WHAT ARE FLUENCY AND LITERACY IN THE LANGUAGE OF MUSIC?

Music is the language of feeling. Using PlayPianoFluently‘s simple working model of rhythmic and tonal vocabulary and syntax, you can tell so many stories about your inner experience. The desire to express inner feelings must be the driving force of fluent musicianship practice. Some people may find that difficult.  But if you’re up for a deep dive, you will find it extremely liberating and exciting.

The language of music itself is simple at its core; a few basic nuts and bolts that you can learn simply by practising “saying” them authentically with clear moment-by-moment awareness, for many hours, until they become deeply familiar. Once fully internalised or embodied after lots of relaxed, playful, expressive practice, you will be able to “say” these components effortlessly. That’s because, unlike conventional music theory, the data is not too dense or inscrutable to be processed in real-time, and so it requires no thinking or working out.

So here’s an outline of the model:

A vocabulary of 12 rhythm cells that can combine in all kinds of ways flowing within the syntax of a stable but flexible rhythmic matrix structure (groove) built from simple rules;

A vocabulary of 12 major and 12 minor harmonic blocks, 2 whole-tone blocks and 3 diminished blocks that plug into 12 pentatonic and 12 diatonic blocks to form a tonal map – the keyboard map. These tonal blocks all fit together like a 3D puzzle.

You then use this model to express yourself, and never to impress yourself or anyone else!

A BREAK WITH CURRENT CONVENTIONS

In today’s culture, music is not often thought of or experienced as a language that we can all “speak”. Most people approach music as something external – a performance, a recording, a skill, an object. They strive for musical results, perhaps trying to achieve or emulate what others do. Material outcomes are not the goal in fluent music making, just a byproduct! It’s important that you embrace this very different paradigm. If people make external results the goal or motivation of their training, the development of musical fluency will be blocked. Your motivation must always be to express yourself authentically and intelligibly using the elements of musical language.

Most of us lack the ability to play well intuitively: we need conscious understanding of musical vocabulary or syntax – i.e. fluency. Of course, some people do possess the instinctive confidence to play music well, without following a fluent model – they use one of the top-down performance models of current conventional musical education approaches:

AUDIATION & EXECUTION – they imagine music, often mimetically, and reproduce it, either by design, intuition or trial and error, all based on their sense of “how it goes”

MUSCLE MEMORY – they play music after repetitious rehearsal, or do a kind of “improvisation” based on patterns, scales, arpeggios, exercises, riffs etc. that they drill into their memory, perhaps with a metronomic click to train time-keeping

THEORY – they encode or decode music, based on theoretical data – lists of notes carrying pitch and duration values, and also intervals, keys, chords, time-signatures etc. (conventional ear-training and practical musicianship approaches are also theory-based)

TECHNIQUE & SHOW-AND-PLAY – they play music as an act of mechanical or physical execution that is practised using top-down understanding, often using involved and complex ideas about technique, even physiology

YOUR INNER MUSICIAN ALREADY WORKS NATURALLY

You might have encountered one of those rare individuals who have intuitive musical fluency. The misconception prevalent in today’s culture is that only these people with their special superpowers (e.g. perfect pitch) are capable of musical fluency whilst the rest of us are stuck with one of the more playing-by-numbers, passive approaches listed above. This is just not true!

In reality, we all have a natural inner musician – a sense of rhythm and tonal relationship – that we developed when we were small children. Your natural sense of musical language is very powerful and already works very well passively, if usually unconsciously, when listening to music. If you didn’t possess this natural sense, you wouldn’t intuitively understand music, enjoy it, feel its message, or recognise a performance as good or bad. And you can do all this already! To become actively fluent in musical language, you just need to train your mind and body to grasp recognisable musical structures and patterns consciously and instantly – i.e. in real time.

REAL SKILLS

Being fluent and literate in musical language will give you so many amazing skills that conventional methods fail to train successfully. You will learn to:-

improvise – in the true sense, i.e. “speak” music spontaneously, like having a conversation
play by ear – understand and therefore play any music you can remember
sightread fluently – which means that you can look at an unfamiliar score and hear it instantly in your head and therefore be able to play it as if you already know it.

You will find that other skills, not directly connected to fluency, are also boosted significantly, such as playing from memory, the ability to learn new pieces very quickly, playing with technical virtuosity, and many more.

RHYTHM COMES FIRST – MAKING GOOD TECHNIQUE EASY & TONAL SENSE POSSIBLE

When you have mapped the keyboard internally, you experience it as an ergonomic tool – like a prosthetic extension of the body. All the keys are laid out in a wonderful symmetric structure that you can fully internalise. This means that your hands and fingers feel relaxed and stable as you move them directly and effortlessly to the places where you know that the tonal sounds live. However, you must always prioritise rhythmic awareness. Fluent rhythm skills precede tonal skills, for 2 reasons:

1. MOVEMENT
When your movements are rhythmic, powered by the inner flow of the groove, they have natural grace and ease. Then you don’t need to think about technique or treat your body like a machine. With clear spatial or proprioceptive awareness of the keyboard map, your fingers can move as naturally as your feet and legs walking on stairs, and with the same ease of articulation that your tongue has when you speak. Expressive rhythm powers these coordinated, efficient movements. To train this, you will practise vocalising rhythmic mantras that describe the structure of musical metre or groove – not singing but in a more speech-based, chanting style. If people neglect this part of the training, fluency will not develop effectively.

2. STORYTELLING
Tonality functions as an enhancement of rhythmic structure. Tonal rise and fall, tension and resolution, or cadence towards or away from a tonal centre – the fundamentals of tonal progression – are things that work within the poetic, storytelling structure of groove. The groove or rhythmic matrix is what generates musical meaning first and foremost. Without it, tonality might sound pretty, like windchimes, but you need the syntax of rhythmic structure to make tonality sound truly meaningful or tuneful. It may seem a little counterintuitive, but by training yourself to know precisely where you are within the nested rhythmic structure of the groove whilst tagging every rhythm cell moment by moment, you will be able to use a poetic or storytelling feeling to understand and express tonal relationships properly.

THE PERFORMANCE MODEL VS. THE FLUENT MODEL

In our current culture, performance models of musical practice and education are deeply established. This top-down approach tends to be deeply embedded into people’s brains as the “normal” way of making music. To overcome this conditioning, you will need to practise letting go – a process of uncovering and tackling psychological blockages. This will also help you find the childlike freedom of self-expression that fluency entails.

The attraction of the conventional performance model is that it offers a hiding place from deep-seated fear and shame that so many of us have around self-expression. So you may need to dig deep to understand the ways that fluency on the keys differs fundamentally from the common approach, to work hard tackling your blockages and resisting the temptation to switch back to a performance model.

Below is a breakdown and comparison of these two approaches.

FLUENT MODEL
Using internalised musical vocabulary and syntax to express yourself effortlessly

PERFORMANCE MODEL
Striving for impressive musical results

FLUENT MODEL
“Saying” a “vocabulary” of 12 rhythm cells plugged into the groove. Sensing the unfolding groove as a poetic, embodied, flexible matrix and maintaining a conscious awareness of where you are within its symmetric, nested, nonlinear structure at all times. This is the primary musical principle and source of meaning

PERFORMANCE MODEL
Generating good rhythm by counting or audiating the note and rest durations, perhaps thinking of these timings metronomically, perhaps playing to a click or metronome, training unconscious, mechanical rhythmic movements, often with counting, foot-tapping or some other technique. Or just playing rhythms acoording to an audiated idea of how it goes, usually based on a kind of speech-rhythm sense of it, with little or no sense of the groove or structure

FLUENT MODEL
Knowing where you are in the keyboard (the tonal matrix) using your natural sense of proprioception (physical/spatial sense) to map its whole, symmetric, nonlinear structure into the body

PERFORMANCE MODEL
Using a visual or tactile (finger-pinning) sense of location in the keyboard, or perhaps not really noticing at all, just using muscle memory whilst applying various principles of technique to encourage varying degrees of accuracy. Or trying to know where you are in the keyboard via some linear theoretical sense of scales and chords

FLUENT MODEL
Expressing yourself authentically using musical vocabulary (complete musical shapes: rhythm cells that “walk” paths through tonal blocks) as natural, flexible movements (like words)

PERFORMANCE MODEL
Audiating music (imagining it) and executing commands to reproduce it, relying on a “karaoke” sense of “how it goes!”. Or breaking the musical shapes into component elements, especially by spotlighting individual notes carrying pitch and duration values but also chords, intervals, scales, keys etc., ultimately using muscle memory of rehearsed movements to play automatically or perhaps with some ideas about good technique to help with control or accuracy

IS IT FOR ME?

If this counter-cultural approach to music training sounds like a breath of fresh air, you may find it liberating and exciting. But people will struggle if they don’t find the attitude of a pre-school child, or fail to let go of attachment to results. An inability to let go causes a build up of tension and pressure, impairing moment-by-moment focus. So, willingness to investigate psychological blockages and discover a playful, childlike expressiveness is a prerequisite for students of musical fluency.

It is practical learning, and requires an autonomous or self-directed attitude of discovery or curiosity. We all learn at different speeds, and have different aptitudes and blockages. So you must really take responsiblity for your own practice. Some people’s learning style is more passive: they prefer to execute tasks assigned according to fixed criteria with predictable outcomes. That simply won’t work. You need to be willing to challenge any residual conditioning from your prior experiences studying in this way.

Because understanding only arises as a resullt of practice (this is how we acquire practical skill rather than theoretical knowledge – more meditative than cognitive!), people’s desire for a priori understanding can block progress. Learning is only possible ig you remove all preconceptions and adopt a beginner mindset. Also, your fluency training must be kept very separate from any music that you do following more passive performance approaches. Your practice must be an activity of pure childlike play and experimentation. So, it’s necessary to protect your practice “space”, keeping it ring-fenced securely, ensuring a playful, expressive attitude.

If all this sounds like the kind of paradigm shift that you’re ready to explore in your piano training, and if you feel ready to use these materials with discipline, patience and curiosity, expressing yourself authentically only within the limitations of your current (but ever-expanding) musical “vocabulary”, using musical patterns, exercises and true improvisation rather than playing familiar music, developing the meditative skill of moment-by-moment focus and letting go, then this approach will bring you genuine musical empowerment.