Perfectionism in music is a modern scourge, and Peter Cropper, who died in May, demonstrated that it is a distracting priority for musicians The word ‘unique’ is one of the most over-used in the English language; the frequent addition of ‘very’, the most annoyingly redundant. The fact is that most of us are replaceable. Whether we’re musicians, teachers, writers or editors, there’s usually someone else around the corner who will do what we do just as well as us. Peter Cropper

Charlie Chaplin was one of the most expressive and popular communicators ever. What can string players learn from his art? Light and heavy Chaplin’s original concept for his tramp costume was of contradiction: tight jacket, baggy trousers; small hat, big shoes. His movements carry this contradiction too. Watch any chase scene (The Vagabond, The Circus, on skates in The Rink) and you see him as light as air, graceful and smooth. Even when he is making a cocktail in The Rink, t

Amid the commemorations of the start of the First World War, you might like a bit of respectful levity, so here is Charlie Chaplin's Shoulder Arms. It's one of my favourite films, made at a point where Chaplin was peaking, with a perfect balance of sheer inventiveness and just the right amount of sentiment. Before he was a little too nasty and liable to kick people in the ass and leer at ladies; after he increasingly tended to the cloying. But in 1918, when he made Shoulder A

The great screen comedian was an accomplished amateur violinist who composed many of the scores to his films At the height of his success, Charlie Chaplin harboured a fantasy about his violin. In 1920, shortly before the release of The Kid, he told a journalist: ‘I once had a day vision. I saw at my feet in a huddled heap all the trappings and paraphernalia of my screen clothes – that dreadful suit of clothes! – my moustache, the battered derby, the little cane, the broken sh

I came late to the Kleiber party – I was introduced to him only recently by Burton Kaplan while I was on his Magic Mountain music course. The whole class watched a documentary on Kleiber and then his performances of Strauss, Beethoven and Brahms. I was mesmerised. Kaplan was trying to demonstrate to us the musical logic of Kleiber's conducting, but also the narrative quality of his rehearsal technique, to show us how this could inform our own musical conceptions. As you can s