I just saw Leonard Bernstein’s Omnibus lecture on Beethoven’s Symphony no. 5 in C minor, Op. 67 (listen to it here). The lecture was very moving, to say the least. Bernstein took Beethoven’s initial rejected drafts of the symphony and played them, mistakes and all, commenting on the probable reasons why Beethoven discarded certain notes and instruments. It was the story of how Beethoven perfected this masterpiece.

It might seem funny when someone who keeps writing about failure and creating crap (eg. me) suddenly brings up perfection. But perfection is only a logical followup to our initial crappy attempts at making anything. When we’re ready to take our “failed” drafts from our drawers, that’s the time to fix it, rework it, and make it perfect.

And that takes a lot of work. Even for Beethoven.

Many of us assume that when we hear the symphony today, it sounds so simple and right that it must’ve spilled out of Beethoven in one steady gush - but not at all. Beethoven left pages and pages of discarded material… enough to fill a whole book. He rejected, he rewote, he tore up, he crossed out. He sometimes altered passages as much as twenty times.
-Leonard Bernstein

Writing this symphony took Beethoven eight years. (By this time, he was almost blind and he had been deaf for a while.) Judging from the discarded sketches that Bernstein showed, it seemed like Beethoven’s process was laborious and messy. He was never satisfied of passages that were simply adequate or logical. This piece had to be perfect. All of them had to be.

Imagine a lifetime of this struggle… Always probing and rejecting, and this constant dedication to perfection, to the principle of inevitability… For reasons unknown to him, or to anybody else for that matter, he will give away his life and his energies just to make sure that one note follows another with complete inevitability.
-Leonard Bernstein

What are we waiting for? Let’s take out that failed first draft and turn it into a perfect symphony.

I wonder how it will turn out in eight years.

Screencapture from Omnibus: Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5

When I came over to my partner’s work station last week, I saw that she made a desktop wallpaper that appealed to my sentiments about perfection (which you already know about):

Click on the image above if you want to download it as your wallpaper. A colorful but simple reminder to the perfectionist in all of us.

I had a professor in one of my painting classes who always gave everyone the highest mark possible. From the struggling students to the almost-pros, our grades were almost exactly the same - 100/100.

Of course, chronic absentees were another question - but the lowest they’d get was 80%. This made everyone happy as it made them feel like their work was appreciated, and that there was finally a teacher who didn’t pour her bitterness at us by trashing our work. Cool, right?

Well, no.

It seemed that our happiness was short-lived. My classmates and I stopped doing our best, knowing we were going to be rewarded with high marks anyway. Many of us even stopped showing up, content with the 80% final grade we’d get from our professor. Her attempt to encourage us actually discouraged us.

After thinking about this myself and talking to my other classmates, I realized that our lack of enthusiasm came from three things:

1. Our mistakes, weaknesses, and laziness barely had any consequences.
2. The hardworking students weren’t happy about being rewarded on the same level as those who didn’t exert any effort.
3. We weren’t given any direction.

Now, one could argue that there were consequences to our mistakes, including (but not limited to) artistic stagnation. Also, why would you need a teacher to give you direction? Aren’t you supposed to find that out for yourself?

First of all, students in their late teens and early twenties don’t usually look at long term, intangible consequences of their actions. Who cares about artistic stagnation at 19? Especially if you’re trying to juggle school, work, a social life, and all the drama that comes with being young and uncertain. What we needed were consequences right now. Otherwise, it’d be too late when we learn the lesson.

As for direction, being self-directed is wonderful and rewarding, but not if there’s no third party pointing out the stuff you missed because of familiarity blindness.

That’s why there are editors. The writer knows what she’s trying to do with a story, but can her readers infer this from her work? For this reason, I’ve always felt that editors were there to find the balance between the purity of a writer’s work and the ability of the reader to understand it. They’re not there just to make you feel like an untalented hack, even if they might give off that impression.

Our kindhearted professor may have had good intentions, but by giving everyone perfect praise she left out one of the most crucial elements of creative work - criticism.

Everyone who makes anything creative has to face critics. If you really can’t stand this kind of criticism, especially for the work that seems so personal to you, then you’re faced with two choices:

1. Either do something creative and let people trash it; or
2. look for something risk-free and painless then choose that be your life’s work instead. Just leave creative work to the masochists.

Which choice are you willing to live with?

Image by lusi from sxc.hu