March 1st, 2023

… PLAY THE MUSIC !

Inspirational yet enigmatic, the recommendation to NOT PLAY THE NOTES is somehow typical of music classes in 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: how can one play the music without playing notes?

It might be intuitive for most musicians or music students to grasp the idea that notes are not music, and it doesn’t require a music degree to see the difference between someone who plays their heart out from someone who just plays proficiently. In the years I found that articulating with clarity this distinction highlights what is at the core of our musical culture, namely the interaction between notation and expression. Educated musicians learn how to inhabit both dimensions.

What is the relationship between notes and music? Notes are a written, visual device enabling us to perform the complex actions required for a piece to sound right. Music however is a way to communicate ideas, emotions, aesthetic content. While music is an undefinable, ephemeral phenomenon, a musical score is a rigorous instruction manual showing how to produce refined combinations of sounds. The score is a practical tool instructing on practical operations. What scores don’t show are the poetic intentions, and they never will.

It might be tricky to distinguish precisely between the two: depending on what we think poetic intentions are, we might be persuaded that music performed by a robot is indeed very expressive (albeit just reproducing the score) or that a young student playing inaccurately is not expressive at all (while not expressing the content of the score, a living performer would still be expressing something...). What we consider to be expressive is a subjective matter, of course, while the information conveyed by music notation is agreed upon by everyone, like words in a language: as a ‘chair’ is an object for sitting, forte means loud, Largo means slow, etc. Like a language, the notation system has evolved through centuries of collective use, shaped and influenced by culture, style, and practice.

The note is possibly the smallest item we can identify in a score, just a brick in the architecture of a piece. The similarity with written language once again is striking: like notes, letters are meaningless by themselves but necessary to form words and sentences. For a sentence to acquire meaning it must be organized properly at the lower levels -letters, words- and at the higher ones -syntax, content, punctuation, vocabulary, etc. Similarly, musical notes are combined by their register and timbre, into dynamic motives, phrases, periods, in sections, according to harmony, form and proportions, characterized by articulations and rhythm, etc.

The musical content is indeed to be found through all these levels of design, in the same way we wouldn’t appreciate a cathedral by just looking at the front or at one detail. The score presents the architecture of a piece in visual form, through lines and dots on paper: a complex coded system that requires education to become music. It’s a visual pathway to produce music, but music is not accessed via the eye. There are plenty of signs you won’t hear, and there is plenty of music that doesn’t have a sign: seeing doesn’t easily translates into hearing.

Notes and music belong to two quite different dimensions, one technical and one poetic: 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 one listens to music, does one hear a succession of notes? Perhaps notes are what is heard as music is being paid attention to. Does one detect intervals, tonalities, chords, or is it more rewarding to just connect with the poetic message of a piece? (One might argue -as musicians often do- that to fully appreciate music one must understand theory, harmony, syntaxis; but would I be more convinced by an argument because I can recognize the rhetoric devices it employs, like hyperboles, paradoxes, oxymoron?) Any listener knows that music means something when it goes beyond its means of production: while every score looks similar, every piece of music is unique. The most passionate listeners -and the best musicians among us- don’t hear pianos, cellos, oboes, but ideas, emotions, human joy, longing, and suffering. In other words, they connect with the poetic message of a piece and thus their inner selves, being that, I believe, the ultimate goal of music.

As instrumentalists, when do we stop playing notes and start playing music? Practice enables us to discover a piece, but only when it has become sufficiently familiar the score starts representing 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 can emerge. Like Michelangelo carved his subjects as if they needed to be freed from marble, we must work until sound can project ideas, colours, gestures or characters into our imagination.

‘You must learn by memory, then forget’, quoting from a movie I was very impressed by as a child (“Shine”, 1996), a phrase likely stolen from a conservatory class. In other words, the score ought to be forgotten so to express the human message that is in the sound and missing from the score. 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: at that point you are not playing notes anymore, music has emerged. For the magic to happen, everything must be in place: solid in your fingers, clear in your heart, and you, the performer, must be free of concerns.

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. There is a deeply humbling element here, emerging from the acceptance of practice as an open journey of discovery against the clear, yet limited information that a score offers.

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 a special mixture of unique qualities. For musicians the process is backwards: we first need to figure out what is the composer telling us, what is it that we are trying to say and why this music matter to us. We must keep trying until the exact balance of ingredients (gestures, ideas, visions, intentions, etc.) emerges to align in a perfect, magical mixture and the little black dots will have become music.

This article was featured in The Cross-Eyed Pianist is now one of the UK’s leading blogs on classical music, with a special focus on pianists and the piano.

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