I don’t have anything especially incisive to say about it but I was struck at the contrast between Colin Walker’s take on Seth Godin (“bands spend most of their time essentially ‘playing covers of their own work’”) and something I literally just read in Richard Sennett’s Building and Dwelling.
Were he or she to think, ‘At last! The Hammerklavier Sonata is just as it should be!’ why would the musician ever perform the piece again? A performer wants to keep playing, to hear the Hammerklavier always anew and so keep the music (and the musician) alive. In this sense, performance is an unfinishable art.