It sometimes feels like the goal is to feel the music in ever-longer chunks of time.
When we first learn music, every beat is its own distinct musical moment. But before long, we can start to understand the bar as having its own musical identity with each beat relating slightly differently to the bar. Later, we can begin to feel the line of a phrase made up of multiple bars – a shape that is determined and felt beyond the confines of the sheet music. With my high school group, I’m working hard to have them feel compound phrases in Shenandoah – how the line continues past the phrase marks, creating larger and larger musical landscapes.
At the ultimate levels, can we feel the pieces as a single musical moment. Not just understanding how a piece commits to a single idea, but actually reflecting how each phrase connects to the ones before it and those to come to create a statement. (Leonard Bernstein liked to talk about the inevitability in the music of Beethoven…this is what he was talking about.)
Only the best music can be felt that way, of course. All the more reason to really commit to great music…so we can better learn to feel music in this way.