Reply To: How to get better at musicality, playing expressively, and inner sense of pulse

[Noa Kageyama]

Hi Emma,

To Mery’s point, you might enjoy this podcast interview with Keith Underwood, where he describes doing this sort of close, detailed listening and imitation.

Another thing to keep in mind is that playing more expressively does increase the technical difficulty of a passage, so it might help to practice this with easier repertoire too. In fact, violinist Pamela Frank has recommended practicing scales musically. And she makes the good point that when you encounter portions of scales and arpeggios in real pieces, you’d want to play them expressively anyhow, so why do we spend so much time practicing scales unmusically? So in your daily warmups or fundamentals or etude work, experiment with playing these things more musically too, so that these skills will more easily transfer to other repertoire.

It might also help to work with metronome apps like Time Guru, that enable you to randomly silence beats, so you can practice cultivating a stronger internal pulse. Or perhaps even better yet at first, to practice with really big beats. Like one beat per measure, or even one every two measures, so that there’s some guidance, but you work on that internal pulse too.