I have picked up lots of advice from this forum, and I am hoping to find some advice and suggestion for my daughter. She is 10 1/2, Y6, she has been playing the violin for 2 years, and piano for 4.5years. She practises daily (without too much of me nagging her) and makes good steady progress. She is planning to take the G5 for both piano and violin in December. We get the same comments from her teachers in her practice books: "Perform!" "Put more dynamics in!" She is a quiet child, is far from talkative, one of those children who always end up in the last one in the queue. She is confident in her own way, and is happy to join in a new group of children if she is sufficiently interested in the activity offered. She does not seem to get nervous to play for exams or at pupils' concert at all. But - she plays rigid! Her body does not move while playing. She can play the "notes correctly" more or less, but sounds bland, not communicating with the audience. Is it - a matter of maturity/age? Is it something which she will suddenly "discover her voice" and explode one day? Or she is not just she is not that musical? Has anybody had similar experiences with your own child(ren) or pupils? Is the ability to "perform" musically innate or learned? I will be happy for her to pass the G5 in her own time, but if she can "improve" her performance then it would be so much better....

I am a piano adult learner, and had a very similar experience when I started.

One day my piano teacher was talking to me about dynamics, and I told her that I felt the dynamics. Her very obvious reply was that she needed to hear them. This came as a bit of a bolt of lightening! I am now told that I play very expressively.

Perhaps your daughter isn't fully conscious that her playing is very flat dynamically. I don't have any suggestions regarding how to help her, except don't give up. These things can change.

Like you I'm just a parent so I'm not saying this with any authority.

I'm not sure entirely with what helps someone ot play musically. I would guess there are two things and one is maturity. The other is help from the teacher right from the start.

My daughter had only just begun playing at 10 and I think teachers stayed off getting her to play with lots of style. At 14 she is beginning to understand what is required and a couple of good teachers have given her some large clues.

I think there is a difference between playing with dynamics to playing musically. I realise it's part of it and perhaps the easiest to explain but it's not the whole of it. My daughter has begun listening to pieces that she is playing, whilst she's always done this she'll go for orchestral settings rather just than AB CDs now.

Can you record your daughter's playing so she can hear it back? Mine has found this useful. You could perhaps get her to play with exaggerated dynamics as a start and then let her hear what it sounds like. I know Emsoboe often thought she was playing the dynamics when they could have been done much more.

hmm, interesting one.

Learning the notes in the right order is just the start of learning a piece, the performance also has to be practised.

She can certainly be taught, encouraged to be more relaxed and less rigid, which I would hope her teacher is doing anyway, and she may discover her inner music later on, as she gets older and more confident she should feel more comfortable with the music rather than just going through the motions. It is certainly something that some people find more naturally than others.


I have an adult student who I honestly thought would never really develop a musicality beyond the notes, but I discovered that she never actually listened to music, any music not even radio 1 or 2, so I suggested that she did, she eventually plumped for radio 3 (I thought she'd go for classic fm but she didn't like the adverts ) and now she has a far greater understanding of how it can sound and she can now understand what she can really do with the notes. The improvement has been enormous.

Also watching other performers can make a difference.

I wonder if musical and expressive playing comes later than technically proficient playing - it can be hard to think about the music when still concentrating on the notes. The physical demands of playing, focusing on intonation, position, bowing etc, or navigating the keyboard, remembering to pedal and so on - maybe it all takes so much attention that the music gets a bit lost. Perhaps playing through some old material which is very familiar would help, and just thinking about how it sounds. Singing through pieces can help (especially in private!) with no fingers to worry about. Also, I think it takes a lot of confidence to be musically expressive, and if she is generally a bit quiet and reserved may not feel comfortable doing anything which isn't specific and on the page.
N

Inborn or learned? It is a bit of both. But I don't believe it is a special gift - except when someone has it in abundance - and apparently without effort.

For most of us, and that probably includes your daughter, we are born with the capacity to produce music that is expressive and moving, but we have to work to develop it.

But she is only 10. That she plays the right notes, practices bithout being press-ganged into it and is making steady progress are admirable inthemselves, and a good basis for becoming a fine musician when she is a bit older.

It is the teacher's job to help the student to create an expressive performance, but it needs more precise and specific instructions, exercises, learning experiences than simply exhorting her to "Perform!" "Put more dynamics in!" " That is bad as throwing someone in the water and yelling at them "Swim! Swim!"

It is not enough to tell her to do it. She has to be shown how.

Are there any songs which she likes singing and which you can get the sheet music for? I sometimes find that I can play pieces with more feeling if they're my favourites anyway because I'm always singing them...

I think listening to a lot of music is certainly a part of it: but I'd also say that exhortations along the lines of "play more expressively" quite simply are not going to get across what it is which needs to be achieved. Louder and softer, faster and more slowly: these are instructions which don't actually describe that accurately what happens when music is played expressively, and even if they did, it takes far too much processing to turn those ideas into well shaped music for it to work.

Successful teaching I have witnessed doesn't talk in those terms at all - our kids' first piano teacher had the most wonderfully vague manner about her, despite being a bright lady, and she spoke about ideas like "where are we going to with this music?" - thus a phrase with a rising scale can be played in a way which emphasises that, and yes, if you were to analyse it in detail you'd say it got louder, perhaps faster too, then plateaued at the top for dramatic effect.....but what the teacher actually would say is, "head for here, this is where we're going at this bit" - and the child could do it from those cues better than a detailed description could have achieved. Use of mood and above all making sure that phrases are understood, will get further than demands to be more expressive, without any indication of how one might achieve that, and getting the child to see if she can find her own ideas within the music to express is even better.

The opposite can happen too - I was an unwilling passive observer of some ghastly talent show thing being watched by one of my offspring, and some of the aspiring musicians were packing so much of "their feelings and emotion" into the guff they were singing, that they destroyed their ability to communicate musically just as much as the unemotional kid would have done.

i would say phrasing is more important than dynamics. after all, you can play expressively on a harpsichord or organ with no dynamics, but playing without an understanding of the structure of the music will sound boring on any instrument. once you get that, understanding how to play dynamics becomes much easier.

We have had it the other way round - my daughter has always seemed to be able to express herself through playing but started off weaker rhythmically and aurally, although these have really developed with maturity. She also preferred not to do technical exercises although now realises the importance of them. I think listening to music and therefore developing your owns tastes and passions for particular music and also seeing it performed live will all be factors that will help your daughter develop abilities to play with more expression. My daughter now listens to professional recordings of anything she plays over and over again so that she can get a feel for the music.

Overall I think that all skills can be developed. We may all have innate qualities for music playing but not many people have all the innate skills at the start. I would suggest that you get out with her to see as much live music as you can from a variety of genres. I'm sure that if she has the motivation and enjoyment it will come.

Has she tried listening to and playing jazz or swing? I find it physically impossible to stay still whilst playing that type of music

I disagree with you on this one: the skill in playing harpsichord in particular, but it applies with the organ too, is in giving the impression of dynamics by articulation. Having said that, dynamics tend to follow naturally once you get a sense of phrase, yes....

Yes - I had forgotten about it all until I read your post. We weren't as far on as you are at the same age (and we still don't mention piano...). I'm awfully good at pontificating with hindsight, and this is just my view, but I think she not so much grew out of it as grew into the music as she began to understand what it was about.

On violin, an adjudicator commenting at a festival once said something like, 'technically just about flawless - - but you CAN smile if you want to' [much laughter] and someone less kindly at a later event (someone she knew, I should add) told her to move, dance, as she played instead of staring at the floor and burning a hole in it [complete incomprehension on her part; she stood like a soldier on parade and frowned throughout when she played the piece again].

Now you'd never know she'd ever been like it. On the other hand, good technique has stood her in good stead.

But you see little ones who can make you cry with their expressive playing, so you may not have to follow the long slow road too.

I think for me it was something that I grew into with more maturity, and also listening to music - especially listening to recordings of pieces I was playing. I would also recommend she tries recording or videoing herself playing, sometimes when you are concentrating on the notes you don't necessarily listen to how it is sounding as a whole piece - you are thinking more about whether a particular note is in tune, rather than the dynamics of a phrase. Or sometimes you hear what you think it should sound like rather than what you are really playing! Actually listening back to a recording is completely different and may help her realise what is missing.

In my humble opinion, musicality has nothing to do with smiling, dancing and general cavorting around. I really can't abide seeing coached theatrical "musicality" in young players.

Listening to music and listening to a recording of her own playing would probably help a lot.
But the way I learnt to play expressively was to feel like I had some freedom. PLaying music is all about rules and you need to be able to break those rules to express what you want using the music.

It might help if they are playing to a scene in their mind - if the music is sad, maybe visualising a sad memory and playing along to that memory. Or if the music is joyful, perhaps playing to a scene that was joyful. Just using the imagination can lead to a completely different performance.

Another way is to decide what story you would like to tell with the music and imagine telling that story through the music.

Another technique I used to do was if the piece was quiet, play it loud, if it was fast, play it slow etc and notice how the music changes - and then decide which parts you liked loud and why and which parts you liked soft and then vary the whole piece until it is the way you like to hear it.
Then you look at the dynamic markings which are actually written and you play them instead of your own. This gives you a different perspective of the piece while allowing you the freedom to practice and play with the dynamics.
After all this you can then incorporate the written dynamics and your own dynamics to complete your own interpretation of the work.

I use all of these techniques quite a lot.

I agree with Mad Tom. Your daughter has sufficient technqiue to get through the notes; however, she may not possess the technique needed for a musical performance. Her fingers may have enough dexterity for fast scales and arpeggios, and she probably has sufficient coordination between her two hands. But there is more... As you said, your daughter doesn't move her body when she plays and her playing sounds rigid. Too much physical motion is not good, of course, but some motions from the arms and upper body are necessary for a musical performance. Such physical motions have to be taught.

Yep, I agree with Mad Tom as well. My own experience (with singing) was that my teacher was constantly telling me expressive things to do but I physically didn't know how to do it with my voice. I could sing the notes but didn't have the control to achieve the precise sounds that I wanted. I felt very musical inside and could imagine exactly how I wanted the piece to go but I just couldn't do it. Therefore, it may actually be a technique issue, even though certain aspects of her technique are obviously very good. Are you and your daughter happy with this teacher? (Apologies if this is in fact an excellent teacher, I don't mean to jump to conclusions, I'm just saying it may not be your daughter's fault)

I think this is very true and with a bit of luck her confidence will develop as she gets older.

Things I have found that have helped me are having my teacher play the piece with me (obviously this won't work for the piano unless she is having lesons in a room with two instruments) but is possible with the violin. Not only does this mean I can try and match my playing to my teacher's but it also feels as though the pressure has been taken off me as he is not standing there watching me play.

Another thing I have found helps is playing with my eyes shut. This removes all distractions (including that of the printed page) and makes me far more aware both of my body and of what the music is doing.

I have never thought of that - that she is actually feeling musical inside and could imagine exactly how, but does not know. Hence she says "I am putting in dynamics" Now I feel awful. "Play musically" is also perhaps too abstract for my daughter. to understand.



No apology necessary about the teachers, I understand what you mean. Yes, my daughter is happy with her teachers. Both teachers are, I think, because my daughter fairly quickly picks up a new piece, are so keen to see my daughter develop further than playing the right notes. As Mad Tom and other posters say she has to be shown how. I will ask them to demonstrate their performance again (hopefullly they have played for her before!), and seeing & hearing how it can be down must help her.

I have been so encouraged by the posters, and thank you alll for the positive and constructive messages.
I will try recording her ( and myself on the piano and violin for a laugh!), I will talk about story/scene to imagine while she plays. Once I told her "think about something sad" her reply was "I don't have any sad things to think about!" I am sure she can think of some sad stories by maybe by Michael Morpurgo... We will see how her she gets on, and her recordings of today will make interesting listening in a few years time.

HanonMum

Very true. I was even contemplating she may have to do some "speech and drama" lessons in order to be able to "act"a bit. It may help her to become less reserved, but it is not a solution, and communicatiion can take place without swinging arms, as DiscoPants commented. I admire in a way those who CAN overact on the stage, though....

I'm not sure that just demonstrating is the answer. It can help, especially if there's some discussion involved too but maybe it needs a bit more of an active approach. Not necessarily physically active (though that can be useful too) but inlvolving stories and ideas as previously mentioned.
At the simplest level I encourage more musical playing even from beginners by maybe referring to the title of a piece and asking whether it sounded like that.
Your daughter has advanced quite quickly technically and the rest might just need time to catch up.
Maybe technically easier pieces for fun would help to develop more musical playing.

We've had some frustration this morning over Flute playing. Emsoboe feels it's really bad. In the last 2 or 3 weeks she's had changes of teacher on two instruments who seem to be sorting out technical and musicality issues. She's had this for a while now on Recorder. She feels her Flute playing has detriorated but it has infact improved. It's simply that she can't at the moment transfer all she's learning elsewhere. I had to remind her that she had problems with support about a year ago but it's second nature now on all her wind instruments and I'm hoping the musicality will develop on Flute. We both need ot accept at the moment it's lack of experience.

Hanonmum I wouldn't worry too much given time and the correct guidance your daughter will sort this out.

Frustration? ... and us. J says she's lost the ability to perform and is very fed up. In her case its slips and intonation. Can get it OK in practice then can't do it in lessons let alone performance (and we have a solos concert toight, solo Bach, help.). It could be to do with regaining the ability to put the technical bits on backburner and turn out a performance and ENJOY IT. Not sure (in haste) whether this has been mentioned above in relation to Hanonmum's much younger player, but J's teacher always used to tell her to go out and enjoy herself.

[Oh - musimum, I never responded to your offer of a swap. I felt so guilty of course, what I do best. Also I just did my tax return and realised the taxman will get all my extra pennies this year so sadly I have to decline your kind offer. And I don't have a pulse either so I don't actually notice]

Son's violin teacher ironically has taught him a lot about expressive playing...by focusing on technique. He had a lot to say on the subject, notably...

..."playing with feeling" isn't about YOUR feelings - it's about how you make the audience feel. If it was just a matter of conveying your own feelings, tonight's audience might find out how you feel about the soulful eyes of the girl in the second row, whereas tomorrow's audience might have to make do with your feelings about having skipped lunch and discovered that you won't get paid for another month!

So if you want your audience to receive a certain emotional impression, you have to figure out how you are going to do that, and then do it consistently...according to him.

What a useful piece of advice - so easy to get wound up looking inwards

I would tend to disagree... as a human race we are (or should be) naturally empathic. When someone cries we feel sad, because we see a projection of ourselves and our own sadness. The audience feelings are your feelings reflected back at them. But when you play a piece of music it is more complicated than showing your 'own' emotion, since you are translating someone elses (the composers) expression of feeling. Therefore, by imagining what they might be trying to express helps you feel the composers emotion and you have to relay that back through the music. It is an illusion that we are separate from our audience.

One of the best ways to develop as a musician is to do as much listening as possible. I often set "listening practice" for my pupils and lend them CDs to listen to which takes up one of their practice sessions for that week.

If possible, listen to different recordings of pieces you're learning - decide which you prefer and think about why. When starting out, I think it's okay to imitate someone else's performance - copying others is one of the best ways human beings learn. Eventually you develop your own style and sound but imitating someone else's performance gives you a starting point if you're stuck! I still do it now - I try and get recordings of any pieces I'm playing with brass bands, orchestras, big bands etc and I listen to them. It's a great way of learning a piece as well as giving me ideas for how I might like to interpret it and perform it (even if I end up doing something different to what I might have heard on a CD).

This made me laugh, but it has a lot of truth in it - my experience is that I can only play musically or expressively when I am thoroughly across the technique in a given piece. Any anxiety or uncertainty or just simply having to concentrate on what I am doing technically throttles the whole thing. And I agree it isn't about my feelings (because if it was, all my pieces would be rather anxious affairs......well, they are when I'm playing for my teacher, because I know she knows what it is supposed to sound like, curses... ) but rather about the mood that I am trying to convey to or induce in my audience and the feelings I want THEM to have.

My teacher and I often giggle about the fact that when I am working on a particular technical issue everything else goes out the window - take vibrato for example. When I am trying to change the vibrato style I am using I completely and utterly forget to count. And even worse, I don't even realise I am not counting properly. I can count. I really can. But I can't count and make my vibrato come right. And as soon as she tells me what I am doing and I go back and check, she is invariably right (grrr). So I get the counting right - and the dratted vibrato goes tight. Aaaagggh. And then you expect me to play musically?? Fat chance.. But when I go back and play old pieces that I know backwards, THEN I can put some expression and musicality into it. Same is true for my daughter - she was playing some Bach in her lesson yesterday (I go in for the last 5 mins so the teacher can tell me what she is doing for the week). Her teacher had worked on several things with her in the lesson - making sure she was in the right part of the bow, joining the phrases horizontally rather than playing them chopped up, building the volume through a crescendo rather than just seeing the crescendo marking and playing louder immediately. It suddenly sounded like proper Bach!! But through the week preceeding I had listened to her practice and I knew it was in tune, all the timing was right and so on but it sounded all wrong. I really like specific instructions as to how to use technique to get the effect you want rather than woolliness - and so does she.

Muse - I would see empathy a little differently, as having an understanding of someone else's feelings rather than experiencing those feelings yourself (I'd call that sympathy). I'd even go so far as to say that projecting your own feelings on to someone else would actively interfere with empathy (but perhaps that wasn't what you meant?) - as a mental health clinician, I note the fact that I am feeling angry and use that therapeutically to infer that the person in front of me MAY be experiencing anger, but I wouldn't assume that was the case (perhaps there is just something about my own life experience and the way in which the person in front of me is behaving which is causing me to become angry by being reminded of someone else who has made me angry). I guess what I am trying to say is that I put my own emotions aside or note them and deal with them.....and then put them aside....in order to do my job and I think perhaps a musician has to do the same? Otherwise how could you ever choose your pieces in advance to reflect what mood you were going to be in when you were performing? But I do see what you are saying about the performer or musician interpreting what the composer was intending to convey. Have probably muddied the waters good and proper here, so feel free to tell me so and I'll happily apologise for any misreading on my part.

Wolfnotes (whose teacher is giving her lots of Baroque pieces to play at the moment to give her a holiday from vibrato.......for now!!)

I've found with pupils that this helps more than anything. Also hearing in your head what you want to produce has a habit of translating to your fingers without actually having to be told 'how' to do it. So I think this is an aural thing more than anything. Listening to music in phrases helps - listen for 'sentences' that rise and fall and push and pull. And listen to good orators! How to they emphasise what they want to say, vocally? I can remember the first time I tackled Chopin; I really didn't know what to do with it. What helped me more than anything was my teacher's explanation of the phrasing, and showing me that every phrase had a high point - the point towards which the phrase was pushing, and from which the music ebbed away. I then also realised that this high point wasn't always a climax in volume - sometimes it could be a sudden dip, or hesitation, for dramatic purposes - think of the orator again. Work out, also, when music is in parts, where the melodic interest is and make sure the listener hears it as well as yourself. Sometimes more exaggeration is required than musicians realise to actually put across what they want to.

Speaking from my own experience, I would think that the young age of Hanonmum's daughter may have something to do with it. Certainly, all the comments I got on the (very few) piano exams I did as a child were critical of my lack of expression (terms such as "timid", "pale" were used, for instance - applied to my playing rather than me, though they might have covered both!), and I remember simply not understanding what it was that they were looking for (and failing to find) in my playing.

Even though my piano technique has all but disappeared in the intervening 20+ years since I gave up lessons, I now find it much easier to "feel" what the music should be doing, and to convey that feeling in the way I play. I can only put this down to (hopefully ) greater maturity as an adult than I had at age 10 (or indeed, age 16 when I gave up lessons), since clearly it hasn't come from teaching or even from much piano playing (I barely touched a piano from age 16 to 36).

As to whether musicality has to be innate, I think it can be learned through experience, but I'd question to what extent it can be effectively taught until the pupil has the range of emotional and musical experience to understand and respond to what the teacher is trying to convey. When I listen to my own son (who is also 10) playing, I can see what he could do to make the piece more expressive; but if I try to describe it to him in terms of crescendo here, rit there etc, even if he does what I describe, it often sounds "choppy", rather than being musically whole and seamless. A bit like the difference between an old master and a "painting-by-numbers" portrait, in fact. (Though his teacher does rather better with getting son to play musically, I have to admit, so maybe it also has to do with my poor explanations! )

So in summary, to a large extent I do think the expression needs to come from within rather than being imposed from outside, and it may be a bit much to expect full musical expression from every 10-year old who is learning an instrument. But in time, with encouragement, and experience, the musicality should come much more naturally.

HanonMum - has your daughter heard much violin and piano music being performed live? Perhaps take her along to some local concerts - all sorts of different types of music, not just classical Then try and open up a discussion about the performance - get her to talk through the dynamics, what emotions she thinks the performers are trying to convey etc.

That's a really good way to put it.
I've never actually consciously thought about this but its a way I started to work after my teacher told me to pay attention to the phrases and begin them and end them, even though that might not be rigidly in time with the music. So yea I tend to ebb and flow within phrases but I've never consciously thought about it as speech, although I have thought about it as 'phrases' like speech, I haven't connected it mentally to the sound of speech if you get what I mean.

That's a very good point! I learned from recording myself that what seems to me an emotional piece of music does not always sound that way. I think that when we are playing, we imagine that we're doing it in a certain way because the instrument is touching us and we feel our fingers and the vibrations and the effort that we perceive from the muscles in our fingers, but that does not always result in a huge difference when heard from ten metres away!

Thus, my teacher's nagging to play louder and exaggerate the rests always seemed funny, but I now realise that I have to do this to get the true feeling across.

I still remember the days when just playing the notes correctly seemed like a huge achievement.

Unfortunately, I hadn't read the small print about piano, forte, crescendo, presto and largo, long pauses, sudden staccato to legato etc. Apparently, it's not enough for me know about it. It has to be obvious to others as well!!

Who can I sue?
Steve