At what point does the pursuit of excellence detract from the pursuit of music ?

[m1469]

Just recently I have realized that the pursuit of excellence can become a distraction to the pursuit of music.  At some point a performer becomes preoccupied with excellence and forgets about music and the purpose of music. 

Interestingly, I wonder which is more distracting and to what degree :  Lack of focus on excellence or too much focus on excellence ?  Both will potentially detract from the music, but I wonder which one does so quicker ?

[leonidas]

Is this musical excellence or something else of which you speak?

Pianistic excellence?

[counterpoint]

I don't have the problem, that the excellence of my playing detracts from the music 

[daniloperusina]

I come to think of a few great pianists with very different approaches. Vilhelm Kempff (according to Arrau) never practiced scales, etudes etc, and didn't pursue 'perfection' in the sense I think you mean. Neither did Artur Rubinsten, Daniel Barenboim, Vladimir Aschkenazy, Sviatoslav Richter, Yevgeni Kissin, Andras Schiff.

On the other hand, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli was notorious for his search for 'excellense', or rather, absolute perfection. Ivo Pogorelich is another one who seems to strive for this perfect technical control. Claudio Arrau also practiced technique on a regular basis.

If you listen to unedited live performances of great artists, many of them make a few slips here and there.

All in all, 'pursuit of excellense', or obsession with technique, doesn't seem to have made anyone of these into great musicians, but their pursuit of music surely have. If anything, some of the more technique-obsessed among them have gotten the label 'great technician'.

I can only see that technique helps you improve your performance, but must not cloud your musical interests. What technique do you need to be able to perform that musical idea that you hopefully have. That's what it all boils down to , I think. Arrau did technical exercises for this, Richter just practiced zillion times to get there, Rubinstein just played.

We who are not already dead or alive legends should perhaps just try to objectively analyse our musical and technical ability and see where we fall short, and try to practice our fallacies away. Always in the pursuit of music!

[leonidas]

Performance itself is in a way a distraction from the core elements of music itself.

We performers deal with dynamic and rhtyhmic subtleties, but the core of music is structured rhythm and pitch relations.
They're handed down to us, and we don't deal in the realm of their creation (except us who compose and improvise also).

But, in terms of performance, we can also be distracted by the singular pursuit of the technical ability to exececute an idea, and neglect the exploration of other ideas.
Sure, it's a balance.

Also, on the 'always think of music' thing, I think it's perfectly possible to play differently with different agendas.
Being technique obsessed means just that, it does not infer that one is musically careless and 'un'obsessed.

[daniloperusina]

...the core of music is structured rhythm and pitch relations.

May I add a thought? That the core of music is also in instrumental timbre? Some things simply make an impact by being played on a particular instrument. I once felt that the Cavatina from Deer Hunter made sense only being played on a guitar. On a piano for example it lost all it's beauty. This is of course something devotees of period-instrument performances will hold on to, but I wasn't thinking in those terms. But where does one draw the line? Bach's Art of Fugue is supposedly just what you describe, purely structured rhythm and pitch relations, a purely theoretical composition, not meant for any particular instrument.

[rachfan]

I believe that any serious pianist always strives for the ideal of perfection, even in practicing and performing a piece 10,000+ times.  Except in rare instances of self-actualization in  effective collaboration and co-creation with the composer during performance, perfection is never attained--but often we come quite close to it.  Rosenthal once said that he had been working on Chopin's little Prelude in A for over 60 years and was still gaining new and deeper insights.  I'm sure that was creating a continually moving, rather than a fixed, target of perfection for him.  But the evolving search itself might have been a form of perfection.

On a practical level, my experience is that some pianists are intuitive, while others (like me) tend to be highly analytical.  One style of playing is not necessarily better than the other.  The blessing for the analytical pianist is that he/she discovers an immense amount of detail in a score.  The curse is that it is not always amalgamated into a unified concept in performance.  Rather, the mind of the pianist is always thinking a measure ahead and anticipating a precise execution for the realization of a coming effect in the details.  While quite correct on one level, it can also lead to "academic" sounding playing--which sidetracks the quest for perfection.  Anyone who has ever studied with an artist-teacher who is highly demanding on managing the myriad of details in a score, causing one to be very preoccupied with it all, can relate to this.

On the other hand, the intuitive pianist might create an extraordinary sense of spontaneity in performance which is a good thing.  Yet, that pianist might also be overlooking some important details in the score due to cursory analysis, thus having a negative bearing on stylish and idiomatic performance--and causing a veering away from excellence.  This will not be criticized as an academic-sounding performance, but instead idiosyncratic playing.

I would see the tendencies arising from personal disposition, philosophical ideals, the impact of teaching, and openness to feedback.  So I believe that the pursuit of music and pursuit of excellence can pretty closely coincide.  But depending on specific forces at play for the individual pianist, I can also see the two aims being at odds.  It's likely situational and might require compromises.
     

[leonidas]

May I add a thought? That the core of music is also in instrumental timbre? Some things simply make an impact by being played on a particular instrument. I once felt that the Cavatina from Deer Hunter made sense only being played on a guitar. On a piano for example it lost all it's beauty. This is of course something devotees of period-instrument performances will hold on to, but I wasn't thinking in those terms. But where does one draw the line? Bach's Art of Fugue is supposedly just what you describe, purely structured rhythm and pitch relations, a purely theoretical composition, not meant for any particular instrument.

I see what you mean, but I fundamentally disagree.

Timbre is a glaringly important element in the presentation of music, but I feel that timbre should be categorised as a 'performance' factor more than a core musical element.

The only constants at the core of music, and the definition of a composition, are the pitch and rhythm.

Part of this opinion is a tad tainted by my loathing of timbral discrimination though, and find it amusing that people can think some music 'sucks' because of the instrumentation.