TECHNIQUE

How to build an emotional connection with music that shines through in every note

BORN

Exeter, NH, US

STUDIED WITH

Bernard Greenhouse, Luigi Silva

TEACHES

Conservatoire students aged 17+

There is an illusion among many young musicians that if they play technically ‘perfectly’, they will sound beautiful. Technical excellence is essential to enable us to say something of value with our playing, but it doesn’t mean that we will. I can be extremely impressed by someone’s technique and sound but be unmoved by their playing. So how does one connect with another person’s heart? To play from the heart is the ultimate goal, with the same passion that drives us to speak with conviction, guided by the human stories we inherit from composers through their writing. Our sounds should be evidence of our feelings, and by listening with the heart, aided by curiosity and a good technique, we can learn to express ourselves openly and eloquently, unencumbered by worries about how to manage our playing. We can engage passionate objectivity to adapt our playing so that we communicate what we really feel and mean to say to our audience.

EXERCISES

To create meaningful sounds, we need emotional motivation. The first step is to build awareness of our feelings and then to listen for those feelings in our sound. We also need to train our reflexes to give us a dependable, accurate technique. In exercise 1:

Notice the emotions that the etude inspires in you, let them become the source of your physical energy, and feel how they shape what you play. What feelings and actions bring you to life?

Release into your playing, pulling against the fluid resistance of the string for the down bows and pushing against it for the up bows. There should be no resistance or tension within the body itself.

To shape the resonance, activity and direction of our sound, it is especially important to be able to manipulate the détaché stroke, which appear throughout the repertoire. Respond to the harmonic progressions in exercises 2–4, to practise experiencing and showing the sorts of emotions you feel in your pieces. Make sure there is a flow of sound and harmony, that you bring out obvious motifs and that you play with character.

HEIFETZ INTERNATIONAL MUSIC INSTITUTE

REPERTOIRE

Now imagine that you are moving into a new room, with different rules: here music is master and technique the servant. Composers’ hearts and souls are embedded in the note combinations that they use and to play their music believably, with conviction, you need to find the side of your personality that identifies with those emotions. Use notes as your words and let your feelings become the music as your technique follows the choreography and progression of each phrase.

Notice how your body and technique adapt when you prioritise character and expression in example 1, just as your voice adapts instinctively to different emotional states. There are no ‘technical passages’ here, only rhapsodic expressions of feeling. Now delve into example 2, with a well-balanced, driving détaché (as in exercise 2) to bring out its brilliant, obsessive character. Finally, feel the joy of being alive in example 3, with all the warmth and exhilaration in the music. Don’t try too hard: just let it sing and dance!

One particularly important expressive device is embellishment, which composers often use to glorify the emotion of a main note or melody. To help us hear the significance of the composer’s choices of notes in melodies and harmonies, it can be useful to break these down into their essential pitches. For instance, in example 4:

Play 4a slowly, with sincerity, heart and imagination

Reintroduce part of the embellishment (4b). Exaggerate the expression you want to hear in the final tempo

Play 4c beautifully. Listen, release and use the full embellishment to enhance the underlying mood.

IN YOUR PRACTICE

Beginning practice with scales, arpeggios and double-stops, letting the ear lead the left hand, will help you to establish accurate intonation and dependable reflexes. Etudes, with their musical structure, will then allow you to weave technical practice in with work on character and sound. Avoid stopping the flow of the music to deal with problems every time that they arise: your hands need to feel each phrase, not only sequences of small, local details.

If your technique prohibits you from communicating music as you feel it, try not to let frustration drive you into obsessive technical practice. Instead have patience, release physically, play something characterfully a few times and see if your technique catches on. Slow down places that need work, hear each note in your mind before you play and ask yourself if your feelings and personality are coming across clearly in your sound, as you communicate the emotional story that the composer has given to you through the evocative power of musical structure.

Celebrate each note in terms of its beauty and excellence.

TIPS FOR TEACHERS

If students become too obsessed with accuracy and the nearperfection of technique and can’t let go enough to trust their reflexes and play from the heart, they can create a kind of prison for themselves. This type of technical accomplishment is valuable up to a point, but real musical energy should come from feeling, not from the mind. Sometimes I’ll stop a student and ask, ‘What were you caring about the most when you played that?’ Often they were caring about not making mistakes. I empathise: it’s a tough art. But the principal artistic aim is not to achieve technical ‘perfection’. It is to speak eloquently and generously, to share their hearts and souls.

Teachers can encourage students to develop a closer, more personal relationship with their music; to help them speak more naturally with their own emotions and voices. This, like most things, can be trained. The number one issue is to help our students access the vivid, volatile, rich emotional history and personality that everyone has within themselves, and to make that their primary resource as they play.

INTERVIEW BY PAULINE HARDING