"I don't think I could have ever had a career as a pianist because I never ever wanted to play the notes the way they were written, I was too sloppy to learn them quite right"
About this Quote
Jerry Hunt admits he was never built for the conservatory bench. The confession fuses temperament and aesthetics: a refusal to submit to the authority of the score and a desire to turn deviation into material. Classical pianism prizes fidelity to notation; the performer is an interpreter whose artistry lives inside tight boundaries set by the page. Hunt balks at that contract. Saying he never wanted to play the notes the way they were written is less a boast about rebelliousness than a statement of fit. His ear leaned toward transformation, not replication.
Calling himself too sloppy points to more than technical shortcoming. It reads as an indictment of an ethic of correctness that can smother curiosity and play. Sloppiness here becomes the crack through which experiment enters, the permission to privilege process, gesture, and accident. Rather than polish away the burrs, he built a practice where those burrs matter. That path led him away from the piano into the unruly domain of electronics, systems, and performance rituals for which he became known. In those works, the score is not a grid of pitches but a web of cues, behaviors, and contingencies; sound emerges from interaction with sensors, custom circuits, and choreographed signs. Precision still exists, but it is relocated from note-perfect execution to the disciplined taming of unstable systems.
Placed within the broader late-20th-century avant-garde, his stance echoes a shift from fixed works toward open forms, indeterminacy, and instrument building. It also undercuts the romantic cult of virtuosity. If a traditional career rewards faithful obedience to the page, Hunt opts for a different virtuosity: inventing worlds in which deviation is the point and the instrument is partly the body. The line reads as both self-portrait and artistic credo. Art finds its form by admitting what one cannot or will not do, and then transforming that friction into a method.
Calling himself too sloppy points to more than technical shortcoming. It reads as an indictment of an ethic of correctness that can smother curiosity and play. Sloppiness here becomes the crack through which experiment enters, the permission to privilege process, gesture, and accident. Rather than polish away the burrs, he built a practice where those burrs matter. That path led him away from the piano into the unruly domain of electronics, systems, and performance rituals for which he became known. In those works, the score is not a grid of pitches but a web of cues, behaviors, and contingencies; sound emerges from interaction with sensors, custom circuits, and choreographed signs. Precision still exists, but it is relocated from note-perfect execution to the disciplined taming of unstable systems.
Placed within the broader late-20th-century avant-garde, his stance echoes a shift from fixed works toward open forms, indeterminacy, and instrument building. It also undercuts the romantic cult of virtuosity. If a traditional career rewards faithful obedience to the page, Hunt opts for a different virtuosity: inventing worlds in which deviation is the point and the instrument is partly the body. The line reads as both self-portrait and artistic credo. Art finds its form by admitting what one cannot or will not do, and then transforming that friction into a method.
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| Topic | Music |
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