Why does practice does not reduce mistakes to zero per cent?

[rovis77]

Why does practice does not reduce mistakes to zero per cent?

[georgey]

What is a mistake?  How about someone that plays a piece without missing a note but it sounds terrible?   Assuming you define mistakes as wrong notes, notes played unevenly or with sloppy sound, etc:

If the only goal was to play a piece without any mistakes, it might be possible to play it without any mistakes.  You could pick an extremely easy piece and play it very slowly without any thought about musical expression.  But people are always looking to play tougher pieces, or play the piece faster or with greater musical expression.  People are always looking to “push the envelope” within their ability and so we have mistakes.  The goal is to come up with the proper balance of mistakes, difficulty of the piece, tempo, musical expression, etc. 

[visitor]

Why does practice does not reduce mistakes to zero per cent?

because the practice and approach are not being done effectively and correctly

[georgey]

because the practice and approach are not being done effectively and correctly

Could be you are correct.  But "zero percent" means to me that the performer never makes a mistake on the piece during performance (good and bad days).  I'm not sure there is anyone that can claim "zero percent" mistakes.

[iansinclair]

It can reduce mistakes to a very very small fraction of the notes.  Zero?  Dream on.  I don't pretend to be an international level pianist -- far from it -- but before I retired I played and conducted professionally, one or more services pretty much every week for about 40 years.  I don't think there was one, in all that time, which was without at least one mistake.  Usually minor, true -- but there were the odd catastrophes from time to time!

[Bob]

It gets to the edge of the human body and brain can do.

Add a natural process of the system consolidating things, streamlining/pruning, not wasting energy on things that don't seem to need improvement or effort.

And add in error.  It's not like learning or anything human is a 100% 1 or a 100% 0.  It's always a mix.  And then there's everything else going on that can disrupt a process.

Music has pushed as much in as a person can handle.

[ted]

I do play much of my limited repertoire without wrong notes these days, and it is very rarely I hit an unintended note in improvisation, but I don't see it matters that much. If you want absolute perfection, then fiddle your recordings as the professionals do, it's very easy. As has been said, it is easy to play all the right notes and produce an uninteresting result. I prefer to take spontaneous risks for musical effect because safety is boring, especially in improvisation.

[mrcreosote]

Trying to perform it perfect is a fool's errand.

Horowitz, one of the greats, made lodes of mistakes and he wasn't he only one.

Artists that rarely make mistakes have some "savant" in them - if you don't have this, you have no chance since you are an ordinary human.

Try to do the best you can and you called it: you can play perfectly and it can still suck.  Just listen to Cziffra play Chopin's Heroic - it's enough to make a grown man weep.

[hfmadopter]

We see professional recorded performance shows and hear recordings that are perfect because they were edited. Making a mistake is not a catastrophe, the goal is to limit them and not have them derail you. You want to be able to play through a mistake  and not have it stop your performance. But you don't want to unknowingly practice a mistake and it's cause if it's recurring.

I make two common mistakes even in my own compositions ( i mostly only play my own music these days anyway), one is a simple glitch of the finger and it rattles off three notes instead of two for instance, or a slip of the finger off a black key and down hard on the nearest white . The other is thinking I'm in a different key and reaching for a chord or note in another key than the piece was developed in. That can really come off harsh sounding LOL !

Also, besides glitches, if you have a common mistake within a piece that keeps cropping up, look at the run of note ahead of the obvious mistake, starting about 6-10 notes ahead of the actual mistake, you might ( probably will) find the cause of the mistake back there.

[Bob]

There's always another level, and that level might be more efficient at eliminating mistakes than the way you're thinking about things now.

It depends what you consider a mistake.

You could consider the whole thing a giant mess of mistakes. 

It might not be worth the effort compared to investing energy in other things. It might not be the goal to play it perfectly, esp. if it's at the expense of other things.

[zolaxi]

We make mistooks because we are human, not machines.

[bernadette60614]

I've never heard a "perfect" live performance, and I've heard Brendel, Watts, Lupu, Van Cliburn, Goode, Kissin..and many others live.

I think as your ear becomes more sensitive, you can always hear something which could sound better...whether it is a phrasing, expression, whatever. 

To me, perfection is does the performance have the ability to move the listener, and by that metric, I've heard some performances with really clinkers which were perfect because the performance was so expressive or unique.

[beethovenfan01]

I have an anecdote that might explain.

A few months ago, I went to a concert, Marc-Andre Hamelin playing Rach 3. I know that piece well; it's in my top ten all-time favorites! Everything  was just so beautiful and well-done it moved me to tears. And yet, I picked up one wrong note during the second movement. But no one cared, including me. Why? Because there is more to music than "the right notes."

Granted, the composer wrote all those notes and gave them all purpose. But there comes a time in music when the notes are only a guideline. Mistakes? More like deviations from the composer's outline, intended or not. As others have said, a mistake is only insomuch as the performer destroys the atmosphere and musical experience that he has created for his listeners. A wrong note here and there? Pshaw. The only reason we've come to expect note-perfect performances is because of digitally edited recordings that seem to set the standard for live performances as well. The pianists themselves understand this, but sometimes not always the listeners.

[louispodesta]

"Granted, the composer wrote all those notes and gave them all purpose. But there comes a time in music when the notes are only a guideline. Mistakes? More like deviations from the composer's outline, intended or not. As others have said, a mistake is only insomuch as the performer destroys the atmosphere and musical experience that he has created for his listeners. A wrong note here and there? Pshaw. The only reason we've come to expect note-perfect performances is because of digitally edited recordings that seem to set the standard for live performances as well. The pianists themselves understand this, but sometimes not always the listeners."

Thank you for your very well thought-out analysis.  You have attained an analytical mindset/epistemology that most pianists never attain.

Accordingly, this was explained to me in the early 1980's by the classically degreed jazz new world pianist Hank Hemsoth (student of John Perry of UT Austin, BM & MM).  If you have viewed the Film/Movie "Arthur," that is him!

Therefore, as a composer/jazz pianist (who has actually written/composed music most of his entire life), he schooled me on the epistemology of music composition.  That means when a composer first conceptualizes a work, they hear it in their head.  They do not see staves, bar lines, and notes on a page.  The final published score is (and has been for centuries) a very rough approximation of the "sound" the composer originally intended.

As a philosopher scientific empiricist myself, this prior statement does not denote or connote the work of Louis Podesta.  It is instead (citing other sources) the published mindsets of Dr. Clive Brown of the University of Leeds

https://music.leeds.ac.uk/people/clive-brown/, and also Dr. Neal Peres Da Costa of the Sydney Conservatorium

https://sydney.edu.au/music/staff-profiles/neal.peresdacosta.php

Conversely, my coach just recently said to me:  "John Perry said this, and then Leon Fleisher said the same:  " if you want to know how to play Beethoven, then there it is on the Henle Urtext version printed page right in front of you."

Are these two individuals famous?  Yes, they are.  However, they do not have any credentials whatsoever which would have resulted in them publishing in their entire lifetime one single Journal artice to support their thesis.   It is, per the OP's original question, what many of us know as the Music Conservatory, Big Music School propaganda,

In his Memoir, the late Earl Wild, stated that this "Urtext" nonsense performance practice did not exist before the end of World War II.  He quotes the late Jorge Bolet as referring to the "Urtext Mob."  Further, the Curator at the UT Austin Fine Arts library recently stated to me unequivocally that the world musicology community no longer considers Urtext scores as legitimate.

Heinrich Schenker invented Urtext to clarify that the improvisers of his day had every right to put their own spin on Beethoven's works, but they did not have the right to go out and publish these improvisations as the proper way to play his music.  Beethoven was the most famous improviser in all of Vienna, but the fact remains that he never played any piece the same way twice.

Finally, when interviewed by Joseph Horowitz regarding one of his recordings, the late Miecyslaw Horszowski (student of T. Leschetizky) stated that one of the main differences between 19th and 20th century performance practice is that back then nobody got bent out of shape if someone missed or played a wrong note.

Enough said!

[beethovenfan01]

Thank you for your very well thought-out analysis.  You have attained an analytical mindset/epistemology that most pianists never attain.

Thank you for your kind compliment, Louispodesta. I am also a composer, so I have an inside track to knowing how composers work (though of course every composer was and is still unique in his (or her) style of composition). But anyhow, that's not the question. And I believe the OP's question has been answered--no, practice cannot reduce mistakes to zero percent. But it can bring pieces to the point where the term mistake becomes relative, and where a mistake is an aberration in the experience rather than a missed note.

[louispodesta]

"and where a mistake is an aberration in the experience rather than a missed note."

1)  This is nothing other than a "scripted" post by Pianostreet.  If not, then why did no one else respond in kind in the last five days?

2)  There is no performing pianist alive ore dead who has/had ever considered a missed or wrong note as an "aberration."

This is once again the propagandized diatribe of the Conservatories and NASM Certified USA Music Schools.

There is no such thing as a zero based wrong note piano/overall music performance!

[beethovenfan01]

What I meant ... is where mistakes detract from the performance. Sorry being confusing!

[adodd81802]

Why does practice does not reduce mistakes to zero per cent?

I think...certainly understanding what you're practicing is essential. Actually practicing to hit the right notes is very easy, I could sit all day and play a piece in the same room, error free.

The problem is practicing to improve isn't necessarily about hitting the right notes, there's so much to it that it's impractical to achieve 0% mistakes.

Practicing with different pianos, in different places, in front of different audiences on difference stages, different smells, e.t.c all the changes play tricks on your brain. If you can't set yourself up to practice in various different environments you're not going to dramatically decrease your mistake % beyond a certain point.

[Bob]

I wonder if it's a mistake to focus on a mistake-free performance, esp. during the performance.  It's not focusing on what the composer intended probably.

[visitor]

I wonder if it's a mistake to focus on a mistake-free performance, esp. during the performance.  It's not focusing on what the composer intended probably.

bulletproof musician (my favorite blogger and online  coach on this stuff) just wrote about this days ago

https://www.bulletproofmusician.com/how-many-of-our-mistakes-do-audiences-and-other-musicians-actually-hear/

[coolpianoman]

Probably wasting precious practice time going over what you are already fluent in rather than cutting out and quarantining only the bar or few bars where you invariable stumble.  It is an established practice approach for maximising the result from any given amount of time and effort. I literally photocopy my score and cut them out and put them on a plain sheet of paper so I cant be tempted to stray into familiar musical territory. For a master on this and piano practice in general see Graham Fitch!