What Does It Mean to Become a Musician?

                There is an interesting metamorphosis that occurs when examining the answer to this question at different points along our development.  As beginners, our goals are to learn to read music and to find the correct pitches on our instrument.  At this point our definition of reading music is not even 100% accurate.  Most students first view reading music as reading pitches (at least this is what we focus on).  If we know how to read the letter on the page, locate the same letter on our instrument and play it, we are a musician.

                Later on we realize that rhythm and beat are also components in reading and playing music.  We begin to read pitch and rhythm simultaneously, while feeling a steady beat in our body.  Even the point of getting the steady beat inside our body can be a gradual development.  We start with this device (a metronome) that externally maintains the beat for us.  Gradually the sense of beat becomes ingrained within us.  We learn to line up the rhythms we are reading with the beat that we are feeling.  We learn how to accomplish this task without sacrificing the accuracy of our pitch reading.

                Next we learn that there is more to music than just beat, rhythm and pitch.  We become aware of our tone, and try to develop a pleasing tone quality.  We become aware of variations in dynamics and articulation, and we begin to incorporate these things into our playing.  Slowly, as we add more elements, we progress from playing notes to playing music.

                However, there is one more stage that needs to take place.  We need to realize that this instrument we are playing is a machine.  We manipulate this machine in order to recreate the musical sounds that the composer originally envisioned.  There may be moments within the piece where we know what the intended sound should be, that that is not what comes out of our instrument.  When this happens, the piece is revealing an inadequacy in our technique that needs development.  We have not yet learned to manipulate our instrument well enough to produce the desired sound for that type of situation. 

This is the final level of musicianship that students must achieve.  We must learn to focus beyond learning to read a play the markings on the page.  Our new focus must be using the markings on the page to hear the sound that composer intended in our minds.  Listening to recordings of professional performances can help us to get to this point.  The recordings help us to connect what we see with what we hear.  Eventually, we learn to hear by just seeing (with no recording).  Then we must learn to create the sound that we hear in our minds on our instrument.  True musicians learn to master this process.