Monday, March 20, 2006

Expressive Tones: Pick a Feeling, Any Feeling

In the last entry, I described how I approach what we in Music for People often call "one-quality tones" (or "sounds"). An excerpt on the MfP website explains a "one quality sound" as "one note or tone--just one!--that authentically expresses how your feel at the moment you sing or play it."

This quality of spontaneous self-expression, playing music that express how one genuinely feels at a particular moment, is one of the things that makes participating in a Music for People workshop so transformative. We so often spend our lives trying to be what we should be, trying to feel what we are supposed to feel. Giving one's self permission to feel one's feelings--well, it is incredible.

There's another powerful way to approach playing single notes. As with one-quality sounds, this practice involves playing or singing a note that powerfully and authentically expresses an emotion. But instead of being open to and aware of what you are feeling at this moment, you choose, or are given, a feeling to express.

Feel anger and play an angry note.

Feel joy and sing a joyful note.

Feel, oh, I don't know, bemused, and make a bemused sound.

And so on and so forth.

I've found this activity to have (at least) two powerful uses.

First, it is not uncommon in workshop settings, especially with college-aged participants, for everyone to find themselves feeling unsure, hesitant, insecure, etc. And so if we are doing an exercise of taking turns doing one-quality sounds, everyone does similar sounds expressing their discomfort and hesitancy. OK, then. John--make an angry sound. Serena, make a silly sound. And so on.

Second, choosing feelings to feel and express helps us to embrace and express feelings we may avoid. To be expressive and uninhibited improvisers, we need to push ourselves into areas in which we are not emotionally comfortable (yet which we can still handle).

And those of us who are performers need to be able to connect with and express the emotions of the music we are playing. Performing classical music, for example, we need to connect with the emotions of the music and express them. Improvising with other musicans, we need to be able to connect with and respond to the emotions being expressed by our collaborators.

I find these two practices compliment themselves very well. Clear your mind, listen inside yourself, and make sounds that express how you feel at that instant: one-quality tones. Then after a while, choose feelings, feel them, listen inside yourself, and make the sounds that express those feelings: expressive tones.

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