From Zero to Mozart
Stage 7Vibrato & expressionLesson 24 of 27 · Ear & musicianship

Making your own choices

This is the one the whole course has been building toward. PRD.md §3 lists five capabilities; the fifth is Choose — make your own interpretive decisions and be able to defend them. You now have the tools. This lesson is the first time you use them on purpose.

The five choices

Take a tune you play cold — nothing you're still fighting the notes of. Then make these five decisions, and write them down:

  1. Where does the phrase peak? Which note is the arrival, the top of the arch?
  2. Where do you breathe? Mark the phrase ends — the little silences.
  3. Which notes get vibrato, and how wide? Long notes, arrivals — narrow or full?
  4. Where, if anywhere, do you steal time? A broadening into the peak? A hair of space before a surprise?
  5. What colour, what character? One word for the character; one colour to serve it.
66 bpm

How to play it

Play it the same way three times running. If you can't repeat your own choices, they're not choices yet — they're accidents.

A phrase to decide about. One worked set of choices: (1) peak is the D at the start of bar 2; (2) breathe after the D's bar and again at the end; (3) vibrato on the held D — medium width — and a touch on the final G; (4) broaden slightly into the D, give it back over 'B c B A'; (5) character: a calm song; colour: warm, plain lane 3. Yours may differ — that's the point.

There is no right answer — but there is a defended one

Two great players will disagree about every one of those five (you heard this in listening-and-copying). What separates interpretation from randomness is that you can say why: "I breathe here because the harmony resolves on the next downbeat." "I widen the vibrato on this note because it's the emotional peak and the dynamic is forte." A choice you can defend is worth ten you stumbled into.

Try it

Try

Do the five-choice exercise on one tune you know well. Write the five decisions on paper. Play the tune three times, matching your written choices each time. Then, for each choice, finish the sentence "I did this because…". If you can't finish it, reconsider the choice.

The usual mistake

Making choices once and never repeating them — that's improvising, not interpreting. Or making no choices at all and calling whatever comes out "natural" or "from the heart" — an un-decided performance is just a series of defaults. Interpretation is deliberate, repeatable, and defensible.