing Chopin’s Preludes, Op. 28. Four measures into the first prelude, his fingers have already landed on several wrong keys. The performance is riveting not despite the wrong notes but because he was willing to risk them. Lose that element of risk, and you also lose the urgency and inexorability of Cortot’s performance, which gives us access to Chopin’s strange and turbulent world.
Recently, midway through a chamber music tour, I played a concert in which I felt absolutely connected to the music. This is not an everyday occurrence: Usually, a chirping cellphone or my overactive brain interferes, if only for a moment. That evening, though, something magical happened. I felt that I had found the essence of the pieces I was playing, that they and I were in total alignment, even if the performance was far from perfect. Afterward, I floated on air.
I awoke the next day with a knot in my stomach. A lifetime in classical music had conditioned me to clamp down, to aim to reproduce everything that had gone so well the night before. I suspected this was impossible. The concert was no longer a source of joy; it was a noose around my neck.
Then the colleague I had played with texted me: “Last night was special. We have to find the truth of tomorrow.”
The concert the following day was once again, by any measure, quite imperfect. We erred often but we sought the truth and, at times, we found it. Maybe we talked to God.
Jonathan Biss is a concert pianist and an artistic director of the Marlboro Music School and Festival.
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