A Minute with Miles

In the world of instrumental and vocal teaching, most teachers approach their students with certain basic principles in mind. For me, one of those principles is that whether we’re dealing with individuals or with ensembles, there’s no separating technical goals from musical goals.

One of the things I’ve learned as a string teacher is that good habits can often replace a student’s bad habits quickly, because the good habits make playing easier. But it was Mark Twain, strangely enough, who helped me to realize that the switch can only result from a very conscious and rational process on the student’s part, a process of understanding and acceptance.

The efficient and graceful use of the body is crucial to both sports and musical performance. But there are certainly many mental parallels as well.

Our notions of “truth” in the history of musical ideas and performance practice may not always be quite as solid as we think.

Performers and performances come and go, but what lasts is the music.

Counterpoint, also called polyphony, is the art, in musical composition, of combining two or more simultaneous lines of music.

Pizzicato is the Italian word for “plucked.” Why is pizzicato never translated? Beats me. Maybe just because pizzicato is a delightful-sounding word. It certainly sounds better than “plucked.”

“Program music” is instrumental music that attempts to tell a story, paint a scene or picture, or convey impressions of a character, place, or event. But no matter how sonically descriptive, music is always open to a range of interpretations—sometimes far removed from the composer’s intentions—and no two people will ever hear the same work in exactly the same way.

Your strange job as a performing artist—musician, actor, or dancer—is to immerse yourself completely in the work of art you’re performing—to lose yourself, in a sense—and yet at all times to remain aware of precisely what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. It’s not easy, and sometimes the process—which is complicated to begin with—becomes downright mysterious.

Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in classical music, the final movements of instrumental pieces—the finales—were almost always in fast tempos, and they usually ended loud, and emphatically.