focus on musicality or technique during performancs

#FOCUS ON MUSICALITY OR TECHNIQUE DURING PERFORMANCS HOW TO#
#FOCUS ON MUSICALITY OR TECHNIQUE DURING PERFORMANCS MANUAL#

īen Verdery echoes Williams and Dylla and suggests that too early of a focus on technique rather than musicality can stifle the emotion and joy of music. I know that anyway they’re going to practice for hours and move their fingers without thinking so much, but still if they dedicate a little time to think about the music, not so much about the playing, it would be just great. And usually that is my goal when I’m teaching. So, while teaching nowadays, I’m just repeating the same things but I’m trying to give clear examples of what it gives you when you just sing the melody, for example what it means to understand the character of the melody to find a nice beat and a groove to make it more organic and less technical - or more musical, less technical. The kids, they usually don’t get it: they just buy a very loud guitar that has nice sustain and “Boom!”. Even though they are struggling to produce a nice sound, they have a desire for a nice sound. When I talk to them I immediately understand that the instrument they have they love because of sound. And I think this is not just musical education, but it is just the maturity as a person, because I know many amateur players - guitarists in the age of 50, 60 - and they just play for fun.

#FOCUS ON MUSICALITY OR TECHNIQUE DURING PERFORMANCS MANUAL#

Young people want to play fast, they want to be able to play well, so they focus on a manual technical approach, and actually music, phrasing, understanding of the form, style, and being sensitive for sound quality - this is coming very, very late. And many great musicians they confirm the same: this technical approach, this is what is at the beginning.

But when you are just a young boy, you just want to play. I remember very well the advice I got from my teachers, but I didn’t get the idea of it: listen to the music sing the melody play just the melody think more, practice less or move your fingers maybe less or work in an effective way focus on the problems you want to solve. Marcin Dylla agrees with Williams but he suggests that this mindset of putting technique before musicality has more to do with the student than the teacher, and specifically to do with the student’s maturity: If the things aren’t expressed and don’t go hand in hand, that is, that it’s absolutely together in a person’s heart from the beginning, then take up something else. absolutely not to think that you look at a piece from a technical point of view and you study those little problems - it is still what a lot of teachers still do they say: “Master that first and we’ll put the interpretation in afterwards.” That is speaking like a total schizophrenic. This is a mindset that maestro John Williams believes rather adamantly to be the wrong mindset to have: So, with the guitar in particular, the student is given, say, the nineteenth-century pedagogical methods (Sor, Aguado, Coste, Carulli, Carcassi, etc.) and first learns to develop technique while a focus on repertoire and musical interpretation comes later. A popular, traditional pedagogical strategy teachers have used in the past (and that some still use) in music education is to first require students to master technical (and mechanical) tools before beginning to develop a musical interpretation. There is a prevalent approach to the learning process of a musical instrument that pits technique and musicality against one another, that thinks of them as competing entities.

Hopefully this will give you some insight into how each of these masters of the guitar think about this question, as well as some nuanced differences between how they think about it. Each of the audio clips in this article are pulled directly from Simon’s podcast interviews with John Williams, Marcin Dylla, and Ben Verdery, respectively. In this article we’re going to take a look at what some of the masters of the classical guitar have had to say about the learning process, specifically focusing on the topic of how technique and musicality should relate to one another.

#FOCUS ON MUSICALITY OR TECHNIQUE DURING PERFORMANCS HOW TO#

But what can add to this frustration is feeling like we don’t know how to learn, that we don’t know whether our own process of learning is the right path to begin to make music and enjoy the instrument we all love. at times it can be a frustrating experience. And this experience can include many peaks, but also many valleys. It takes time, discipline, patience, knowledge, experimentation, and weathering a lot of storms along the way. The process of learning a musical instrument can be an arduous one.

Focus on musicality or technique during performancs