Use Your Imagination--Having a Vision for How to Make Music Sound Good

So I've talked about how I've been working on making musical phrases when playing the piano.  That's coming along quite nicely, at least in the sense that I actually actively think about phrasing now, as opposed to ignoring composers' phrasings marks when I was younger.

Another thing I briefly touched on is having a consistent interpretation of a piece of music.  This is something I need a lot more work on, but until I actually play a few more pieces of music in completion, I'll remain deficient in this regard.  I'm in no rush, of course.

I also mentioned that I need to let music come to me once in a while.  That's tricky, because unless you have good intuition, letting music come to you sometimes means you're churning out madness.  Think of children playing--not the prodigies, of course--say, Mozart's K. 545.  Extreme speed, right?  That is not what you want when I say "letting the music come to you".  It's something that needs to be nurtured, but at the same time, you need to expose your primitive modules of your brain to grow musically.

Today, as I'm listening to the Ax, Frank and Ma's version of Chopin Trio, I am struck by how good it sounds.  I've been a little distracted by the despite wild fluctuations in tempos and some seemingly non-faithless interpretations in my past hearing of their performance, but as I'm being frustrated by my inability to make my piano part sound good, I realize just what caliber of musicians they are.  And I realize, I am been following scores to such a tee that I am hampering my imagination.

Currently, I do have have the vision to be able to create good musical sounds in my head, and perhaps that's why I have so steadfastly remained faithful to the score.  I need to be able to imagine and hear various ways of playing music in my head to actually be artistic and creative--after all, that's what playing music is all about.  It's not about following every last bit of the composer's dynamic and tempo markings.  That's what professors and, gasp, musicologists do.  As an artist, you need to be able to go one step beyond that.  I'm not talking about violating the composers' intents, but turning the music the composers created into pure gold.  Once the composers wrote their music, the music becomes human property, in a sense, and as long as you understand the spirit what the music was written, the dynamic marking and tempos should all come naturally if you have that artistic vision.

And that artistic vision and imagination is what I need to develop.  It kind of encompasses "letting the music come to you", I suppose, because now you're letting the music come to you even when you're not actually making the sounds at the piano.