Features of the profession of a musician
Musicians are at the forefront of culture and style in present times. Additionally, their role in history has been immense – only those with a sincere passion for music could become a musician or learn to play an instrument.
During the Middle Ages, a majority of musicians were monks and music was seen more as an indication of one’s social status and wealth. This meant that playing instruments was no longer simply a form of expressing art, but rather a representation of their affluent lifestyle. Moreover, roaming musicians composed their own music and taught themselves how to play. They then recruited even more self-taught students to learn from them.
Currently, no individual is hindered from learning how to play an instrument or sing due to any issues. If you have the talent and motivation, anyone can learn music. Music education is now available to people of any age and is no longer a limitation in pursuing a career as a musician. In fact, it has become more of an internal choice and a way of life for many.
Musical skills and abilities
Currently, in the pedagogy of music education, there is an increasingly strong assertion that there is a fundamental difference between skills and habits.
Musical Skills
Musical art can be quite transitory, yet the skills one develops through it such as observation of intonations and sound, performing activities, composition and improvisation are invaluable. Musicians are able to develop an understanding of how music works with relation to other forms of art society in general. Such skills cannot be automated, as they are associated with a creative, never-exactly-repeating process of understanding musical art. Musical skills are based on knowledge about music and are developed through live perception of it. At the same time, two sets of skills are developed during music lessons.
1. The first of them can include skills inherent in a particular type of musical activity and corresponding to its nature:
In a listening activity, the first abilities to develop are the ability to perceive musical intonation and emotionally respond to the content of the heard work; characterize your inner state after listening to this music: your feelings, experiences, and thoughts; to give a verbal (in words) or non-verbal (in a drawing, in plastic, etc.) characterization of the listened work, its figurative and emotional content, the means of musical expression, their relationship, the process of development of the musical image, and the musical dramaturgy of this work, it can identify the commonalities and differences between the listened work and other musical works of the same author, the works of other composers, works of other types of art, and life sources based on its intonation, genre, and style features.
In performing musical activities, all of the above skills remain significant, and at the same time, a number of fundamentally new skills appear related to the need to translate this work into one’s own performance (in singing, playing musical instruments, and in plastic intonation). The specifics of a particular type of performance determine them, and they are aimed at reproducing and interpreting a musical work.
At the same time, when singing, playing musical instruments, and performing plastic intonation, skills in the form of musical and auditory ideas about how the sound of the work should be in a certain character, genre, or style come to the fore.
Furthermore, it is essential to single out another kind of skill related to the interpretation of learned and performed works. These skills include the ability to intuitively and, to a certain extent, consciously perform a work (when singing solo, in musical and plastic activity, in playing a musical instrument) in one’s performance interpretation; offer your own version of the performance interpretation of the same work; compare different interpretations and choose the best option from them; evaluate the quality of the chosen interpretation’s embodiment in their performance.
The differences in the skills developed through different types of performing activities are mainly due to the fact that each type of activity requires its own unique set of skills to coordinate musical and auditory representations with specific ways of reproducing them: in singing, there is coordination between the throat and the voice; in playing musical instruments and in plastic intonation, there is coordination between hearing and the motor apparatus. In both cases, such coordination is regulated by the student’s ideal idea of the sound of the particular work.
In terms of musical and compositional creativity, one can improvise and compose music according to given parameters such as rhythm, melodic-rhythmic, syntactic, genre-style, texture, and others, as well as without them.
2. The second group can benefit from carefully selected music that matches or even contrasts to their current emotional state. Through special knowledge and self-reflection, the effects of the music result in a more positive psychological state.
It is essential to give these skills more attention, since they are first introduced in music education, and it takes quite a lot of time to master them.
Art therapy and correctional pedagogy have both shown that music has a great impact on one’s psychological state. This reveals the amazing potential of using music to improve mental health. At the same time, a correlation between music and a person’s psychological state was established. This correlation is individual and personal, depending on the student’s state of mind. After receiving the necessary knowledge and experience of interacting with music, the student is able to determine what kind of music he needs to establish spiritual comfort. Based on this, he will be able to create his own home music library in the future, which he can use to improve his condition.
Musical skills
In psychology, skills are considered as actions that, as a result of repetition, have become automated. At the same time, three main stages of their formation are distinguished: mastery of the elements of action; formation of an integral structure of action; and consolidation and improvement of the integral structure.
Musical skills, based on musical knowledge and abilities, are the necessary technical foundation for musical and performing activities, which require specific training and development of the psychophysiological apparatus.
In performing activities, skills are primarily associated with the mastery of technique. Therefore, in singing activities, the main vocal and choral skills include the skills of singing posture, sound production, and vocal technique, singing involves breathing, articulation, choral order and ensemble coordination, and the ability to follow the conductor’s instructions while coordinating the activity of the vocal apparatus with the main properties of the singing voice.
Auditory skills constitute a special group, among which the skills of auditory control and self-control over the quality of their vocal sound and general choral sound are of fundamental importance. These skills are based on the mental correlation of the real sound with the ideal idea of it.
Playing musical instruments develops skills that are similar to those involved in singing.