On Imperfection

Pour a glass of water at the cafe stand, acknowledge my liberty with a glance at an attendant, and head to the spongy chairs to recover from the shakes before I attempt Chopin.

Fall into conversation with the couple opposite me. “Oh you are a pianist. There was a girl playing last week who was playing Beethoven and giving it all she had, sitting on the edge of the piano stool.”

“Oh I only play Chopin, I wish I knew Beethoven though'. His other Sonata, the one that is not the Moonlight one, I first heard it from a man I met at this very piano, he was there at the hospital because he had a broken finger. He played the Beethoven later at my house and also on a rickety outdoor piano at a beachside cafe.

Anyhow, I dont know it.

I headed over to play, a performance that was full of perforations due to having just got over the flu and still having an inner ear infection. However as usual I stumbled over the simple pieces only to land all the complex jumps later, only to attempt Winterwind and mangle it, with all pieces underlined by a Helfgott-like muttering and frustrated interjections.

(Realize later that they had been talking about me because they had been there for oncology treatment which probably happens on a weekly basis.)

(Beethoven! How dare they!)

Perhaps just as great as providing music for the hospital is making mistakes with applomb. The listeners are in this building because something has gone wrong.

A performance with errors or technical fragility is much more convincing to the brain because we are so used to perfection these days, from robots and programmes and mathematics. I wish to keep you on the edge of your seat, by playing from the edge of mine.

To give all that you've got means more even if it's less, because it is a relative rather than an absolute measure, and physics agrees with me.