till you make it

Today I introduced one of my graduate students to the ancient and noble art of faking it, also known as Just Play Something.

He's been called in to play a series of chamber music concerts with a group that's been rehearsing for months--he's replacing someone who got a full-time orchestra job and had to quit the group. The first concert is tonight, and the music is really difficult.

He played some of it for me in his lesson today. After giving him the standard I-could-have-been-more-help-if-you'd-shown-me-this-three-weeks-ago-when-you-got-it lecture, I settled in to help him get through these concerts.

He can't play the music. Can't. That's not to say he never will--it's perfectly well within his capabilities and given some more time, he'll play it great. But he's got to play it tonight. When he played it in his lesson he was doing all of the things I've taught him about practicing--playing slowly, isolating difficult passages, stripping the music down to only a few elements to work on, the whole routine. But (and I think I may have mentioned this already) the concert is tonight.

So I showed him how to cut his losses, essentially: simply white-knuckling and Trying Really Hard isn't going to substitute for the extra months of practice that everyone else has had, so he's got to figure out what's really important and focus on those things. For instance: if he's got to play 7 notes in one beat (and in this music, one beat lasts less than half a second), I told him to get the first note and the last note right, and Just Play Something in between. I told him to make sure that the style and rhythm were correct at all times, even to the exclusion of right notes in the very fast passages. Let's face it: certain mistakes are more noticeable than others, and when it's obvious we can't do everything right, we've got to do the important things right and not worry so much about the rest. I call it pragmatic; I think he felt shocked and a little dirty.

Part of the problem is that playing this way is tantamount to admitting you're not perfect. Even making a statement like, "OK, I've got to get the beginning and the ending of this right" is a tacet admission that there may be some problems in the middle. And it's true that faking doesn't sound as good as real, practiced accuracy, and that discerning ears can tell the difference, but it's also true that it's better to cut your losses than to fall apart completely because you're trying to do everything before you're ready.

Did I mention the concert is tonight?