Expression: 1. Active Listening - The Musicality Book

In the introduction to this chapter we talked about how even if we don’t yet understand how to play music expressively and convey the emotions we intend, we all innately appreciate expressive, emotional playing when we listen to music.

Now that we understand the musical language of emotion, we can start to not only experience the emotion when listening, but also take real steps to the expression of our own feelings through music.

As covered in Chapter 5: Active Listening, “listening with a question in mind” can let us go beyond casual listening, using a specific question to focus our attention on the particular musical aspects that we wish to explore. To learn more about our own expressive possibilities, let’s listen with questions of emotion and expression in mind.

EXERCISE: Active Listening for Expression

Select a music recording that you know well, and listen to a particular section. For example, just the first verse, or the solo you love, or the first minute or so of a longer work.
Listen through once, purely for enjoyment’s sake.
Now listen again multiple times, each time focusing your attention on one of the questions below. Feel free to also choose questions of your own, based on your Active Listening experience, but tailored to our current interest in expression, and the musical language of emotion. You can focus on a single instrument (most likely the lead/melody instrument to begin with) or the arrangement as a whole.
Once you feel like you’ve explored quite fully, repeat with another section of the same piece or another piece.

Example Questions:

What emotions come through most clearly? (You may like to reference the emotion list at the beginning of this chapter)
Do the emotions expressed vary during the section? When and how?
How is emotion being expressed through changes to Timbre? Which emotions and how?
How is emotion being expressed through changes to Dynamics? Which emotions and how?
How is emotion being expressed through changes to Pitch? Which emotions and how?
How is emotion being expressed through changes to Rhythm? Which emotions and how?
As a whole, which techniques in which dimensions are being used to make the music more than a dry, robotic performance?

You may wish to look back over each dimension’s section above to remind yourself what techniques may be being used. Keep in mind that the expressive possibilities in each of the four dimensions vary by instrument and by genre. This means you may well not be able to discern any ways a particular dimension is being used for expressive purposes! This is part of what we are listening for, as the last question in the list above indicates. But don’t give up too easily… For example, even if there aren’t prominent pitch bends and slides, that doesn’t mean there aren’t subtle nuances to the pitching of notes which enhance their expressive effect.

It would be valuable to jot down notes as you go through this exercise. For example you might write something like “The lead vocal uses clear Pitch embellishments throughout, including heavy vibrato and slides into sustained notes. This gives it a heavier, somber feeling, especially at the end of each phrase. In the last line of the lyrics there is some rubato, as the notes seem to float freely above the beat rather than being strictly in time, and this adds a sense of weightlessness and freedom.”

Now that we’ve woken up our ears to the way emotion is expressed in music played by others, there is a simple gateway to bringing that same expressive palette to our own playing.

We can do this by actively listening while we are playing. Listening not just to ourselves, but also any other music going on around us, for example our fellow musicians or recorded accompaniment like a backing track.

An inner “Listening Voice” can keep us engaged in the music and in actively making musically-expressive choices—considering what has come before, responding to the moment, and projecting into the future. Note that this Listening Voice is the friend of expressive playing, whereas the (probably all-too-familiar!) judgemental Inner Critic is often the enemy of our free-flowing musical expression. We’ll discuss this more in Chapter 18: Performance.

EXERCISE: Active Listening for Your Own Expression

Select a section of a recording of a piece which you can play yourself.
If you haven’t already, carry out the exercise above to discover the expressive techniques being used, and the emotional results.
Now play the piece yourself, recording the performance, and aiming to mimic the expressive techniques you heard, to convey the same emotions. Remember to “keep your ears turned on” and listen carefully as you play.
Listen back to your own recording. How did you do? Remember to suspend your Inner Critic and listen as objectively and constructively as you can.
If you’d like to, you can repeat the process based on what you heard in your own expression.
Now play the piece one more time, but use your own aesthetic judgement and the emotions you feel, to create your own expressive performance. Record it, listen back, and repeat if you would like.

By mimicking a recording in this way we can “bootstrap” our own awareness of the expressive possibilities for a piece, which can help free us up to express our own personal rendition based on the emotions we feel or wish to convey.

The second part of this exercise, recording your own rendition and then actively listening to the recording to assess the effectiveness of your own expressive playing, is something you may well wish to add as part of your standard practice habits. Even if you don’t do so, from now on you can make use of Active Listening every time you play, to make sure you are bringing Heart into your playing with each and every note.