Letting the Music Come to You

So I've kind of went through the 4 movements of the Chopin Trio, and the few days have been playing something different.  A couple of Scarlatti Sonatas, some Bach Prelude and Fugues, Poulenc Mouvement Perpetual, and also, Chopin Etudes.  Actually, I should say, mostly Chopin Etudes.  Op. 10-5 (Black Key), Op 10-8 (Sunshine?), and Op 10-12 (Revolutionary).




These are all etudes that I have visited years ago. The Black Key I first played for a competition when I was 13, and the Revolutionary I started playing around the same time.  Op 10-8 I played quite a bit later, but don't remember when.  Unfortunately, I never really actually got the notes quite down for any of these pieces.  So even though in the case of Black Key, I can play from memory even without practicing for, oh, even years, there are some passages I just play with plain wrong notes.  So it's time to correct them.

Correcting the wrong notes, as it turns out, isn't the most difficult part.  It's getting the Etudes to make sense musically while coping with the tremendous technical difficulties.

So I tried... and tried, and tried.  Some ideas came to mind, and I can translate them onto the keyboard, more or less.  But they are nowhere close to what I want to hear.  With the Scarlatti Sonatas, technically easier, but musically, same thing.  Some ideas, but the outcome either sounds too harsh, too busy, too monotonous, you name it.  I wasn't happy.  I repeatedly told my wife, "Why is playing the piano so hard??"

Today, I went back to the Chopin Trio.  And I learned a great lesson immediately--RELAX!

As it turns out, I've been trying hard to logically make the Trio sound good.  Too hard.  Trying to put together interesting ways to phrase things, trying to break down the structure of the piece, trying to come up with various ways to interpret the different sections of the piece, trying to figure out the rhythm and where best to place the accents... Basically, I've been trying to do too hard.  If I sit back a little, relax, and let the music come to me, I actually rather like results.  For instance, I like how the music just flows when I play the opening of the 4th movement this way.  It feels good!

So perhaps with those Chopin Etudes and Scarlatti Sonatas, I am also trying too hard and too logically.  Maybe I should let the music come to me--and I actually think it makes sense in the following way:

We humans have a limited logical capacity.  To fulfill your potential, you need to entrust the more primitive parts of your brain.

Logic and reasoning abilities, as evolutionary biologists now know, are rather recent acquisitions among humans, perhaps only a million years old.  Yet they are so evolutionarily advantageous that they have evolved rapidly and come to define what we humans are all about.  However, emotions and sound processing capabilities have been in our brains for way longer than that, and to become a better musician, you have to tap into those modules.

And that, I believe, is what people mean by "Letting the Music Come to You".

Of course, you also need to become in command of these non-logical modules in your brain.  You can't let, say, anger and passion dominate everything when you play the Revolutionary Etude.  Those emotions need to be tempered somehow.  With other emotions, or perhaps with logic.  All these things work in tandem.  And that is perhaps the most important part of a person's musical growth.

Indeed, it might well be the most important part of a person's growth, period.