Back in the days of listservs, before blogs took their place, I came across an anecdote that’s almost certainly wrong (at least I cannot find any confirmation for it) and that I like very much. It contains a lot of truth, in my book, even if it may lack historical truth. And maybe I just imagine the whole thing. That’s just as well.
The anecdote goes like this: The pianist Artur Schnabel, famous for his fast and daring interpretations of Beethoven sonatas as well as playing a few wrong notes along the way, and for his, ahem, lovingly abrasive character, had just recorded one such sonata, again with some wrong notes. His producer said, “You could have played this better.” Schnabel responded: “That’s right, but then I wouldn’t have played it just that well.”
As I said, I believe that I read this somewhere, but I cannot find a source, and, like Laurence Sterne’s Susannah, I am a leaky vessel, and thus the story probably never happened, or was told about another pianist, or about another artist, or not at all and I made it all up. I do not remember. But I like it nevertheless and think it is true, musically and in other respects.
And much recorded music is usually perfect in the sense that all errors and imperfections are sliced out or autotuned away. The result is dazzling but I find that it often goes against the real musical experience of the music in the moment. I do not just mean that perfection can diminish the authenticity of the individual, personal performance of a musician (it can, even though I find authenticity in art to be overrated), or that imperfections make music interesting (they can). What I mean is that music is experienced in a fleeting moment, and that moment is always different. This is true even with recorded music that can be reproduced perfectly: the situation in which we hear it, the side and background noises, the tinnitus in our ears, our attention, the thoughts that float through our minds as we listen, and so on, make each experience unique. If there were a perfect performance, wouldn’t it have to transcend the moment, and thus cease to be music?
I am not sure this is a rhetorical question. The answer may be “no.” Maybe there is a perfect performance in a perfect moment, where everything comes together in a fleeting, perfect experience. And maybe it wouldn’t be perfect if it had not vanished in a moment. My intuition is that this is not the case. But it may be. And I am losing my train of thought.
There’s also truth in Schnabel’s apocryphal (well, invented) quip that goes beyond music: We live in a society that values optimization, the constant improvement of everything. There are long-running roots for this: Think Plato’s absolute good, think Christianity’s perfect God — the idea that there is something absolutely perfect has been with us for a long time, though always with the additional thought that life as we know and experience it is imperfect (shadows on the cave wall, valley of tears and such). So that idea of perfection is not modern. But what, I think, is modern is the idea that we can constantly improve and better things, and as a result, even if we do not achieve perfection, we approximate it, just like a mathematical limit, in the here and now. By now, we’ve adopted this type of thinking in all areas of our life: technical progress, self-improvement, AI gods, you name it. And that may not be that good.
Am I simply restating, at tiresome length, the old adage that the perfect is the enemy of the good? Not sure: I’ve always understood that adage to mean that by pursuing perfection we lose what is good, for example by never finishing a project in our quest to make it perfect. (Every PhD candidate has experienced that risk at some point: the best dissertation is the one that get’s done.) I do not mean that the good but imperfect is preferable because the perfect will never happen. What I am saying is that the perfect, even if it happens or exists, is worse that the thing that is just that good.
The performance that is just that good even though I’ve heard better.
The meal that is just that good even though I’ve eaten better.
The conversation that is just that good even though some of the arguments have flaws.
The day that is just that good even though I’ve seen better days.
The list can go on.
