On the different sides of experiencing music
26.09.2010
Today my breakfast was accompanied by Radio Helsinki and the host was Lasse Kurki, a Finnish rock musician. I like his style on the radio, he plays stuff I would (for the most parts) never listen to otherwise. Some tunes really capture my attention and that's when I check the playlist and get it myself. A great way to expand ones musical knowledge!
This time the "new" stuff was "Compared to what", originally sung by Roberta Flack (you can correct me if I'm wrong), now as the John Legend & The Roots -version. It was not really new cause I now both The Roots and John Legend and I had heard about their co-operation. But still, the groove really caught me immediately, and Legend's singing was amazingly soulful. I noticed that after a minute or so I could not help moving my neck with the music. A great feeling!
My education is all classical, everything else I learned more or less through listening, imitating and practising. I had fantastic teachers, I was often offered some mind-blowing images and very creative ways to think and feel the music. But extremely few were the moments that some teacher would of talked about feeling the music in the body. One exception was a master class of the fantastic pianist and educator Liisa Pohjola. She said that a pianist should have certain sensations in his/her arms and hands while playing, she sensed that I did not. It took me years (the course was 1993!!!!!) to begin the process of making this part of my professional playing.
Now I can immediately say several reasons for this. Piano texture can be extremely complicated, one has to be able to think in many layers and dimensions. In order to be able to achieve this it just takes about a lifetime of mental weight lifting. Another reason might be the immense challenges of the finger work. I mean, that's where all the articulation happens. And this is very much identical with the practising all the professional athletes do; finding the right way to do it and beat the physical weaknesses preventing it and then repeat it manymanymany times. If your thoughts are not clear, the physical side doesn't work. If your technique doesn't work, you might as well be typing a blog:D Or become a crit...no, I didn't say that!
When playing soul, funk or r'n'b, in many cases also jazz, the essential element is to feel the rhythm in your body. If you don't have it, your playing does not groove. Period.
Why is that not the case in classical music?
I mean, most of my favourite musicians have it. The viola player Tabea Zimmermann, oh my, does she have the music in her body! Does it somehow make her playing less brilliant or less intellectual? Look and hear Leonard Bernstein conducting, no words needed! Hear, feel and see Dmitri Hvorostovsky singing, it's all there. Why do I get the feeling that some particular musicians "just magically have it" and that it is not result of the education?
The author Ken Robinson talks about this theme in a wider context in one of his lectures, saying that because of our educational system we "look upon our bodies as a form of transport for our heads". I think that in the field of music we have the chance to start changing this. And I'm not talking about dancing merengue to "Verklärte Nacht" (why not try, though...). I just delicately suggest:
Let us feel the music in our bodies.
Post Scriptum: I was told several times to be 'relaxed' while playing. This did help me a lot, but never brought to the comprehensive, overall experience of feeling my body while playing.
Comments (1)
03.10.2010 10:12 Sami Väänänen
A good comprehension, Jarkko. I think you address a general dilemma here; to what extent we as music consumers or musicians are capable of grasping those different layers of (emotional) information that classical music conveys to us.
To fantasize a bit, we could even think that Beethoven himself addressed the thing, when he, after painstakingly fighting through those forty-something minutes of meticulous late-Beethoven style in his 9th symphony, concludes: „O Freunde, nicht diese Töne! Sondern lasst uns angenehmere anstimmen, und freudenvollere“.
What then follows, lends itself much more willingly to merengue than the thing before - or, indeed, "Verklärte Nacht". Yet, dancing any music remains indispensable for a satisfactory performance. For as you know, Hans von Bülow himself reminded us: "Always remember that a musician's Bible begins with the words: "In the beginning there was rhythm."
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