Music is the language of the soul.

Traditional music lessons generally follow a widely accepted approach that blocks musical expression.

I remember, as a child, how my own teacher would use the same approach for each new piece I learned while preparing for my graded exams. We would spend weeks and months embedding the muscle memory to execute the notes on the page and then when she could no longer find things to correct in my playing we would add in the expression marks i.e. when to play loud, soft, speed-up etc.

The concept of expressive playing being a matter of executing some symbols on a score seems ridiculous to me now. Imagine if, through language, we tried to 'hit' similar marks? 'I'm angry so I must raise my voice at precisely this moment in the sentence I'm speaking.' Or, 'In order to show I'm happy I should maintain a higher pitch at THIS moment...' What could remove us further from feeling what we feel than a bunch of instructions to be executed 'correctly'?

Music is the language of the soul and must be felt at that level. Any instruction on how to express ourselves will produce one effect: the thinking mind will bypass the feeling mind and concern itself with 'getting it right'. This sends our inner critic into overdrive turning playing into a cognitive task loaded with judgment and anxiety.

In order to express ourselves through music we must actively bypass the thinking mind so that we can feel what we play and express ourselves from a deeply felt, authentic place. When we learn to process music as a list of information on a page we can all too easily fall into the trap of playing in order to 'get it right'.

As Beethoven said 'To play a wrong note is insignificant; to play without passion is inexcusable.'

The antidote to all of this is that we must connect with our emotions and play from that place each and every time we sit at the piano. We must communicate ourselves with absolutely everything we play and resist passively executing music as a series of instructions.

The requires a deep commitment to exposing ourselves and being real. Not an easy task but one that anyone can do given the right approach. Only then will the music we play speak from the soul. Only then can our playing connect us to others and, perhaps more importantly, ourselves..