Perfectionism and The Piano
In our household our Dad paid the piano teacher a bit extra to come to the house at 7.30am every Sunday to assess the progress of our daily practice sessions through the week. There was something utterly ridiculous about a large middle-aged man in a suit arriving at the crack of dawn, often in pitch darkness during the Scottish winter with some crumpled Beethoven under his arm, but that was how it was.
Surveillance, a pencil sketch reflecting on the daily practice at the ivories as a child.
The piano itself was incongruous in its camp-ness - a sexy, white, 1970s Yamaha which sat glamorously in the living room, the seat of our dad’s authority, scrutiny and punishment. Its appearance promised show tunes and good times but more often than not emitted stuttering Bach interspersed with sobs. The irony being that between our heavily policed practice sessions, my Dad himself would joyfully bang out Ye Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond, the only thing in his repertoire, hence why we needed the teacher.
The only authorised way out of the daily surveillance sessions and the rude Sunday morning awakenings, was to pass the top grade with a top mark. Thankfully, piano came fairly naturally to me and I knuckled down, worked hard and secured my escape route with a Grade 8 distinction aged 13 when I vowed never to let him hear me play it again. My siblings were not so lucky, plonking on miserably into adolescence.
When he died some years ago, it was decided that the piano should come to live with me, though even now, the emotional weight that’s attached to sitting on that very same stool, is almost too much to bear. When it does sporadically happen, I try to keep it light with a bit of Patsy Cline or equivalent, finally giving the piano a taste of the life it should have had.
The learned idea that I have to “work hard in order to be free” has cast a long shadow over my working life as an artist and realising the enormity of my attachment to it has been crucial in helping me understand my recent creative breakdown and how I want to reshape my practice.
I hadn’t ever really thought about how deeply repressed I was. I’m the only artist in my family and I’ve always been perceived by the others as the one who escaped, but I realised this year that I didn’t make it out after all. The deafening roar from my Dad to get it right (not just at piano but across the board), to put the hours in, to be the best, sucked the joy from pretty much everything as a child and has made a creative life as an adult artist increasingly challenging. As I got older, his voice got louder, not quieter even though he’s gone.
As I move into a new era as a different kind of artist, I know I need to lose his voice once and for all and to raise my own as loud as it’ll go. To let go of outcome and achievement and to relish in the moments where I’m lost in the making - that’s where the magic is. To metaphorically learn to play by ear, to be able to riff rather than be tied to the manuscript - the parallels are everywhere.
As I start to loosen the jaws of judging myself, I’m aware there are so many platitudes around this stuff and I know I have to nurture the self-compassion and enjoy the fails and all the rest, but it’s a daily if not hourly struggle. If left unchecked, I will spend 15 hours a day in the studio trying to be perfectly imperfect, doggedly trying to play and experiment just a bit harder, desperately trying to take more risks to impress the new me. It’s exhausting. The progress I’ve made so far this year has certainly been hard fought.
I found this wonderful passage written by the late Danaan Perry, in The Parable of The Trapeze, which has helped me this week.
“I have a sneaking suspicion that the transition zone is the only real thing and the trapeze bars are illusions we dream up to avoid the void where the real change, the real growth, occurs for us. Whether or not my hunch is true, it remains that the transition zones in our lives are incredibly rich places.
Yes, with all the pain, and fear and feelings of being out of control that can accompany them, they are still the most growth-filled, passionate, expansive moments in our lives. “
I am very much flailing around in a transition zone right now and it’s incredibly useful to be reminded that this is it, exactly what I was wanting and where I need to be. Not the route to the next place where I know what I’m doing, but this big, dark, crazy, scary, messy, wild hole of a place is IT.
Learning to play in the studio this week. Kitsch, crazy, untethered… Trying to get comfortable with not knowing.