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"No, no – stop Sherlock." Sherlock's private tutor, Mr. Dawson, commanded for the fifth time in the last ten minutes. Sherlock sighed and dropped the hand with his violin bow gripped in his fingers down to his side. He detested being stopped while playing, especially if Mr. Dawson was about to reiterate what he had said precisely thirty-six seconds ago. "You're not listening to a word I'm telling you!" Sherlock rolled his eyes. "Music isn't just a collection of quavers and crotchets Sherlock… You need to put life into it; it needs emotion and passion vibrating through the strings, singing through each note." Mr. Dawson was gesticulating with some force in Sherlock's direction. "In music it does not do just to play the notes perfectly. Technical ability is a large part, but you need the feelings to make the notes translate off the page." Sherlock was glaring at his tutor with a somewhat petulant eye. "You are a good violinist Sherlock, but you have the potential to be exceptional…"
"I'm trying." Sherlock retorted rather grumpily, focusing his eyes completely on Bach's Partita number 2 in D minor; Mr. Dawson sighed in exasperation.
"Alright… you can put your violin away now. But for your next lesson I want you to spend some time just focusing on a strong pure emotion, it doesn't matter what it is, and allow it to fill you up – and then try playing. Adding any kind of emotion to the notes will give them a depth that neither vibrato nor perfect pitch will achieve."
Sherlock desperately wanted to not believe that Mr. Dawson was correct about music needing more than just perfect timing and precision playing… What got to Sherlock most was the fact that he had the capability to be amazing – yet he fell down when it came to expression. Every single one of his exam papers from when he had started music gradings had said that: 'more expression needed', 'more dynamics', 'the pieces were technically played but need more expression'. It was all Sherlock ever seemed to hear about in his lessons, and he was absolutely sick of it. Sometimes he wanted to give Mr. Dawson a rap around the head because of the time he spent going on about feelings and expressions. Expression couldn't be everything! There had to be a cut off point where emotion and technical ability merged – but Sherlock had heard about that too.
In his three years at the school he had managed to rise to the front desk of the violins in the orchestra, but he was still not in the lead – Jeremy was… Jeremy was also in the same year as Sherlock, not quite as technically able – even Mr. Dawson had admitted that – but he expressed himself through his playing. Sherlock had always considered Jeremy's playing rather mediocre – he would often not quite pitch a note perfectly or struggle with sight reading new music for the first time – but he did use his emotions. When playing solo his face would contort and then relax as what he was feeling and experiencing seemed to flow through his being like a liquid gold. Sherlock was frequently distracted by the way that Jeremy's whole body moved while he played, and several times Sherlock had to duck a stray bow when it nearly impaled him… How could that kind of playing be genuinely better than his own precise annotations and pure notes? Sherlock could feel his competitive side straining; he had to beat Jeremy, he had to prove that his playing could be far superior than the jumped up blob of emotions who sat next to him in the front desk…
But no matter how much effort Sherlock put into immersing himself in an emotion, he found it almost impossible to do it in connection with the music… The notes remained just black dots scrawled on a sheet of paper, completely unattached from any feeling that might be flowing through Sherlock's body. He spent an entire evening just staring at his score and trying to, in some way, decipher how he could add emotion to the piece.
Then suddenly it came to him – halfway through an English lesson in which they were studying the poetry and emotional connotations of Sylvia Plath. If he turned each bar of music into a set of poetry or prose, the notes comprising the rhythm and each phrase creating what would translate into a line, then it was possible that he might be able to add extra into the piece. He was delightfully surprised when the Bach's partita he was working on fit this method exactly… All through his lunch break he sat at a table, his pencil sandwiched in between his teeth and his fingers tapping out the rhythm, allowing his brain to formulate its own phrases which would correlate to a kind of inner poetry. Every now and then he would mark a small line to punctuate the score and scribble a few words above the music… It was just enough to get his mind firing.
"That's wonderful Sherlock!" Mr. Dawson gave a triumphant clap as Sherlock relaxed his grip around the neck of the violin and dropping his bow to his side. "You've done exactly what I told you to do! Well done; it is superb!" Sherlock's face twitched into a small smile as the praise poured forth from his tutor's lips; there was a certain warm glow which had ignited inside him as he knew that there was a different, more spiritual sound to his playing that had not been there before his idea with the prose lines. All he had to do was create a story line for the music that he could attach to the phrases. Once that was done and he had connected the two of them together, then he successfully managed to capture the essence of the music he was performing.