… PLAY THE MUSIC !
Guest post by Alberto Ferro
Inspirational yet enigmatic, the recommendation to NOT PLAY THE NOTES is typically given in music classes of conservatories all around the world. It suggests that a musician should forget about technical things and focus on the poetic content of the music. Easy to say. And it doesn’t even remotely hint at how that shall be accomplished. How can one play the music without playing notes? Is it perhaps figurative speech?
What is the relationship between music and notes? Music is a way to communicate ideas, emotions, aesthetic content, and the notes are a notational device that helps reconstructing the complex series of actions necessary for music to be performed. While music is an undefinable, ephemeral phenomenon, a musical score is an inescapable, very tangible instruction manual that conveys in a rigorous way how to produce refined combinations of sounds on your instrument. The score (and every kind of musical notation) is a practical tool instructing on practical operations. What scores don’t show are the poetic intention, and they never will.
A note is possibly the smallest item we can identify in a score, a small brick in the architecture of a piece. The similarity with written language is striking: like notes, letters are meaningless by themselves but necessary to form words and phrases of content. In language, for a sentence to acquire meaning it must be organized properly at the level of letters, words and above; syntax, content, punctuation, vocabulary, etc.
Musical notes are grouped into motives, phrases, periods that are dynamic, contextualized by further levels such as harmony, organized in rhythms, sections, according to proportions, characterized by articulations, etc. The score presents all of it in visual form, through black dots on white paper: it takes some years of musical education to see all of that just by studying the score. Even more significantly, seeing doesn’t exactly translates in hearing, and even less easily transforms in performing.
Notes and music belong to two quite different dimensions: instrument and art, instruction and expression, gesture and intention. The ability to maintain the former at the service of the latter is possibly the highest way of conducting ourselves in music.
When you listen to music, do you hear notes or do you pay attention to the music? What is more rewarding, to connect with the poetic message or to detect intervals, tonalities, chords, and notes? Any listener knows that music is relevant when it goes beyond its means of production: every score looks the same, black dots on paper, how uninteresting, but every piece of music is unique. The most passionate listeners don’t hear pianos, cellos, oboes, but emotions, art, sublime ideas, pure creations, etc.
As instrumentalists, when do you stop playing notes and start playing the music? As you practice, there is a point where you have grown so much familiarity with the piece that the score stops showing notes and starts presenting an emotional roadmap, a poetic journey, an aesthetic design. What makes a piece of music exciting are the ideas, colours, gestures, the human characters we find in it, so we must practice it until these emerge, until sound projects ideas, colours, gestures or characters.
‘You must learn by memory, then forget’. The score ought to be forgotten so to express the human message that is in the sound and missing from the score. Or, only when we ‘play without thinking’ music acquires a deeper meaning, since thinking is the very process by which we inhibit more instinctive ways of expression, and the number one reason we get distracted while listening to music.
Start with one bar, one phrase, one chord, and when it works build up from there: the bar, the chord, the phrase, will at once become a vision, a gesture, an emotion, and that means you are not playing notes anymore. There is only one way for the magic to happen and requires that everything is ready in place, solid in your fingers, clear in your heart, and you, the performer, must be free of concerns.
No doubt it is hard, but there isn’t any more valuable route in music. As listeners, for music to reach out and move us, it must be really a special mixture of unique qualities. For musicians the process is backwards: we first try figure out what is it that we are trying to say, why this music matter for us, what is the composer telling us, and keep trying until the exact balance of ingredients (gestures, ideas, visions, intentions, etc.) emerges to align in a perfect, magical mixture.
Alberto Ferro is a composer and pianist. Current Creative Director at the London Contemporary School of Piano, Alberto holds a Piano Performance Degree from Milan Conservatory and a Master in Music from Washington State University, U.S.
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