Playing From the Heart

You’re working on a phrase, and it sounds mechanical, so you decide to put more feeling into it. You lean in. You dig into the string. You let your body swell up with the bigness of the moment, and maybe your face goes along with it. And somehow, for all that effort, the phrase comes out smaller than it was before, tighter, a little forced, like a photograph of an emotion instead of the emotion itself.

Almost every musician I know has done this, and it comes from a confusion I gave a good deal of space to in my book, Soulforce — the confusion between the effort you feel and the feeling your listener hears.

Among many artists, there is a confusion between expressive tension and muscular tension. This confusion often takes form in a subconscious belief that more effort will yield more expression. The result is sometimes called “guitar face,” because of the scrunched faces and contorted postures of artists who look like they’re “really feeling it.”

However, trying hard, really feeling it, and even trying to be creative aren’t actually the same thing as authentic emotional expression. In an echo of the adage, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again,” it’s almost as if the message many of us get about expression is, “If it’s not expressive enough, just put more effort into it!”

The key to unraveling this confusion lies in an awareness of the body. Trying hard or putting more effort into expression creates bodily tension, which in turn interferes with your expressive potential. Emotion is a kind of energy, and expression of emotion requires the movement of that energy, like the flow of water through a hose.

But when you try hard, tension builds in the body and acts like a kink in that hose. The result, instead of having the hoped-for emotional power, has only the characteristics of excess effort and ends up feeling strained, mechanical, or superficial.

So the effort you add to sound more expressive is the kink in the hose. Which raises the obvious question: if the answer isn’t more intensity, then what is it?

And the people listening can feel that difference, even when they couldn’t say why. When a performance is merely virtuosic, when someone is visibly trying hard, it impresses you and it leaves your heart alone. Because an audience isn’t actually asking for intensity.

They’re asking for connection. They want to hear a person in there. You can play the plainest little tune, and if there’s a real person inside it, they will love you for it, and no amount of technical fireworks stands in for that.

So where does the flattening come from? Here is the principle I keep coming back to: what you pay attention to comes out in your sound. When a passage is hard, your attention goes to the notes, to the mechanics, to the little black marks on the page and the list of things your hands are supposed to do.

But a note on a page is a concept, and a concept is static, a dead thing. When you give your full attention to matching something dead, your body stiffens in the effort of it, and the sound that comes out is exactly as stiff and literal as the thing you were attending to. Your playing is, in a real sense, a recording of your attention.

Which means the fix isn’t more effort. It’s a change of what you’re paying attention to. Instead of the dead concept of the notes, put your attention on something alive, the emotional energy moving in your own body as you play.

I call this the Inner Audience Member, the part of you that feels something when it hears music. It isn’t complicated and it isn’t only the big, nameable emotions. It’s the felt sense of opening or closing, of leaning toward the sound or pulling back from it, of something in your chest or your gut that likes this or doesn’t.

Play from there, and two things happen at the same time. The music becomes expressive, and your body becomes free, because you have finally given your attention something alive to rest on.

People sometimes worry that the feeling they find in there is the wrong one, that it’s anxiety or boredom rather than something noble. It matters less than you’d think. What makes playing expressive is not the particular emotion but the presence you bring to it.

Listen in to whatever is actually there, without deciding in advance what it should be, and it comes through. You are not manufacturing a feeling to perform. You are stopping the habit of ignoring the one you already have.

Here’s the hardest part of learning to play from the heart. Letting go of the muscular effort feels like a leap of faith, because there’s a real fear that if you stop gripping and managing every note, the whole thing collapses and the expression won’t be there to catch you. That fear is the thing to test, gently and for yourself, because the expression is already in you.

It does not arrive through more effort. It is made of your own emotional life, and it comes out the moment you stop clamping down on it. Think of a flower opening.

It is not straining to be beautiful. It simply opens, and the ease is part of why it’s beautiful at all. When you strain to be expressive, you are working against the quality you’re reaching for.

This is what I mean when I tell my students that they are the gift. The notes and the techniques and the years in the practice room are real, and they matter, but every last bit of it is in service of one thing, which is sharing the part of you that feels. That is the whole point of playing music.

It’s easy to lose it under the achievements and the ego and the endless technical to-do list, and it’s worth remembering, at the most practical level, right in the middle of a hard passage: can I feel my own heart while I play this?

None of this is an argument against technique. Virtuosity is an asset. It’s what lets you do the thing you want to do. The mistake is only in confusing the effort with the music, because they are not the same, and when you mistake one for the other you can spend years laying tension into your playing and calling it expression.

So here’s something to try, and if it doesn’t land for you today, let it go and come back to it later. Take a phrase you know well, and play it once while you try to get it exactly right. Give it two numbers: how tense your body was, zero to ten, and how alive it sounded, zero to ten.

Then play it again, slowly enough that you can feel your heart and gut as you go, paying attention only to your Inner Audience Member, more open or more closed, more pleasant or less. Rate it a second time. Most people watch the tension number fall and the aliveness number rise in a single pass, from nothing but a change of attention. You didn’t add a thing. You stopped adding, and let the gift come out.

Joseph Arnold
Violinist, Alexander Technique teacher, and author of Soulforce
SoulforceArts.com

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