Your New Imaginary Friends

Today's post comes from a personal realization a few years ago that was particularly profound.

As musicians, we find ourselves in much the same situation as many a cartoon character. Any fan of Bugs Bunny will remember two important characters: the angel and the devil who show up on people's shoulders. As a musician, we also should have two character's on our shoulders. Ours, however, are the conductor and the opera singer. The conductor lives on my right shoulder and the opera singer on my left. Here's why:

As a conductor, I make every effort to show the beat pattern when appropriate and a gesture reflecting the music when not. When on the podium, I make use of both hands but for this discussion only the right hand is important (where I hold the baton). I recommend my students practice conducting a simple 4 pattern to instill this feeling into their body. After a few measures I ask them to set their hand in their lap and remember the feeling they just experienced. I hope I never know first hand but from what I understand this is similar to the feeling of a phantom arm. To me, it is very important to have a kinesthetic feeling of the music and the meter. I then ask the students to play a simple melody and imagine the feeling of their arm moving while they play. After a little practice, it becomes very easy to imagine this feeling through all the music we play. Once this exercise is used on a regular basis it becomes possible to mentally (or "phantom-ally?") conduct through any music. When this is second nature, it frees up quite a bit of brain space formerly allocated to mundane counting of meter. By using this kinesthetic awareness, we rely on a distinct feeling rather than any sort of mental activity. With enough practice, it becomes similar to running or walking in that we can "feel" our way through even the trickiest music by only being aware of this feeling. When things get really sticky, we can always resort to other measures, but most of the time this exercise will free up some "bandwidth" we need to concentrate on other musical elements.

On the other hand (or shoulder), we have the inner opera singer. The opera singer is responsible for making the prettiest musical lines, guiding phrases, and bringing out our inner divas. To give this little lady some exercise, I suggest students sing through a musical idea and really focus on breathing where the music dictates and not where our eyes or the beaming make it appear to be. In my studio, we have a rule: no breathing at bar lines if at all possible. If we follow her guidance, the opera singer will not lead us astray, usually. Once in a while we come across something that is not supposed to sound lyrical and it is in those moments we make her work as hard as we can but realize she can only do so much when something is disjointed and meant to not sound remotely singable. These situations are by far the exception. More than 99% of the music I have played or studied makes good use of our singer friend. I, personally, feel that most people are too eager to dismiss their inner singer in favor of what their eyes see and the effect is an overly robotic and often disjointed performance.

Remarkable and inspired performance occurs when these two imaginary friends reconcile and eventually work together. If you can make these two seeming opposites work together, you will find your performances have rhythmic integrity, musicality, and an elasticity to it that makes us reliable and enjoyable collaborators to other musicians. The really fun part about this is that it works for every style and genre of music.

So on that note, let your inner Karajan and Callas out to play and you will find yourself enjoying your music making more and doing it with greater ease.

Play pretty! (I stole that from my major instructor during my DMA studies)