Develop your musicality and play the music you love beautifully

Expressing your emotions through the violin is a learnable skill

Interview with Emily Williams, author of the 5 book series ‘Musicality for strings’:

How to learn musicality on the violin

Musicality or musical expression is a skill you need to practice on and not some magic that will come to you… or not. A lot of violin players struggle with feeling the music inside, but not being able to express it through their instrument. They get los in the technique. Is this something you recognize in yourself or your students?

If you picked up the violin, you are clearly sensitive to music

Don’t worry that you won’t know what to do or won’t recognize phrases. It’s in you. You just need to learn to skills to transfer the emotions you feel with the music to your instrument. Don’t leave it to chance. From the interview you’ll learn that musicality is something that is part of everything you do on the violin: your bowing technique, tone production, vibrato, dynamics and choice of bowing and fingering. Developing each of these areas and learning a big palette of sound colors, gives you infinite possibilities to make music your own. There are three aspects to musicality: tone, phrasing and affect. Emily describes how to develop your expression in each of these areas for each level. A lot of teachers have difficulty teaching musicality or postpone it until a student has reached the intermediate or advanced level. Emily demonstrates in the interview that you can play musically right from the start and gives you tips how to incorporate it in your lessons and/or daily practice.

Learn more about musicality:

Click here to order the ‘Musicality for Strings’ five-book series written by Emily Williams. The books are aimed at five different levels of students and written for teachers. As a player and student you can also learn a lot from them as they are step by step and easy to understand. Click here to read more about ‘Bow like a Pro’ and it’s module ‘Express yourself in Phrases’. Here I (Zlata) teach expression and interpretation on the violin together with a team of concert violinists.

More Emily Williams on Violin Lounge TV:

Click here to watch the interview where Emily tells about running a high level teaching violin studio. Click here to watch the interview where Emily tells about her book ‘the beginning violinist’.

Now I’d like to hear from you!

Share in the comments below what inspired you from this interview and how you are going to practice on musicality: