Monday, June 10, 2013

What Price Perfection?

Is it unthinkable that a musician can learn more about how music works from listening to errors than from listening to right notes all the time?

If so, then I certainly have wasted a lot of time learning how to listen to errors!

But in the process I have learned how great a pull musical tone exerts upon the subconscious, so great that it re-routes right notes turning them into insightful wrong notes, insightful because they reveal the difference between pro forma logic and the non sequitur that distinguishes genius from same-old.

Recently a young composer bemoaned to me the fact that, though many professionals could just sit down and sight-read his compositions perfectly, they had nothing to say about them.  No comment.  So why write?