Better or Worse?

Is it a compliment or a criticism to call someone a 'Perfectionist'? It probably used to be intended as praise but with our contemporary understanding of psychology the comment is now more often to be seen running alongside words like obsessive and controlling.

Musicians engage in perfection every day. Outside nature, there are not many things more perfect than The Marriage of Figaro or Mahler's Fourth Symphony and it's only natural that we should want to honour that perfection by attempting to mirror it in our peformances. But there's undoubtedly a point at which striving for that ideal starts to impede our ability to express it. As current business jargon aptly puts it: 'Better' is the enemy of 'Good'.

One of the main jobs of a conductor, or any other type of leader for that matter, is to inspire a large group of people to achieve more than they thought possible on their own. But if in trying to do so, you push people past the point at which they can express themselves, it very quickly results in a downward spiral of confidence and enjoyment. Without those two things, there's no way anything can improve. The question is how do you know when that point has been reached.

The answer, I think, lies in where our desire for Perfection comes from. As a motivating factor, it kills the joy of music. It completely gets in the way of our ability to express ourselves. As a goal in itself, it is unattainable - there can never be a perfect performance. Apart from anything else, it's going to be a matter of opinion and no two people are going to react in exactly the same way. In fact giving up on Perfection's attainability is the first step towards getting closer to it. Only by accepting little mistakes can you prevent yourself from being the victim of a bigger one. Nothing great was done by anyone who wasted time over-analysing their faults. If we insist on seeing everything with perfect clarity before we decide, we never make a decision. Shakespeare wrote some bad scenes, Mozart wrote a few boring pieces. I doubt it bothered either of them too much. Even the sun has spots.

It is the artist's lot, even perhaps their duty, to be unsatisfied. Musicians will constantly have unfinished business, always have reasons to try and make the next performance better. But those reasons should be about trying to get closer to the truth of what the piece is, not about trying to eradicate the mistakes that marred the previous attempts. The happy performers are the ones that see this journey as a pleasure, as an inspiration, and maybe even realise that beating yourself up about falling short is more about vanity than creativity. As the Buddhist nun Pema Chodron says: 'Do everything as if it was the most important thing in the world, but at the same time know that none of it matters atall.'