Perfectionists unite

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I can sit for hours making music completely zoned into the experience but doing this is very very tiring mentally and emotionally. Im one of those musicians who works painstakingly slowly. I deliberate over everything and obsess over minute details to the extent that I end up trashing whole sections lol I sometimes feel embarrassed by how slowly I work, but its because I try and load every second with detail.

Anyone else extremely perfectionist

As a pianist and musician in general this has cut my repertoire in half, because there are so many things I can play at home and a lot of them I wouldn't be able to stand playing if someone else was there regardless of my technical errors being minor or my disappointments with the interpretation being very nitpicky.

I've been playing this for over ten years and I'm still not satisfied with the inner voicing and my use of rubato:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9BO-YzSvLs[/youtube]

My piano teacher was very obsessive about ensuring that I make voice leading clear. I would spend absolutely ages trying to make sure that every finger played legato on fugues. I played Mendelssohn's Prelude and Fugue in D. The fugue was a nightmare to learn. My piano teacher would insist that all four voices were delineated perfectly with inner phrasing so I know what you mean when you talk about inner voicings. I think that its one of the harder parts of piano playing because it requires you to think horizontally along parallel planes where the instinct is to think vertically

There is much about music that is counter-intuitive and it's so easy never to realize a lot of the key concepts, this is what separates some guy who can play a nocturne or two by Chopin and pianists like Sofronitsky who probe the depths of the human soul:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9nDMS8mgR8[/youtube]

It baffles me that anyone could play with bel canto that perfect, his playing was so unbelievable that people would go to see the same recital twice in one day because they knew he would come up with entirely new interpretations ad libito. I'm afraid I'll never reach that level of spontaneity with my interpretations. If you've never heard much of Sofronitsky's playing try his performance of the 24 preludes, it's all one performance and I remember it blowing my mind the first few times I heard it, that he could play my favorite interpretations of all twenty four in one night. And you haven't heard Scriabin until you've heard performances like Sofronitsky's vers la flamme.

My family thinks I play wonderfully but I feel as if I utterly lack sensitivity in comparison to Richter, Sofronitsky, Michelangeli, Gilels, Perahia, Cutner, Yudina, Cortot, and Gieseking. Somehow they are able to find and articulate one hundred shades in between mf and mp. And I guess the biggest frustration is that I'm wired to understand what they are doing extremely well, but I'm not wired to do it.

Scriabin is one of my most beloved composers. The poemes the late sonatas.... Maria Yudina was a peer of Sofronitsky I believe. His interpretations of scriabin were among those that introduced me to his music. Martha Argeriche's rendition of Gaspard de la nuit is probably my favourite interpretation of any classical piano piece. Ive never heard it played with such suppleness and clarity

As a vocalist, I seldom spend much time practicing, unless it's a song where I can't easily hear the harmonies in my head (it's usually 12-tone and post-romantic music, like the music of Mrs. H. H. A. Beach that gives me fits, which then causes me to start up Harmony Assistant on my Mac and transcribe the music by hand, so I can play it back and I can hear the the harmonies fit with the melody.)

As a clarinetist, (and I haven't had my Penzel-Mueller Artiste model horn out of the case, nor my beloved Buffet R-13, before I sold it, because of the time constraints put on me by whatever IT job I was working at the time, and the fact that I also developed Carpal Tunnel Syndrome over the years), I got really vicious and perfectionistic while practicing, especially while trying to woodshed a passage. For example, learning the Reger Clarinet Sonata Number 1 was pure hell. Ditto for the Saint-Saens Clarinet Sonata as well as the Poulenc and Brahms Op. 120 No.2.

As an occasional conductor, I ate other intrumentalists, vocalists and accompanists for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. If you ever played under the late and much respected (and feared) William D. Revelli from the University of Michigan, or sang and studied under the enfant terrible of the conducting department of Indiana University--Bloomington, the late Hugh B. Johnson (after he left Bloomington and moved to Indiana, PA, to initially take over as head of the music department at IUP), you'd understand where I'm coming from.

If you think that was bad, you should seen me when I was building my own PCs, and Windows would continually take a crap on everything. I would have installed Windows, all my application, as well as all service packs and system updates, do a hard reboot, and everything would be fine. I'd shut the PC down for the night, start it up the next morning, only to find that the partition table would be totally screwed up so badly that neither chkdsk or any of the third party utilities were able to fix the partition table. If the drive turned out to be ok, starting RegEdit was an exercise in futility, because the registry would be fubar'ed.

I'm also extremely perfectionistic and require a certain level of performance out of my cars, especially since I needed them to be in perfect working order in order to deliver pizza. Most managers didn't want to hear the excuse that you had car trouble, even if it wasn't your fault that you ended up with a flat tire trying to get the order to the customer in 30 minutes or less, or you couldn't get the pizza there on time because of either road condition, or heaven forbid, there was an accident.

Otherwise, I'm a lousy perfectionist.

Maria Yudina studied with Sofronitsky and was there at his debut recital. She absolutely adored him and his wife (Scriabin's daughter!) and often tried to encourage Sofronitsky to make recordings. Sofronitsky, however, regarding his recordings as corpses and didn't like to hear old interpretations because his process was one of constant evolution. People actually had to sneak devices into the pianos he would play and this is primarily how we've received recordings of his play. This is very sad because apparently Sofronitsky could play quite a bit of Borodin, Shostakovich, Mosolov, Feinberg, Roslavets, and Lyatoshynsky as well as all of the standard repertoire.

Argerich is great but she's not always my cup of tea, her Prokofeiv is fantastic but her Scarlatti just doesn't do it for me, not imaginative enough and too anachronistic. I'm not a HIP fanatic but there is a certain threshold for me with anachronisms. I'd kill to be able to play as well as her though. But she isn't an immortal figure to me yet, I just can't place her up there with giants like Sofronitsky, Richter, Feinberg, Michelangeli, Cutner, or Gieseking, because they were formative for me and I have very detailed memories of listening to them. There are wonderful performances and there are those performances that literally define something for me and help me define myself.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKlLPe86Flk[/youtube]

(See the second movement about 13 minutes in)

My standards are really too high though, because for me there are only twenty or so pianists who have done something like that and there are billions of people on this planet. I'm tired of hearing "oh, that was nice" and "how pleasant, how relaxing" instead of "how did you do that, you brought something out of me that I didn't know was there". I guess aside from the perfectionism it's this disconnect about what music is basically about in the first place, is it the same for you? Other people's thoughts on my performances seem so mundane and I wonder if they were receptive at all to what I thought and felt when I played the music.

I hate it when people call my work "pleasant/nice/sweet" >.<

Complexity and beauty (order clarity depth of field). My work is a strugglle to find balance between the two. As an electronic musician complexity can be accomplished with a little technical knowhow and beauty is a pad and cycle5 away. Musicians like Bill Evans and Bach established this balance and their music has a quality we refer to with terms like sublime and transcendent. Its music which makes the psyche resonate at some higher frequencty

I dont know if I can encode my feelings of transcendence that I feel into my music but I know that I can refer to them objectively by creating compositions which work on multiple layers and can be viewed from many angles but which exhibit symmetry clarity depth and motion.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEHWaGuurUk[/youtube]