Notes void of this "musical" quality will turn off the listener. "I am happy." "I am sad." I am in despair." "My love is unrequited." And more.Īnd if you can't quite get them to understand exactly what you mean from your perspective, the next best thing is producing music which evokes a personal meaning within the listener. However, a more accurate and specific definition is the ability to take one's technical knowledge of the instrument and create sounds which reflect the musician's and composer's internal emotional, imaginative, and musical intent.īasically, when a person listens to you play, they get what you're trying to say. Has a teacher ever told you, "You need to play more musically?" While we all have an intuitive idea of what it means, it takes practice and lots of listening to translate the idea into our own playing. We often associate the term with "expression of emotion through music." While this is partly correct, we can go into further detail. Those are the ones the scholars seem to wrinkle their noses at because they can do something they spent lots of money and time TRYING to do.I bet when you hear the word "musicality," images of a passionate Joshua Bell, Maxim Vengerov, and Fiddlerman pop into your head. Then there are the ones who are naturally or genetically predisposed and somehow just develop a sense of Musicality through exposure and life experiences. The good teachers can show you all the tools (aka MUSICIANSHIP) and HOPE and GUIDE one into becoming MUSICAL. There is no way to accurately teach musicality across the board. If it stops at using Musicianship to play the notes on the page - it gets stale in a hurry. Musicians can use Musicianship to decipher Musicality. They "made music" then used a piece of paper to record what they did in a way for others to do. I use to tell my HS Kids, why do you think this guy wrote this piece of music? Was it just to make YOUR life difficult? They didn't just one day start writing notes to make a song - then play them to see if they sounded good. If the same story was read again, using inflection and emotion, the listener would find themselves forgetting about trying to measure the correctness of the measurable standards and such, and actually get lost in the story it's self. One can read a story from a book verbatim, with no inflection in their voice, and it can be considered correct by any measurable standard we have. Knowing How, and Being Able To - are 2 different things!!! We don't fully understand that when we get frustrated why we cant sound like Charlie Parker after only 10 years of playing the saxophone. In the era of instant gratification we live in - we hear a Musical Musician - then we try to learn how to do what they do. These seem to be the people with huge egos that can never understand why they don't get as far in the musical world as "name brand" Musicians. The ability to look at their own playing from afar and determine if what they are doing is provoking an emotional response from others - is beyond their compression. In their OWN mind, they believe that they are musical (because in their OWN mind - they are). I have met too many people who recognize musicality when they perform, yet don't have the ability to convey their own emotion past their own cranium. Musicality is the ability to invoke an emotional response through music. Musicianship can be described easier by stating a criteria that one must accomplish. This is a HUGE concept that I think goes beyond words we have available to us in the english language. You can't fake musicality.įor that reason, people who are merely musicianly will always resent those who are merely musical, and even devalue them - sometimes without even knowing it. Knowledge comes when you follow passions - learning comes when you follow instructions. But, objectively speaking, you will have learned nothing. You can devote your entire life to pursuing it, possibly even with breathtaking results. The difference is that there is no credit or recognition for the study or acquisition of musicality. Nobody is naturally musicianly.īoth take long hours, years, of study and dedication. A musicianly person becomes a servant to it.Ĭertain people are naturally musical. Musicianship is a discipline - you do what it demands.Ī musical person becomes a part of the music. Musicality is a journey - you do what you must. It is devalued in favor of musicianship, which demands abstraction, execution, and precision. Musicality demands an intimacy with the tonal, the rhythmic, the expressive. A few unsolicited thoughts, possibly relevant, possibly not.
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