What is Musicality?

OK, I am again reminded of why I became a musician instead of a writer. Kijanki and Jax2, my statement "as professionals our much deeper knowledge of the music gives us much more pleasure in listening to a great performance" was not at all intended the way you and some others here took it. It was not at all meant to be read as a comparative statement that musicians take more pleasure from music than others do. Onhwy61 put it much better than I did. I was simply referring to the fact that the greater understanding and comprehension add to our own pleasure when we listen. I guess I see how you could take it the way you did, but that is not at all what i meant, I assure you. I was not trying to engage in oneupsmanship. While on this topic, I should add that much of this knowledge and understanding is easily acquired by non-professionals if they want to take the time required. I have often advocated on this site for more audiophiles to take a formal ear-training course, or study some basic music theory. It will only add to anyone's enjoyment of the music, no matter what type of music it is that you listen to.

Newbee also put my main point very well, as he so often does: "But folks, music, soul, whatever you want to call it, is only found in the composition and the performance, not in your audio systems!"

To Bryon's excellent comments I would only add that expertise and appreciation are not mutually exclusive, not that you were suggesting they were. Sometimes it is difficult for professionals to enjoy recordings of their own playing for some of the reasons you suggest. Some orchestral musicians have a hard time listening to orchestral music at home for pleasure after a hard day's or night's work (it is indeed hard to "turn off" the critical ear), and only listen to jazz or rock at home. Others get burned out on the standard rep that we all have to practice so much. We very rarely have any control at all over what we are paid to play, so it can at times seem like drudgery. One of the main reasons I listen, in fact, is to keep my sanity, and keep my love for music alive and well, which in turn makes me a better musician. I truly appreciate and am grateful for the fact that I am making my living doing what I most love to do.

As far as Kijanki's statement that "quality of gear is inversely proportional to musical education and involvement," this cannot be taken seriously. I'm sure there are many who decide only to have their iPod (I personally do not know a single professional that only relies on a boom box, this would usually only be true of students, and just about all of them have iPods nowadays as well). There are many more musicians that do care about high-end audio than you imply, however. In fact, the very best two or three systems I have ever heard were assembled by professional musicians, and I would also say that the percentage of musicians with at least some high-end audio equipment is probably higher than almost any other profession, despite the fact that most of us don't make a whole lot. Economics is another big reason more musicians don't have the best equipment - the vast majority of us simply can't afford much of the gear talked about/sold on this site, even at used prices. But just because many do not personally own high-end gear does not mean they do not appreciate it when they hear it. We just would never place gear above the music, as many calling themselves audiophiles do.

I was not going to enter into this discussion, and I am certainly not going to try to narrow down a definition of "musicality." Even the dictionary doesn't try to do that by the way, in most of them "musicality" is not even given a separate entry - it is listed as the noun form of the adjective "musical."

That aside, I do feel compelled to respond to a couple of comments made here about how professional musicians listen. Particularly Kijanki's "Are you suggesting that musicians are better listeners? Nothing can be further from the truth." This statement is completely absurd on the face of it. One cannot become a professional musician without VERY highly developed critical listening skills - this should go without saying. In fact, these skills go quite far beyond those required to analyze the sound of an audio system, and those that do not have them do not make it as professionals.

Jax2 is on the right track when he says "they listen in a completely different way than I do and are far more particular about content," and also "critical listening of a system, for me is the antithesis of enjoying music."

A couple of comments from my perspective as a professional performer. First, all performers are very aware of the shortcomings of the recording/playback process - there is not now, and probably never will be, any way to record and play back music in such a way that it remotely resembles the live event to our ears. And since we experience the live event literally on a daily basis, the very best system in existence falls far short. This is probably the main reason why some audiophiles have the impression that many professionals don't "get" high end audio. We tend to "listen through" the limitations of the recording/playback system, in a way similar to how some audiophiles talk about "listening through" distortions. The quality of the system/recording is simply not nearly as high a listening priority for us, either for work or pleasure. The music itself and the performance of it is a far higher priority in both cases.

That said, there are many musicians such as myself who do appreciate a good high quality system, but the priority will always be on the music (and the music-making), not the equipment. IMO, this should be true of anyone listening to music, whether they call themselves an audiophile or not. If the equipment and/or recording quality becomes more important than the music, than the priorities (musical ones, anyway) have been misplaced. If I do not like a performance, I won't listen to it for pleasure, no matter how excellent the recording quality and/or the system it is played on (I might have to listen to it for study purposes, but that is a separate thing, and as I said the listening in that case would be much more critical than an audiophile listening to equipment). On the other hand, as professionals our much deeper knowledge of the music gives us much more pleasure in listening to a great performance, even if it is a bad recording played on a crappy system.

So those are some of the reasons many musicians do not bother to get into some of the purely technical details of audio playback that many audiophiles love to go crazy over. I could of course elaborate much further on any of the above comments if anyone cares, but I'll shut up for now.

Mapman, one answer to your question might be that emotions, while a part of music, are not all of it. Otherwise, we wouldn't talk about "musicality" as something separate from "emotion." Sometimes a composer wants a completely non-emotional effect, and there are many different types and ways to create them. The ability to create these effects would also be considered pre-requisite for having good musicality. So while the latter part of your question is a big part of the initial attraction to any given piece of music, ultimately I think the former part of the question is actually closer to what constitutes musicality.

I didn't go back and reread the rest of this thread, by the way, so this may have been already mentioned, but generally when musicians use the word musicality they are referring to phrasing, or one's ability to make nice musical phrases - again, not necessarily an emotional thing, though of course it often is.

Having a good sense of rhythm would also be a very obvious pre-requisite for musicality. Ultimately, music is the organization of sound in time. Just some thoughts on your question. By the way, most certainly the bells would be considered music, and musical.

Hi Detlof - I think you misunderstood me slightly. I did not mean to equate music exactly with emotion. What I meant is that almost all music is expressive of some emotion, which is not the same thing. In fact, music can be much more expressive of emotion than words.

Also, a great deal of musicality can be quantified, but one has to be somewhat versed in music theory to do so. Music is a language, that has a great deal of logic and "grammar", and all musical compositions have some sort of form, whether it is a simple song form, or a complex very large scale work. Mastery of all these things is fundamental to creating music, and therefore must be a part of "musicality."

To speak to Sabai's comments - almost all music is highly intellectual, though you are certainly not alone in not wanting to think about it in that way. One of the major criticisms of Schoenberg, to pick one of the composers Detlof named, was that his music was too intellectual, despite much of it being very emotionally expressive. He was accused of composing by the mathematical tables, filling in notes according to a formula.

Detlof, I think I see where you are coming from now. What I think you mean is that music, on the page, is nothing without the performer(s) to bring it to life, and you are also saying that it is the performer who imparts emotion to it. Yet, you also say that the composer can translate emotion into his score. Here is where I am not certain you can have that both ways. I think it is clear that very often a composer is intending to project a definite, specific emotion through the music. So in this sense, emotion is indeed part of the music, and this is what Frogman is saying in his post.

Uberdine, to the excellent recommendations by Schubert and Frogman, I would add the Haydn concerti, and there are great sonatas for cello and piano by Beethoven and Brahms.