Musical Expression

Musical expression is the art of playing music with communication. The elements of music that comprise expression include dynamic indications, forte or piano, phrasing, differing qualities of touch and articulation, color, intensity, energy and excitement all at the service of the composer's intention as best perceived by the performer.

A performer aims to elicit responses of sympathetic feeling in the audience, and to excite, calm or otherwise manipulate the audience's physical and emotional responses. In a great artist, one can feel that it is the soul that is speaking, in lesser artists, the ego. In non-artist performances, one can sometimes sense the soul of the composer in the absence of interpretation.

Expression can be closely related to breath, and the voice's natural ability to express feelings, sentiment, deep emotions. Whether these can somehow be categorized is perhaps the realm of academics, who view expression as an element of musical performance which embodies a consistently recognizable emotion, ideally causing a sympathetic emotional response in its listeners. The emotional content of musical expression is distinct from the emotional content of specific sounds (e.g., a startlingly-loud 'bang') and of learned associations (e.g., a national anthem), but can rarely be completely separated from its context.

The components of musical expression continue to be the subject of extensive and unresolved dispute.

Read more about Musical Expression:  See Also

Famous quotes containing the words musical and/or expression:

    Then, bringing me the joy we feel when wee see a work by our favorite painter which differs from any other that we know, or if we are led before a painting of which we have until then only seen a pencil sketch, if a musical piece heard only on the piano appears before us clothed in the colors of the orchestra, my grandfather called me the [hawthorn] hedge at Tansonville, saying, “You who are so fond of hawthorns, look at this pink thorn, isn’t it lovely?”
    Marcel Proust (1871–1922)

    The American adolescent, then, is faced, as are the adolescents of all countries who have entered or are entering the machine age, with the question: freedom from what and at what price? The American feels so rich in his opportunities for free expression that he often no longer knows what it is he is free from. Neither does he know where he is not free; he does not recognize his native autocrats when he sees them.
    Erik H. Erikson (1904–1994)