When Notes Become Words
International Student Essay Award
Writer's Memo
When I came to study Music Performance at Miami University, I thought I would be able to spend a lot of time practicing my instrument, the violin. But I was supposed to attend to classes such as Music Theory, Research Methods and English, and all these required me to do so many readings and writings that some days I could hardly touch my instrument. Reading and writing are very time-consuming — even more so in a foreign language. And I could not see how they could contribute to improving my violin playing, which is the main goal of my studies. It all annoyed me because I was forced to spend my time reading and writing rather than doing what I really wanted to do: practice.
But after a while, I realized that writing and playing an instrument are actually correlated. They have many similarities, and I would like to describe some of them through this essay.
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Our first experience with writing happens when we learn how to write some words and put them together in an order that makes sense. Our parents have to make some effort to understand our unshaped handwriting, but they feel proud of us. Then, through many years at school we learn a lot of grammar, vocabulary and spelling, so we can work with words in order to express ourselves well when we write and to understand others' writings.
It is the same with playing an instrument, for example the violin. In the first lessons, we learn how to hold the instrument with the chin, how to use the bow to produce sound and how to play a few different notes. When we can put it all together and play a
little well-known melody on the violin, our parents are moved to tears of pride. And while we improve our violin technique, which is our musical grammar, we also learn many different pieces, that is our vocabulary.
In order to keep improving our writing and playing skills, we need to practice really hard. We must do it tirelessly, trying to do it better and not to repeat the same mistakes. Also, it is very important to have a good teacher, who points out our mistakes, who suggests how we can improve and who encourages us to keep going.
We may also drink from resources of inspiration by watching really good performances of artists that we admire, like the violinists Itzaak Perlman and Hillary Hant, and reading really good pieces of writing, like some articles and op-ed pieces from The New York Times or books by great Brazilian writers such as Clarice Lispector and Machado de Assis. All these give us valuable ideas of how to improve our performance, and such ideas can be the guidelines for our next practice period.
Good writers have always something important to say. Otherwise, their papers are just a big pile of words. And they need to make sure they write clearly enough so the reader can understand them. I can say the same about music performance. Musicians have to know which story they are going to tell through the piece they are playing and the feelings they want to make the audience feel. For example, if the character of a piece is happy, the musicians have to make sure that everything they play can be translated in happiness — the sound, the articulation, the way they move their bodies, even their facial expressions.
In a good performance, every note, like every word, has a meaning. Both musicians and writers must know how to use them idiomatically, effectively and expressively. For example, when a writer is telling a story and a surprising event comes up, he or she must know how to keep the reader interested but without telling the secret before the right time. This effect of surprise also happens in music. In Beethoven's symphonies, for example, there are some passages in which the whole orchestra is playing pianissimo (very quietly) and suddenly everybody plays fortissimo (very loud) creating a surprise effect.
According to an essay called "The Maker's Eye," by Donald Murray, writing is a process. The first writing is only the first draft, the first step on a long staircase. He says the writer must be able to stand some distance from his own paper, analyze it and make it better, until the final version is achieved. For the musician, this process starts when he first sight-reads a piece. So it is followed by a period of conscious practice, in which he must be able to hear and judge what he plays, until the performance on the stage happens — that is the final version which he submits to the audience.
If writing is a process, so is music performance. And I hope all of this practice on English writing can really help me to express myself better and clearer, as a writer and as a musician as well.
