Musical Communication
By Keith Hill and Marianne Ploger © 2001-2002
Playing a musical instrument is a technical craft. Expressing music, by contrast, has been viewed as an art. This view has been held so long that we rarely question it. The purpose of this essay is to question the truth behind this view and to propose another view. That alternate view is that expressing music is also a craft. It is the craft of musical communication, the art of delivery. It is possible to be very skillful at using a musical instrument to accurately realizing musical notation yet have little skill at the craft of communication. It is also possible to be unskilled at the craft of accurately realizing a musical score and still have a high degree of skill in communicating music. This means that these skills have very little to do with each other. The greatest musicians were highly skilled in both crafts. Alas, today we too often hear musicians referred to as great who have little skill in the craft of musical communication.
Musical Communication or the “Art of Delivery,” as Aristotle calls the Modes of Utterance in the Poetics (XIX), is the craft of using the technical means which enhance the enjoyment and understanding of meaning of music for normal, ordinary music lovers. The purpose of this craft is to touch the soul, raise the spirit, elevate the mind, and deeply move listeners with music. The technical means employed in the exercise of this craft are eleven in number. These techniques are designed to present heard musical information in forms which the human brain can easily process and comprehend. The cognitive aspect of these techniques is what makes them so powerful. In fact, these techniques are wholly derived from normal human speech and perceptual experiences we constantly utilize to express ourselves and communicate with others. All of them are natural to human expression.
The eleven cognitive or communication techniques are designed to enhance musical communication rather than act as a replacement for being musical. Being musical is a spiritual quality and it is this quality which indeed resides in the realm of art. If there is a downside to these techniques, it is that if a musician isn’t deeply spiritual, the cognitive techniques will enhance the perception that the musician is spiritually wanting. If a musician is spiritual, the cognitive techniques reveal this clearly. The true art of musical performance fuses the craft of accurately realizing a score and the craft of musical communication from the spiritual substance of the musician.
As the word technique suggests, these eleven techniques are very practical tools, not mere theoretical concepts. Therefore, we have placed suggestions for applying the techniques at the end of each section. The techniques need to be applied to work. When they are applied, they do their job. If not used the effect they contribute will be absent from music.
There are two kinds of music: music that requires attention and music that serves as background. The eleven cognitive techniques apply to music intended to be listened to in the same way that human speech is intended to be listened to. What does this mean for music that is intended as background? For such music, these techniques are unnecessary. Nevertheless, music, which serves as background, is more enjoyable if these techniques are employed.
What follows is a discussion of each of the eleven cognitive techniques needed to enhance the communication of music. They have been organized according to the intensity of the communication-enhancing effect each technique has on the listener.
- The Synaesthesis Technique
Synaesthesia means multiple, simultaneous perceptions. The brain is designed to simultaneously perceive multiple sensations. With the senses of sight, smell, and taste, we expect our sensory experiences to be loaded with multiple, simultaneous stimulation. Even a simple pie is a combination of different flavors from fruit, flour, sugar, salt, spices, eggs, butter, and the effects of cooking. The culinary art lives because people adore eating food that is highly dimensional in flavor. Each dish mingles salty, sour, sweet, bitter, and savory in various proportions. We apparently taste the different flavors on various parts of the tongue. This creates the effect of synaesthesia. The senses of sight and smell function similarly. A large measure of the joy of viewing Monet’s best paintings is to see all the colors of the rainbow on every square centimeter of surface. The sense of hearing likewise needs that same level of stimulation. Yet classical music is performed today in a manner designed to eliminate synaesthesia altogether. This is due to a basic ignorance among musicians about how the ear/brain makes sense of heard experiences.
Although different frequencies and timbres are discretely detected by the ear, we perceive musical and other regular simultaneous sounds as composites, as opposed to distinct and discreet frequencies and timbres. When music is performed so that chords sound simultaneously, the normal human ear hears only one sound. If the composer has written a four-note chord, and all the notes are played simultaneously, the normal listener will hear not four notes but one sound only, a rich sound, but nonetheless only one sound. If the performer endeavors to perform each note in the chord so that the notes don’t sound absolutely together or simultaneously, the normal listener will easily hear all four notes and the chord simultaneously. That creates an experience of hearing a total of five sounds altogether.
The synaesthesis technique requires musical information to be slightly desynchronized for the listener to perceive all the timbres, all the pitches, all the melodies, all the rhythms, all the details, and all the harmonies.
The human brain is so competent that it has no trouble following as many as six simultaneous streams of information as long as those lines or streams are functioning with total independence, even if they are supposed to be together.’ The proof of this is that there are typically six parts in a rock group. Rock musicians understand the need for conveying the feeling of independence of parts even when the score would indicate otherwise. They are exceedingly sensitive to synaesthetic boredom and work very hard to create synaesthesia in their performances. Not to do so would spell financial disaster for them.
In his Musica Mechanica Organoedi of 1768 (vol. 2 chapter 22 paragraph 522) Jacob Adlung writes the following concerning harpsichord playing: “One must endeavor to use more arpeggios and such, rather than striking the keys together or playing too slowly since the strings cease vibrating right away.” Mozart and Chopin also insisted that the hands are never played together.
The result of having the notes ‘misaligned’ is that they are desynchronous. Desynchronicity helps to produce independence of voices. When voices sound truly independent, the brain is able to perceive each individual voice more easily. When we perceive two or more voices or lines as distinct yet simultaneous expressions the effect in us is called synaesthesis. It’s an amazing paradox that when the motion of the voices is truly independent, the surface appears exceedingly complex but, in fact, the music is simpler to follow. Indeed, the listener feels deprived when the feeling of independence of voices is missing. The synaesthesis technique depends on the ability of the performer to hear, follow, and create multiple voices in the music; voices that are clearly independent of the others yet always manage to agree.
When the lines are always played simultaneously even a trained musician has trouble telling the voices apart. This is because the brain reads intervals played simultaneously as a composite of the lowest heard note. Once so recognized, the brain pays little attention to what is happening except in the lowest or the highest voice. Indeed, very few musicians today have the ability to expressively sing and maintain two voices at the same time. This inability results from a keypunching attitude that has now even infected singers. Only by consciously creating distinctions between lines and by singing each and every voice can the performer make clear to the listener what is happening in the music. Differences in timbre and volume help to create distinctions, but these devices are never as successful at creating clear distinctions between the different lines as even a slight use of the synaesthesis technique.
Giovanni Tosi, in his treatise of 1736, The Art of the Florid Song, uses the term vacillare to describe the effect of vacillating in the melody from being before the bass to lagging behind the bass. He states that “the singer should endeavor to sing before the beat or after the beat and never with it.” Astonishing! Today, almost no classically-trained singers do this because they are mercilessly censured for doing so. Bel canto means beautiful singing, not beautiful tone. Tosi says of this effect that it “is one of the most beautiful effects in music”. The vacillations he describes give the synaethesis technique a feeling of flow and freedom — a most beautiful effect indeed.
Application: Always play with one hand leading the other and vacillate between which of the two hands leads. Give up trying to be together in ensembles. The exception to this is when one arrives at the end and a simultaneous concurrence of the voices tells the brain that the music has concluded.
Application: Expressively sing each part independently of the other parts. Do not drop attention to any line or voice, otherwise listeners will hear the lapse in attention and cease paying attention.
Application: In ensembles, vacillate between having the upper voice lead and the lower voice lead. This vacillation must follow the logic of the musical lines and structure. When the upper voice leads, the music soars. When the lower voice leads the music lingers and resists forward motion.
- The Inégal or Entasis Technique
Entasis is an ancient Greek term meaning tensioning. Speech that is delivered in a metrically perfect manner causes the listener’s brain to shutdown and cease processing the meaning, within a few seconds. The human brain needs the condition of constant or stable irregularity for it to remain alert and attentive. Irregularity produces a state of alertness and attentiveness. Constancy or stability eliminates the feeling of discomfort which the erratic and irregular creates. The balance in tension between the feeling of predictability, which constancy provides, and the feeling of anticipation, which irregularity and unpredictability creates, is a state of entasis. The opposite of entasis is stasis. Entasis in normal human speech is brought about by the flow of thought. Flow of thought is both irregular and constant. So it must be in music.
In the 17th and 18th centuries the French understood the importance of entasis. This, we believe, is what musicians who wrote about inégal meant by the term. The word actually means rough, irregular, unequal. The conventional interpretation of this word betrays the real meaning by forcing it to conform to the present fashion for metricallity. The current interpretation suggests that inégal means perfectly regular limping. Had the French writers meant that they would have used the term for limping. Therefore, we must take the term inégal at face value and understand it from a cognitive point of view.
Every note played predictably creates cognitive stasis. In stasis there is an absence of tension and, consequently, listening further to what is being played is pointless. The result of failing to understand the entasis technique is deadly, because it virtually guarantees that the audience will be prevented from really paying attention to the music. In the Poetics (XXIV), Aristotle observed that “sameness of incident soon produces satiety.” Similarly, anyone can observe that it takes only three notes of equal value with two equal spaces between them to create a condition of boredom in the brain. Within the time it takes to hear three notes, the brain has noticed that the second event is like the first, that the third is like the second and the first, and it predicts that the fourth will follow the pattern. As soon as that prediction comes true, the brain either goes to sleep or looks elsewhere for something more interesting. If this happens to the performer, mistakes are the natural byproduct. Mistakes, which occur in a static musical environment, become the meaning of the music: a disaster. This is why musicians today who can’t learn to play music without mistakes are discouraged by every means possible from performing in public.
Learning to play music exactly according to a metronome is the major cause of performance anxiety. Trying to avoid making mistakes when your brain has gone to sleep is virtually impossible. It is hard enough when your brain is fully alert. And when the mistakes become the meaning, which is always what happens, the groundwork for paralyzing fear of performing has been carefully and cleverly established. It is the reason why one might define talent in music today as the ability to play the right notes, exactly in time, with a brain that is fast asleep.
Metrical exactitude in musical performance guarantees that most listeners are barred from experiencing the spiritual essence of great music. It also guarantees that classical music is ignored by most normal people. This slavery to the metronome is the embodiment of slavishness in music, which is exactly the opposite of what C.P.E. Bach advocated in the Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments. One should “endeavor to avoid everything mechanical and slavish. Play from the soul, not like a trained bird.” The entasis technique is the way out of slavery into freedom. It is simple to do: perform notes of equal value in any manner other than that which appears, feels, sounds, or can be construed as regular or equal.
Using this technique has problems. The greatest problem is that it sounds chaotic. Most musicians vehemently hate this effect. Indeed, it is unpleasant. Listening to people who speak in a halting, jerky, and noticeably arbitrary manner is frustrating and irritating. However, there are other cognitive techniques designed to create order and logic out of the chaos of totally irregular, unmetrical music making. These are the Gesture, Syntactical or Voice leading, and the Recognition Signal techniques. They create the feeling of logic, flow, and meaning when the techniques of synaesthesia and entasis are being applied. The second problem is that musicians have been bullied into playing metrically accurately for so long that purposely playing not-metrically is hard to do. It takes practice, as does the synaesthesis technique. But, as with all things, practice makes perfect. Except in this case one must understand that perfect is a feeling in the souls of the listeners, not an articulated fact in the accurate presentation of pitch and time value of each note in the score. Music must feel perfect. To be so, it must be metrically imperfect.
Application: Avoid performing music in strict accordance with the beat. Avoid playing more than three equal notes with equal spaces between them. Even two notes of equal value and separation are enough to flatten the listener’s attention.
- The Gesture or Inflection Technique
The Gesture or Inflection technique is designed to group musical and verbal information into larger units, with a shape that is easily recognized and remembered by the brain of the listener. Language lives or dies by inflection. Flat, uninflected speech is instantly tedious and tiresome to hear. Highly inflected speech is effortless to follow. Music is the same. Inflection or gesture is the technique we use in speech to organize the distinctly irregular nature of language. The specific shape of the gestures or inflections is a parabolic curve. The egg is an excellent example of this kind of shape. One could also say that the shape is elliptical. This shape creates a feeling of naturalness and is easy to follow. Language without this gesture of inflection is flat, expressionless, ugly, and difficult to comprehend. The same is true in music.
To properly realize a logarithmic gesture in music a performer must study nature and copy the shapes that nature has to offer. Further, human speech patterns are replete with this gesture, in utterances, words, phrases, and groups of phrases. By consciously playing music using elliptical gestures, everywhere and in any way possible, a performer can guarantee that listeners will feel that the result is more natural, comforting, and loving.
The brain interprets flat uninflected speech as the behavior of a listless, dying, depressed, extremely ill person. It interprets highly inflected speech as the behavior of an animated, spirited, lively, robust, healthy person. The same is true in music. People normally don’t like to be around listless, depressive personalities and love to be with animated, loving people. In the same way, they like listening to music that feels animated and highly expressive, even if the music expresses sadness and grief.
Application: organize musical information in easily comprehensible gestures and mini-gestures.
- The Syntactical or Voice Leading Technique
The Voice Leading technique comes from the syntactical or grammatical property of speech. Notice what happens to the previous sentence when all the words are reordered to eliminate references. The or voice grammatical syntactical comes technique property speech leading of from. The reason the reordered sentence can never make sense is that every word receives equal value. Its ’order’ is designed to reinforce that equality: no word in that sentence refers to another word. The result is that the sentence means absolutely nothing, even if we know what each word means.
The human brain requires referential relationships to make sense of things. Anything, which lacks this referential aspect, creates the feeling of nonsense in the brain. We ignore it at our aesthetic peril. It is this syntactical “referential” property of language that underlies the logic in music. Sense and meaning in language and music come from grouping words and notes into logical phrases or gestures as well as from stressing or leaning into notes or words according to their grammatical significance. Every note in the diatonic scale refers to the tonic just as all parts of a sentence refer in some way to the subject. Therefore understanding the intervals and chords in a scale is essential to understanding the meaning in music just as the words and clauses in sentences are essential to understanding meaning in language. This is the heart of the voice leading technique. The human brain is ‘hard-wired’ to grasp meaning through grammar and phrases in language, including the language of music. When the brain is exposed to music, which conveys little feeling of its grammatical properties, it is forced to work out what those tendencies by itself. The problem is that music goes by too fast. No normal brain can keep up with the task of working out what those tendencies should be, at the speed of music. Feeling overwhelmed by the blur of seemingly unrelated sounds, the normal brain will just tune out and go into sleep mode. The question is: Is this an appropriate outcome for a musical performance?
The technical devise for the voice leading technique is legato, meaning ‘connected.’ This connection, however, must take place in the mind, not merely in the ear. The musical means is cantabile, “in a singing style,” and refers to the style of a truly great singer. Bach was renowned for his cantabile playing. A letter by F.K.Griepenkerl (a student of Bach’s first biographer Forkel) relates that “Bach, his sons, and Forkel performed the masterpieces with such a profound declamation that they sounded like polyphonic songs sung by individual great artists; all means of good singing were thereby brought into use. No cercare, no portamento was missing. There was even breathing at the right places…Bach’s pieces want to be sung with the maximum of Art.”
Application: sing every line as expressively as possible and then play the music exactly as expressively as you sang it. We have noticed that musicians are almost never more expressive in their playing than in their singing. A musician who sings music in a boring manner WILL play in a boring manner. It is therefore imperative that musicians learn to sing expressively. Musicians who play more than one line at a time must sing every line simultaneously for the entirety of each piece. This is hard work but get used to it! It is what making music is all about.
What is both unbelievable and fascinating is that people can instantly tell the moment a player has stopped imaginatively singing the lines. Listeners normally can’t articulate what has happened, but they usually say that the life went out of the music. In fact, normal people know a great deal about how music needs to sound. Hence a musician, who gathers a group of ordinary people and asks them how to play music in a way that works for them, will quickly discover exactly how articulate and competent such listeners can be. The key is to start each piece by playing as metrically accurately and boringly as possible. Then ask the listeners what they feel would make the music speak more directly. The amount of energy in the room will astonish every musician who would otherwise treat listeners as passive subjects. Musicians who do this experiment will come to appreciate their listeners and will learn how to communicate music. We know because we have conducted this experiment ourselves with people who professed to hate classical music. The appreciation they expressed after hearing the music played exactly as they had asked was inspiring. Try it!
Application: Sing every note as expressively as the note requires and no less, then play it that way. This means that you must sing all the music in your imagination with such intensity, conviction and energy that the little that leaks out will ravish the listener.
- The Recognition Signal or Harmonic Technique
The Harmonic Technique or Recognition Signal is designed to assist in creating the feeling of harmony between the souls of the listener and the speaker. Human beings will produce this utterance when acknowledging or agreeing with the person talking. Harmony between speaker and listener results from this utterance. The absence of this utterance indicates a failure to communicate or to persuade. The technique is most effective when the speed and manner of executing it is closest to a spoken technique.
The recognition signal is designed to express many of the listener’s views, including agreement, comprehension of a line of reasoning, the desire to continue listening, and assent to a point made. It is an uh-huh, with the pitch rising at the end. It is interesting to note that in the Poetics (X), Aristotle defines recognition as “a change from ignorance to knowledge”. The recognition signal in music creates a sensation of easily following what is happening and a feeling of unanimity between the performer and the listener. It also clarifies what the harmony of a note is. The recognition signal or cercare changes musical incomprehension to comprehension. That feeling is usually articulated as being spiritual because it is experienced as enlightenment.
It is extremely interesting that the word ‘cercare’ (pronounced chair-cár-e), mentioned in the Griepenkerl letter, is defined in Riemann’s Musiklexicon as a 17th century Italian ornament in which the upper or lower auxiliary note is performed softly and suddenly before the main note. This is exactly how the recognition signal is expressed. In other words, the recognition signal is a cercare. Yet, today the cercare is frowned on as being in exceedingly bad taste by classical music singers. Do you suppose Bach played his own music in bad taste? Who do we trust in this matter? We choose to trust Bach and natural human expression.
Application: The speed of the cercare is its most important characteristic. If the speed of the cercare is too slow then it sounds like an arpeggio. If the speed is too fast, then it sounds like a grace note. The correct speed for most uses is the speed at which you most naturally would say pah-dum with the accent on the second syllable. If you say this as pah dum with the accent on the first syllable, it is too slow. If you say it as pahdum without accent, it is too fast. When the music expresses greater gravity of feeling the cercare is performed more slowly and with greater emphasis. When the music expresses more liveliness, the cercare is performed more rapidly and lightly.
The theme of the chaconne from Bach’s d minor partita for solo violin is an excuse to play one cercare after another. The Italian Concerto by Bach begins with a cercare. Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata begins with a cercare followed by another with a few notes stuck in between. The Ninth Symphony of Beethoven is full of cercare, though you would never know it from hearing it as it is usually played.
- The Distortion or Attention-Grabbing Technique
This technique uses distortion to get the listener’s attention. A clearing of the throat is just such a device because it draws the attention to that particular moment. Magicians’ tricks would never work if they failed to employ this device; they call it distraction. A trill or any other ornament is also just such a device. When a singer changes the vowel during a long held note; it is a distortion of the original vowel and creates a feeling of increased interest on the long note and in the minds of the listeners. Noise or ‘dirt’ is another. The acciaccatura is an example of dirt being added to a chord. Allowing the voice to crack or break for emotive effect is a distortion technique. Another example is when a violinist crushes the string to create a distortion. Portamento, a glide in pitch from one note to another, is a distortion technique.
Although Aristotle does not use the word ‘dirt’, he does use the word ‘error’ in the Poetics (XXV): “error may be justified, if the end of the art be thereby attained, that is the effect of this or any other part…is thus rendered more striking.” He adds to this the warning: “If the end might have been as well, or better, attained without violating the special rules of the poetic art, the error is not justified: for every kind of error should if possible be avoided.” No clearer definition of poetic license can be had. The distortion technique needs to be used judiciously if the end result is not to be marred by a wanton, intemperate use of the technique. And so it must be for all the techniques.
The greatest error of all is to bore the listener with an overly polished performance. This is the grossest breach of good taste. Here we must add a comment. There are listeners who actually like music played in a manner that most people find totally boring and meaningless. These listeners tend to be interested primarily in the information in a piece of music, its construction, how the composer has played with the information, and in the mathematical accuracy of the performance. The ideal performer for such listeners would be a computer, because computers make no mistakes in data transmission. Neither data transmission nor accountancy is appropriate to the realm of art, however. Most listeners listen to music to feel what the music is about, that is, to feel the feelings which the great composers intended when they first wrote the music. Where feeling is natural and genuine, there is bound to be some element of chaos and unpredictability. The impulse to eliminate these elements is an error of arrogance and ignorance. To assume to know better than nature what is right is arrogant. To assume to understand nature without the ability to create naturalness in art is ignorant.
Therefore, think carefully when sterilizing a musical performance of everything interesting and unpredictable lest you achieve perfection without realizing that the only thing perfect about perfection is that it is perfectly boring. The true aim for perfection in art is the feeling of perfection, not the fact. The feeling of perfection in Botticelli’s painting PBirth of VenusP is a direct result of the astonishing amount of distortion in relation to the proportion of its design.
- The Anxiety Free or Sans souci Technique
We call this technique sans souci because it is designed to create moments in the music which give the feeling of shrugging the shoulders, throwing up the hands in a gesture to say, “Don’t take all this so seriously! Live a little! Stop controlling! Let go! Be happy! Don’t worry so much! In other words be sans souci, be without a care!
Even when the alignment of notes in the score suggests a strictly simultaneous performance, purposely jumble the notes and play in an irregular or a staggering manner to create a careless effect. Whether you call it a sans souci technique, tempo rubato, a jazzy feeling or disjointed, the idea of relaxed effortlessness is paramount in the feeling which this technique gives to music. A rose by any other name smells as sweet.
Anxiety rubs off on all who observe it. A musician who is concerned and anxious about making mistakes generates a feeling of anxiety in the audience through body language, sound and musical presentation. Physical tension creates anxiety. Attention dispels anxiety. Mental stress creates anxiety. Relaxation dispels anxiety. Mechanical, metrical and regular playing create anxiety. Inégal, irregularity, and logical playing eliminate anxiety. Over concern with relatively meaningless detail creates anxiety. Sweeping gestures dispel anxiety. Obsession with accuracy creates anxiety. Focusing on meaning and purpose dispel anxiety. Concern about the opinion of others creates anxiety. Carelessness of the opinion of others dispels anxiety. Self-consciousness creates anxiety. Confidence and a total lack of self-consciousness dispel anxiety. That is the function of sans souci. Listeners can only truly enjoy listening when a sans souci environment and attitude prevails.
Application: Sans souci is the antithesis of how we are taught to play classical music. The attitude is the most important means of applying this technique. Look for every opportunity to use it. Try every passage to see if it can’t be improved by having the lines staggered by exactly one half the written value. Sometimes the bass should lead and sometimes the treble line should lead.
- The Stride Technique
In the preface to his compositions, St. Lambert states that the normal tempo in music is that of a man walking. The initial observation one makes is that people walk at different tempi and so the only conclusion that one can make of this is that St. Lambert was an idiot. If we take what St. Lambert said seriously, however, and attempt to discover what he observed, then something very interesting happens. We discover that he was right. That is, if you observe all people walking, they indeed walk at all different tempi. But if you observe people who are intending to get someplace specific, you will find they all walk at the same tempo. Large or small, young or old, the tempo is the same. The only condition is that they are healthy, able, strong, and normally formed. The tempo of a purposeful stride is exactly 116 beats per minute. For every other purpose, people walk at different speeds.
What makes this so interesting is that music, like thought, always intends to get someplace specific. That place happens to be the end of the thought or the cadence. What is even more interesting is that just as we walk at 116 to get someplace specific, most people also speak with the accents occurring at a rate of 116 beats per minute. But we only do this when we have something specific to say. People who speak more slowly than 116 are perceived to be intolerably dull or slow witted. People who speak more quickly than 116 are perceived to be untrustworthy. The affect of being slower than 116 is slothfulness or painful self-consciousness. The affect of being faster than 116 is like a shyster who is always trying to fast-talk people into doing things they don’t want to do.
What is even more interesting is that our moments of pausing, our moments of emphasis, our phrases, and the duration of silence between exchange of speakers in conversation occur at 72 beats per minute. Why is this interesting? Because this ratio produces the golden section, which is endlessly repeated in nature and is highly pleasing to human perception. If you divide 116 by 1.618, the number needed to calculate the ratio of the golden section, you get 72 (71.69).
If you find these observations incredible, test them yourself. Take a metronome, set it at 116, and put it near the television. Next set the metronome at 72 to verify the speed of emphatic moments, pauses, and phrases. Then set it slightly off these tempi to see if speeds such as 118 or 74 or 114 or 70 produce the same level of coincidence. Do this and you will know that what we have observed is real.
It is also extremely interesting that there are a few other tempi which work. These tempi are multiples or divisions of 116 and 72 such as 58 (one half of 116), 144 (twice 72), 96 (4 times 72 divided by 3: a 3:4 ratio), 108 (3 times 72 divided by 2: a ratio of 3:2) and 87 (116 times 3 divided by 4: a 3:4 ratio).
What one can conclude from these observations is that the human brain is designed to process heard information at a precise rate of flow. The rate of flow changes depending on the significance, density, importance, intensity, or degree of urgency of the information. If the information flows at a rate faster than we can process we feel overwhelmed. If it flows at a rate slower than we can process we feel hampered, impatient, irritated, or bored.
We propose that the cognitive mechanisms, which process flow, respond to speed of flow and intensity of content. If the intensity of content decreases and the speed of flow remains constant, we perceive that flow has become much slower. Therefore, as intensity of content decreases, speed of flow must increase, lest the mind become bored. Conversely, if the intensity of content increases, but the speed of flow remains constant, the mind assumes that the speed has increased. Therefore, speed must decrease otherwise the mind will soon feel overwhelmed. The relationship between speed and content is most easily understood as an inverse proportion. The more that is happening in the music performance, the slower the tempo needs to be. The less that is happening in the music performance, the faster the tempo needs to be. Furthermore, these musical communication techniques may require the tempo to slow, if only slightly, depending on information intensity.
Thus it is fair to criticize the way classical music is performed today because it is highly metrical and the parts consistently sound simultaneously. Musicians who play early music feel compelled to play too quickly due to the lack of interest or meaning in the delivery. Excessive speed fills up the spaces between notes so listeners’ brains won’t fill up those spaces with thoughts of boredom Musicians who play romantic literature play too slowly in order to include techniques that ‘warm up’ an otherwise cold, mathematically accurate performance. These techniques include continuous vibrato, acceleration and deceleration of a predictable, regular sort, and predictably regular gradations of change in volume. When applied to speech these techniques produce the silliest, most ridiculous effect. These ‘warming’ techniques, used to take the chill off otherwise stiff, passionless performances, are distractions which performers hope will divert listener attentions from their unimaginative playing.
Tempo selection must account for the changing rate of flow. This change in flow rate depends on the significance, density, importance, intensity, or degree of urgency of the information, as well as the affect of the piece. Failure to find the right tempo will create the effect of forcing, if the tempo is too slow, or racing if it is too fast. If these observations are dismissed, then the selection of tempo is based on hope. It is like buying groceries, throwing them into the oven and hoping an edible dish will emerge after awhile— the three stooges approach to cooking. Otherwise you must rely entirely on talent; which is OK if you have it and not so OK if you don’t have it.
Application: note where in a piece a metrical value may be played at 116 or 72. Test these tempi on listeners. These tempi should make music feel more natural to listeners. Sometimes it will be challenging to play because the speed may be far faster than a player can handle technically. However, many composers took these tempi into account and designed the piece so that it would be easier to play when taken at the correct tempo, even if that tempo is significantly faster than normal.
- The Evaporation or Mystery Technique
This technique is best executed on instrument with clear dynamic possibilities. The evaporation technique is a diminishing of the sound volume at the end of a phrase until it altogether disappears or evaporates. The technique is also used in cinema where it is called the fade out. The evaporation somehow forces the listener’s mind to finish the phrase as it disappears. By playing with the power of suggestion, performers can lure the music lover on path of their own making. The part which evaporates is normally less important. Evaporating the less interesting parts of the score makes them powerful to the mind of the listener, even if they are less obvious.
Cognitively speaking, the brain is designed to lock on to what always appears to be just out of its reach. Although the eye is designed to perceive light, it is shadows which most attract it. When ideas are stated flatly and emphatically, the mind tends to treat them as unimportant. When ideas are merely alluded to and suggested by inference, the mind won’t be satisfied until it knows all about them. When ideas are clearly expressed with a strong point of view, the information is processed and accepted or rejected by the mind but in either case can’t be ignored. When information is ever present, it becomes part of the landscape and few notice the information. When sound waxes and wanes unpredictably, the mind of the listener more easily grasps how the ideas are wrought and grouped. Whatever is mysterious and hidden tantalizes the soul. This is the perennial lure of the spiritual realm. Brains invariably want what they can’t have.
The evaporation technique helps listeners feel the paradox between an understated phrase ending and the strong attention focusing effect which understatement can produce.
- The Timing or Hesitation Technique
The timing or hesitation technique requires a slight hesitation just before playing the most important note in a line. You can also hang on to a note for much longer than its written value. This technique manipulates the listener’s expectations of what note is going to sound, when it actually sounds and when a note stops sounding. This occurs when a climactic note is slightly delayed so that the listener has just enough time to take the suggestion and mentally fill in the note before the performer finally makes the note sound. Comedians use this technique to change the timing of an expected word to one that is unexpected, which causes laughter.
Public speakers who overuse this technique come across as being contrived and unconvincing. Ditto with performers. As always, unpredictability is key to creating naturalness of effect.
The cognitive partner of hesitation is anticipation. Anticipation is created by building up assumption on assumption about what will happen. When the event that should occur fails to happen at the expected time we experience a moment of disappointment. That moment of disappointment gets transformed into a rush of pleasure when the event finally comes to pass. This is what children experience on Christmas morning. Parents use delaying tactics to draw out the moment of opening the presents in order to increase the pleasure of discovering what Santa left. If children are given free reign to rip everything open in a willful race, they experience disappointment, even when they get what they wanted. If they are prevented from building up any anticipation heavy-handed rituals, they lose interest in the moment of discovery. So it is in music, comedy, politics, and sports. The art of these endeavors is in the timing.
- The Excrucis Technique
The word excrucis is derived from the Latin: *ex, meaning ‘out of’ and crux, meaning ‘cross.’ Excrucis is, literally, out of cross or out of crossing. This technique has to do with how important moments involving dissonances are treated. The proper moment for this technique is when voices, each of which is logically and expressively following its own inexorable path, come together in a crossing that results in an extreme dissonance which then resolves elegantly and beautifully. These moments, properly treated, produce some of the most excruciatingly beautiful effects in music.
Perhaps the easiest way to think about this is by noticing how it is similar to the feeling one gets when deeply hugging – out of a crossing action – or being deeply hugged by one you love or who loves you intensely. It feels so good it hurts. Many times such moments are heavily loaded with profound emotion of the most positive and spiritual kind. This is the cognitive effect of the excrucis technique. Making the most of those moments means temporarily slowing the action down, without losing flow, so that the listener can notice the “grinding” effect as the dissonances rub and grate against each other in the crossing process.
Epilogue
These are the cognitive techniques needed to enhance communication. According to Aristotle, in the Poetics (XXI), “The perfection of style is to be clear without being commonplace.” The purpose behind these techniques is to connect musical information into clear and meaningful phrases to help listeners make sense of the score. The effect of these techniques is a clear sense in the listener’s mind of what is important and what is unimportant. In addition, the brain needs constant and intense stimulation in the form of unpredictability, clarity of reference, clarity of relationship, uninterrupted flow of idea, and the occasional enigma in order to maintain an alert, attentive, and focused frame of mind. That is the function of the techniques. These eleven different techniques are devices needed to keep the brain from falling asleep and to create connections, which clarify the musical hierarchy for the listener. What feels clear for the listener creates a feeling of resonance in the soul and so moves it.
C.P.E. Bach stressed the importance of flow in performance. Flow helps the feeling of connection of all parts and aspects of a performance. This is important because these techniques can disrupt flow due to the infusion of so much interest, meaning, character, emotion, and expression. That, we believe, is the reason C.P.E. Bach tried to impress on his readers the importance of flow. Too often, we read such passages and assume we understand what they mean. That assumed understanding gives us license to do anything that will create that effect. C.P.E. Bach’s use of the word ‘flowing’ has been perverted to mean constant and continuous sound using the metronome as the final arbiter of truth. Judged by Bach’s own words, that behavior is both mechanical and slavish or, as Aristotle might have described it, mean or commonplace.
From all that Bach says of flow, it is clear that he is referring to flow of thought. Flow of thought, whether musical or verbal, must be strictly maintained, especially in front of an audience, lest a lapse be detected and the performer appear to have lost the train of thought. It also needs to be remembered that flow of thought is always supported by the intention to say something specific. Constant and continuous sound has no such requirement and is a pathetic attempt to appear competent despite the absence of musical ideas or thoughts. It is for this reason that the injunction to maintain strict flow must refer to flow of musical thought because maintaining strict flow of musical thought is essential to an agreeable (to use Bach’s term) or “love”ly performance.
Flow is not the same thing as tempo or speed in music. As we all know from experience, a performance can exhibit an absolutely strictly maintained speed and yet be devoid of flow of musical thought. It is musical thought which must flow. The notes are necessary only to carry that flow. Musical thought must flow like a great river. The eddies, whirlpools, currents, and swirls that one observes on the surface of the river never stop the overall movement of the whole river, it flows on, come what may. So it should be with musical thought. Its purpose is to express the meaning of the music. It is the job of the performer to intuit what that meaning is and to express the musical thought behind the notes. An honest effort, no matter how meager, is better than none. These eleven techniques are a means and an aid for uncovering and communicating to listeners the intention of the composer.
The problem with using these techniques is that they are effective only when they are obvious. The trick in using them is to be as obvious as possible without having any one technique be the center of attention. This is best done by using all of them simultaneously whenever possible. By intending to use all eleven techniques simultaneously, it becomes impossible to use one to the exclusion of the others, thus keeping all eleven in the right perspective. As soon as one can notice the technical means of generating an effect, the technique is being employed improperly. As the saying goes: art disguises itself. It is a delicate balancing act to use a technique or techniques without having the technical aspect become the focus of attention.
These techniques enhance musical communication because they induce and support a high degree of attention paying in the listener and the performer alike. Loving and paying attention are one and the same thing. This is why performances of music can be characterized as either supporting attention paying or stealing from it. There is nothing in between. The mere presence of sound in a room is no guarantor of attention only passive exposure. When a high degree of attention is created in the listener, the meaning intended by the composer can then be felt. The alternative is either boredom or incongruity. Whereas boredom is clear, incongruity is purposely not clear. That is, performers who lapse into mechanical habits of playing music but occasionally use one or two of these techniques bore the brain but seek to interest the mind. Being both bored and interested is a confusing state for anyone, especially for a devoted music lover.
Very few listeners have the skill or the power to overwhelm their feelings of boredom in order to focus on matters, such as compositional techniques and structure, which can mentally be followed but remain unfelt because the feeling of boredom is too intense. Such matters call attention to the ‘genius ‘of the composer rather than to the feelings, which the composer intended to create in the listener. It requires a significant amount of practice to notice structural details in music when it performed without the communication techniques. That is what music students spend their years in conservatories learning. Most listeners have very little time or patience to do that. But, when music is performed to create a high level of attention paying, compositional technique and structure are enhanced to the point that listeners can detect and appreciate them.
When all of these techniques are used appropriately, the essence of the music is efficiently communicated and easily received. The result of an extremely skillful use of technique is a highly expressive performance of music that deeply touches and moves those that hear it. Using these techniques creates the effect of playing “from the soul” and for the soul of the listener. This is the function and purpose of the Art of Delivery.
Send comments or feedback to:
Keith Hill Instrument Maker 10332-M52 Manchester, MI 48158 734.428.8660 pictagoras@aol.com
