Difference between evoking and expressing.

[JamesS]

What is the difference? A teacher where I study suggested that musicians do not express emotions when they play, rather they evoke them. Having thought about this for a while now I think I understand what he meant. When a composer writes a piece he/she doesn't set out to express their feelings but rather to evoke the same feelings in whoever hears the music. Therefore everything they write evokes an emotional reaction from the listener. As a performer you do the same, you are essentially a commuincator, trying to evoke the same emotion in the audience as you felt when learning the piece. If you sat down at the piano and just tried to express your emotions it is quite likely people wouldn't understand what you were doing, instead you have to know how to play in a way that evokes the same feelings in the listener.

[xvimbi]

A slightly facetious response to your post would be "duh." You just expressed what music is all about, most Classical music anyway. No offense

Less facetious would be to add that in order to evoke emotions in a listener through music, the listener must have had prior connections between the type of music and the type of emotions that the composer or performer is trying to convey. That's why the emotional content of a piece/performance is often lost on children, or generally, those who haven't experienced that particular emotion. Likewise, it is often difficult for performers to convey an emotion they haven't experienced personally. Finally, the weirdest situation is that where an audience associates a completely different emotion with a certain type of music than the composer/performer. If someone grows up hearing funeral marches during happy occasions, or happy music during sad occasions, the associations don't match, and the results may get confusing. Although this sounds somewhat extreme, it clearly demonstrates that music alone is not able to convey anything if people don't have prior associations with it. Music is, after all, a language.

[JamesS]

A slightly facetious response to your post would be "duh." You just expressed what music is all about, most Classical music anyway. No offense

Yes I realise now that I probably answered my own question, and that it does seem quite obvious. However it is something that I think people often don't realise. A lot of people I know think of music as being about expressing emotions when really that's not the case. I totally agree with what you say, we have to have experienced those emotions for music to have an effect on us. In that sense I think music is a very human language, it works by playing on human emotions.