This may sound like an odd question but does anyone else use their imagination while studying a piece of music and think of a story to go along with it?

My last flute teacher always had me describing what kind of setting/situation the music portrayed.

For example while studying Mouquet's La flute de pan, in Pan and les bergers I was to imagine sheep running up and down the hills and that the fast semiquaver passages were the wind blowing through the trees.

It was a couple of nights ago at 3am (couldn't sleep) and I decided to have a look at my Grade 8 Clarinet programme and write in little comments such as counting, reminders of flats etc. I was going through the Malcolm Arnold sonatina in my head and looking at the score thinking of what could make me give more expression when performing it, when all of a sudden the idea of a foxhunt came to me. Before I knew it I had put together a story that went from the beginning of the piece to the end about this foxhunt idea. I remebered that I used to use this technique (but hated it back then). It has certainly helped

Does anyone else use this technique?

I do this with my daughters. With the elder one (12, plays cello and trombone) we make up a story together. With the younger one (9, piano) we tend to make up words to go with the music and sing them.

I don't do this when I'm playing myself though.

Completely not deliberately, I always find myself creating a little story to go with pieces. Sometimes it's not a full story, but images that go with various passages. Sometimes if I get distracted frm the image and start following it further, I forget what I'm playing and mess it up because the story has changed!

I've found that encouraging my students to do this too allows them to engage more with their music and it also helps them to add more character to it.

At the recent concert party I attended, the concert was started off by our hostess, who told us the story which takes her through the piece she played, and it was a very interesting way to communicate it. Strangely enough, it didn't actually become what I thought of as she played, but there was a continuity and flow in how she played it which you could see had been influenced by the story, so it really is a method which works.

I tend to be less imaginative, and focus more on moods than to have a narrative as such, but it also helps me in my playing. Whether that transmits to those listening, I'd have to leave to others to judge.

Sometimes.

How dextrous!

On topic:

For any given piece of music I don't really have a story in terms of words in English - I have the story the music tells. Words are a poor substitute for music and vice versa.

Don't get me wrong: Words can be a wonderful accompaniment to music (e.g. almost any lyric by Johnny Mercer, Cole Porter, Ira Gerswhin etc. etc. not to mention the Messiah, Bach's Mass in B minor, Verdi's Requiem, Beethoven's Missa Solemnis etc.)

More, words can be wonderful in their own right, and can express things that cannot reasonably be put into music (the instructions of how to assemble a wardrobe, the Origin of Species, Dulce Et Decorum Est, Animal Farm, etc. etc.).

However, I genuinely believe that music can say things that words just cannot express: If picture can paint a thousand words then music can conjure up a thousand pictures, all at once, all equally true and valid and different every time. Words take the glorious technicolour multi-dimentional palate of music and put it into shades of grey if not black and white.

I agree. In fact I was rather taken aback when my oboe teacher suggested thinking up a story for a piece. I was then surprised to see the same idea surface in a master class I was at a few days ago.

I am so glad to find this thread as I feared I might be alone in these curious musical stories . . . one of my other passions, aside from music, is creative writing and I have always developed the 'mood' of a piece into some kind of narrative. Often it is undeveloped or partial, but it is an integral part of how I hear and learn music. Maybe I am not so mad after all . . .!

Yes - frequently, when trying to work out how I want a piece to sound interpretation-wise. Sometimes it's a character rather than a story, and sometimes it's a sequence of separate scenes from a film - I used LOTR characters and scenes when working on a recital a few years back.......

Yes I do. In fact my teacher does snippets with me too, and then I expand on them to come up with a more complete story.

I feel that stories are particularly useful for slower pieces, to keep one from drifting away into auto-pilot mood, which I am guilty of.

For my G6 List B exam piece by Beethoven, I imagined the poor Ludwig writing a letter/poem to his childhood girlfriend, lamenting on how they used to be a perfectly innocent pair, sharing secrets without a care. Then she grew up, they grew apart, she left with another young man. It was only until her heart was broken that she contacted Ludwig again. Despite the heartache she has caused him, Ludwig writes that he accepts her as a best friend wholeheartedly again, and now their relationship has matured beyond physical attraction, towards the level of being soulmates. And the letter/poem ends "sweetly, happily, ever after"

For my List C piece (The Buccaneer), I pretended that I was Jack Sparrow, standing at the bow, laughing and saying," Here I come!!!". Then Jack Sparrow was foolishly defeated by some rival, and goes into hiding (pp). But of course, Jack Sparrow returns again towards the end, shouting,"I AM BACK!" and accidentally misses a step, falling into the water.

It was so much fun to play with imagination, but one must keep practising when to imagine what

I find that some teachers use it more than others. I had a teacher that created whole stories, whereas the teacher i'm with just now just has little ideas about little sections of a piece.




I'm the same, I loved creative writing classes in English at school and I find it helps me to not just play the piece, but play it with the right character in terms of the context of the piece.

I also found that changing the story can change the character of the piece. Hmm who knew.

Quite poetically expressed, and very true.

I do sometimes ask pupils to imagine a type of scene - pastoral, seascape, busy city etc or a particular mood. But I never go much further than that. I sometimes ask very young children to imagine what happens at a particular point in a piece for examlpe a high note in a piece with a title like "In the garden" might suggest climbing to the top of a tree.

Apart from that this is not something that I find helpful. I'm inclined to agree with Robodoc. A narrative stream would, for me, interfere with rather than enhance the music. That of course does not apply to opera, lsongs or other forms where the text and the music are linked.

However if a pupil came to me with a story invented to help with interpretation I would certainly accept their personal approach.

I think it's interesting to see different peoples' approach to learning new pieces.

Some folk have weird and wonderful ways of learning, whereas others just sit down and get on with it.

It's similar to how we study for school exams and remember things: visually, aurally, orally, written...