Musicality: how to make your ocarina playing sound good

Very broadly, musicality refers to the aspects of playing that make music sound musical.

If you take a listen to some of your favourite singers, you'll notice that they aren't just monotonously singing one note after another. You'll hear sentences in the lyrics, separated by gaps and breaths. Perhaps you'll also hear other details like a flourish of ornamental notes or a wavering of pitch.

Bringing these aspects into your playing can very quickly elevate your music beyond that of a beginner.

The aspects of a melody: figures, motifs, phrases, and parts

As a beginner, it's really easy to find yourself thinking about and playing music one note at a time, but such a view is 'missing the forest for the trees'.

A melody is not a random series of notes. Rather, melodies are formed from collections of notes called 'figures', which themselves are combined to form 'phrases'. Phrases come together to form 'parts' like verses and choruses.

Figures

A melodic figure is a small number of notes that form a distinct melodic idea, for instance:

Motifs

Distinct from a figure, a 'motif' is a short melodic pattern on which a melody is based and which is repeated and varied throughout the whole melody. For example, you're probably familiar with the 'da, da, da, dum' opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, a motif that recurs throughout the composition.

You may also have come across the term 'leitmotif', which refers to motifs used to represent a character, concept, or emotion in film or game music.

The following motif from the Irish tune 'Out on the Ocean' consists of a long note followed by a descending scale. We will be drawing more examples from this tune throughout the article.

Motifs frequently follow similar overall patterns, even though the exact notes used in a single figure may change. This structural repetition creates a sense of grounding and uniformity within a given piece of music.

Variations on this pattern, one of which is shown below, are found throughout the entire tune. While the absolute pitches here are different, the approximate shape of the pattern is the same:

Motifs are very common in all kinds of music and are one of the factors that help to make a song or piece sound coherent. They are also the basis of much classical music; fugues, for example, are based on the statement of a motif and its subsequent variations.

Phrases

If a figure is a melody 'word', a phrase is like a 'sentence'. Phrases are groups of figures that represent a complete melodic 'idea'. Here is the first phrase in 'Out on the Ocean', for example:

Just as figures can repeat, you'll often find that whole phrases are repeated. For example, if you consider all of the phrases in the first part of 'Out on the Ocean' (following), it's apparent that phrases 1 and 3 are almost identical.

This is a concept called 'question and answer'. The first phrase asks a question, and the second phrase is a response. The third phrase restates the original question, and the final phrase provides a final answer.

Recognising phrases in music comes down to a few factors:

• Phrases in any given piece of music frequently have the same duration in beats, such as eight beats (two bars) for music in 4/4 time.
• Phrases often end with a longer note. Pay attention to where the performer creates gaps in the music and listen for repetitions in the melody.
• In vocal music, phrases often align directly with the phrasing of the language in the lyrics, ending where you would put a full stop or comma in writing.
• You can also try to find examples of music where the phrases have been marked, or ask an experienced musician or music teacher to play something to you phrase by phrase, so you can learn to intuit them from a practical example.

These concepts are discussed in more detail in 'Recognising phrases in sheet music'.

Being aware of the phrases and figures in the music you are playing is critical to playing musically because they tell you how to group notes, as well as where you can take breaths without breaking the flow of the music.

Parts (verses and choruses)

Phrases are themselves brought together to form parts. Essentially, a part is a unique melody that works sympathetically with the other parts of a tune. The structures differ widely across genres and types of music.

Popular songs are often constructed from 'verses' and 'choruses'. A verse is a part where the lyrics change over a common melody, and a chorus typically repeats the same lyrics. Normally, a song will consist of a series of verses with choruses between them.

Dance tunes like 'Out on the Ocean' are formed from parts which are named 'part A', 'part B', 'part C', etc. Normally, each part is played twice, and the whole tune is played two or three times.

How to make your playing sound musical

A general idea of musicality is to adjust how you are playing to draw attention to the different figures, phrases, and parts of the music. If all notes are played using the same tongued articulation to a mathematically perfect rhythm, it is hard to hear any structure. But what about if you emphasise the first note in every phrase? Then they can be told apart.

It can be intuitive to do this by blowing harder, making the note sound louder. In fact, this is a common technique on other instruments. Unfortunately, it doesn't work on the ocarina, as blowing harder also changes the pitch.

One option is to vary the duration of articulations by changing how long you stop the air with your tongue. You could use shorter articulations within the phrase and longer ones between phrases.

Note that these gaps do not change the rhythm, as the time from the articulation is 'stolen' from the duration of the previous note.

Start by tonguing a series of notes to a consistent beat. As you do so, pay attention to what your tongue is doing. You'll notice that there is a moment during the articulation where your tongue is touching the roof of your mouth, completely blocking the flow of air.

By varying how long the tongue dwells in this 'stopping' position, you can vary the length of the pause between notes,

• Allowing the tongue to dwell for a long time creates a long gap between notes.
• Alternatively, you can tongue very briefly, creating a short pause.
• Or, in fact, anywhere in between.

Let's give it a try:

• First, play a sequence of notes, stopping the air for a long time with your tongue, creating a long gap between notes.
• Then do the same, but move your tongue very fast to only briefly stop the airflow.

Once you're comfortable, try introducing this technique into some of the music you play. Listen to a performance of the song, notice the different phrases in the song, and bring out these elements within your own performance by varying the duration of your tonguing.

Using ornamentation

Another aspect of musicality is embellishment and ornamentation. Ornaments are details and 'flourishes', like a seasoning you can add to your music. One kind of ornamentation that's really easy to apply is vibrato.

Vibrato is a rhythmic change in the pitch of a note, and it is created on the ocarina by varying blowing pressure. We explored how to vary your blowing pressure in How to play the ocarina, and creating vibrato is done in the same way:

• Put on a metronome at a slow tempo.
• Slightly raise and lower your blowing pressure, one vibrato cycle per metronome click.
• Then gradually speed up the metronome.

Aim to make your pressure change smooth, like this.

Then choose one of your songs that uses long notes and introduce some vibrato.

There are numerous ways of applying vibrato in your music; it can be slow or fast, deep or subtle. It may be in time with the music's pulse or desynchronised.

Rhythmic variation

In the article Getting rhythm, we explored how music creates rhythms by subdividing the beat into halves or quarters, or holding notes over the duration of multiple beats. This is true, but in real musical performances, these subdivisions are not as mathematically precise.

Like a sense of emphasis can be created by changing the duration of the articulations, it is also possible to emphasise notes by lengthening or shortening their duration.

Swinging a rhythm

If you play a series of notes with every note having exactly the same duration, there are no 'features' within the music to draw attention to any note over any other. But if you instead have a rhythm where each beat is split into two, and the first note is held longer than the second, then it will stand out more. This is called swing and is common in Jazz, blues, Irish, and many other styles of music.

Exactly how long the notes are in these pairs is called 'swing ratio'. I'd recommend learning it by ear.

Fermatas and tempo variation

Swing in rhythm means lengthening and shortening notes uniformly, so that the overall timing of the beat remains consistent. However, in vocal music, you often encounter another kind of rhythmic variation, called a 'fermata'. It involves holding a note for longer, delaying all following notes.

The overall tempo of the music can also vary over a period of time, so that the music gradually speeds up or slows down. A gradual increase in tempo is called 'Accelerando', while 'Rallentando' means a gradual slowing down.

Breaking the timing

It is possible to deliberately play notes slightly early or late once you start to get a handle on your rhythmic accuracy. Playing a note early can create a sense of urgency, and in general, slight rhythmic variance adds tension, a feeling of something being 'not quite right'.

And other options

There are many more techniques that we can perform on the ocarina to emphasise notes, like:

• Invert what you tried above, setting off notes with long articulations against short ones.
• Play several notes together in a single breath (slurring) and contrast them with tongued notes.

There are also many more kinds of ornamentation possible, including:

• Grace notes, optional notes added to embellish a melody.
• Rolls and cranns, sequences of fingered articulations.
• Humming into the instrument, which changes the character of the sound.

It is even possible to create true volume dynamics on the ocarina in performance situations using a microphone. The volume your audience hears can be varied by moving closer or farther from the mic, or using a volume pedal.

These techniques are explained in the article articulation and ornamentation.

How to develop your musicality

There are several ways of developing your musicality:

Logical analysis

It can be helpful to look at music with an analytical eye, such as identifying repeating figures in the melody and noticing how the different parts come together to form the whole. Searching for terms like '{song name} analysis', 'the structure of music', and 'melody phrasing' will give you a lot of results if you'd like to learn more.

However, this can only take you so far. Once you start looking at smaller and smaller details, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to determine what to do with logical analysis alone. This is due to the high complexity of human performance and our limited understanding of how the brain perceives music, and what makes it sound musical.

Imitating performances by ear

There are many variations in human performance that can be hard to explain through logical analysis. If you consider just one note ornamented with vibrato, it can vary in:

• The duration of the vibrato, speed of the oscillation, and intensity (amplitude) of the oscillation.
• When the vibrato starts: Does it start immediately or partway through the note? Does it start and stop multiple times?

Also consider that many of these factors can vary over the duration of the ornament, and that a single song can contain hundreds of them; this is clear evidence of the great complexity of human performance.

Written text and even sheet music are not effective media for communicating this. Because of this, I feel that much of musicality is best learned by imitating other musicians. After all, we learn our accent in speech by imitating those around us, not by analysing them. One essentially plays musical instruments with an 'accent'.

• First, learn what ornaments and articulations you can do with the instrument and how to perform them. See the article Articulation and Ornamentation.
• Listen to human performances in the same style of music and imitate them using the tools available to you.

Listen to a performance and repeatedly play over parts of it, imitating what you are hearing. You can use a digital audio workstation to loop small sections of a recording, then play over it, trying to imitate it as best as you can. Then find other performances and repeat.

One thing I'd recommend imitating is performances on some kinds of bagpipes, such as the Scottish smallpipes, Northumbrian bagpipes, and Cornemuse du centre. They have similar technical limitations as the ocarina, being unable to vary the sound volume, and players use many kinds of ornamentation to work around that.

The point of doing this is not to clone or plagiarise anyone. Humans imitate each other all the time, acquiring their language and accent from those around them at a young age. Both continue to change due to the imitation of other people throughout one's life, largely without conscious awareness.

In the beginning, you may end up effectively cloning a performance, or aspects of it, but as you do this multiple times with performances in many styles and from many musicians, you'll acquire various things from different places. You'll eventually find some things you prefer over others, and you'll develop your own style, especially if combined with the following.

Trying random stuff

Once you are aware of the different kinds of ornaments that ocarinas can play, it is possible to try applying them to your music at random. See what you like the sound of.

Closing notes

In this article, you've learned about the basics of musicality, from an introduction to the structure of music to performance techniques like articulation, ornamentation, and rhythmic variation.

Musicality is a complex subject to discuss, as there are many different, equally valid options depending on what you are trying to do. Every genre of music has its own stylistic preferences:

• Classical tradition prefers every note to be separated. Playing style is generally 'clean', with every note tongued. Phrases are typically separated with longer gaps. Where slurring is used, it is indicated in notation, as is other ornamentation.
• Irish traditional music slurs everything by default, which is the complete opposite of classical. It gives this music its characteristic flowing style. Fingered articulations are preferred, and tonguing is used sparingly to separate phrases or to emphasise notes.

Other styles of music do other things still. Fortunately, a great deal has been written about this topic, and regardless of what style of music you want to play, you should be able to find books and other resources for similar instruments which can be adapted.

But regardless of what approach you opt for, one thing is certain: Working on your musicality will step up the sound of your music.