What is musicality?
Musicality is the totality of the abilities and skills one needs to be musical.
This includes hearing, processing, creating and performing music.
It is our ability to understand music on a more refined level and to turn that inner understanding into performing music.
Musicality means performing freely in a way that expresses what you are feeling at the moment.
Your mind and fingers already know what notes to play and how to physically play them.
The specific chords or notes or scales or timing or fingering or theory all come naturally to you.
You just enjoy the sounds you are making.
What matters is that you have fun playing. If you don’t enjoy the playing, you will stop.
How do we measure or describe musicality?
- Listening to a piece of music and after a silent gap of 4-6 seconds, playing it on your guitar, harmonium,
keyboard instrument, violin or flute, or humming or whistling it, without a single mistake.
- Singing in perfect tune with another singer with no rehearsal,
- Jamming with other musicians (innovating a new song on-the-spot),
- Having a good sense of rhythm (identifying: 4/4 or 3/4, कहरवा, दादरा, रूपक, दीपचन्दी, etc.)
- Writing music in western staff notation or Indian notation,
- Improvising a solo,
- Talking intelligently about music,
- Understanding Music Theory when explained,
- Clapping in time, identifying the down beat (सम) and the (खाली),
- Knowing your instrument in and out,
- Tuning your instrument by ear, without external reference,
- Performing live before an audience,
- Playing multiple instruments.
- Reading musical notation,(this needs more skill than simply writing notation)
- Sight-reading music,
- Playing from a lead sheet
I have seen kids at age:4 being able to do the first 13 of the above,
so one suspects that some people are musical, and some are not.