Getting the Notes But Missing the Music

As many of you know, I do a lot of recording for films. Maybe 80% of the time it’s pretty easy stuff – read it and get it down on tape. It’s the other 20% I want to talk to you about today.

You see, it’s in the challenging music that the priorities of a musician are unmasked.

Many of my colleagues, fine players that they are, suffer from a confusion of musical priorities. When the music is too challenging to simultaneously get all the components (notes, dynamics, rhythm, time, articulation) they go for the notes, before anything else.

Take a moment to think about this. Let’s say the music is so difficult it is only possible to get 1 component, and it is the notes. The result will be chaos. The same is true of all else except one – TIME.

If everybody places time first, at least there will be basic ensemble. You start together, you make tempo changes together, you finish together.

Keep thinking. Can notes be next? No, they can’t. If there are notes, but no dynamics there is cacophony. DYNAMICS must be read next, for they give the sound a basic shape.

And guess what, notes are still not next. RHYTHM is your next priority. Again, this gives the aural proceedings coherence. Notes without a duration attached to them, will not.

Even ARTICULATION will communicate the composer’s intentions better than notes, if one or other is to be sacrificed.

So there you have it. Because the NOTES are usually regarded as the most difficult component, they are mistakenly given the most importance. Bottom line is, the music suffers.

This is a valuable lesson. If you haven’t exactly seen things this way, and you’re open to new ways of approaching music and the instrument you love, you ought to jump right over and pick up your copy of Kreutzer for Violin Mastery, Vol. 1
now.

All the best,
Clayton Haslop

P.S. The mastery of ‘time’ is every musician’s first priority. click here to become that ‘solid as a rock’ player that everyone else tunes into.