Developing Musicality

In the Reclaiming Music series, I talked about how:

You are probably musically wounded, but you have innate musicality just because you’re human, and you have a right to learn music by doing it, which means doing it wrong a lot.

Now I want to delve into the basics of musical skills development.

Even though we have latent musicality, we can also encourage our musicality to become even more robust and refined through developing musical skills.

In this next series, I will present some ideas around how we can grow our musical abilities through trying to do stuff that’s challenging for us at our current level.

In my opinion, the reason to learn how to make music is so that we can make music together with each other, and have all the benefits of that for body, soul and spirit.

Of course there’s value in doing it alone, too, but for the lens of these pieces I want to think about how we can get to the point of that perfect musical merge balance where we are bringing our full personal expression to bear, while also unifying with a group musical mind, while understanding that no matter how far we get in our skills development, we will always be operating within limitations (which can also be thought of as creative restrictions).

There are all kinds of levels of group musical experiences, and if you want to be part of a philharmonic, the Harlem gospel choir, or a jazz quintet then you are obviously going to need to dedicate more time to developing that musicality than if your goal is to play simple folk songs or just be able to jam with friends or make up songs together. For me, while I would love to be able to play more skillfully than I currently can, I am very grateful when I can participate enough to get the creative satisfaction and musical merge experience.

In my following posts I’ll share some exercises and things you can do to pick up general musicality skills. For those of you who might like to facilitate musical healing experiences for others, I consider these good core competencies to develop, that give you the capacity to join another and co-create in the now (aka improvise).

Enjoy!

Part 1: Rhythm

MusicHolly Mae Haddock