Education Quote by Jerry Hunt

A pianist’s job is fidelity: submit to the score, honor the exactness, disappear into someone else’s intentions. Jerry Hunt frames his own non-fit for that role with a wink that’s also a manifesto. “Too sloppy” reads like self-deprecation, but the phrasing keeps slipping out of simple shame and into deliberate refusal. He didn’t fail the notes; he didn’t want them. The “way they were written” is the real antagonist here: notation as authority, correctness as a cultural gate.

Coming from a composer associated with late-20th-century experimental practice, the line carries a familiar contrarian charge. In that world, “sloppy” can be a coded compliment: an openness to accident, rough edges, the body, the room, the unrepeatable. It’s a defense of intuition against an institution that trains musicians to treat deviation as error rather than information. Hunt’s “never ever” doubles down on temperament over technique; it suggests an artist who hears music as something living, not something to be verified.

The subtext is also about authorship. A pianist is often judged on how cleanly they reproduce; an experimental composer gets to redefine what counts as the piece. By admitting he couldn’t be a pianist, Hunt quietly claims a different kind of virtuosity: the ability to turn misalignment into method, to make “quite right” beside the point. The line works because it turns limitation into aesthetic leverage, recasting obedience as the real constraint.