My parent’s house is rented by two music PhD students during the winter. Last night I got into a long talk with one of them, a pianist, about a performance I saw of a UCLA PhD piano student. While technically perfect, it felt devoid of emotion. My friend looked hard to describe the (apparently common) phenomenon among musicians, when I came across the term indicating.
“Exactly!” She said.
Indicating is described in Delia Salvi’s book Friendly Enemies as:
When we say that actors are indicating, we mean that they are resorting to external, physical ways of showing what their character is experiencing. Affected facial and vocal expressions, gestures, and body language are the tools actors use when they are indicating. They may furrow their brows to show concentration, roll their eyes to show exasperation etc. They will display physical expressions commonly associated with a particular emotion, but the realism of that emotion does not seem to come from within. An actor who indicates informs an audience but does not involve them. This mode reveals that the actor doesn’t know how to make a personal identification with the character or the circumstances of the scene.
This is what the musician I saw was doing. I once saw a documentary about the great Vladimir Horowitz. He commented that he often sees pianists bobbing up and down or shaking as if with great emotion. He said that he does not do this because “the emotion is in the keys,” in the notes.
My musician played the notes perfectly, but there was no emotion, no person behind them. It is like an actor reading lines he can’t identify with. He plays fortissimo, but we feel no anger, pianissimo, but we feel no sadness.
Musicians, just like actors, must personalize. Just learning the lines or the notes isn’t enough. It’s a dangerous place to go, but it’s the only possibility to move an audience through music or action. Of course for student writers this requires a script that is both understandable and moving to the actor, although hopefully some of this can be helped with precise casting.
