tldr: performing music is only fun when you turn the character up to 11; classical musicians have been averaging an 8 for the better part of a century. Here's how to fix that.
I want you to turn on a new level of sincere enjoyment in your music making. A level in which it is abundantly obvious what every phrase in your music is about. I’m talking about your audience getting what you’re doing, because you get what you’re doing, and you’re doing it so well. As a result, I think your career will improve along with the state of the classical music world at large.
Even though classical music comes largely out of the elite, erudite monarchies and aristocracies from centuries past, and often features highly sophisticated compositional techniques, it is still basically entertainment—the same as all other music. However, I think other musicians don’t suffer any confusion on this topic and are clearer in their head with what their artistry is about. Meanwhile, we have some hangups to let go of.
We’ve got legions of wondrously talented luminaries who strived to be serious throughout the seriously depressing 20th century and this overlaid a constricting tradition onto our performance norms. Now, I admit I'm paint with a broad brush and fabulous performances abound in modern times. Nonetheless, more frequent than not, the entertainment value of our concerts is undermined by a dysfunctional force at work, and I believe our pervading culture could use a shock.
What started in the 19th century as a worship of genius composers afterwards tended towards the standard of the “transparent performer”: the prevalent expectation that the musician is to behave as a humble servant intent on minimizing their interpretative input to the point that their performance might be mistaken for an act of self-flagellating prostration as much as for music. Richard Taruskin called the trend “text-fetishism,” pointing to the limitations in what modern performers allow themselves to bring to the sacrosanct score.
But we have a compass back to the truth of our musical roots. We have a gold mine of recordings of musicians who grew up in less inhibited times. And what we hear on those records are full-blooded, well-defined characters. Anything but transparent, they make an impression when light strikes them. In fact, the character they throw off becomes the whole point of the music. It’s simply the commodity they trade in and what their audiences pay to enjoy.
I’d go so far as to say that the depiction of character is essentially what music and art is.
Now, think of your favorite pop songs. Doesn’t each one deliver its own vibe and mood? Its own character? Basically, what your favorite pop star does, is excel at a number of impressions. And each of their songs inhabits one of those impressions. Well…that’s what the performance of music entails—the depiction of a characterful impression. Ours included.
Character is what you see. It’s the surface area, the skin, the effect of the affect. True, it’s only made possible by the great effort to build everything underneath—learning all the notes, rhythms, and markings, figuring out the implied phrase grammar, and gaining a technical know-how of actually playing the instrument.
But all of that work only makes music to the extent that it’s holding up the final layer—the music’s particular spirit. That’s where all the fun is. That’s the point.
There can be a lot of stunning technical prowess achieved by the bones and musculature underneath, but the artistic statement is incomplete and not actually enjoyable if the purpose of the performance is not channeled to the proverbial facial expression that typifies what all that work is all about.
And honestly, technically talented performance that’s deficient in musical character is a somewhat gruesome thing to behold—it’s as if, mixed up with the facial expression, you can also see the bone and muscle popping through. Well, that’s sort of distracting and makes it hard to appreciate what the music is actually about. Halloween is fun once a year. But Halloween every night is, I believe, the definition of Hell.
No. If the music were a ballerina, its eyebrows must lift in just the right way, and its smile has to be just so, for the emotional impact of some incredibly complex jump to have its intended impact.
I’m not saying you have to make funny faces when you play your instrument. I’m saying that the audience needs to hear those faces with their eyes closed. I’m saying the whole reason for playing the piece and for the audience to show up is to hear what those faces sound like.
And so. How to do it:
After you learn the basics of reading music and playing your instrument, you can finally get started with the work of the artist—having fun. You start asking deeper questions during your practice. What is this phrase about? How does it move through the room? What is its body language?
And as you reach into your imagination and all your past experience of life, you find what can’t be written between the notes. You’ve seen things. Things that start to show up in the answers you find.
Now, will you find the right answer? Are you interpreting the music tastefully and in style—that is, with the character the composer had intended?
Well, yes and no.
It’s likely that the composer struck a slightly different pose than the one you’ll make.
But what’s important isn’t that your impression of the musical character be identical to Louis Beethoven’s. What’s required is that you make an impression.
The notes are merely a vessel for the impression. And that vessel can either be filled with it or not.
Music happens when it’s filled.
And if you make an educated guess, chances are your take on the musical character will be pretty similar to what Beethoven was going for.
So, listen. This is your only choice if you want to make music out of classical music. Or any music.
To pop musicians this couldn’t be more obvious. It’s what they live for. It doesn’t matter if they aren’t actually performing an instrument. It doesn’t even matter if they’re lip syncing! They understand that what they are doing on stage, first and foremost, is about setting a particular mood for this song and a particular vibe for that. It’s all an act. And they do whatever their instincts and experience tells them they must to accomplish this.
And I regret to say that with their bag of tricks, they know more about the allure, sexiness, and attractiveness of musical power than many elite classical instrumentalists do today.
Ask yourself this. When you listen to 19th century musicians and give them permission to do the things they do that are not on the page—things that can’t possibly be on a page—do you give yourself and your peers that permission? I fully expect you do many artistic and admirable things. But how far are you willing to go? Far enough to pierce through to a level where you are satisfying a need for sincere and abundant enjoyment?
I’m not saying we are to recreate the performances we hear on the old records. But the time has come for the extroverted gifts they left us to overpower the constraints that have intervened since then. Their personalities, their moxie, their take on things, their individuality, were all necessary to the vitality and truth resonating from their interpretations. And to be like them, we will need to walk out on the plank and find the courage to strike a pose of our own.
It doesn’t mean you have to wear rhinestones like Liberace or ham it up onstage like de Pachmann. It just means you have to have a personality. It means you can’t be a transparent servant who hides behind the wall of respect our (diminishing) audience has for classical composers.
But I believe audiences will give us just as much permission as we give ourselves to add thick layers of personality to the score that could not possibly be marked. I think they’re still coming because they’re yearning for it—even if their longing is not fully articulated and they’ve half forgotten how moving and satisfying music can be.
So getting back to how it’s done.
Before you can bring out the character of a phrase, you’ll, 1.) need to decide which part of the music is a phrase, and 2.) you’ll need to know how to make the required sounds come out of your instrument—i.e. have the required chops.
First, phrasing.
At its most basic, phrasing is a commitment to speak the music in a way that your listener will understand. It requires an epiphany on your part that at any given moment in performance, you are either beginning something, being in the middle of something, or finishing something—and you are doing myriad rhetorical things to transmit your understanding clearly to your audience.
Now, parsing the music into these sentence fragments is mostly instinctual and related to our gift for language, but sometimes knowing where they start and stop can be fuzzy around the edges. It will necessitate investigation around debatable moments, especially when the markings the composer wrote are in apparent contradiction with linguistic common sense.
[And here I would like to tell you that if you would like to read my upcoming tutorial on phrasing, and also if you have requests for pieces you would like to be included in its chapters, then please click here.]
But once you become more conscious of how these phrases work, you are prepared to ask the crucial question, “What is the first part of this phrase all about?” “Who is it, what is it, and how does the vibe change in the next part of the phrase?”
Keep asking yourself and venturing an answer. Perhaps with a little luck, or perhaps in proportion to the sincerity of your asking, you will get two things in return for your question:
You get an audiated insight that you actually value, enjoy, and are amused by. It comes as a special gift at first. But, with practice you become gifted! You build your musical imagination like a muscle and become a constantly inspired, intuitively musical person—that is, a person who is apt to intuit the character of whatever music is thrown in front of you in an abundantly colorful way.
And the second thing you get when you think on the phrase’s character is a better chance at having an effective technique. This is because the audiated vision gives you a clue as to how to physically accomplish that inner sound at your instrument. If you hear a particular type of good-natured humor, say, that spirit literally moves you and guides your hands to play…in the manner and essence of its spirit.
Technically, this is the best lesson you can have, because the accurate obtainment of sound with character requires the most precise and nuanced touch. The motions you must make to create it are simply more engrossing, devoted, and specific than what you do to create a prescribed, objectively “beautiful”, conservatory-stamp-of-approval type sound.
Now with all this said, you might still be doubting just how capable you are at coming up with spirited and brilliant ways of turning a phrase.
“Who am I?” You might ask. “Am I a great personality? A great diva that can captivate audiences and make people laugh and cry?” “Do I have what it takes to make the microsecond decisions that make sounds sincerely moving?”
I’ve let something slip a few times in this essay that I think buries a big lead:
Humor.
I’m going to make the following claim: I contend that you are an expert at hearing the humor in something. At getting a joke. Perhaps not some brain teaser type joke. But when someone’s being funny and says or does something in a funny way, you probably laugh in a flash.
Going further, I’d say that there’s a good chance that you are very funny. Even if in your own introverted way or in only your most trusted circles.
Yes, I’d bet your social skills come with a fairly extensive training on the funny frequency. Open your chats with friends. Are they not essentially devoted to the next funny thing someone says?
In our society, humor is what we retain of our childhoods filled with playing and putting on make-believe. But instead of pretending we're kings and queens, knights and sorcerers, now we just usually joke around with our friends.
What I'm saying is that we all have experience acting like a character sometimes. And we know that to get a laugh, we need to reach a pretty high level of expressivity. What I’m saying is we need to use this standard in our interpretations of our music.
To borrow a phrase from the movie Spinaltap: for something to be funny, you need to turn the character “up to 11”. That means we’re going to need to turn the character of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms up to 11 too, if we want to sincerely enjoy this music and connect with our audience.
And there's something else about humor. Think of the expression, “What type of humor are you in?” In this broader sense, humor is essentially, a stand-in for the word attitude. Ill-humored. An odd humor, etc. The usage comes from the Ancient Greeks, for whom there were four “humors” or fluids in the body, and each person’s health and disposition depended on the balance of each flowing through their veins.
Remember, music and art is about the full cast of characters making their procession across the guise of our rapt attention. And even if those characters are not comic, they still captivate us with their aura and flair. And even if they don't make us laugh, per se, there is still something funny about them.
So if you are still playful enough to joke around, you still have it within you, at least with your instrument, to play make-believe as you once did, and enjoy putting on characters that are in all sorts of moods. You can divine the spirits on the page before you and brew them into your interpretation until they are thick and pungent and appreciable from the back row of the concert hall.
If this feels disrespectful and silly to you and seems like it's reducing classical music to a joke, there is a reason for this, which I alluded to above. The short version of the story is that after we slaughtered each other in a couple world wars, endured a generation of economic depression, and stunted our childhoods and formative years with an industrialized education system—well, we just can’t take a joke.
While we all laude the glowing playing from yester-century, we generally shy away from partaking in its sauciness and sassiness and would probably criticize it as unserious if it cropped up today. And for this reason, we are more willing to illuminate musical character that is angry and threatening. Less so, music that is humorous, tender, and romantic. And I actually often hear that anger slip into music of all these other sorts whenever the composer draws an “f”.
In some way, I sense that the historically informed practice (HIP) folk are trying to skip over the 20th century. They’re trying to heal themselves from its trauma and get back to a more direct and rhetorical report with the audience.
And I agree with them! When I think of going to the symphony, I think of a good time—but I’m afraid I don’t really think of a rip-roaring, good time. I think about sleek patron funded concert halls with matching music stands and clean corporate font programs. I don’t think about strong personalities coming out on stage and blowing the roof off the place. (Go listen to Sir Thomas Beecham conducting Gounod’s Faust. We don’t have anything like that guy.)
Well, that’s too bad. Because blowing the roof off the place is what pop music audiences get, and it’s what they expect and deserve. It’s what we all deserve.
Now, think of that minuet from the sonata you’re working on. Could you honestly play that thing for your friends who don’t know classical music? Probably not much of it. You’d probably get away with playing something fast and furious—but not that minuet.
But what if you went all in imagining its innate quirkiness and you heard its idiosyncratic way of darting around? A totally shameless dance like in the final act of that movie Napoleon Dynamite.
It will take some courage, but after you hear it to the point of amusing yourself, you have in your mind a way of spinning it that is worth anyone’s time to hear—because it’s funny.
Well, you’ve just correctly interpreted the piece! And all the sudden, all the microsecond details that give the music this “can’t look away” character will flood into your mind. And each of those little tics and jolts will guide you and your hands in exactly the way to move.
That minuet will probably become the most charming music your friends have ever heard.
And once you have opened this world and made them smile, you have access to other special places. You have permission to say something a little raw. Something a little sad. And it will actually touch their hearts. You will become a diva.
And it will all be just for fun. Playing pretend. Make-believe.
I think you get it, but I’ll just close with a coda.
Remember the Disney film Fantasia? I think that film was a bittersweet touchstone. In hindsight, I think it’s the moment in mainstream society when the momentum of 19th century-style classical music-making finally unraveled—its last gasp in a modern, brutal world.
The film is essentially a series of gorgeous cartoon depictions of the character behind the notes. Even when it’s solemn or scary, the vibe of the film hums with playfulness. It’s as if that playfulness is the viscous ether through which the character of the music moves.
I invite you to embrace this imaginative nature within yourself. To awaken something ancient in you that used to play all the time. I invite you to make this playfulness the central focus of your music-making.
I believe this will guide you back to the spirit that moved the composer’s pen across the score, to a wider and more appreciative audience, and to playing your instrument with sincere enjoyment.
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