Dear readers, I’m happy you’re here! Thank you for being part of the Pride & Practicing community. I hope you’re reading things here that bring you inspiration—or at least a few things to think about, that are real for you in your own playing. If you enjoy it, please consider subscribing, and share it with your friends.
Okay, let’s get down to business! Sometimes our practicing is about learning the piece in the first place. Other times it’s about solving technical problems, or trying to memorize it. But today’s Featured Practice Tool is one to pull out for those magical times when we want to point our practice in a more imaginative direction! Let’s say we’ve learned the notes; we’ve pretty much “got it down.” But we can feel that something’s missing, and it’s time to cross a different kind of threshold. Shifting gears to focus now on our interpretation of the music, our practicing takes flight.
But what does interpretation even mean? We could say that to interpret a piece of music is to make sense of it, to find how we can relate to it. It’s not about what the notes are, but about what they express. This can lead us into an amazingly rich exploration, especially given how often we are interpreting pieces written in a time and culture so different from our own! NB, we may very well rail against the fact that so much of the music we play comes from such a limited slice of human experience & culture (yes, I’m talking about all those old, dead, white, European men—and in our ongoing occasional series on WHAT to practice, watch for more on that). But for now: whatever we are playing—whether it’s part of the traditional canon, or whether we’ve branched out to engage with the human-experience-expressed-in-music of people not white, or of women, or of people who are queer or trans or who have grown up with traditions and influences wildly different than our own—or even if we are opening the door just wide enough to include old white European men who happen to be still alive—the fact remains that the music we’re working on, whatever it is, was written by our fellow humans. Right? If we’re going to play it, we need to relate to it from our fellow humanness! And this means delving into the question of emotion.
Of course, the relationship between music and emotion is different in different styles, historical periods, and for different composers. For example, in general, music written during the Enlightenment has a more stylized, less personal relationship to human emotion than music from the Romantic period. In music of the Baroque, the emotional “affect” is absolutely central to the style, although most Baroque keyboard pieces carry no words or markings indicating what that “affect” should be. And for Stravinsky in the 20th century, the last thing he wanted was for performers to be “emoting” all over his pieces! How he hated that! His view was more that musical expression transcends individual human emotion. Of course we could say that that, too, was not an escape from human emotional experience but a certain stance towards it: one of turning away from all the messy, raw human muck. And contemplating that stance—is it transcendence or rejection? denial or universality?—might open up a whole different can of worms.… hmmm….. but wait! WE ARE SITTING HERE AT THE PIANO! Let’s don’t get lost in the theory of all this! We won’t get stuck in trying to adhere to any scholarly, arms’-length musicological or philosophical approach, because here we are, just sitting here practicing, trying to play beautifully! Let’s keep it simple. Let’s agree that in most of the music that most of us play most of the time, a big part of “playing beautifully” could be described as playing expressively. And what is it that is expressed? A lot of it, surely, is emotion.
Though scientists at Berkeley are excited to let us know that music activates at least 13 different emotions, (can you guess what they are before you click on this link?), I’d like us to go much broader! For today’s Featured Practice Tool: MAKE A LIST of 100 ADJECTIVES that could be applied to musical expression.
Why 100, and not 13? Because there’s happy, happy, and happy! There is a difference between, say, being happy because you finally got to see your grandchild you’ve been away from for a whole year (and what year would that be, dear readers?); or because you ARE that grandchild and your birthday is tomorrow; or because you’re the parent of said child, the last raucous birthday-party guest has finally left, cake crumbs have been vacuumed out from the couch cushions and icing scraped off the walls, and you can put your feet up. Ahhhh. Or here’s another one (heaven forbid, but I do think I’d be happy if this were me): because you’ve successfully escaped someone who was trying to kill you. Happy, happy, happy and happy: we need a better vocabulary, because as we get to know our piece ever more deeply, these shadings of emotion make a difference! In defense of the Berkeley study linked above: they have mapped in the brain these 13 categories of emotion on which listeners tend to agree. Within each category is where these kinds of shadings would presumably live. So for this practice tool, don’t stop at the category: let’s hone our interpretations as finely as we can! The vividness & specificity of our own emotional sense of the piece is a big part of what makes it meaningful, expressive, beautiful, and connecting.
Let’s start a list right now. Music could sound…..
jolly… tragic… fearful… proud… manic… thoughtful…
The first step is just to get our lists going…. Another step could be to pick a phrase of music, offer apologies in advance to its composer, then try to play it in a way that conveys each of your adjectives. I dare you!
worldly… gentle… devious… tumultuous… noble… exhausted…
Another step could be to improvise based on the words on our lists (and we’ll take improvisation up in more detail another time, that thrilling and terrifying stepping into the unknown). For now, let’s just note that music has to start somewhere, and your music, that no one has ever heard before—including you, at the moment when you sit down to improvise—could start with words from your list….
godlike… hesitant… impulsive… cacophonous… resigned… strict…
Bear in mind that the point of this is not to have listeners be able to “guess your word.” We’re probing musical expression, not playing charades! -though you can make a pretty fabulous game of musical charades out of this if you want…. The words are simply fingers pointing at the moon, if I may borrow that phrase. The words point us in the right direction, give us something to relate to in this music in terms of shared human experience, but the words are not the thing itself! You might might think tender, I might think wistful, someone else might think plaintive…. someone out there might think jubilant, and who’s to say anyone is wrong? We share emotional experiences, yet very, VERY different things may elicit those emotional experiences for different people. Back to that Berkeley research: Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s Somewhere Over the Rainbow was Scientifically Demonstrated to be experienced as joyful for these cross-cultural participants in the study, whereas I confess I find it heartbreaking. Am I wrong, or is everyone else wrong? Wrong question! The point is not the word, but the relating. Each of us, in our own way, connects the messages carried by these musical sounds to our human lives (our lives that unfold in their infinite variety, but contain universal emotional experience). We make a “text-to-self connection” with each piece we play. When we’re trying to get at what the piece “is saying,” the words give us one possible way in, for us. They’re not right or wrong; they’re stepping stones. They help us open to the parts that go beyond words. In the end, the words don’t have anything to do with it!
relaxed… feral… cacophonous… dreamy… soaring… hopeless…
But let’s keep this practical, too. Another element here is that although no two players or listeners may settle on the same word for any given phrase or piece, still our choice of words is—or should be—far from random. As we use this kind of tool to try and interpret a piece we’re working on, it’s only meaningful to the extent that our choice of adjectives is grounded in what’s actually present in the piece. Despite my point above, a person would need to have a very good reason to interpret the opening movement of, say, Beethoven’s “Pathètique” Sonata as cheerful. That’s not to say that trying to convey cheerfulness while playing it wouldn’t be a great exercise (in futility? I guess you drew the short straw in that charades game)…. It might show us what the piece is not, and at least that’s a start! In actively using our list of adjectives to try to understand a piece more deeply, we take everything into account: key, tempo, dynamics, articulations, markings of all kinds; phrasing, sound, and intangible qualities we don’t have names for yet and only dimly perceive. We might “try on” different but related words. We may never settle on one—but all the same, having experimented with the subtle differences between, say, majestic, imposing, and glorious, we’ve surely gotten closer to what it is that we hear in the music. Glenn Gould and Andras Schiff hear different things in this Bach Sinfonia (here and here)….. what adjectives would you assign to each of these renditions?
The act of interpretation is a kind of collaboration between composer and player—and it is a privilege, a responsibility and a thrill. We, ourselves, have a very real role to play in determining what our piece “says” or means. But of course some composers are less willing to leave these interpretive decisions to chance, and give us expression marks that are quite specific. (Fearing that cheerful approach to the Pathètique perhaps?) We must honor these markings—and we still have to interpret what these words mean to us (dolce; mesto; amabile; agitato….). Beyond that: the markings, though we consider them carefully and honor them as best we can, are never more than fairly blunt objects. They can never cover everything that unfolds in every phrase of the piece! No matter how many markings are present, there is always much that demands our interpretation. And in the case of music that doesn’t carry any written expression marks: well, it’s a good thing we’ve got this practice tool and have made our shiny new lists to get our interpretive juices flowing! Take something you’re working on, and find the best adjective you can for each section in it. If the right word isn’t on your list yet, add it right now!
insistent… luminous… devout… carefree… foreboding… sly…
To not interpret is to play not from our humanness. To merely push the correct buttons; to not relate to what we are doing. To play in such a way that it doesn’t make any difference whether we are playing this piece or that one. To inadvertently speak loving words in an angry tone, or vice versa; to unknowingly scramble the meaning of the sonnet; to fill the silence with random noise. Better to connect, isn’t it?
Have fun with your lists! Post your favorite adjectives in the comments if you like! Thanks for reading and happy practicing!
sparkly enchanting profound .... great article!