Why Technical Skill Isn’t Enough in Music
1. The Heart vs. The Hands
If we zoom out, the pursuit of music is a very romantic pursuit. We all relate music to particular moments in our lives and given the right circumstances it can elicit quite a visceral emotional reaction. No doubt we all have the experience of playing a song on repeat 5000 times because it sounds so good! To some extent this experience is an innate feature of being a human.
In 2011 a song was released by Wretch 32 and Josh Kumra called “Don’t Go”. At the time I was 16-17 years old and I spent many many hours listening to this song. I was a care-free teenager hanging out with a group of friends. If I listen to that song now, it takes me back to that age and gives me that strong sense of nostalgia for who I was at the time and the people I was around.
I also remember in 2022 when I saw Jacob Collier at Brixton Academy in London after the Covid-19 Lockdowns had ended. Having spent so long unable to go to public concerts and be around others, it was a very emotionally overwhelming experience! Hearing his music live while being surrounded by others that were experiencing the exact same thing was a very intense experience and reminded me why I spent so long studying music!
While, as a musician, I am likely to be slightly more sensitive to music. I think we all have experiences of music that show us how music impacts us. However, learning music can often feel like the exact opposite experience. One that requires learning a lot of information and going through the procedural process that is learning notes, techniques and everything else that makes up learning an instrument.
2. The Procedural Process
Of course music requires some level of detachment from the “end effect” of the music in order to learn it, otherwise it would be very emotionally exhausting! However, in my experience most learning musicians go too far the other way - a piece of music becomes a series of notes to play in the correct order rather than a meaningful attempt at relating to people.
Often the process looks something like this:
Step 1: Read the notes
Step 2: Play the notes
Yet this is an approach that doesn’t really correspond to what music actually is! - An experience to relate to. Everything we play on an instrument is with the long term aim of being free and able to create something meaningful. This doesn’t mean that everything we play needs to be meaningful in itself. It means that when the opportunity to play meaningfully arises, we need to practice that too!
Let’s take learning a scale as an example. Scales aren’t always the most exciting thing to learn, but they do allow us to understand how music is constructed and give us the ability to play freely on the piano. When initially learning a scale, it may require a lot of repetition and slow practice, but when a scale becomes easy - the aim should shift to playing with dynamics, articulation and a sense of musicality. Over the short term a scale is somewhat detached from the musical experience, but over the long term those new skills help us play with a greater depth of musicality
3. The Real Process
This is the same for learning a piece of music. Initially the process may involve working out the notes, however beyond that the aim changes. When learning a piece of music, this same approach would look like this:
Step 1: Read the notes
Step 2: Work out what the notes mean
Step 3: Work out how to play the notes to show the meaning
Step 4: Play the notes
As a musician, interpreting the meaning of a piece of music and being able to give that meaning to your audience is the entire game. This too requires practice!
There are lots of ways to work out what a piece of music is trying to convey, it could be the lyrics, chords, dynamics, texture, instrumentation, structure, genre or any number of other features, the important thing is to ask yourself how the music feels and what about the music is making it feel that way. As a human, we have the ability to feel the sentiment of a piece of music naturally. As a musician, we are aiming to understand and reproduce the sentiment of a piece of music!
Matthew Cawood
(This is from my “Monday Music Tips“ weekly email newsletter. Join my mailing list to be emailed with future posts.)