Monday 6 September 2010

Shifting the Focus back to Expression and Creativity

The Sensible Flutist offers some insights and ideas to the role of creativity and imagination in the performance of music, even scored music, and adds some advice for stepping just a toe out of the discipline of technical musicianship:
the conversation took a turn towards the question of creativity and how so many performances nowadays are technically accurate or "note perfect" but lacking in musical expression. For flutists, the current focus leans toward technical superiority and perfection. My guess is that this focus extends through all woodwinds because of the physically emcompassing requirements of playing a wind instrument. We get so wrapped up in the physical and technical side of playing the instrument that we forget why we committed ourselves to music in the first place. I certainly didn't start playing the flute because I wanted to learn to control my breathing or have fast fingers. I began playing the flute for the expressive powers and potential it holds.

Classes and books often focus only on the ways and means to make sounds without asking why it is we wanted to make these sounds in the first place; as with reading any script, it isn't so much what you say as what you say with it that counts, and as our flutist correspondent observes, the best way to get a feel for that is to go out and see directly how music is used in the live setting!

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