Nocturne - the ideal player

Nocturne number twenty one,
opus two number eight,
in sea minor.

Imagine the ideal player ...
May I be so crass as to split hairs
between perfect and ideal?
Perfect is a correctness factor of unity.
Perfect allows no statistical fluctuations.
Perfect wears a ballroom gown,
and make up for a wedding.
Perfect has played the piece so many times
so as to achieve a 100% success rate.
Perfect is the execution of a program,
a clockwork deterministic reliable machine,
beautiful in its complexity,
programmed down to every detail,
an unconcious automaton,
fully admiral in its precision and complexity.
Yet, the metric of success came from outside,
and it was a long journey to embody a mentor's metric of success,
their own source was quiet, a distraction.
Perfect is a facade, where the player is but the building material.
The artists is elsewhere.
Their own source was silenced to prevent mistakes.

Ideal accepts statistical fluctuations and finds opportunity in them.
Ideal dresses for comfort, to let the music flow.
For Ideal, makeup is not their concern,
but sitting in that chair, state of mind is.
Ideal has played the piece time and time
again, to explore all corners of its beauty,
honouring each,
to develop a gut feeling,
an intuition.
Technicalities are no longer a distraction,
and the essence can flow
as if it was an extension of the players body, mind and soul,
as if the player is in their own trance,
returning to visit childhood imaginary friends
for a delightful conversation.
Ideal requires relaxation,
which requires safety,
which requires the player to have their own gushing source,
rather than a projection
... of what the communal them are wanting and expecting of the player.
It is a pursuit of a state of mind.
It is the discovering of one's own spring,
and learning what makes it flow

Oh dear player, are you real?

I am my own father figure.
Of course I have a biological father,
and that is a part of me,
but I had the freedom to pick and choose
role models, and make myself in my own image.

-- (c) 2017 DBW, all rights reserved.