How do you teach musicality?

An ordinary box can have endless possibilities in the eyes of creative student.

by Jennifer Donelson

A student's natural expressivity

I'll never forget the day that my seven-year-old student John walked into his piano lesson with an alligator made out of a box. It was complete with carefully carved-out eyes, a beautifully shaped snout (thus distinguishing it from a crocodile!), and made from cardboard masked by green crayon scribbling that must have taken at least an hour to complete.

I was amazed.

Where I would have seen a box that needed to be crushed and hauled off to the recycling bin, my student saw raw material that begged to be shaped into a reptilian friend.

What do they see? What can they see?bThis incident prompted me to think about John's experience at the piano. When he sat at the piano working on his pieces week after week, did he see a bunch of notes that had to be played correctly? Or did he see and hear raw musical material that could be shaped into an Angry Alligator? ²

"What note is that?"
"Did you play the right rhythm there?" "Where was your crescendo?"
"What about that sforzando at the end?"

I realized that these types of questions might help a student pay more attention to the score, but they did not help the child see beyond the notes to connect to the musical and expressive content of the piece. If I didn't teach John to stop playing notes and begin playing music at this early stage in his musical development, how could I ever expect him to grow into the kind of pianist that makes good interpretive decisions and renders an artistic, expressive, compelling performance?

What kind of interpretive decisions can a young beginning pianist make? I believe we can find the answer to that question by looking at how students express themselves in day-to-day life. Once we discover these creative and expressive capacities in our students, we can creatively apply their experiences to their budding pianistic abilities. In this way, we shape a child's natural abilities into a meaningful musical experience. 

Having a musical conversation

One activity I like to do with beginning students who have just learned about the groups of two and three black notes is a "musical dialogue." In a conversation with my student Raphael, I discovered that he was very interested in dinosaurs. When he spoke about them, the rather stilted tone he used to talk about other things melted away into a naturally expressive and excited cadence. After discovering his interest, we planned and rehearsed a conversation about dinosaurs.

"Hi, my name is Jenny!"
"Hi, my name is Raphael!"
"I really like dinosaurs."
"I do, too!"
"My favorite dinosaur is the Triceratops."
"My favorite dinosaur is the Tyrannosaurus Rex."

Next, I asked Raphael to place his index fingers on each of the notes in a group of two black keys. I spoke my first line in the conversation and while doing so, played the group of two black keys, alternating between the notes at the same pace and volume as my speech. Raphael replied, both by speaking his line in the conversation and by playing his group of two black keys.

After finishing the conversation, I asked Raphael to imagine having the same conversation in different scenarios: outside on the playground, in a library, when feeling sleepy right before bedtime. In the musical conversations during these scenarios, he instinctively adjusted his playing to fit the situations, making it louder and faster on the playground while he played slower and softer right before bedtime.

In this activity, Raphael made his first interpretive decisions. He showed that he could adjust his playing to fit the musical context. The best part about the activity, though, was that his interpretive decisions were based on his natural expressivity and did not require learning a new concept. It helped Raphael think of the notes that he played as a coherent and meaningful phrase, rather than just an unrelated series of tones. This connection of speech inflection and delivery with musical "thoughts" or phrases can be cultivated at more sophisticated levels to help the student produce progressively more beautiful musical phrases.

Reading between the lines

The next activity I usually do with my students helps them see that there are unwritten musical principles built into their music-principles that can only be followed when one reads between the lines, or interprets the music. This activity also draws on the student's everyday experience of breathing while speaking or singing and can be done with most pieces in a primer level lesson book.

Pieces written for beginners frequently include well-planned lyrics in which grammatical junctures coincide with phrase endings. I often have my students sing along with the words in the score and breathe at those spots where both the musical and textual ideas break. In doing this, students can learn to connect a breath while singing a musical line with a "lift" at the conclusion of a phrase. Even if a piece does not include phrasing slurs, the lyrics act as a guide by showing students when a break in sound makes sense.

Making dynamic decisions

When my students are learning to play with legato and basic dynamic contrasts, I introduce them to some unwritten principles about the dynamics of phrasing: that the final note in a phrase is frequently tapered, and that most phrases have one or two notes which are the "goal" of the phrase and therefore receive the most emphasis. Through a basic understanding of speech inflection, however, students already instinctively know these rules. They know that it would sound funny if someone made the last syllable in a sentence the loudest. They also know that the meaning of the sentence is affected by choosing word stress; "How are you today?" means something different than "How are you today?"

By creating activities in which musical phrases are directly connected to speech inflection, I help my students continue to develop their ability to think of a series of notes as a coherent musical thought, complete with notes that are stressed to convey the meaning of the phrase and a graceful, tapered ending. A typical activity might be creating lyrics to fit a musical phrase and experimenting with choosing different notes to highlight. Students select a note and word to emphasize and then see if their choice works by making a crescendo up to the important note and getting softer after it. Students can select several differ- ent notes, play their selections, and decide which one sounds the best based on the context. While they may need a little help in making this decision in the beginning, usually by the third or fourth time they can easily hear which note should be the "goal" of the phrase.

Using life experiences

A student's life experiences can also be explored in learning to creatively interpret a piece and give an expressive performance. Students can connect a rollercoaster ride to the tension and repose in a musical phrase. Tone can be explored through a child's knowledge of color. Voicing can be related to a student's experience of trying to listen for one person speaking in a room full of other noises. Rhythmic flow can be enhanced through imaginative movement exercises.

By doing activities like these with my students, I have found that even at an early stage they can begin to see their music as something that is creative and expressive, something that is much more than a series of correct pitches. When they make connections between their natural creativity and their music, they are more interested in what they are playing. After all, isn't an Angry Alligator with accents that snap like jaws and crescendos that show him emerg- ing from the murky water much more fascinating than a bunch of notes, dynamics, and rhythms? 

¹ Healy, J.M. (2004). Your Child's Growing Mind: Brain Development and Learning from Birth to Adolescence. New York: Broadway Books.

² The Angry Alligator by Dennis Alexander (Alfred Publishing, 2002).