Do Not Rewrite Reality
My reality, your reality.
I want to respect each for what it is.
A note slightly out of tune.
A trembling voice.
A tempo that rushes.
A moment of uncertainty.
And then comes the urge to fix it.
I understand that feeling.
When we send a work out into the world,
we want to make it as beautiful as we can.
But perhaps a live performance
has a different role,
and a different kind of beauty.
That does not mean
we should leave everything untouched.
Do not hide it.
But do not present it carelessly.
Clean up the noise.
Soften the frequencies that are difficult to hear.
Make the sound more beautiful,
as long as the atmosphere of that night remains intact.
But do not turn
what someone truly played
into something else.
When I watch a live performance,
I am not particularly interested in whether it was perfect.
Of course, I notice mistakes.
But what I watch is
what the musician does after the mistake.
That is when I begin to see
whether this person can create an atmosphere
simply by standing on a stage.
Does the voice carry conviction?
Is there a truly organic relationship
between the performer
and the way the music is expressed?
No.
That sounds too metaphysical.
Put simply:
Is the music alive
in that place?
That is what I am looking for.
So a little wind in the recording is fine.
A voice can tremble.
The balance of the sound
does not have to be perfect.
I would rather something remain
that could only have existed on that particular night.
We may make reality more beautiful,
but we should not rewrite it.
Perhaps this is not only about music.
I, and probably all of us,
would rather not reveal
our weaknesses or the parts of ourselves
that are still unfinished.
But what truly moves another person
may not be a perfectly polished image.
It may simply be
the sight of someone
who is still standing there.
Confidence, too,
is probably not something
we can talk ourselves into.
You stand there again and again.
You fail.
You continue anyway.
You listen to someone else’s sound.
You return to your own voice.
Those accumulated moments
eventually stay somewhere in the body.
And perhaps one day,
when you watch your own performance again,
instead of thinking,
I need to fix this,
you may find yourself thinking,
That night was truly alive.
Whether someone comes to understand this
is ultimately something
only they can discover for themselves.
It is not something
another person can teach them.
So I will simply leave here
what I believe.
Do not hide it.
But do not present it carelessly.
We may make reality more beautiful,
but we should not rewrite it.
And while I may be thinking about someone else’s music,
I know I am saying this to myself, too.
Sometimes I wish
there were another version of me.
Someone who could stand a little farther away,
look at me from a distance,
and say,
You are all right.
But in the end,
the person who stands against me,
and the person who can forgive me,
both live
inside my own heart.