Walter Meyer wrote:

>>If a student plays a passage all alone in a forest, and his teacher isn't
>>there to hear it, has he still made a mistake?

And Noboru Inoue replied:

>Of course No. When he came back to school or home, some one point it if
>any.  No music is in the forest.  Music(score or play anyhow) and player
>and composer and audience and instrument and even mistake is created by
>society and tradition, in my word, nature or universe, as any other
>artificial things.

If this were true, then solitary music-making would be perfect playing --
which it clearly isn't.  Ask the practicing instrumentalist, or the writer
who tries in solitude to fill the blank page.

Most people are self-critical in solitude:  our mistakes can mortify even
there.  Thankfully.

Bert Bailey