Musicianship - insights from Nodame Cantabile

This is the cover of my very first book of cello exercises by Feuillard. I think I must have been 12 years old when I was working from it.

The last few weeks I've been around a chapel service each day (played 5 of those days) and also in services around a variety of places.

Euge started me thinking about these questions. What exactly is musicianship? and How does it play into public corporate worship?

I think the Japanese drama Nodame Cantabile has had much to help me refine my thinking. See my earlier posts (here) or use the Label Cloud on the right. Chiaki, the archetypical technician, has the skills and technique and the rigor to pursue the composer's intent mostly at all costs. Nodame, the freespirited interpreter, who plays how she feels and plays too freely so that she re-composes while playing from what she remembers hearing. Schubert sounds like Chopin! BUT Nodame has phenomenal technique! She can make a piano sing and still be messy.

There are two levels to musicianship in my mind, however neither are technical because you have to have physical technique before you can play competently. Musicianship is firstly studied craftsmanship - we need to understand in someway the musical context and construction of the piece or pieces we're working with. The harmonic construction and options available if improvising or changing chord structures. A "G" chord is not "G" chord on a guitar there are many different versions and inversions. We need read the dynamics and relative dynamics asked for in the getting louder and getting softer. This is Chiaki.

Musicianship also needs a soul or spirit. Metronome, drum machine or musical boxes are all mechanical in feeling, even with swing. Composers did not and do not mark everything performers need to know. There is breathing and phrasing. There is slowing down and speeding up. There are grace notes, for guitarists hammer-on and pull-offs. I read Bradley Lehman assert that "The reproduction and manipulation of other people's work is not expertise. It's consumerism." Certainly its not musicianship. In the days when I conducted a choir I talked a lot about milking a melody. Musicianship is to be able to take a melodic line and squeeze every ounce of emotional value from it and still stay in time! The chanteuse, the cantabile voice does that. This is Nodame!

Musicianship in public corporate worship goes a step further because it involves accompanying and conducting a congregation. There need to be musical cues to support singers, telling them when to come in and keep them in tune. Musicians have to support and give confidence to those singing. Often if one verse of a song goes badly the congregation loses confidence and sings halfheartedly. Carlin keeps reminding me of the importance of transcendence in worship and this brings in the relationship between texture/dynamics and the content and meanings of words. Sad, fearful, or repentant words tend to be quieter but more intense, happier, praiseful or confessional words louder and perhaps in major keys with very few thirds.