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A music is a sentence of notes. If you were to give a presentation would you let Siri or Alexa read the words instead of you? What is on the page is the language part ... the CONVENTIONAL part ... the letters, words, phrases and sentences of music. How that music gets interpreted and expressed by the player is the meaning part ... the EXISTENTIAL part.

I have been in similar situations in my youth, competing in state wide music competitions, and performing at gigs. In my opinion this is a hard thing to get right because it is not a quality of you and your playing only, but a quality of the relationship between you and the audience. For the moment let's not discuss what "feeling" really means. I choose ...

Basically, it means to improvise rather than to play plainly according to the notation. For example, consider a simple (yet beautiful) piece like I Giorni by Einaudi. The tune is really simple and even an amateur can play it; however, there would be a difference of land and sky between the amateur version and the Einaudi version. The amateur would be simply ...

Have you ever seen a bad actor perform? Someone who has memorized all of their lines and goes through the appropriate motions on stage, but you just don't feel anything from their performance? Imagine taking a script from a play showing a highly emotional scene -- say, an argument, or a romantic scene. Now imagine reading all of the lines in a monotone -- ...

There are great answers in this topic. Here is some more input: So my only conclusion is that they didn't want me to play what was on the page. Oh yes, you can play what is on the page, but a forte section or a piano section is not just about playing all the notes at an equal volume in that section. Focus on phrasing. Like you can go up and down in ...

So my only conclusion is that they didn't want me to play what was on the page. Correct. Standard notation is very flexible, but it often only allows for an approximation of how the piece might be expected to sound. What you may need to do is put in very slight timing and dynamics variations that, if notated accurately, would make the page a hideous mess ...

Watch the first five minutes of this demo by Evelyn Glennie of the difference between "reading the music and doing what it says" and "interpreting the music". There's not much "being expressive with her arms and swaying" involved. If you still don't "get" the difference, watch it again. The following 30 minutes are also well worth watching, of course

If you want the nuts and bolts of it, expressivity in music is probably boiled down to variations in the amplitude, timbre (how hard/soft you're hitting the strings, though this is obviously mingled with amplitude) of each note, and the time you put in between each note. Vary those and you'll have more expressive music. To put it in terms of playing "from ...

it sounded pretty nice to me. ... I don't believe in something called "putting feeling" into music. Bzzzt! Self-contradiction detected. ;) "It sounded nice" is a description of a feeling. What other feelings might there be, besides "nice"? Have you ever heard music that's ... passionate? Threatening? Sad? Irritating? Hopeful? Miserable? However, there'...

I don't believe in something called "putting feeling" into music. Can you tell the difference between a human and a midi sequencer performing the same piece? Yes, of course you can. The difference is feeling. You are supposed to play what is on the score, but you're supposed to play more than what is on the score. Your job as a performer is to interpret ...