Playing Music Vs Playing Notes – Getting Away From the Roadmap

Playing Music vs Playing Notes – Getting Away From The Roadmap

What I’m about to say may sound a bit ‘artsy’ to some, and totally incomprehensible to others, but will make perfect sense to those who are masters of their craft.

Music is NOT what you buy in a book; music is made by someone who has the skills to communicate the EMOTIONS and EXPRESSION that are present in printed form.

When we read a good novel, we are affected by the words, and what builds excitement is the amount of emotion and inflexion that we give them. Great actors have made their marks by delivering particular roles, and what has made their own versions so special is the FEELING and INTERPRETATION with which they have imparted.

The words of Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ are just words until they have been ‘brought to life’ by someone who truly understands the meaning that Shakespeare was trying to communicate. Different actors have studied the text, and given their own slant on their meaning.

The same could be said for vocal pieces of music – the lyrics are intended to tell a story, or convey thoughts and emotions.

What makes playing music well so difficult is that, instead of words, composers use sounds, tonalities and textures to communicate emotions. It is then the responsibility of musicians to work out the intent, and use their skills to communicate their individual interpretations.

So, musicians practice to extend their capabilities of tone colour, articulation, tone control, and understanding of phrasing, style and historical context, so that they can reproduce the piece, with their own interpretation.

It can help to think of it like this: consider the printed form of music as a roadmap; when you are first learning your way around your neighbourhood, or to a particular location, you of course refer to a roadmap – a set of directions that get you where you want to go.

You follow the roadmap to the letter, watching carefully for the roads and turns you need to take. You’re paying so much attention on just how to get there, that you aren’t really enjoying the scenery.

Printed music is like saying: Take the third left turn after the traffic lights, then the second right, and the house is Number 45.

(These are essential directions – without them, you wouldn’t arrive at your destination)

Performed music (by a skilled musician) would take you to the same destination like this: Go through the traffic lights (there’s an exquisite old post office on the corner), then turn left where there’s a beautiful park with magnificent trees changing colour. You’ll see a gorgeous two-story house with a magnificent garden, full of brilliant flowers; turn right into that street. Our house is the one with the Tuscan finish and potted plants along sandstone-paved driveway.

See the difference? The first is clinical; bare-bones stuff that just gets you there. The second one is much more involved with the character of the journey.

In fact, it can help to think of your music as having no barlines; this encourages you to look at the melodies as horizontally-represented musical ideas, and releases you from any preconceptions of the strong and weak beats of bars, ideas that are commonly taught. Early music notation had no barlines at all – that came later in the development of written music.

Novels and stories that you read don’t conform to a set number of words to a sentence, or a particular number of sentences to a paragraph; so it is with our music. A composer comes up with a melodic line, and it is up to us, as artists in music, to determine the composer’s intent and decide on the shape of the phrase, and on the aspects of tension, climax and release. Barlines are an arbitrary method of mathematically organizing into notes manageable chunks.

One of the best ways to get in touch with the intent of the music, and of the ‘conversations’ contained within, is to memorize your music; this may be a gradual process, but like most things, the more often you work at it, the better and more efficient you become. Getting away from reading gives you the chance to do something really important as a musician – LISTEN!

If this seems obvious to you, then I’m glad, for you would be one of the few gifted with understanding the importance of simply listening to what you are playing. I’ve seen quite a few people who just don’t pay attention to what they are doing, and miss so many chances to enjoy their own playing.

The next time you are studying a piece of music, spend some time looking at the shapes of phrases, the way in which parts of a melodic phrase lead onto the next, and get to know the roadmap so well that you can enjoy the journey of musical creation.

Fred Whitson is a musician with the Royal Australian Navy Band, and has had over 22 years teaching and coaching musicians and ensembles in primary and secondary schools, and at colleges in South Australia

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