Feel the Music... Happy Life

How does a person communicate emotion in music?  And if music is simply the collective sounding of pitches, motifs and phrases; what differentiates music that instantly grabs your insides and pulls at you, from music that simply doesn’t?

I’ll always remember the teachings my Jazz instructor in high school who is a world renowned drummer and percussionist.  In Jazz Band rehearsals he didn’t teach us to play the notes on the page or any specific fingerings or strokes on our instruments.  He taught us about life and mostly about feeling the music.  Whenever we would play a piece of music by simply reading the notes on the page he would stop us and tell us if we’re not going to feel the music we might as well just stop playing.  He had no shortage of illustrative analogies to share with us, but one in particular I absolutely loved and always remembered.

He would say, “if you don’t play right and with feeling, you’re not going to feel good about the music.  If you don’t feel good about the music, you’ll be miserable.  Then you’ll go home and make your girlfriend miserable, and then you’ll make your family miserable.  Then your household will be miserable and your life will be depressed and miserable. So focus on the feeling and play this music right or you’ll have a miserable life.”  There were never any shortage of responses from the band members from that one.  He would also say, “Feel the music.  It’s not on the page… it’s in your heart.”

These words have reverberated with me ever since. Feeling the music and communicating emotion, either in the composing of the music or in the performance and interpretation of the music, is necessary to connect to the hearts and minds of the listener.  But how do you achieve this? How you take a string of notes and pitches and create something memorable?  Possibly this is what separates mere technique from art.  If technique is the facility one has gained on an instrument or craft through years of practice and dedication, then artful delivery is taking that experience and using it as a tool to aid in the expression of an idea.  Also in this mix is passion and the desire to want to express the idea in a connective and intimate fashion.

I’m certainly not a scholar on the subject, but I believe if my Jazz teacher was on the bandstand with me now he’d certainly want me to feel the music, and I certainly want a happy life.