Friday, June 13, 2008

What does "musical" mean?

First of all, thanks, Mom! While I didn't inherit your perfect pitch, I do seem to have relative pitch (which for my purposes is probably better) and your musicality.

But what does it mean to be "musical"? I've had various voice teachers over the years tell me that I'm musical - good feel for the music, sense of phrasing, that sorta thing. Which doesn't automatically mean I can sing well. I once saw a quote to the effect that having a Stradivarian instrument doesn't mean you can play the thing - you still have to learn the mechanics of it. I guess musicality means that, when you do learn the mechanics, they don't sound mechanical.

At this point in my vocal education, I still have a lot of mechanics to learn but have just about completed all the remedial work I had to do. Now I'm finally able to start working on how to combine technique and musicality to produce a performance, not merely a mechanical exercise. Not "See, I'm singing these notes", but "Ruth is happy to be a pirate" or what-have-you.

And why are humans, at least some of us, musical at all? What evolutionary or survival purpose does it serve, if any, or is it merely a byproduct of something else? There are all kinds of studies demonstrating that abilities in music, math and language tend to track together - if you're good at one, odds are that you're good at one or both of the other two. Since that has to do with brain function, maybe music is a byproduct of language? A predecessor or enabler of language? Discuss.

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