Robert Adams

Learning to play a musical instrument, or to sing, with a high level of musicianship takes lots of training, practice , and listening. A student will take lessons in school and attend music classes beginning in early elementary school, and continuing through middle school, if not further. Through it all, music teachers will teach and model good musicianship and technique, with the intent that students will learn from and emulate their teacher. They traverse  together a path along which the student’s skill and musicianship increases. Early on, music is taught by rote. The teacher performs, then the students repeats what the teacher has just played or sung. Though this early rote learning can easily be limited to pitch and rhythm learning, it need not and should not be so constrained. Even before the student can play or sing back the teacher’s example with equal expression and nuance, the student should be hearing the highest level of musicianship, storing its beauty in memory until technique is enough to reliably reproduce those well formed musical phrases. 

There is a need to go further than just playing with artistry for students. What is the source of these well formed phrases? Why has the teacher played the phrase just that way? What are the clues the composer has left in the music to help the musician shape the phrases into so musical a form? If expressiveness to the student is only the product of imitation, and to the student what is being imitated is born of some mysterious, unknown impetus, then the student, with nothing more to go on, won’t be able to shape a musical phrase without imitating the way someone else has shaped it. 

One solution is for the teacher to explain, along with playing, what they are feeling and what they are expressing with the music. ‘I feel a rush of joy as I climb this scale, arriving at a forte, and then releasing all the excited energy I have built up as I reach this sustained note before the music descends once more.” With such a description of what has just been performed and heard, the student now has something to search out, something to empathize with as they are listening, and a purpose to infuse into their rendition of the passage. 

A teacher can also ask, “what did you feel as you listened to me play that? Did you get excited? Did it give you goosebumps? Did it relax you? Try playing it in a way that will make me feel what you felt when I played it.” Then teacher and students can explore how to get at certain feelings and emotions by manipulating expressive musical gestures.

When I was an undergraduate at a music conservatory, we all had our weekly private applied music lessons. For me, a clarinetist, assignments were divided between etudes, solo repertoire, and orchestral excerpts. Because most performance opportunities (and requirements) were ensembles, etudes and excerpts usually took precedence. And once in an ensemble, the interpretive decisions of the conductor were what we were principally concerned with. 

But every Monday afternoon, the entire school gathered in the main concert hall for musicianship class. The president of the school, a musician of the highest order, worked with individual students who had signed up ahead of tie, honing their interpretations of solo literature. The rest of the school watched, and learned from what was being said, what was changed from one try to the next, and how it all sounded better when that student’s time was up. For everyone who participated, the musicianship training given, elevated and moved ahead the specialized training already received in the private studio. 

This brings me to an important point. There are two facets to musical training. One facet is in areas specific to a particular instrument—what is known as technic. How to move the fingers on an instrument to produce a smooth legato, how to play or sing in tune, how to manage breath while playing, how to make and adjust reeds, and so on. All of these things are necessary for performing with a high level of musicianship. But once one has mastered all of these things, one must know how to use them and what to do with them. A smooth legato is of no use if the player or singer doesn’t know how to shape a phrase, how to introduce subtle nuance and rubato, how to color the tone, or move from one register to another without loosing the expressive beauty or the connection between notes. These are the things that musicianship is made of, and one can only come by it though much listening, tutoring, experimenting, exploring, practicing and performing. The last can’tbe overlooked. Fine musicians are not made in the practice or lesson studio only. Frequent performing is necessary to make training authentic, rewarding, and meaningful. There is always a purely spontaneous expressiveness that only comes when the adrenaline rush and audience expectation combine to electrify the experience of making music in public. 

Without getting on a soapbox, the lack of spontaneity and the expressiveness that follows, in musical presentations that are entirely or in part pre-recorded, requiring the performer to conform with tracks instead of intuition, has cheapened live music experiences, cheated performers out of many of the greatest thrills and pleasures of being a performing musician. 

Students are freed to discover and enjoy the passion and joy of honest music making only when they are released from the boundaries of only imitating what they hear. When the music they study and eventually perform is literally brought to new life by being animated by a personal encounter with it, then and only then, does music, and specifically the ability to perform it, become worth learning for a lifetime of enjoyment. 

Robert Adams’ compositions for band, orchestra, and chamber ensembles is available at JWPepper.com