Musical expression motivates: integrating technique and musical expression from the start.

Practicers, performers and audiences love it when the nervous system is hooked up to integrate the gymnastic coordination needed to play a musical instrument with the emotions appropriate to express the music. It generates feelings of personal integrity, wholeness, ecstasy and fulfillment. The way we speak our native language offers a perfect model for how the musician should be hooked up to "speak," that is, to express musical emotion with his instrument. The steps are clear. First, we experience an image of what we want to express; Second, we use our mouth (our instrument) to express the image in our mind without thinking about how our mouth operates to do so.

As we all know too well, though we were genetically hooked up to speak, we were not genetically hooked up to play an instrument. We think nothing of listening to the child stumble around in the world of words she is learning as she develops the expertise to express herself clearly. But, instead of helping the music student at each level of technical growth to try to express musical emotion in sound, music pedagogy has gotten stuck trying first to perfect the student's technical control of his instrument. I suggest this has led to great unhappiness and confusion in many musicians. Listen to this e-mail I recently received from a forty-five-year-old, successful professional violist: "... have done a lot of contemporary stuff recently. It all went GREAT knew what I wanted to do with pieces, was convincing, had successful performances, like that. And I realized recently that I am able to approach this type of repertoire relatively 'shackle-free.' Meaning that when I am doing standard rep, I feel terribly inhibited by trying to do 'what is correct.' How do I get from worrying about whether something is correct, to doing what I am able to do with contemporary works, which is 'Here it is! This is what I have to say.'" This musician's plight is the result of the traditional and continuing bent of musical pedagogy to leave out feeling and personal interpretation until technique is incredible.

To engage and develop the student's capacity to emote in music, we can start by using the Technique of the Narrative. The student is asked, "If the music you are playing were the music for a movie, what scenario might be appropriate?" To answer this question, the student must form a mental image of tone and timing that expresses the emotion suggested by the score. Following concepts expressed by Stanislawski in An Actor Prepares (1936), the student is asked to elaborate the scenario in increasing detail. For example, if the musical material is song-like, who is singing? What gender are they? What age? Are they singing to themselves or to another? What is their song about? As the student makes these decisions, his mental auditory image becomes increasingly specific. Imaging sound is to a music student what visualizing is to a painter. Until the mental image exists, there can be no appropriate gesture to produce a desired effect. Once the image is clear, it offers a guide for the music student to evaluate his expressed musical idea as he plays. If, instead of playing from an emotional image, the musician's image is only a technical one of how to play the instrument, the result will not compel the audience's attention.

This idea has been carried further by Eleanor Angel in a work called "Music Alive." She encourages students to make up stories related to the music they are playing, and she encourages them to draw pictures illustrating the scenarios, expressing the emotions they experience inside when imagining how the music should sound. Using this approach, she has uncovered remarkable musical intelligence in children, teenagers and adults before they have become masters of their instrument. Most importantly, these fortunate students love to practice to express their musical thoughts.

Structure is the other dimension of music that demands instruction to give musical pleasure to both player and audience. Once again, there is a meaningful similarity between spoken language and performed music. As the patterns of notes or letters are inflected, moments of fulfillment or stability are perceived. In language, these moments are commonly referred to as closure. The idea of closure exists in music, but to date only major moments of closure, namely cadences, are commonly alluded to when describing the structure of musical events. In the simple folk song shown here, a comma to the right of a pattern of notes signifies that a mini-closure should be expressed. Please do not mistake the comma to mean "take a breath here." Each comma is merely to acknowledge that an inflection is needed to enable the listener to become aware of an expressive mini-substructure of the phrase. (I call them musical words [m-words].) A bracket signifies a phraselet, and a double bracket signifies a phrase. A star signifies the most intense stress in a phraselet; and a double star signifies the most intense stress in the entire phrase. I call this the Technique of the Stars. If you disagree with my interpretation, please feel free to create your own. In music, as in written language, the possibilities of meaningful expression are numerous, and I find the implied ambiguity delightful. There was not enough time to elaborate this idea in my presentation, as there is not enough time in this brief summary. But I hope you can take over from this beginning.

In my forty years of teaching, I have found that students at each level of technical control are remarkably capable of making music in an insightful and expressive way when their attention is turned in that direction. Their sense of fulfillment in expressing musical feelings within recognizable musical structures makes their practicing interesting enough to motivate them to practice a lot, and they develop a confident performance technique.

Burton Kaplan is professor of violin and viola at the Manhattan School of Music and New York University. He also is director of Performance Power, an organization dedicated to teaching a system for harnessing and integrating the powers of mind, body and spirit in the practice room and on stage.