Music is something that we experience with our ears, right? Yes, but if you only listen to music, you’re missing out on another dimension of performance that makes the musical experience truly special and unique. It’s the reason that some people won’t listen to music unless it’s live and to find examples outside of music, it’s the reason that watching a sporting event live at the venue is so much more fun than watching at home on TV. The more of our senses that are involved, the more an experience moves us.

Music is meant to be seen as much as heard. Why would the biggest name composers of their day spend so much time producing operas that didn’t pay as well as other composing jobs? Because they knew that opera was music in its perfect form. It combined both visual and aural art that moved people in a way that symphony alone could not.

What Does that Mean for Me?

As a musician, regardless of how you’re performing, it’s not enough to play the notes. Your worth as a musician also includes your talent as a performer. How can you address the visual side of your performance as you practice?

Posture

Your teacher has probably told you far more than once about posture. Posture serves not only a functional purpose putting your body in the best position to work correctly but as we’ve all heard, your appearance says a lot about you as a person. People with a slouchy appearance aren’t regarded as confident and lack of confidence is seen as lack of skill or knowledge. In other words, bad posture puts you at an instant disadvantage.

Watch Others

This is why listening to recordings of famous performers isn’t enough. Go to Youtube or even better, go to a live concert of professional musicians in your area and truly watch their performance. The conductor will give you insight in to how to feel the music and even watching how the performers walk on and off stage will be a lesson on how they set first and last impressions in the minds of their audience.
Marching bands and other performing groups spend large amounts of time choreographing movement not just in the form of moving around the field. Modern marching bands learn the basic of ballet, Yoga, and other movement art forms in order to better convey the music visually.

Know Your Piece

Your music teacher knows how much you practiced without asking. All they have to do is look at you while you play. Those with ridged posture are the ones who aren’t confident with what’s coming next. Panic mode over the next line of music is clearly evident just be looking at the performer. The audience knows it too. If your piece isn’t memorized, you probably don’t know it well enough. If playing it isn’t as automatic as walking or talking, you don’t know it well enough. It is only with this knowledge that true performance takes place.

Let Yourself Go

What does the music mean to you? What do you think about when you play it? What would be happening on stage if your piece was used in an opera or musical? If you were watching somebody perform this piece, what you expect to see from the performer?

Most important, do what feels natural to you. Almost everybody shows emotion with his or her body and that is no different when playing music. Don’t forget about the visual aspect of music. Both are important and one will have a positive impact on the other.

The very best thing you can do for yourself in music and piano playing is to take a comprehensive course that covers music theory as well as reading music and improvising using chords. Click here to read about our “Crash Course”

Often you can give your songs a “lift” by modulating up a half-step from the key you are in. For example, if you are playing a song in the key of A major, try playing the last verse or chorus of the song in Bb. All you have to do is locate the V7 chord of the new key, and off you go.

If you need help in the area of modulation and/or transposition (they are similar but different) please go to Modulation and Transposition.

What in the world would you and I do if there was no such thing as music?

Can you imagine a world without music? No songs, no tunes, no rock, no roll, no jazz, no hymns, no boogie-woogie, no country-western, no symphonies. No singing in the shower. No whistling Dixie.

Lovers wouldn’t have songs to romance to. There would be no such thing as “our song.” Sinatra couldn’t fly to the moon. Elvis couldn’t complain about people stepping on his blue suede shoes. Tony Bennett would have to write a letter about how he left his heart in San Francisco. And Ray Charles would look pretty strange up on stage without a piano telling us that Georgia is on his mind.

Then when the wedding day arrived, what would the bride march down the isle to? A poem? Silence? Applause? And when the happy couple marched out of the church together, would they do it to the bark of neighborhood dogs, or perhaps all the wedding guests talking at once?

And at the reception, what would they dance to? The Funky Chicken just isn’t the same without music. Since rhythm is part of music, no drums would even be allowed.

And the honeymoon I suppose would take place with radio news on, or perhaps the educational channel accompanied by the drone of an air-conditioner.

When baby arrives, do we lull her to sleep with a reading from Shakespeare? Or perhaps random readings from the dictionary or encyclopedia? Could we bore her to sleep with words?

Nursery rhymes would have to be chanted or recited instead of sung. School music programs would of course be non-existent, as would school choirs and orchestras and bands. When the school football team plays, there would be no school fight song. Cheerleades would have to cheer and dance minus any music.

And when those birthdays roll around, we would have to all recite together in a monotone “happy birthday to you.”

And when duty calls, what would soldiers march to? What would take the place of music in parades, since there would be no marching bands. John Philip Sousa would have had to get a day job.

And on the 4th of July there would be no patriotic songs – just speeches. At Christmas time there would be no Christmas carols. No rousing gospel music at Easter, no hymns in church.

And can you imagine radio without music? Nothing but news and talk shows and bla bla bla bla….

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had it up to here just thinking about it. I’m heading for the piano now to celebrate the fact that our Creator gave us the wonderful and inspiring and uplifting gift of music that we all take for granted.

I think I’ll play a nursery rhyme or two, then the wedding march, then Silent Night, then Auld Lang Syne, then Fur Elise, then the blues, then…..

Music has been defined in hundreds of ways, including:

“An art of sound in time that expresses ideas and emotions in significant forms through the elements of rhythm, melody, harmony, and color.”

“The art of arranging sounds in time so as to produce a continuous, unified, and evocative composition, as through melody, harmony, rhythm, and timbre.”

“Vocal or instrumental sounds possessing a degree of melody, harmony, or rhythm.”

These are all accurate definitions. But where did music come from? When and where did it begin?

If you think of music as communication, perhaps it started with all creatures, including humans, communicating. To this day, we hear birds communicating with distinct melodies and tones and consider it music. Even today we refer to music as the “universal language.”

In ancient Israel a thousand years before Christ, King David composed and sang hundreds of songs called psalms. A few of them are cataloged in the old testament in the book of Psalms.

But music as we know it now, as having structure and form, may have begun in the 10th century with the Gregorian chants. These chants were organized and detailed with soloists and small groups singing distinctive parts. This lead to the need to notate and write down particular tones and passages.

Common rhythm notation began around the year 1200 and soon after, troubadours singing “folk” music starting to appear in parts of Europe. In the 14th century, sacred music (church music and hymns) was quite common (but secular music had begun to take hold as well). During the renaissance (around the year 1500) one of the most significant events occurred—the birth of the composer. The appearance of composers, of course, spawned instrumental music and the creation of the instruments such as the piano and lute.

1750 to 1820 is considered the Classical period with the piano being a composer’s instrument of choice. During this time, Mozart wrote his first symphony, Bach performed in London, and Beethoven was born. Many of the symphonies we enjoy today were written during this time.

By 1900, Scott Joplin had composed and published the “Maple Leaf Rag,” an event many see as the beginnings of the music we know today as popular music. Strauss and Stravinsky were active during the early 1900s, but with regard to popular music, a ground breaking performance occurred in New York in 1924, George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” This was hailed by many as the first truly American composition (most compositions at that time were still derived from European forms). Not only was Gershwin a fine composer, but he and his brother, Ira, helped usher in the Broadway musical with “Porgy and Bess” being their most well-known.

Soon after, new musical forms were taking hold. Jazz in the 1930s (Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday), big band music in the 1940s (Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington), and rock-and-roll (Elvis Presley, Chuck Barry) in the 1950s. Other countries (most notably France and Spain) were creating their own popular music during this time (although their music were not as vibrant and as influential as the music happening in the United States).

In order for a piece to be played accurately and with expression and dynamics, written music includes a number of signs and symbols to guide the musician. Some of these include words that tell the musician how loudly or softly to play a note or passage. The following is a list of dynamics often used:

Pianissimo: very soft.
Piano: soft.
Mezzo piano: half as soft as piano.
Mezzo forte: half as loud as forte.
Forte: loud.
Fortissimo: very loud.
Sforzando: forced, abrupt, fierce
Crescendo: a gradual increase in volume.
Diminuendo (or decrescendo) a gradual decrease in volume.

One piece of music can contain many symbols for dynamics, everything from very soft passages (pianissimo) to loud passages (forte) to passages that increase or decrease in volume (crescendo or decrescendo). In some cases, the conductor (or leader) of a group will request changes in dynamics that do not appear in the music (leaving to their discretion the interpretation of the music).

Tempo is measured in beats per minute (bpm). A tempo of 60 bpm would match the ticking of a clock with a beat every second. Quite often, you’ll see the tempo (in bpm) displayed at the beginning of the piece. For a piano or other music student, a metronome is sometimes used as a training device. The metronome can be set for a wide variety of beats per minute and helps the student develop consistency of tempo in their playing. When you see a drummer in a rock band click his drum sticks four times, or call out the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4!, he is setting the tempo for the rest of the band. Tempo has a great effect on the feel and effectiveness of the music played and it’s critical when musicians are playing for dancers. Dances such as the waltz and two-step require a particular tempo.

Bar lines (vertical lines on the staff) are used to separate a song into measures. Measures divide the music into regular groupings of beats be it three, four, or six beats per measure. Except in rare cases, each measure contains the same number of beats throughout a song. Measures are often numbered so that there is a “road map” for the musician when playing as part of a group. For example, a conductor may ask the orchestra to “begin with measure 31.”

A repeat (sign) is used quite often in music. If a particular music passage is to be repeated, a double bar line, preceded by two dots is used. This tells the musician to return to the beginning of the passage and play it again. Other markings such as the coda, and da capo (dc) are used to guide the musician to the proper place in the music such as playing the passage again from the beginning (passages are repeated quite often) or jumping ahead to a particular measure or point in the music.

A fermata (sometimes called a “bird’s eye” because of its appearance) tells the musician that a particular note is to played longer than its normal duration. How long the note is to be held is usually up to the musician or conductor. A fermata is usually displayed above the note it affects.

Some music contains breath marks that show the musician when to take a breath (if singing or playing a wind instrument) or when to lift the bow for string players.

What is an octave? The word “octave” is related to “octopus”, “octagon”, etc — in other words, eight. In music, an octave is 8 diatonic scale notes  higher or lower than  the note of the same name.

For example, the “A” note is always 8 notes higher or lower than the previous “A”. The “A” above middle C vibrates 440 times per second, so the “A” an octave above it would vibrate 880 times per second, while the “A” below middle C would vibrate 220 times per second, and so on. 

The human ear identifies these octave notes as being “the same” — only higher or lower, so if a soprano sang A440 and a bass sang A110, the human ear would hear it as the same note — just separated by pitch. That’s why there are only 7 distinct diatonic pitches and only 12 distinct chromatic pitches, despite the fact that the piano keyboard has 88 keys. Each note is repeated over and over again, but at a higher or lower octave.