Desirous or eager to imitate, equal or excel another; desirous of like excellence with another.
One of the most pointless rituals of conservatory life was the march to the library to listen to every available recording of a certain piece of music. This routine part of the learning process assumed an imitative relationship between the student and the recording artists.
I did this too though I felt it was folly.
My feelings about the futility of this ritual were confirmed in a breakthrough moment at the conservatory library.
While attempting to learn the Chopin G Minor Ballade I, like any typical conservatory student, went to the library to hear as many recordings I could find of this piece. I might have sat through a dozen or so recordings by pianists of varied fame before spotting a strange item in the card catalogue. I remember the card as being very old with minimal information about the record, but it appeared to be an old recording by an unknown artist of this Chopin Ballade.
The record, it turned out, was in storage, and I had to wait a day or two for it to be retrieved from there.
A day or two later I had the record, or rather records. It was a stack of 78rpm platters of Vladimir Horowitz playing Chopin and Liszt. I had to find a special turntable at the library to play these ancient discs, which spun so fast that each side only held a couple of minutes worth of music. If I remember right the Chopin Ballade was broken up across 4 or 5 sides of these records, and as each side ended I could tell where Horowitz stopped his playing to accommodate for the end of the side and the listener’s manual process of flipping the records over to continue the music.
These logistics, while exciting in their way and evocative of a past era in recorded sound, took nothing from the unbelievable sounds of Horowitz attacking this Chopin Ballade like Jacob wrestling with God. I had never wept so freely at the sounds coming off a record. I sat for hours replaying the old 78rpm platters, watching them spin so fast that the needle almost jumped from the surface of the records, listening and listening again as the sounds of Horowitz roared like a conquering lion.
I would later hear and vigorously agree with the oft-repeated cliché about Horowitz, that to hear him play was to feel you had been deaf your whole life. Everything sounded different to me after that day. Not just music but everything. Those days in which I listened and re-listened to that Chopin Ballade and then the Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody #6 made me believe more strongly than ever that the imitative approach to pianism was the worst kind. Yes, I had found a recording which changed the way I thought about the music I was learning but it was in a way that I could never imitate, in a way that made imitation look preposterous, and in a way that made all my work up until then seem tiny. I never played that Chopin Ballade again.
