Music emerged from a combination of singing and speech. In fact, music was inseparable from speech for thousands of years. In ancient times, oratory was linked to elements of singing. Epic poetry was always sung. This not only projected the voice so it could be heard more clearly, but infused the words with elevated emotion. Music heightened the emotion of words. Here is an example of early Christian church chant….

Speech is filled with emotion and feeling.  Charles Darwin remarked on this: “The character of the human voice alters much under different conditions, in loudness and quality… in resonance and timbre, in pitch and intervals. No one can listen to an eloquent orator or preacher, or to a man calling angrily to another, without being struck with the truth of this…”

Listen to Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech. His way of speaking is almost singing.

The action of speaking or singing is inseparable from feeling and emotion. The heightened feeling of the speaker or singer permeates the space in which it occurs, engulfing the environment in its feeling…look at any rock concert. We see the same emotion filled quality in vocal music….

Darwin believed that music, song, was a natural outgrowth of the courtship process in humans…“A great part of the emotional effect of a song depends on the character of the action by which the sounds are produced…It’s obvious that whenever we feel the “expression” of a song to be due to its quickness or slowness of movement—to smoothness of flow, loudness of utterance, and so on—we are, in fact, interpreting the muscular action generally, But this leaves unexplained the more subtle and more specific effect which we call the musical expression of the song—the delight given by its melody…This is an effect that can’t be described in words…”

Expression comes from the sensations of the person creating the sound, in the same way that people cannot help but speak or move without feeling and emotion. The music is the wave of feeling coming from the performer and permeating space with this sensation. One can’t help being affected, since we are not separate from the space.

None of this can be gleaned from the written text.  In other words, the text cannot show you what music is.

Music really is an ecstatic emotional outburst. Its character is inseparable from feeling. Any technique used to play music must contain this feeling as intrinsic to the motion needed to play or there will be an artificial gulf between the action of playing and the purpose of doing it at all. Understanding instrumental music as if an instrument is singing has been the tacit approach to music for hundreds of years:

For example, J. S. Bach’s title page for his collection of 2 and 3 part inventions included his advice for students:

“Forthright instruction, wherewith lovers of the clavier, especially those desirous of learning, are shown in a clear way not only 1) to learn to play two voices clearly, but also after further progress 2) to deal correctly and well with three obligato parts, moreover at the same time to obtain not only good ideas, but also to carry them out well, but most of all to achieve a cantabile style of playing, and thereby to acquire a strong foretaste of composition.”

The act of singing was the birth of what we call music. For hundreds of years top level music education was based on learning to improvise over a pre written, partimento, bass part. Students learned to sing an improvised counterpoint over a written bass part. Or one could work out a more refined improvisation that would became a somewhat fixed composition. But the creative fluidity of improvised singing was foundational to any sense of what music is.

All of the greatest performers model their playing on singing.

Horowitz, Glenn Plaskin, p.282: “During the early years of his retirement, Horowitz’s interest in the bel canto singers who had thrilled him as a child revived. After reading about how much Chopin had loved to listen to and learn from great singers, Horowitz began to study the art of the Italian baritone, Mattia Battistini, …whom Horowitz considered a “forgotten genius.” He memorized details of Battistini’s performances, fascinated by his plasticity of phrasing, breath control, tonal shading and lyric expressiveness. Horowitz’s interest in Battistini became a near obsession.”

Horowitz is not alone in his modeling of bel canto singers. Liszt was influenced by their effortless musicality as was Chopin. Chopin’s nocturnes are really bel canto arias. Chopin believed  the best way to attain naturalness in performance was to model your playing on Italian bel canto singers. He always praised their simple style, and the ease and remarkable sustaining power this gave them. What is bel canto singing? 

Smooth flowing connection that underlies articulation. Any motions used for playing or singing must be flexible enough to contain the possibility of varying expression and energy without the need to change their underlying motion to do so. Otherwise adding expression and emotion will alter the learned motions. This is the essence of great technique. 

This is what we teach at SFIM.

Our piano classes teach students these principles from the beginning of their study, giving them a foundation that allows them to improve without limit.