Often, as musicians hungry to learn and improve, we get swept away in the task of learning this or that skill, and forget what brought us to music in the first place. Even when we are focused on musicality skills like Playing By Ear, Improvisation, or leveling up our practice with Superlearning, we can lose sight of the most basic truth about our musical experience:
Music has the power to evoke emotion in us like no other form of human expression on the planet.
Sound and emotion weave together inextricably as we listen to and play music.
Imagine if our language had no emotion to it, and that we were unable to change the tone of our voice, its speed, pitch, or volume to express what we were feeling! It sounds crazy, but that’s what it’s like to play music when you don’t know what to do on your instrument or voice to express emotion.
In this chapter we’ve explored and experimented, using an “Outside → In” perspective to become more aware of the language of emotion in music, and how Timbre, Dynamics, Pitch, and Rhythm all provide choices we can make throughout the music, to bring out the emotions we intend. Then, equipped with this new awareness and the corresponding connections between Head, Hearing, Hands and Heart, we began to intentionally express emotions through sound (“Inside → Out”). And through Active Listening, Movement, Audiation and Singing, and Creativity (both in interpretation and improvisation) we discovered new opportunities to use this language of emotion to express ourselves musically.
If nothing else, this chapter should have given you a lot of new things to pay attention to when playing music! The more we can guide this attention, the more connected, expressive and “at one” we will feel with our music.
Perhaps along the way you have felt yourself becoming less judgemental and more engaged in your music. When we feel this way, sharing our music with others becomes easier and more enjoyable, both with other musicians and with the audience in Performance situations.
Of course the journey is far from over! I almost included this chapter in Part I as one of our “foundational skills”, because it can be applied everywhere, throughout your music-making, to level up the experience and enjoyment of music, both for yourself and for your listeners. In fact, I would invite you to cast your eye down the Table of Contents at the start of this book, and take a moment to think about how you could incorporate Expression practice into each and every one of the topics covered.
Just by going through the exercises in this chapter, you should find you have opened up a whole new world of expressive possibilities, which you are starting to instinctively draw on to more easily express emotion through every note and piece you play. The more you continue to bring conscious attention and effort to increasing your fluency in this “language of emotion”, the more effective, fulfilling and beautiful your music-making will become.