PRACTICE MYTH #3
GOAL OF PRACTICE IS PERFECTION
or Practice makes perfect
Photo by Dolo Iglesias
‘You need to practice until it is perfect’. The myth that says music exists only in its perfect form, suggesting that anything less than perfection is without worth. It contains a certain degree of truth and for many pianists is a motivating ideal to look up to. Perfection inspires us, we are driven and pushed by it in our work.
It also romanticizes the idea that playing an instrument is and shall only be an act of purity, precision, and transcendence. With this view, we are not allowed to be flawed, incomplete, contradictory, or awkward. In other words, ‘normal’. Deciding to sit at the piano, allowing our flaws and imperfections to emerge is a challenge many of us face daily.
It is worth noticing that of our best work comes out only when we are able to move beyond that point: we shall collect all the limited tools that we can gather and get our hands dirty. Even the Renaissance masterpiece ‘David’ was initially just a huge, cumbersome piece of marble: Michelangelo used a hammer and chisel to carve out the figure. In other words, we must start hitting the rock, roughly at first, until our view gets more sophisticated and our craft more accurate.
We must decide that it is worth doing our best even if it’s not going to be perfect. If it turns out to be perfect in the end, even better!
Perfection as a model to refine practice, not a goal for its own sake.
The path to perfection is too long: realizing that might be overwhelming. Worse, the better we get, the farther away it seems to move. Practicing piano until the music sounds perfect is not always an inspiring motivation, particularly if you are already giving it blood, sweat and tears and the results are still not quite right.
I sometimes wonder whether our search for perfection is motivated by the genuine need for a piece of art to exist in the world, beautifully and immutably, demanding our complete sacrifice and devotion to the cause, or perhaps it is a caprice of our inner Narcissus, wanting to see his own perfection mirrored in the performance.
Regardless of what you think of that, perfection is something to strive for, to imagine and to regard as our model. Use it to refine your taste and to practice better: don’t judge yourself against it.
The goal of practice is not perfection. Rather, we practice to make the music better than before. In fact, there are always plenty of ways for your music to improve. Ask those internationally recognised, world-class performers, who sounded perfect already in their teens. They continue working at it, day after day, just to play better than they already do.
Perhaps you have recently sat at the piano, focused and clear minded, confident and prepared, sure that your piece will sound absolutely amazing. Ready to enjoy your own performance, very soon after you have begun, you’ll realize the situation is not so good. You try again, more focused this time, but the result is no better, same mistakes. And again, although now you are less confident and clear minded. More mistakes appear. Sound familiar?
Every pianist has experienced that, in a way or another. I mean the desire of being recipients of a perfection that falls from the sky, because we are committed, focused and because we practice enough.
Here are few things you could do instead: if any wrong note, take care of it, try different fingers; if the pedal is not clean, adjust it; sure tempo is correct? If not, figure out why. It sounds wrong but you don’t know what to do: listen with more attention to the sound you are making, until the problem emerges and the situation becomes slightly more clear. In other words, get your hands dirty and forget about perfection. If by the end of your practice session your piece sounds better by even just one parameter, that was a successful session (this is what my teacher used to tell me).
Alberto L. Ferro
I teach at the London Contemporary School of Piano, open to all students in UK and abroad. For inquiries contact me or the school directly.
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