
The problem with perfection - ciconia
http://www.classical-music.com/blog/problem-perfection
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djaychela
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.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Reading is hard and it takes a lot of time - years - to get good at it.

The trouble (not the right word, but bear with me...) is that improvisers
assume reading is easier than it is. In fact it's exactly like learning a new
language from scratch. _Even if you can already play_ you can expect to spend
at least a couple of years getting to minimal fluency, and much longer to
being able to sight read mid-level standard rep with any confidence.

Oddly, improvisation is the same. You have to work at it for a long time to
get competent.

But I agree with the general point. We've tried to put classical music inside
a glass case to keep it pure. Historically, that was never what the music was
about, and it's tragic that we no longer teach classical musicians to
improvise as well as perform.

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hammock
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.

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girzel
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)

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matchagaucho
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).

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m_mueller
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?

~~~
Synaesthesia
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.

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tomcam
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.

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ethan_g
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.

