When is Music Ready to Perform?

Another one here that emerges from a series of conversations with people in different parts of my musical life. ‘Performance-readiness’ sounds like it should be a relatively easy thing to define, but my observation is that there are wildly different views on what people take it mean in practice.

So at one extreme there is the position that a piece needs to be highly polished before it is fit to be shared with others. And, while in many ways I like the commitment to high standards this view implies, in practice it often serves as a procrastination tactic. ‘I’m not ready yet, I need to practice more,’ is a way of avoiding the risks inherent in a performing situation by hiding behind an activity that you’re never going to be judged harshly for wanting to undertake. Doing more practice is always a Good Thing, and so can usefully be deployed to deflect criticism for holding back from performance.

The problem with this extreme is that imagines perfection, or even merely excellence, as a static state that one will eventually attain. The thing is, though, that every time you get better at music, your capacity to perceive other things improve at also increases, so your concept of ‘ready’ always dangles out ahead of you in the future like a mirage that disappears as you arrive at where you thought it was, only to reappear just ahead of you again.

And you learn different things in performance from in rehearsal, so in fact you’ll never actually reach excellence without taking a piece through the process of performance, usually several times, on its route into the state of ‘established repertoire’. The first couple of times will never be as good as the third and subsequent, so the question shifts to that of: at what stage of near-readiness is it good enough to share with others?

The other extreme of the notion of ‘performance readiness’ comes when people share a piece as ‘work in progress’. This is a practice that embraces an awareness of what you learn through sharing music before you feel you have ‘finished’ learning it, and usually takes place in relatively informal performance occasions where a degree of forgiveness is part of the social norms. I enjoy these occasions a good deal – as I enjoyed the new acts/new material nights in stand-up comedy – for the insights they give into people’s process as well as the shared sense of vulnerability and mutual support in the room.

Though I do sometimes find myself thinking; this wasn’t ready to perform yet. It’s not that I want to be judgy about the performances, but I do find my heart sinking during them, and I want to interrogate this response. It’s partly a human response: a frustrating combination of empathy (one knows exactly how it feels to be labouring through something with difficulty) and irritation (there was no need for the performer(s) to put either themselves or their audience through that struggle).

There’s also a musical dimension to the response. A piece of any substance can feel awfully long when performed significantly under tempo , for example. It’s not just the time taken, though, it’s that if the basic motor actions to get round the music aren’t under control, stringing the music together into a narrative rather than just a series of atomised moments becomes much harder work for the listener.

And if the listener is struggling to get the musical narrative to cohere in their heads, it’s likely that the performer(s) are likewise just living moment-to-moment with little cognitive capacity spare to experience musical flow. I think this is key: a performance in which the execution is not fully under control but still carries a sense of intent and communication can still succeed in creating a shared musical experience, whereas one that stumbles along without finding a through-line leaves the listener stranded outside of the music.

Part of this is also, I suspect, about the extent to which the performer(s) actually get the benefit of workshopping a piece. If their entire attention is absorbed by the sheer act of getting through it, there isn’t much brain space to experience growth through the act of performance. But you sometimes hear a performance that is inaccurate or inadequately controlled, but you can hear that the performers(s) are growing as musicians through the process. To witness someone in the act of learning brings a sense of occasion and creativity that is largely independent of technical prowess. I am reminded of Daniel Coyle’s distinction between the Thrash Zone, in which you are floundering about without enough traction to get better at your thing, and the Goldilocks Zone, where you are actively learning from your mistakes.

C.P.E. Bach wrote that you shouldn’t play pieces that sometimes go well, but not always, in public. I find it cheering to think that one of the best keyboardists of his generation had pieces that didn’t always go right, there’s hope for the rest of us. And I think in the context of higher-stakes performances, such as where one has a professional obligation to a paying audience, this is sound advice.

But in less formal, lower-stakes contexts I think there is a value in workshopping music that is as yet not fully reliable, as sometimes you discover thereby what it is that is getting in the way of reliability. The obstacle is sometimes a technical issue (in which case it is more likely to reveal itself in practice) but it can also often arise from your relationship with yourself as a musician, and it might need the presence of listeners to teach you what you need to learn about yourself to sort it out.

Still, I’m with C.P.E Bach on the point that unless it sometimes goes well in practice you’re probably not ready to share. I often used to reassure students in my Conservatoire teaching days that an audience can tell the difference between a well-prepared performance that didn’t go to plan and a performance that wasn’t well-prepared in the first place. The point was to help them trust their preparation, but implicit in that is that you have to have done sufficient preparation in order to have something to trust.