I'm a concert pianist. This is why I seek imperfection.

It is not only classical musicians who are being stunted by the search for perfection. It is harming many aspects of our lives, too.

- Jonathan Biss

Playing an instrument well takes a lifetime of arduous work and can become all-consuming, making it easy to forget that technical mastery is a means to an expressive end, not the goal, says the writer.

(PHOTO: RORY DOYLE/NYTIMES)

“As a performer, one has a mission, like Coltrane, to take your solo out to talk to God.”

That’s from Patti Smith, a great and uncategorisable artist, describing the saxophonist John Coltrane’s influence on her. In my head, I hear it in Smith’s South Jersey twang, the delivery blase and slightly weary. To her, it is a self-evident statement.

Classical musicians are not trained to talk to God. We are trained not to make mistakes.

There are many reasons for this. Few of today’s classical music performers have written music; ideally, we strive to be creative in our interpretive work, but primary creation is a thing we've only studied, not experienced. That can lead to paralysis. If you don’t understand how something is made, you fear you might deface it merely by engaging with it.

The problem is made worse by the vast recorded history that precedes us. Marketers like to use the word “definitive” to describe venerated recordings, turning them into part of the canon, as much as the pieces themselves are canonical. For young musicians, it is tempting to sidestep the complicated work of discovering and internalising these works, blood and guts and all. It’s simpler to declare a specific performance sacrosanct and aim to reproduce it.

Playing an instrument well is phenomenally difficult. It takes a lifetime of arduous work and can become all-consuming, making it easy to forget that technical mastery is a means to an expressive end, not the goal. Mastery is a prerequisite if one is to communicate the essence of a piece of music. In and of itself, it is uninteresting.