75%

For many young adults, New Year’s Eve is a fun night out with friends filled with booze, cold hands and an anticlimactic countdown to midnight where they may or may not kiss a stranger under conveniently placed mistletoe. This year I spent my New Year’s Eve at home hanging out with my parents toasting in the new year with some sparkling apple juice and watching Kathy Griffin and Anderson Copper awkwardly interact on CNN with a morbid fascination. As my dad flipped through the channels we stumbled upon Idina Menzel’s performance of Frozen’s Let it go (for those of you who have not seen it watch the link below, the money note is at 0:16).

As I heard her struggle, I cringed. I know what it is like to be on stage and have a note not go your way, yet I tried my best to trust in her technique and waited for the epic Eb believing that she could recover from one or two bad notes. Unfortunately, that note didn’t go much better. In fact, it went much worse.

After my dad changed the channel I couldn’t help but wonder if I was simply being too critical or if everyone else would notice what I considered an egregious error, and if they did, I worried about what horrible things the internet would shortly be saying about the immensely talented Idina Menzel.

Of course the internet exploded with vicious comments and so on her Twitter account Idina Menzel posted the following response:

In one way, I agree with what she says. Yet in another, much bigger way, I have a huge problem with her definition of success.

Most musicians would agree that in a performance there are more important things than the pitches and rhythms that appear on the page, it’s about making music and connecting with the audience through what is written on the page by making it real. Yet, correct pitches and rhythms must be there, otherwise the audience is pulled out of the story as they cringe and turn to their friend asking “Did you hear that? What was that?”.

I recognize that the performance was not under ideal conditions, but she accepted the job knowing that it would be exceedingly cold and the danger of a major vocal flub on such a demanding piece. Still, I do not hold it against her. What bothers me is the percentage she used.

In live theatre, there will never be a perfect performance. Notes will be botched and you have to move on. If you are lucky, the audience doesn’t notice. If they do, by the end of the performance they will probably forget about it because you will have sung so many good notes throughout the show you will erase the unpleasant memory. While one or two, and maybe even ten or fifteen botched notes can be forgiven in a performance, using Idina Menzel’s math of 3 million notes in musical and success being getting 75% of them right she would consider getting 750,000 notes wrong a successful performance. To me, that is horrifying number.

In school 75% is a C. In the engineering world 75% accuracy in your calculations means your product will not work and someone could end up hurt or worse. I believe that in music it is the same way. One or two notes can be forgiven, but not 25% of them.

The notes Idina Menzel sang on New Year’s Eve were just a few of the millions of notes she will sing in her lifetime so we can, and will, forgive them as the memories are replaced by new, better ones in performances yet to come. But it is not right to pretend that her New Year’s Eve performance was a successful one – because if that is considered success in music, I may start avoiding live productions.