Recommended Reading
Music and emotion have always been linked in some way or other. But who is feeling this 'emotion', when are they feeling it and should they be? One of the more memorable series of lectures I attended while at University was part of a 'Music and Science' module, which, as well as looking at wave forms, basilar membranes and what have you, presented us with psychological research on the relationship between music and emotion. At the time, most of our essays concluded with the ineluctable compromise that some of music's emotional resonance is hard-wired into us and the rest is learnt through cultural association (why does minor sound 'sad' to us and major 'happy'? - there are theories aplenty on their intrinsic qualities but there was also time when melancholy words were set in a major key without any eyelids being batted...).
Years later, after graduating, I decided to scrub up some piano pieces that I had learnt in my sixth form years and give them an airing at an ABRSM diploma. Beethoven, Ravel and Chopin. Rubato and over-pedalling abound as the pianist's brows furrow in reverie or violent transport. Or at least that was the image under which I had veiled these pieces in my teenage years. I could still get from the beginning to the end but they never quite did what I wanted them to do. I recalled getting to a similar stage for my second year composition portfolio and, scrapping the lot, fuelled myself with car-tyre coffee and started writing barlines onto a blank page of manuscript. It had worked once...
I blew the dust from my metronome, which I had, hitherto, seen as a symbol of rigid, mechanical, un-emotional and, worst of all, un-musical playing. I worked away, bar by bar, at painfully slow speeds, writing in fingering for all but the most obvious notes, treating the whole programme as a dance whose steps had to be memorised and internalised one by one. This is probably what every other musician on the planet considers a perfectly normal and unremarkable way to practise, but this level of technical objectivity was new to me, despite the weekly exhortations of past teachers. When I did allow myself the luxury of playing through a whole piece as a performance, I found that, far from stripping the programme of emotion, I was now free to concentrate on the more elevated nuances of performance and could take for granted that the right notes would be in the right places.
So what am I driving at? How does all this affect how I teach? Essentially, I try to instill the idea of one's 'practising hat' being a shade different - a trifle cooler - than one's 'performance hat', the terms I use growing less patronising as the age of the student increases. An opera singer for whom I have worked for many years once told me, "An amateur musician will practise until they've got it right; a professional will practise until they cannot get it wrong!". At first glance the latter seems the less enjoyable course but how much more satisfying it can be, how much more free is the performer to then turn their art to the communication of an emotion, however abstract, that the music has suggested to them. This is all the audience really wants at the recital hall and the opera house, and, I daresay, what the examiner is secretly hoping for in the dark recesses of the ABRSM examination rooms!
