As we explore musical emotion through Active Listening and Movement, we’re getting closer to how we feel inside about music, and how we can bring those feelings out into our playing. There is something else that we all do which we can harness to help express our music from the inside out.
Audiation, as covered in Chapter 3: Audiation, is the practice of hearing music in your head. It’s quite common for us all to audiate on a casual basis, as we create imaginary soundtracks for our lives or simply get a song stuck in our head. As musicians, we can go beyond that and develop our Audiation skills to do quite a lot of “work” for us, even without touching our instruments.
Just as we have the (sometimes unwelcome!) ability to conjure up thoughts in our own heads that lead to strong emotions, we can do the same with “thinking music” or audiating. And just as a feeling may in turn produce a thought, we can begin with an emotion and transform it into music before it ever makes its way into the actual physical vibrations produced by our instrument.
A simple example of this in practice is when we have a feeling or we’re in a certain mood, and a song pops into our head which reflects that emotion. Through Audiation we can explore similar possibilities within a piece of music, conjuring up the sounds which would best express the emotions we feel.
EXERCISE: Audiate Your Expression
You can even do step 2 with techniques not normally possible on your instrument (e.g. what if your piano could bend pitches? What if you could produce a deep operatic vibrato with your singing voice?) |
As is so often the case with Audiation, this pairs beautifully with Singing. We mentioned above how uniquely expressive the human singing voice can be. This provides us with a wonderful way to explore expressive possibilities even before touching our instrument, and can provide a stepping stone to “translate” what we intend and imagine (with Audiation) through our singing voice, and then have a clearer sense of what we’re aiming for with our instrument
EXERCISE: Intend, Imagine, Sing, Play
|
What did you notice about each of the renditions? As always, recording can be your friend. Were you able to audiate a performance which expressed the emotions you’d intended? How closely did your sung performance match what you’d audiated? Were you able to translate that onto your instrument?
Did adding the stepping stone of Singing make it easier to produce the instrumental performance you intended, compared with the previous Audiation-only exercise?
It might feel cumbersome to go through all these steps if you’re used to simply grabbing your instrument and playing a piece. But as with all the exercises in this chapter, by taking the time to explore and experiment step-by-step, we are internalising the language of emotion and making it instinctive, levelling up the expressiveness of our playing even if we do just “grab our instrument and play”.