Feel

I’m hard pushed to think of a musical term that’s as difficult to pin down as it is important. I actually think it’s far easier to grasp from the perspective of the audience than it is the player. As a player, feel can be made up of so many individual pieces that link to every facet of the music making experience, but as a listener, it really comes down to..how it makes you feel. As such, as players we must live in the feeling of the music if we hope to give the audience an experience that moves them.

Many people past and present talk about ‘feel’ as something you either have or you don’t. A neat binary evaluation: Good feel or bad. Also implied in this is that you have one feel: your feel, the way you play, and if it isn’t great then that is going to be an issue. I don’t think that this is quite the case. I do think that everyone has their own unique fingerprint musically and this comes across when expressing ‘a beat’ or a pulse or a group of notes etc but one’s ‘feel’, along with every other element of music, is constantly in flux. Like everything else it can change subconsciously or consciously. As soon as you notice that it’s possible to learn to play with different stresses on the beat or subtly change the way you hear a pulse, you will realise that on some level, it’s no different than learning a more sophisticated harmonic choice on a cadence or becoming more comfortable on a certain form. I.e. something that can be learnt or altered if the knowledge and application is there. Also if you have absorbed music by participating in it, some of these changes will happen in perhaps a less studied manor. I have proof in my own process; I still sound like myself – it is still me who plays – but I’m not the same person (musically as well as philosophically) as I was at the start of my career, nor do I sound the same (though undoubtedly I am a continuation of the musician I was). Regarding my feel, many of these changes are conscious decisions; to be able to play a little more like this or that, taking on other player’s influence or pushing my mind/body into new directions in one way or another. Perhaps learning to play behind the beat a little, or wider, or more on top of the beat without rushing, perhaps working with a click. Or on a deeper level, absorbing parts of a style of music with it’s phrasing, language, intent and emotions, different roles and ways of interacting with other players. Many of these elements have large unconscious dimensions, especially the way we are influenced by other people in real time, but it can be helpful as musicians to form clearer pictures of how we would like our playing to feel using the model of others; of using existing music, or sound more generally to influence our own way of playing.

As musicians our feel will continue to change in subtle but very real ways. This is why as students of music, we must nurture an ongoing dialogue with the way music makes us feel and how to reflect it outwards in new levels of depth so others can hear it and feel it too. I believe feel is a mouldable and ever-shifting part of music on the level of the individual and the group. This stems from our shared reality as humans: We are complex processes and not static results. We are always becoming, and so no one should be resigned to the idea that their feel is fixed rigidly and permanently, least of all that it is beyond redemption.