Expressly YOU!

Recently a young student asked me, what is expression? Her question was in response to my comment that how we physically use our hands on the piano affects our ability to express the music. It’s a good question, and one that all music students must learn to answer in their own playing.

So, what is musical expression? How do we unleash or facilitate it in our own playing? 

Music is a language, and like any language, conveys thoughts, ideas, and feelings. When a song makes you feel exactly what the composer intended you to feel, the performer has not only correctly interpreted the music but has also physically applied various techniques to evoke emotions through sound.

We speak in sentences, and in a sense, so does music, through musical phrases. Each phrase of music conveys a particular musical idea that sounds complete, much like a sentence or a clause within a sentence. A musical phrase may be short or long. The performer’s job is to determine how to shape those phrases with sound. 

For example, one can blast through a phrase, like blowing a horn, and that may be appropriate depending on the musical context, or one can start softly and gradually increase volume, or apply a variety of volume changes. One can hold back a bit here and there, lingering almost imperceptibly on a note, or rapidly accelerate, and one can choose where and how to apply emphasis. 

Any word in sentence can change the meaning of the sentence when it is the emphasis:

• I didn’t say I don’t like cake.

• I didn’t say I don’t like cake.

• I didn’t say I don’t like cake.

• I didn’t say I don’t like cake.

• I didn’t say I don’t like cake.

• I didn’t say I don’t like cake.

• I didn’t say I don’t like cake.

Music is the same way. How you hear the musical sentence is how you will play it and no two pianists will play it exactly the same. That’s the beauty of musical expression — everyone has their own unique capacity to express what they hear in the music as it is written.

The better our technical skills — for example, how securely and proficiently we can play scales, arpeggios, chords and various articulations such as staccato or legato — the  more control we will have over our playing and our expression will be not be muffled by clumsy, deficient or inconsistent technical skills. 

The better our physical approach at the piano — for example, our hand and body posture, how we strike a key or lift off a key etc — the more refined our expression can become because how you strike a key and how you lift off is playing piano. You can’t play the instrument without striking a key! And how you strike a key at any given moment communicates something to the those who hear. So well-honed technical skills, framed with good physical approach,  help equip the pianist with an endless gateway for expression.

Listening, recognizing and responding to changes, however subtle,  in colour, tone, and mood within a piece of music or musical phase are also essential skills required for developing musical expression.  This is why listening to a variety of pianists perform the same piece can be so instructive and inspiring. We hear what they hear in the music, and it might be something we missed! 

Next time you’re listening to piano music, try listening to that same piece played by another pianist, and see if you notice differences in expression between the two performances. Helping students develop this skill is an important component in my lesson regimen so they become sensitive to nuances in expression and discover the joy of incorporating their own nuances into the music they are playing.