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On Saturday night, I sat down with my wife and a glass of wine and listened to my CD of Pablo Casals performing the Bach Cello Suites. This is an astonishing recording, but not in the way you may be thinking right now. This recording has many missed notes and intonation problems; the sound is not consistently centered and resonant. But far beyond any of that – and maybe because of it – this recording is beautiful. It flows and sings and dances, and when I finish it I want to hear it all over again. If this recording were made today, though, it would never be released because of the number of “problems” and “mistakes”.
This started me thinking about the state of classical music today, a world so burdened by the goal of perfection that it has become almost the only standard by which performers are judged. Listening to this recording reminded me of listening to Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue”; the music is so pure that the missed notes and intonation seem entirely trivial. The correctness of it is simply not the point. Somehow we have gotten away from the point of making music in the classical world. And in an age where a machine can do anything far more “correctly” than us humans, we ought to pay attention to exactly what it is we are trying to do.
Hitting all of the right notes doesn’t make for a good musician. While accuracy is great, I like to focus on maintaining a beautiful sound, and along the way I do miss some notes, but I think people would prefer to hear something pleasing, rather than perfect. All music we hear today is overly produced (whether it’s classical or other)– I’m going to go pick up a copy of Casals to check this out– I think it’s refreshing to hear it as it was played!
Why is it that we think that the effort toward perfection and musicianship/artistry are mutually exclusive? Certainly it is possible to enjoy music that is a little less than perfect from a technician’s point of view if it is beautifully phrased and well conceived. My question to you is; if it were just as beautifully phrased and well conceived, but also technically sound, wouln’t it be more enjoyable? It has always been my belief that artistry is acheived through technique, not around, in spite of, or burdened by it.
Bob F.