What is musicality?

[mertas]

How you understand Musicality and how would you develop it?

Secondly: don't you think, that 95% from us "musicians" develops shapes, scales, patterns, playing from notes rather than working on "musicality" ???
Why we do its so?

[Thumpalumpacus]

To develop my musicality, I spend time away from the instrument. I tune into my mind's ear. Maybe I'll hear a chord progression, and imagine soloing over it, just mentally free-flowing, and then analyze what I was thinking in terms of scales/tonality/modality etc.

Then, every time I pick up the guitar for practice, I give anywhere from 15-20% practicing improvisation, so that I continue to reinforce the connection between what I hear in my head and what my fingers do mechanically.

You're right, too often I still fall prey to scalar/chordal cliche, and still too often let my fingers fall into familiar patterns, which is another way of saying that too often, I'm less musical than I should be.

What is musicality? It's imagining put through an amplifier (and by that, I mean the system, from strings, pickups, any pedals, to amplifier itself and speaker). The gear cannot change that much, and can only provide inspiration rather than ideas, I think, so for me, the essence of being musical is working on the imagination side of things. Tweak the knobs so it feels good that day, and then tune in to my inner ear.

Much easier to type than to do, I won't lie.

[Jonah]

To me musicality is ability to precieve music as artistic language. Not as tones realtions etc. but as meanings.(It does not mean verbalization of course - actually artistic language of literature has the same difference from our everyday language).

I often have the feeling when I listen to music that it is very intimate channel of communication, very subtle - it goes far beyond... once I said that I have it like purely spiritual thing becomes almost touchable
We use a lot of conventional means of communication. But there are two ways to communicate uncoventionally wchin give us miraculous experience of co-participation... teh feeling that someone else - as lively and complex as I - really exists.. to me these two ways are Love and Arts

In my understanding this is higher level than any theoretic knowledges, or basic feel for rythm or intonation etc.

I know many people who are not musicians at all and have no special knowledge but are much musical than some pro musicians. They often cannot express their feelings in conventional terms but for me it was obvious that they really understand complex symphonic music in all its complexity and take pleasure not only in nice motive but following key changes, harmonic and other means of development. They can follow it from the side of meaning they have within the language and the piece.

It is approxamately the same as ability to feel insintctively complex realations of colours, lines, perspectives, shadows and light etc. in painting... as system expressing the meanings - not only the meaning of the plot but higher.

The thing that makes art very intimate spiritual unconventional communicative tool.

How to develope it? Everything developes it... from digging into practical musical things - like learning teh instrument or theory to very general cultural thing... like being involved in the eviroment where this music exists.

But still I believe that there should be something from teh very beginning... something beyond experience that we already have... only we never know it for sure if we have it or not.. it mey be discovered suddenly.

My 5 years old daughter came to me and said: you know autumn is like D? - what? - well... summer and winter is like C and E on piano... and autumn is like D - because when we play C or E we are like staying and D is like coming from C to E...

This is what I call natural musicality

[Thumpalumpacus]

Jonah -- one of my favorite jobs as a real-world gig was managing a custom-framing shop, building picture frames for wall art. I'd be building frames for everything from Monet to Lichtenstein to Brassai to Ansel Adams.

I'd get home from a long day at work, pick up my Les Paul, and ask myself, "What would that shade of green sound like? What progression would capture this contrast?"

Synesthesia, y'know? It's often a good thing to take a child-like view of the world ... before our brains got hammered into shape.

[Jonah]

Synesthesia, y'know? It's often a good thing to take a child-like view of the world ... before our brains got hammered into shape.

It has always been an issue for me...

I think that culture - in general sense, as a personal way of seing and communicating with world - both captures us and gives us possibility to move on...

There was philosophical image - 'sky of ideas'... and one moment this 'sky of ideas' gets frozen and stuck... and we do not even see that we do not live under the living and vivid sky but under stoney and fixed dome (which is not that bad too if we're concious about it - but mostly we're not).

I think I should try both use the ties of culture but at the same time always be alert and keep escaping from these ties...

art is one of the best ways to do it... artist should use any means to avoid it... cheat, trick, fight, run... but not to get caught there)))

I think the greatest artists in that sense are always just keeping balance on the rope... just there right now... and there's only one risk with it that you can lose conventional communication with the world...
Artist cannot afford it because art uses conventional means for unconventional communication.
I think I would just be considered crazy very soon if I had not a family with three kids... they keep me in good shape).

We should be like dogs... whenever we smell ideas got too solid and fixed... too secure and reliable... whever we begin to say 'this is reality'... just run...



I believe actually religion deals with the same thing... but to me art is much more effective since it does not preach at all.

Why would Christ show miracles to people..? To me it was only to break this 'frozen sky of ideas'... to show that there's possibility of contact on another level... that when we think we communicate with someone we often only interplay with pale images... it was to show that there's the other

It's not that one reality is more real than another...

no.. it's just trying being concious of this illusive nature of ideas.. and understanding that it is my given choice and resposibility - with undestanding of this illusion - still to be able relate things together, to make it integral and individual, to make it alive after all...

[Jonah]

Synesthesia, y'know? It's often a good thing to take a child-like view of the world ... before our brains got hammered into shape.

I often put classical records to my granddad who was not at all a musician or interested an art.. but was very open sensitive person..

So we listened to - I cant remember what - it was Scarlatti maybe... and he suddenly said: why did he change his mind? - I said what? - Why did he changed his mind.. it sounds like he really wanted to lead to something serious something that worried him and then he suddenly changed his mind, like said: ok next time... but why did he do it?

This is also musicality to me... he does not hear sounds, he hears meaning.

[Jonah]

Let me share with you one classical record that actually left me speachless when I first heard it...

This is Bach choral prelude - arranged for piano by Busoni (common pianist repertoire piece)... today this performance is often criticized as non-authentic... which again shows me that the word 'music' means absolutely different things to different people...

After I listened to this record I checked original score (I can play some piano)... and the lyrics of the choral that Bach referred to...

That text is dedicated to nativity and the promising of both tragic future life of Christ and further salvation... I believe it is strictly connected with Cristian mistery of the Communion..

So what Bach did - he uses variation form.. and he first plays 2-3 voices in the low and middle range - more or less close to original melody - then adding higher range plays a variation ... then again go down as if he is coming back to original variation and then again to new high variation... and so on...
So it comes out as if he first reads the line of the text and then makes his comment... his own very paasionate very intimate contemplation on it...

I heard many performances of this piece but I think none of it gave me the feeling I had from this one below.. for me it was not music.. it was just living through another person's personal experience.. his thoughts, aspirations, doubts, hopes.. (Any performance I heard after that seemed to me formal - stuck in the bars and measures, derived of living forces)

[John A.]

How you understand Musicality and how would you develop it?

Secondly: don't you think, that 95% from us "musicians" develops shapes, scales, patterns, playing from notes rather than working on "musicality" ???
Why we do its so?

To some extent musicality is intuitive - I can't define it but I know when I hear it. But it also has elements that can be identified - e.g., pushing and pulling at meter, dynamics, phrasing, tone and expression (especially vibrato) on the instrument (and on electric guitar, amps and effects), interaction with other players, choice of repetoire, nuances of swing. Musicality is the ability to manipulate these elements in a distinct way that becomes a reflection of yourself and a complement to others.

All of these things can and should be worked on. I think it helps to have mastered harmonically and technically simpler and/or less improvisational music and developed a sense of musicality before moving on to stuff that requires more attention to theory. I think that's the path most good jazz musicians followed, rather than starting with more abstract elements and trying to develop "feel" at the end of their education.
John

[matt.guitarteacher]

How you understand Musicality and how would you develop it?

Secondly: don't you think, that 95% from us "musicians" develops shapes, scales, patterns, playing from notes rather than working on "musicality" ???
Why we do its so?

I've thought a lot about the last question, having gone to far far too many awful piano recitals. I think it mostly comes down to greed. The next level of complexity is just too compelling . We want to learn a little more basic stuff rather than learn to play simpler music expressively. To play anything expressively, you basically have to have margin. You can't play expressively at the very top of your ability level.

I've been to some of these stinking piano recitals where every player by a certain teacher , from first-year beginner six-year-olds to six or seven year students are all playing at the absolute limit of their ability , with no expressiveness. I think this is just an absolute crime. The most important things about music are the things you do which arte off the paper.

Why not give them the experience of really developing a piece which is slightly easier? Maybe it has to do with teacher showing how far along the student has developed in terms of "level", or student boredom with these less concrete pursuits. actually, that's probably mostly yet. There's a modern tendency to give in to whininess were inpatients from the student. Those of us who are lucky had teachers who wouldn't compromise and demanded that we fully develope what we were doing before moving onto the next thing. those are lessons that are probably the most difficult to learn without a teacher, the discipline and patients stuff.

To be fair, most of us, as students, suffer from the same thing though. The next level is just too compelling. Like a moth to the flame.

[matt.guitarteacher]

Re the first question, I think the most important thing is having a few really good teachers in your time. First, because these things are mostly off the paper , and somewhat abstract in listening alone, if you don't know what you're listening to. I have had teachers who were insistent on relating musical expressiveness to the implementation of very concrete musical devices and are somewhat irritated by the notion of emotion in interpreting music. Others are more heavily into visualization and relating emotionally or spiritually to music. Both perspectives are quite valuable in my opinion , and you'd be lucky to have different teachers who came from each camp.

[christianm77]

Musicality is much hard to pin down. People with no training at all can have an incredible musicality.

Highly trained musicians who can sight read insect droppings can have .... not so much.

Musicality is much more interesting than mere skill, mere musicianship. Sometimes it arises from a lack of training or ability. A flawed and cracked voice, for example, that is incredibly musical for some reason.

I'm not sure you can develop this.

[mr. beaumont]

I'm not sure if we define "musicality" in the same way, but for me it's about letting go of the ego and serving the greater good of the music.

Scales, shapes, patterns aren't antithetical to musicality in my opinion, it's only an issue when one tries to acquire too much knowledge at the expense of actually making music. We all know the person who has a stack of method books and videos but can't play 10 tunes.

[christianm77]

I think you CAN work on developing your musical imagination.

[NSJ]

Charlie Parker said, "if you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn". He also spent 14 hours a day for three years in the Ozarks getting his chops and musicality up to speed .

My friend who was a teenage saxophonist in the 1950s growing up in Los Angeles has two great stories about this. He met the then realatively unknown Ornette Coleman who wrote his high school band a blues to practice, which they did at the coffee house gig and got them fired for playing some "weird shit ". Ornette asked them what they thought of his music and they responded honestly "it's very confusing". Ornette responded with, "well have you been out in the streets today?"

The second story is from Harold Land, Who was one of his teachers. Harold attended one of his gigs and scolded him afterwards, "don't play what I taught you, play what you were thinking about today, play what happened on your way to the gig, play what you were thinking and feeling ".

[NSJ]

I'm not sure if we define "musicality" in the same way, but for me it's about letting go of the ego and serving the greater good of the music.
.

That's basically what Mike Longo says, easentually paraphrasing Dizzy Gillespie . Basically, when he encounters someone who has a lot of ego and arrogance, , that tells him they can't really play .

[christianm77]

That's basically what Mike Longo says, easentually paraphrasing Dizzy Gillespie . Basically, when he encounters someone who has a lot of ego and arrogance, , that tells him they can't really play .

That's what anyone who actually knows anything about music says.

[NSJ]

I think you CAN work on developing your musical imagination.

Absolutely, but it won't happen being one dimensionally holed up in one's room practicing Dorian scales

[christianm77]

Absolutely, but it won't happen being one dimensionally holed up in one's room practicing Dorian scales

Depends how you practice that Dorian scale and what you do with it.

The exercises on Mike Longo's DVD II involve soloing in the Dorian mode. :-)

[medblues]

That's what anyone who actually knows anything about music says.

So Buddy Rich, Miles Davis, Jaco Pastorius could not play ? :-)

[mr. beaumont]

That's basically what Mike Longo says, easentually paraphrasing Dizzy Gillespie . Basically, when he encounters someone who has a lot of ego and arrogance, , that tells him they can't really play .

It's a slippery slope, I suppose. I mean, a musician needs a certain sense of ego to even have the cojones to get up in front of a crowd believing "I'm gonna entertain these folks."

It's more about how you support the others, I suppose. I mean, it's jazz. When it's solo time, it is about you.

[christianm77]

So Buddy Rich, Miles Davis, Jaco Pastorius could not play ? :-)

The fact that you have an ego in life (who doesn't) doesn't equate to ego in the musical sphere.

In fact Miles is someone I would hold up as an exemplar of ego-less playing.

[christianm77]

It's a slippery slope, I suppose. I mean, a musician needs a certain sense of ego to even have the cojones to get up in front of a crowd believing "I'm gonna entertain these folks."

It's more about how you support the others, I suppose. I mean, it's jazz. When it's solo time, it is about you.

Haha yes that's it.

When it's solo time it's certainly not about you. Well other than you are moving your fingers about and music is coming out of your instrument. So physically it's obviously you in that sense.

I can only comment from my own personal experience, what other musicians say and what I have read in interviews. By and large, as soon as you become conscious of yourself or the ego gets involved everything goes down the toilet. This happens EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.

So this isn't high fallutin' philosophy. It's just what I deal with on a daily basis in my office so to speak. My ego getting in the way on the bandstand is like a bad boss or a busted computer.

Doh! Stupid Ego.

[mr. beaumont]

Well, it ain't so much ego, but there has to be confidence. When it's your turn to lead, you gotta lead it.

But yeah, I agree. See, the ego brings doubt. Doubt is the killer.

[christianm77]

Well, it ain't so much ego, but there has to be confidence. When it's your turn to lead, you gotta lead it.

But yeah, I agree. See, the ego brings doubt. Doubt is the killer.

Yes - true confidence though.

It's a funny one, people are really complex. There are many stories about incredibly confident performers who are somewhat shy and quiet in normal life. Miles is one of the fascinating conundrums, many layers.

[mr. beaumont]

I'm no "incredible performer," but I've definitely never had a deal with stage fright. I've always chalked it up less to confidence and more to not being street-smart enough to realize things could go wrong up there.