This is the goal of enriching the musical performance with a unique and meaningful interpretation, playing with commitment and a sense of style.
Bringing yourself into your musical performance - your personality, your feelings, your flair - is an essential part of music-making. Music, as an art, can fulfil some of our deepest needs - self-expression, creativity, finding meaning, catharsis, even transcendence.
Learning to meet this goal brings a deep sense of accomplishment and joy in both playing and listening to music.
Because there is so much agency in this area, it reinforces a sense of individuality of the self, while inspiring awareness of the individuality of other performers.
In group music making, expressing musicality together is an especially binding experience.
There are essential goals in this area from the start; even the shortest beginner pieces often have titles, lyrics or mood-words to inspire performance beyond simply the notes - getting to the character of the piece.
Soon the student encounters expressive marks written in the music, such as dynamics (louds and softs) and tempo (speed) changes, and their goal is to pay attention to the marks and interpret them in their own way.
Over time new skills support the more sophisticated goals that the music requires, especially phrasing (which means shaping the “sentences” of the tune with subtle changes of tone and time). One goal I have for my students in this area is that by Grade 3 they should be able to phrase competently by themselves, without needing to imitate someone else's phrasing.
Just as in the area of technique, the skills in this area involve the student listening with discrimination to their own playing and to other good interpretations. Their goals include learning to experiment with their own phrasing and with other aspects of musicality.
The choices for interpretation, and the skills to apply them, happen on the smallest to the largest scale; fine-tuning of tone and time, adjusting articulation to taste, or using dynamics and tempo fluctuations to shape a long piece of music.
The goals and skills in the area of musicality build indefinitely over a lifetime. Interpretation is the main preoccupation of professional musicians who have mastered general technique. There is no end goal - only endless exploration.
Students sometimes need some pushing to remember that the music is about more than just the correct notes, which is why I often have to remind students in the weekly Practice Guide to pay attention to the expressive marks in their practice.
During lessons I prod them to consider the character of each piece as they learn it. I try to persuade them, with humour, that it is better to play some wrong notes than to create a boring performance. I tell them that if it was only about playing the right notes in the right order, we already have machines for that, but that I and their listeners want to hear what they, as a living breathing human being, do with the music.
Musicality, like technique, is an area where demonstration in the lessons is important. I have found that even beginner students are capable of mimicking basic phrasing. As their playing and listening skills develop, I challenge them to try to phrase themselves, without hearing me demonstrate first. Then I encourage them to listen to different interpretations of the music they are studying - as demonstrated by me and on recordings - to inspire them in all the other aspects of musical choice and execution.
Students differ in their innate musical expressive abilities, but they are all capable of making music their own, of putting their stamp on it. If they miss out on this area, they are learning a purely mechanical skill, which might feel satisfying in terms of accomplishment, but misses the core value of learning to play music, as opposed to learning some other skills.