Effective Communication: A Simple (But Difficult) Equation

I was recently invited to speak and work with emerging professional musicians at a festival. While I continue to teach instrumental and chamber music in these settings, I’ve noticed my role expanding—more and more, I’m asked to coach artists on their careers and creative projects.

Having been on the receiving end of both good and poor teaching, I take these roles seriously. I remember once taking instructions way too far from an extremely strict cello teacher. My wrists were “too low,” I was told, and I needed to bend them more. The teacher inadvertently overemphasized the issue by saying it needed to be fixed if I “ever wanted to be any good.”

“Any good??” I thought. I wasn’t sure what any good meant, but if there were individual units of good, I certainly didn’t want someone looking in and saying there weren’t any. So even though it was only a week between lessons, I came back with my hands dangling like the vestigial front claws of a very nervous T-Rex.

My teacher was flabbergasted for a moment. Likely thinking about what would happen if I were told to go back the other way, my teacher mused out loud: “Whoa… Uh…How do we get to LESS?”

That moment stuck with me. Instructions don’t exist in isolation—it’s not just what you say. It’s how you say it.

And yet, when it comes to coaching artists on their careers and creative projects, I’ve found myself thinking the opposite. Many musicians don’t overcomplicate how they communicate—they overcomplicate what they’re saying.

What Are You Actually Saying?

When I listen to artists talk about their work, I can tell they’ve spent countless hours refining how they communicate their career hopes and creative projects. But they’ve spent much too little time on what they’re communicating.

Most early-career artists I meet are focused on the mechanics of launching a career:
How do I get an agent? How do I book a concert tour? How do I get a record deal? How do I create a project? How do I meet the right decision-makers?

And with the ease of information and online tutorials, they’ve figured out how to communicate their art. They know how to create a podcast, a website, a vlog, an internet presence. They know how to play their instruments.

But when I ask them what they are trying to say, the conversation gets much more complicated. And not because the answer isn’t there—but because they’ve never had to answer it before.

The Communication Equation

Effective communication is comprised of two parts:
What You Say + How You Say It

My estimation is that most early-career artists focus only 10% of their time on “What You Say” and 90% on “How You Say It.”

And I get it. Musicians have had decades of being taught how to do everything: This is how you play, how your fingers should look, how to play loud, how to write counterpoint. 

I remember on one of my speaking tours, I would ask the audience to plan an artistic event happening a year from now. There were no limitations (but also no resources). What would they choose to do?

The responses were always logistical: Find a venue. Find the artists. Figure out marketing. Choose the program.

Not once did the audience start with the most important questions:

• What do we want the audience to feel?

• What do we want them to think in the middle of the event?

• What might happen in the lobby?

• What do we want them to feel at the end?

We default to logistics because they’re easier to solve than the harder substance—the what—of our message.

Overcomplicating What We Say

It’s because it’s difficult that we tend to overcomplicate it.

Take the basic art of communicating from the stage.

How many times have we been to a concert where a musician introduces a piece using terms like “enharmonic modulation,” “scherzo,” “E-flat minor,” or “sonata form”?

Perhaps we forget that 99% of the audience has not spent the last 20 years immersed in the same musical pursuit, nor have they spent 80 hours learning the specific work we’re presenting.

We’ve been too busy with how we got here that we haven’t figured out what we want to say.

Great communicators across history have understood the importance of this. Woodrow Wilson was once asked how long it took him to prepare his speeches. His answer:

“It depends. If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation;
If fifteen minutes, three days;
If half an hour, two days;
If an hour, I am ready now.” (Daniels, 1946.)

It takes work to make things simple. And simplicity doesn’t just happen. It has to be clear in our heads first.

Turns out, our natural instinct works against us. Research shows we tend to add more instead of simplifying. Adams, Converse, Hales, and Klotz (2021) found that humans overwhelmingly favor additive solutions over subtractive ones when attempting to improve or clarify an idea. In other words, when we want to explain something, we tend to add more instead of simplifying.

That’s why we:

• throw on more ideas because we don’t know what connects

• default to academic or technical explanations, because that’s how we were trained

• assume audiences process information the way we do, so we add layers of explanation rather than removing jargon and clarity

• add more words for fear of losing depth

Getting the Other Half of the Equation Right

Last week, I said that higher education doesn’t have to abandon the traditional aspects of building our artistic craft. But something has to change.

In my research, when I asked 12 internationally award-winning, entrepreneurial classical musicians what non-musical skill was most essential to their careers, the most common answer was: communication.

And yet, these musicians all reported that this skill was never taught.

Communicating our art effectively comprises both what we say and how we say it. Without proper training, research shows we are wired to focus disproportionately on only one half of the equation: How You Say It.

So how do we rebalance it? How do we shift our focus from just ‘how’ to also include ‘what’? A simple starting point is to ask these questions:

• What’s the emotional core of the work?

• What do I hope people might feel? Think? Become?

• What’s the simplest way to express it?

• Would a non-musician understand this in one sentence?

I myself am guilty of understanding the complexities of how we say it, but overcomplicating the realities of what we say. When we are inevitably put into a real-life situation where we need to refine what we say, we flail and throw every additional thing that we think we know.

My old cello teacher was onto something. The first step toward clarity isn’t adding more but getting to less.