Thursday, August 17, 2006
(3:34 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Sloppiness
After watching Five Easy Pieces with the mysterious Bitch PhD, I started to regret not having done more with the piano. Specifically, I am sad that I had such a nice keyboard all summer (on loan from the mysterious Marta) and didn't take advantage of it to learn any new pieces. Now learning a new piece seems overwhelmingly laborious -- the only new thing I've learned in the last few years has been the Chopin waltz that's in the same opus with the "Minute Waltz." I think back on all those Hanon exercises left unplayed, which if mastered would've greatly increased my accuracy and sight-reading abilities, and just on the general sloppiness of my approach -- as though I could get by solely on having the "balls" to attempt music that was too difficult for me, and slopping my way through it would be forgivable.There was always this odd disproportion -- I could bluster my way through the "Revolutionary Etude," but never play a simple accompaniment, or serve as a church pianist. I was never comfortable with anything approaching improvisation, prefering instead to play all the way through each piece a million times, at first improving in certain areas but eventually hardening my habitual mistakes into unchangeable features of my way of performing that particular piece. Even with this "new" Chopin waltz, there's one particular measure where I never quite memorized the chords I was supposed to play in the left hand, so I just fake it, every single time, even though it would be a simple matter to get out the music and just look at what it is.
This sloppiness isn't necessarily limited to the piano -- there's an overall impatience with small details, or more exactly with new small details. That's what killed me in high school science classes, not being able to be bothered to memorize the different types of rocks or to gather the various types of leaves. It always seemed transparently like a huge waste of time, an insulting imposition. Something like math or physics made more sense to me because of the obvious logical necessity of everything, and I was initially fascinated by the periodic table -- but simple brute facts that showed no inner necessity were not worth my time.
It's the same with people who want everything to be broken down into clearly defined arguments: I actually hate that. It seems transparently worthless to me, and I never condescend to formulate my ideas in ways that will satisfy them. Partly it's just a matter of not wanting to learn a new game -- just as I have never picked up a new video game in close to a decade, but am virtually unbeatable at Street Fighter II. But it's partly just that I recoil from the idea that my statements will be rejected due to formatting errors, or that the truth can fail to win out based solely on the contingent fact that falsehood was defended with stronger arguments. I went straight for opacity, skipped over clarity altogether -- wanting to be Derrida or something, but without doing all the work, just as I want to communicate the idea that I am playing a very difficult piece without going through the tedium of mastering it, hoping that no one will notice that I'm trying to cover over my mistakes by blurring everything with excessive pedal.
And so there's most often this tension, seldom the calm fluency that humbly refuses to showcase how difficult this all was, how hard-won. I learned one piece well enough to have the calm fluency -- the third movement of Shostakovich's second piano concerto, a piece so difficult that trying to just play all the way through it was obviously not going to work -- and it served as a kind of culmination for my piano career. I finally persuaded myself that I could really do it, that I could really play well and be proud of what I had accomplished -- not to the level of a concert pianist, but at least to my own satisfaction. So strangely useless, though, so closed off -- not a career as a concert pianist, not an accompanist, not a church pianist, just nothing, just myself measuring my own skill by my own standard, sometimes thinking someone is overhearing and duly "impressed," but not wanting to talk about it.
