On Love and Mediocrity

Or: what being a lousy pianist has taught me

I have been a mediocre pianist all my life. I started lessons when I was four and continued until I was eighteen, and over all those years I became more skilled but never stopped being mediocre. And mediocre I remain to this day: competent enough to play advanced repertoire, but only with lots of flubs and fudges, and never getting close to the speeds and dazzlements of a professional.

Was it ever possible for me to be otherwise? I remember years of local Kiwanis competitions that I never won even when there were only two or three entrants. I remember being jealous of the classmates who played better than me, who were numerous. For my final ARCT exam in piano performance, the culmination of almost fifteen years of study, I scored a 75 out of 100, which was the lowest score you could get and still pass. And I have never wanted to blame anyone but my own dreamy self, who loved to play the piano but not practice it.

My musical awakening came when I was fifteen. I was at the point in my piano curriculum where learning repertoire was complemented with courses in music history, music theory, and counterpoint. The textbook for history was called The Enjoyment of Music, and it came with a CD. Even now, I don’t quite understand how I fell in so deep. But the way the course asked me to listen closely and carefully sunk a hook deep into some soft part of myself. One of the things I remember most vividly from my teenage years is spending hours on the city buses to and from school with my discman and my headphones on, in a state of euphoria. I suspect most people who love music have similar memories. It felt to me like falling in love.

And yet I remained mediocre, even though every piece I learned was newly flushed with meaning. My playing was full of mistakes, my technique substandard, and I had trouble recovering from errors. But it seemed unfair to me that the more skilled pianists, who were chosen for high school showcases and won competitions, were listening to Weezer in their off hours, and seemed so maddeningly incurious about their music. They don’t care the way I do, I thought, in my teenage snobbery. I believed that what I felt for my music should entitle me to something. But as I approached adulthood, I did the necessary thing. I had to admit, in the end, that I wasn’t very good.

This was, I suppose, the source of my rejection of the “do what you love” mantra. I was about to go to university and choose a career, and I chose to study something I didn’t love, almost to prove a point. I believed I understood something that the “follow your passion” didn’t: that love and ability are often misaligned. I decided that passions were for stronger, better people. When I told my piano teacher at the time that I was going to study accounting, he told me he wished he’d done the same when he was young. “I love music, but it sucks as a career,” he said. 

Who were the people who could make a life in music? They were fundamentally different from me, I thought. They were obsessive, single-minded, and driven by something other than love, something crueler and more demanding. They were the elect, and I knew that I was not among their number. I have never been the obsessive type. My inability to play the difficult Liszt passages with accuracy was proof enough of that. 

I believe that love can lead you into deep mediocrity, if you’re not careful. The things you have to do to transcend mediocrity can run counter to love — they’re tedious, repetitive, uninteresting, far from the creative engine. It’s the difference between playing and practicing: when you play the piece, you can relish all its beauty, but to learn the difficult passage, you need to play it over and over in ways that sound ugly. 

My “Holy Grail” piece, the one I would want to play if I could wave a magic wand to make it possible, is Chopin’s Scherzo in B flat minor. I have been working on it, on and off (but mostly off) for ten years. There’s a theme early on with a lyrical, swooning quality, and it thrills me to play it every time. But I can’t play the difficult arpeggiated section convincingly, and I get completely bogged down in the weeds of the middle. I have, so far, not had the patience to clear away those weeds, even after years. 

This is where an obsessive personality and a perfectionist streak come in handy, if it’s powerful enough to overcome the tedium. These were the qualities that I believed belonged only to the elect, the people who always knew what they were meant to do. I now believe there is another way, if you’re willing to step out of love for a little while. It means being patient and stubborn instead, and cultivating a high tolerance for boredom as well as a certain mercilessness toward your work that would be unforgivable from a lover. I will never be a really good pianist, no matter how deeply I care about Chopin. But I have other passions, and I believe I can be merciless.

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Photo by Wengang Zhai on Unsplash