About Interpretation

[mila5405]

Hi! I played piano since I was 6 yo. Now I'm 53 with a lot of experience. I work as a Piano teacher and have done so for more than 25 years. I'm practising regularly and give concerts. I play classic music and Jazz in a Big Band.
My questions today is about Classical Music and the process of interpretation.

There´s a lot spoken and written about interpretation but Im more interested the intuitive process. What do you discover and get inspired by when you work with a piece of music.

/Mike

[faulty_damper]

The intuitive process requires intuition which requires learning and forming mental representations and categories from experience and then making extrapolations.  Without that experience intuition will not form.  It would be useless to ask a student with limited knowledge and experience to be more intuitive because you are asking the impossible.

[bkaldridge]

I think it depends on the person.  It's like anything else.  Some are born with a talent for it.  Others have to work at it. 

[faulty_damper]

Both the talented and talentless must work at it.  The difference between the two is the speed of learning.  If a talented person does not work at it, a talentless person who works at it will surpass the talented easily.

However, an environment conducive to learning will always trump innate talent.  For example, becoming multilingual while growing up in a European country is considered the norm.  Speaking only English probably means you're American. 

The point being, the environment has a far greater effect on what is learned and the quality of that learning.  If most of the people around you excel at the instrument, there is a high likelihood that you will also excel.  Contrary, if most of the people around you don't play, neither will you.

Back to the point of intuition of interpretation: music often requires some form of mental representation to understand.  That representation often manifests itself as emotion (i.e. happy, sand, angry, beautiful pieces, etc.)  It is the emotional representation that allows a musician to feel the music and perform it in a way that serves that expression.

In contrast, we've all heard performances which, while note-perfect, were lifeless; it failed to communicate the emotions and ideas within the piece.  It is plausible that the performer practiced only the notes while neglecting to consider the ideas behind those notes, just like a person can read an entire page in a book and not know what it was about.  The ability to play notes, like the ability to read words, can be done without understanding the meaning behind the notes or words.