Perfectionism™
Welcome to the fourth installment of my “™” series where I complain loudly about and then hurl metaphorical sludge at things that musicians say that I think are stupid and that probably you do too.
First Installment: Not Good Enough™
Second Installment: I’m Just Not Creative™
Third Installment: Genius™
Musicians can get insufferably cerebral.
This usually happens when the focus shifts from being on music itself to something more highfalutin. Usually academia.
All of a sudden, you aren’t playing your instrument for the music, you’re playing your instrument so you can be super smart and sophisticated.
And the sad thing is, that most musicians don’t even do this intentionally. They’re bait-and-switched into it by the Musical Priestclass™ who only ever descend from their ivory towers to reinforce the perception of the plebeians that they are, indeed, very smart and have complete knowledge of music, and that if you ever want to amount to anything, you’ll follow their every word.
Heaven forbid they be seen on a regular basis, or for long enough for anyone to suspect that there really isn’t as much depth of knowledge there as they pretend with their fancy robes and accolades.
Whether most musicians realize their affectation or not, though, many of them do aspire to walk the same halls of academia as their professors, and in the process, lose sight of what really got them to care about music in the first place.
Which was, of course, music.
And not the books, histories, analyses, -ologies, and theories that you spend countless hours learning about in music school.
Now, don’t let the fact that all of these things are taught at a university fool you into thinking that these things are the only correct ways to think about things. No, no, these things are only peddled around in academia because some musicologist at some point found out about it, thought it was cool, wrote a book about it, and then marketed the book to the other academicians who then echoed its contents through the chambers of the music buildings ad infinitum until the present day.
And no one ever thought about where this information came from or why we all decided that it was cool or worth mentioning again.
The end.
Certainly, what gets taught in music schools is very robust and isn’t selected arbitrarily at all. /s
Similarly, the techniques and interpretations that professors pontificate at length about are also usually selected arbitrarily, and have been passed down from who-knows-how-long ago without anyone bothering to double-check the details, until what was originally a claim that maybe sometimes we can think about this piece of music this way becomes this is the ONLY way to play it and if you don’t, then you’re a heathen.
Without the foundational knowledge establishing why, exactly, something is done the way it is, students are left chasing incorporeal ideas without any concrete understanding of what it would actually look like if that idea were to come to fruition. Then, when musicians get obsessed over this idea of Perfection™, they base it on these formless, nebulous, phantasmagoric definitions instead of actual understanding.
This leads them to spend incalculable amounts of energy on pandering, people please, and Perfecting™, in the hopes of pleasing their professor, who probably is worried about a bazillion other things that have nothing to do with their enrichment as students.
All of this instead of actually learning for themselves what good music sounds like and taking personal responsibility for it.
Up-Brained, Down-Brained
Alright, taking responsibility sounds like a pretty good idea. So how do we do that?
Humor me for a moment.
People like to talk about right brained and left brained. Let me have some creative liberty here and talk about the up-brain and the down-brain.
You can think of the up-brain as the kind of thinking that happens strictly in our heads. These are the ideas, the symbols, and imagery we create with our speaking and playing. Also, the theories, -ologies, histories, and analyses, I mentioned earlier.
The down-brain is our ability to match what we observe in reality with what we understand in our heads. This involves actually defining things, making them rooted in reality, giving them a concrete form and an identity, and excluding other things that would confuse the definition we’re trying to create.
Most people are chronically and terminally up-brained. Especially in music school. A quick test to be able to tell this quickly is to ask someone who voices an opinion how they got to their conclusions. If they can’t answer, or they blow off the question, they probably believed it because someone told them to.
Classic up-brains. Always terminating their investigations into the unknown whenever someone deemed Very Smart™ or Qualified™ tells them what to think.
The great news is that doing this test simultaneously points out to people that they don’t really have a good reason for believing the things that they do, and honest people will usually take the time to think about things for themselves as a result of your inquiry. And if they don’t, they’re probably not worth wasting your time on anyway.
You can also do this test on yourself. When you notice yourself getting upset or angry, or feeling like your identity is threatened when someone questions a previously held opinion of yours, ask yourself why you believe that in the first place. And if you can’t answer thoughtfully, thoroughly, and independently, maybe take the time to reconsider your opinions or revise your reasons for believing them until you feel confident that your arguments are sound.
Developing your down-brain in this way helps you avoid post hoc ergo propter hocs and other logical fallacies. In other words, believing nonsense instead of things that make sense.
Objectivity in Standards
A permanent deficit of Perfectionist™ thinking includes the inability by its believers to actually define, precisely, what Perfection™ even is in the first place.
I call it a deficit, but for the Musical Priestclass™, this is actually a feature, not a bug. This is because the idea of Perfectionism™ is not a tool designed to help you become a better musician, it’s a tool designed to control you. And the best way to control someone is to make them a slave to something whose whims are ever-changing, can never be defined, and most importantly, never be fulfilled.
But for us normal people who don’t like to control people or be controlled, what we actually want to do is have objective standards of measurement for when something is good.
In essence, applying the down-brain to things that traditionally have been very up-brain dominated.
To start, we have to answer the question of “What do we even want in the first place?” And then from that, derive other questions like how to measure it, and how are we going to know when we have enough of that thing.
That first question there is really important, because without that, we’re relying on someone else’s definition of what is Perfect™ or Good™ or what have you. The important thing here is to note that you have to answer the question of what you want. What are you trying to say?
And then if you manage to say that well, maybe that’s what constitutes perfection.
A Quick Note on the Pareto Principle
Or what I like to call the “good enough” principle.
The Pareto principle1 states that for lots of things, 80% of the results come from 20% of the causes. At least roughly. This means that:
20% of your workers do 80% of the work
20% of the instruments in an orchestra play 80% of the notes
20% of the carpet gets 80% of the wear and tear
20% of your practice time gives you 80% of the improvement
You get the idea.
This, of course, means that your efforts are best spent on that 20% of stuff that’s going to give you 80% of the results, as that is the most efficient way to spend your time.
When you’re developing your objective standards, it’s helpful to have a threshold for when something is “good enough” to be ready for performance or release. Of course, this threshold should probably change depending on what you’re releasing, but typically, I like to think that if something is 80% good, then it’s good enough to release.
If 20% of your time goes to making this 80% of good, then you can expect to release things fairly consistently, and also have a decent level of quality.
Besides, everyone is always a work in progress, so your 80% today is probably not going to be as good as your 80% a month from now, so it’s likely to be a waste of time to try to get your work that’s 80% good enough to that nebulous, undefinable, Perfect™ 100% that people are always hustling after.
Just release it and move onto the next project. The real defeat would be to give up on your projects and never release another thing again, or even worse, release the same quality of work over and over again and never improve.
Other kinds of questions and suggestions on how to create objective standards can be found in my provocatively titled piece “I Don’t Believe in Kangaroos.”
Perfection Unnecessary
Yo-yo Ma’s Masterclass trailer video tells the story of how he made it a goal to perform a piece with absolutely 100% accuracy, which he eventually did.
And then he realized that it didn’t make any functional difference in the way the audience perceived his performance. Or in how fulfilled he felt after the experience
Interesting.
If anyone alive were to be deemed capable of putting on an impeccable performance, it would certainly be Yo-yo Ma. So this, therefore, is evidence that striving for perfection, as if it were an end of itself, is a waste of time.
Case closed.
After all, what is the purpose of music in the first place? Is it to draw attention toward our technical skill? To show off how perfectly we can play?
Or is it more important to be authentic and to show vulnerability? To bring life, and character to the human experience that we all share.
Is this not music's raison d'être?
Yes, it’s necessary to be skilled at your instrument.
What’s more necessary is to be mature.
To be able to handle with dignity and tact the difficult emotions that people are coming to your performances with. Are you going to step on them and give them more to complain about? Or are you going to do your part to ease the burdens of humanity.
That’s the sacred responsibility of musicianship that no one seems to want to talk about very much.
After all, things that are truly beautiful are not things that are perfect, but things that are whole or complete.
To quothe ye olde bible, when God said that his creations were “good,” he didn’t mean that they were Perfect™. Good, according to Strong’s concordance, means ready, complete, or whole2.
No one seems to think that the universal appeal of music—what draws everyone to it, regardless of race, culture, or background—isn’t the “perfection” of it. It’s the story telling. It’s the human desire to create something beautiful and meaningful.
And isn’t that the answer of what life is all about? To create meaning and beauty? To mimic what all of creation so obviously puts right in our faces on an everyday basis?
So we see that Perfectionism™ is just an ersatz substitute for real connection, beauty, and meaning, which is the actual point of music making in the first place.
Final Thoughts
“The aim and final end of all music should be nothing but the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul.” -JS Bach
When we forget this timeless truth, we’re apt to fall for all sorts of nihilistic and antihuman philosophies that seem tantalizing on the surface, but just turn artists into slaves to a nebulous nothing that can never be appeased (because it doesn’t exist!) and can never create any meaning.
The best way to avoid falling for any of these philosophical dead-ends is to always measure what you believe with what happens in reality. Does believing that inspire you to be more courageous? To be more kind? More helpful? Does it make more sense? To be more judicious in your assessments of other people? To make sure that they aren’t taking advantage of you, nor you of them? Are their caveats to your way of thinking that lets you account for the people who are genuinely evil in the world?
So I don’t know man. Maybe you should spend a lot more of your practice time working on the things in your heart rather than just your head. Spend some more time engaging your down-brain than your up-brain.
And above all, don’t let anyone who is chronically and terminally up-brained tell you that you’re dumb or stupid for being more down-brained.
Peace.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
https://strongsconcordance.org/results.html?k=02896