I met Karen Ramos, a most excellent singer-songwriter, at Blue Mountain Center in 2010. We played music for each other. I happen to know two songs, Girl from Ipanema and Moon River, and they worked for her so I played guitar and she sang and we entertained the other residents a few times. We killed ‘em, but they were an easy audience.
When Karen asked me to accompany her at a fundraiser, I was flattered, and more than a little nervous. We rehearsed. I knew Girl from Ipanema like the back of my hand — I’ve been playing it for more than 30 years now. But Moon River was another story. We rehearsed some more. I practiced the song a lot.
Imperfect
The night of the fundraiser, in the middle of Girl from Ipanema, I became wrapped up in Karen’s spectacular voice and I lost it in the middle of the song. I had to stop and I apologized profusely. We finished the song. The crowd of friends and supporters were very forgiving and applauded. We then nailed Moon River. People came up to me afterwards and told me how much they enjoyed our songs. I believe they were sincere.
Perfect
Yesterday, I was in the VCCA silo. There’s tremendous reverb in the space because of its circular shape and glazed clay walls, so I brought the guitar and my portable recorder in there and played a few things. And I played them over and over because I wanted them to be perfect, and it occurred to me how when we see or hear something live, we don’t expect perfection, but when we watch something that’s been filmed or taped, or listen to a recording, we expect perfection. (Artists strive for perfection during live performances, but that’s another story.)
Suddenly, it seemed especially strange to me that when it comes to documentaries, which are supposed to be documenting real life in all its messiness, we expect perfection. Yes, you’ll see documentaries with some blips in them, but more often than not, these are intentionally included to give a sense of “reality.”
Do we go to live performances to experience the surprise of the “imperfect,” and here I mean a deviation from the recorded version? And why do we expect perfect recorded versions?
Help me out here, people. I know many of you will have interesting things to say on this topic.
More classical guitar music coming soon. In the meantime, you can access the music files on the blog by clicking here.
Eleni
Recorded things are edited and we expect editing to remove ‘imperfections’.
David Licata
I’ll buy that.
But there seems to be a paradox here. Take “reality” tv, for example. It goes out of it’s way to tell the viewer that it’s real and unscripted, that we are watching a life as it is, “unedited.” But we all know that reality tv is not at all real, is manipulated (if not scripted) very finely edited. Yet we expect a certain aesthetic, the reality tv look, the “imperfections” (the things that don’t jibe with that aesthetic) removed.
So maybe what we’re expecting from recorded things is perfect recording apparatus, perfectly operated?
I think I just wrote what you initially wrote.
As always, thanks for the comment!