Why Beautiful Playing Isn’t About Accuracy
1. Accuracy
Many players spend much of their time thinking about how to play accurately and how to avoid making mistakes. Logically, this makes complete sense. Wrong notes might feel obvious, wrong rhythms might disturb the flow of the music and mistakes are easy to identify. This means that many players subconsciously treat accuracy as the goal when practicing. However, this isn’t entirely the case.
Imagine you are having a conversation with someone and they trip over a word mid-sentence or they say something grammatically incorrect. You may notice the mistake, but it’s far less important than what it is that they’re saying. If someone said to me, “You is handsome”, my immediate thought isn’t “I don’t understand what you’re saying” because of the grammatical error. Instead, my thought is “you are correct.“ (of course), because I understood what they meant.
Similarly, if accuracy was the most important thing about music, then computer-generated performances would be moving to us. However, for the vast majority of people, meaningful music is meaningful because the music connects to them in some way. You might hear a song played by an amateur band that reminds you of when you were a child, for example. Even if that band makes lots of note mistakes in the song, you still connect to the music.
So, while accuracy is important for becoming a better player, it only really serves the purpose of telling us what is being played, rather than how or why it is being played.
2. Meaning
So what should you focus on?
Well, if playing the correct notes primarily serves the purpose of transporting meaning, then the focus becomes playing the notes in a way that represents the meaning we’re trying to convey. Giving the music direction, intention, tension, release, character and having this be the central focus of our practice means that even if you play wrong notes, someone will still be able to connect to it.
For many players, the order of focus is:
Play the correct notes.
Work out how to play those notes.
Repeat.
However, in order to create a meaningful performance, those first two should be switched around:
Work out how to play those notes.
Play in a way that gives you the best chance of playing the correct notes without losing meaning.
Repeat.
By doing this, the way that you play the notes is infused with the meaning behind those notes, very much like when we communicate using language. The way that we articulate words, the syllables and words that we put emphasis on and the volume at which we speak all convey the meaning behind the words, and this is our motivation for speaking, rather than trying to communicate a technically accurate sentence with no meaning.
3. Priority
So how do you actually do this with the piece of music that you are learning?
Well, before starting a piece of music, think about all of the elements on the page that give you information. At the very start of learning a piece of music, it’s a fact-finding mission. We can then use those facts to make decisions about meaning.
So, what key is the piece of music in? Is it major or minor? How fast is the piece of music? How loud is the piece of music? What rhythms are used? What is the pitch of the notes? What’s the texture of the music? Is it thick or is it thin?
Once we have answers to these questions, we can then relate them to something.
Let’s say we have a piece of music that is in a minor key, that’s slow, quiet, has notes that are very rhythmically spaced out, is low down on the piano and is thin-textured. What would this mean to you? What story would this piece of music be trying to tell?
To me, a minor key has a darker sound or a sadder sound, a more negative emotion. A slow tempo might mean it feels downtrodden or timid or something like that. Being low down on the piano might mean it’s defeated or depressed. A thin texture means it might feel isolated.
Now that I’ve related a meaning to the facts on the page, I can create a character in my head. In this particular story, it might be an older gentleman living on his own, isolated and feeling sad about the world.
This doesn’t mean that the story won’t change. In fact, stories will almost certainly develop, so later on in the piece of music it might become higher-pitched, it might get thicker in texture. This can take the character that I’ve created in my head on a journey. But it does mean that the way that I’m going to play the notes will now be telling that story.
So how do you play the notes to reflect a character like this?
Well, playing the piano reflects what we do when we communicate in other ways. Our body language usually reflects how we feel. In the way that we press the keys, we can almost embody the character himself. So we may play with a sense of defeat, with a sense of isolation, not moving very much while sitting at the piano. If we think about how this character might play the piano himself, he might play with weight in his arms. He might move more slowly and more quietly.
Once we have the meaning and the character behind the piece, then when we are focusing on playing the correct notes, we can do that while playing in character. This will mean that not only are you reinforcing the correct notes, but you’re also reinforcing the meaning behind those notes.
The important thing to remember is that a beautiful performance is hardly ever a performance where nothing went wrong (in fact often mistakes can make it more human), but it’s a performance that had connected with someone. Of course, we want to always work towards playing accurately, in the same way that we want to say the right words when we speak. However, at the foundation of that accuracy should be the story that you are telling.
Matt
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