Over express yourself

This is an activity that I tell my students to do all the time.

I tell them to play like they’re the best musician they’ve ever heard. Imagine that they’re the absolute best musician ever, or at least they think they are, and play the music that way. Add way to much vibrato. Exaggerate the dynamics. Exaggerate all of the articulations. Play like you’re the best player ever playing the best song ever.

And I demonstrate this for them. I make faces. I move around. I add way too much expression to every part of the music.

It always gets a laugh, but they end up playing the music much better.

Less experienced players often forget to add in all of the dynamics, expression, and articulations that are written in the music. And understandably so because it’s a massive amount of information.

It’s a ton of information to think about. Thinking about adding vibrato on every note, while also thinking about where to put your fingers and how to use your bow or your embouchure or your pick, while also thinking about what the notes are and what the rhythms are, all the while thinking about how to play staccato versus legato and trying to play those at different volumes is a lot. That’s a lot of things to be doing at once.

And thinking about all of those different things causes us to only kind of play all of them. We don’t play as loudly as we could for the forte or fortissimo sections. We don’t play as staccato as we can for the staccato sections. We don’t add vibrato when we can during the sections that need it. And all of this happens because we’re trying to do too many things at once.

One way to improve this is to think “over express” yourself in the music. Play with as much feeling and emotion as possible. Play self indulgently is another way I phrase it sometimes.

This gets the students to understand exactly what I mean. They don’t need to hear separately, “Play staccato. Play legato. Add vibrato. Play piano. Play forte.”

Give it a try sometime. Whenever I practice like this I surprise myself with how well I can play. I’m surprised by how many different things I can play and how well I can express myself. I know all of those things separately, but sometimes I forget to add them together when I’m playing.

We are playing music after all. We want to hear some emotion and some expression.

So give this a try next time you practice. You might impress yourself with how much you can do.

ISJ