How exactly is good music performed?

I grew up learning music the traditional way just like most of you. In other words, I learned a few pieces of classical music ever month or two and performed them as close to perfect as possible in various competitions and recitals every year.

Eventually, as my exposure to other musicians has grown, it has become clear to me that there is a very different perspective on learning and performing music. In fact, it is so different that there is a lot of conflict between the two perspectives.

I have talked about this conflict many times here. In summary, the differing perspective is that musicians should focus not on perfecting their ability to flawlessly perform a piece of music but rather on perfecting their ability to create music while performing. In fact, musicians who hold this perspective consider music that is preplanned as inferior to music that is improvised in real time.

Here is what that means in church life. It means that musicians should not necessarily learn an offertory to play in church. They should rather learn how to create an offertory in real time while actually performing it.

That is called music making.

This kind of music making is not polished. It will not be free of mistakes. But it typically has some very important advantages. It is alive. It feels different. It is more honest and reflective of where the performer is. If you do not know what I am talking about, I hope that you experience it some day.

Some reject this kind of approach in church. They say things like “God deserves our best and if you have not practiced your piece, you are not giving God your best.” My response to that is this: maybe yes and maybe not. If you are not practicing your improvisational skills, you are indeed not giving God your best. But if you are working hard (and learning this skill requires much more work than playing a memorized arrangement), the mistakes are not important and the trade off is probably worth it.

The reason I am thinking and writing about this has to do with my own music. Let me be clear. My music is sometimes improvised, but in concerts, sadly, it often is not. In other words, I play pretty much the same thing every time when I am playing with tracks. Tracks tend to force you to do that because you obviously cannot change harmony, tempos and such when you are playing with a track of a big orchestra.

I was reading this article today. The man that owns this blog is a person that I disagree with on many levels but he is very astute in his observations about music (his genre is Southern Gospel).

The gist of his rant was this. Southern Gospel music is bland and unappealing because it is over produced. The spontaneity is gone, largely because of tracks which do not feel authentic and limit the ability of the musicians to make real music. By way of contrast, bluegrass and other folk music may not have the sophistication but does have authenticity and spontaneity that makes music good.

I am not a Southern Gospel musician, but in my heart, I know he is right. In some ways, he is talking about me too.

But what should I do? Throw away my tracks and start traveling with a band or orchestra? That is financially infeasible for almost everyone. After all, even some of the biggest names in any kind of music use tracks rather than live music. I recently went to the concert of a huge star. He travels with a violinist, and cellist and gets a dozen or so local musicians to sit on the stage and play his music (They are there entirely for appearance; I never heard them the whole night over his tracks).

I learned a long time ago that I am happiest and making the best music when I am working with other live musicians. That is why I try extra hard to get live music into my concerts. I had a very special moment this last weekend because I on a whim invited someone to sing that I suspected was a good singer (I was right). It was my highlight from that concert. At a very minimum, I am going to try harder to make it possible for those moments to happen. No, it is not safe, but there is something far more important at stake.