on performing ❧ 59
better than I play. Only rarely, and usually in connection only with the briefest
amount of talking, am I equally content with both.
I am not a popularizer, but neither do I believe in rendering a performance
unnecessarily inaccessible. I have always had the superstition, which I fancy in
large measure to have been borne out by experience, that if an artist behaves
according to his own lights, a large segment of the ignorant but potentially
perceptive public will sense his integrity. I do not believe that either children
or adults need to be addressed in baby talk.
I always imagine that I can sense the reaction of any given public, but I
am frequently wrong. There is that kind of applause which is deafening, but
like that of a compulsory high school assembly, it stops as abruptly as it starts.
There is also the applause indulged in, especially by European youth, as a kind
of sport to see how many encores can be extorted. There is, furthermore, the
applause which betrays a mixed public composed of those who are enthusiastic
and those who are bored or indifferent. Fortunately, the combination of sitting
sideways and the limits of my peripheral vision make it impossible for me to see
what is going on in the hall while I am playing. I can judge only by the quality
of the silence. One can tell much about the musicality of an audience from the
way it coughs. In a fully musical audience, such coughing as takes place adjusts
itself to the ending of phrases or to the arrival of cadences.
As a performer, I have been able to solicit and to digest much less criticism
than I have as a writer. A performer must at all costs maintain a state of intact-
ness when faced with public appearances. With no profi t either to himself or
to his public can he walk out on a stage in a state of semi-demolition. But even
with the most bruised and battered manuscript, there is generally time for revi-
sion and recovery. Many of my performances, however, could have profi ted by
more prior criticism and by more time for its assimilation. As a writer, I have
learned in submitting to criticism that while most indications of dissatisfaction
need to be taken seriously, even the most articulate critic has often failed to
identify the real cause of his discontent, that the remedies he suggests are all
too often not the right ones, and that one must search himself for the causes
and cures of what has failed to convince.
But since performance is much less than a totally organic form of art, many
a performance can, by skillful coaching, be patched up to the point of giving
an illusion of a perfection that, however, is only temporary and which can gen-
erally be counted on to disintegrate, except as the experience of performing
at near-perfection may have somehow conveyed insights that go beyond the
domain of mere coaching. As a performer, I have always preferred to be my
own coach, to draw from a work of music the interpretation that I fi nd inher-
ent in it, and to be as little infl uenced as possible by the performances or the
recordings of others. From them, however, I can sometimes deduce general
principles that in my own way I can digest and apply to other pieces.
KKirkpatrick.indd 59irkpatrick.indd 59 2/8/2017 9:57:06 AM 2 / 8 / 2017 9 : 57 : 06 AM
rick simeone
(Rick Simeone)
#1