Ask Augustin 43 - Speaking in Musical Sentences

It's been a while since the last Ask Augustin! In this episode I wanted to talk about the distinction between "sung" and "spoken" music. These words get used often nowadays. For me, there isn't a sharp distinction between the two types of playing, they are both components of beautiful violin playing -- since "spoken" music is also vocal, and even the most lyrical "singing" music should still have structure. Thinking of a musical passage as "spoken", as language, rather than just thinking of playing the notes with a beautiful sound, can be useful in finding phrasing that communicates the expression of a piece, as though you are speaking to the audience - or singing to the audience with lyrics. It's often said that music is a language that can communicate things in a way that words can't. Just like any other language, music has a syntax, rules about emphasized syllables and weaker syllables, about sentence structure, and you will find sentences that are questions and others that sound more like answers, and you will find dialogues, monologues, stories. Some composers -- Schumann comes to mind -- approached writing music from a literary angle, and their music seems to talk to us in sentences. If we only "sing" when playing this kind of music, just focusing on sounding like a voice and sustaining a nice sound, it might not end up saying very much, or moving the listener. So no matter how 'cantabile' a theme is, and how beautifully the sound that we make, we also need to decide what we are trying to say! In this video I give a few examples (Bach, Schumann, Brahms, Bartok), but even though this is one of my longer videos, it only scratches the surface of the topic.