People can handle very different things, when talking about "music". Here is my attempt to open the meaning of "musical value, which is not technical".

My main thesis is:"Music results from speech".

Everyone has been in the school and knows, how one teacher can tell in an interesting manner and the other is just boring. It's not matter of the words meanings in the text. It is the matter of intonation, agogic rhytm-changes and respites between different thaughts. Respites of surprises following them; the effect raising tension of waiting. Classical example is the winner announcement in some competition. The host is not just dully saying:"Mr.Wonderman won", but. "the winner iiiiiiiiiis -------mr.Wonderman". In the music there are such pauses, too. The repetition of the beginning in the sonata-form is the classical example. Or cadenzas, which can bear very long pauses in them. It's the situation, When the audience knows, that this must go on, but performer is not hurrying at all with it. It's the classical tension-rising trick for all performers. So let's use it!

I'm illustrating my thesis with the opposite of good speech. The counterpart of dully speech is the speech-synthesizer. Why it is so? Because it omits very important parts of human speech:

1. Breathing pauses between separate sentences. It's very difficult to follow the thought, when there is no appropriate time given to "digest" the sentence after it has ended. Synthesizer can be quiet for certain amount of time, if there is the dot or comma in text. But it's mechanical. Only human knows, how much is the human dose of silence. Only human can make it feel natural.

2. The main word in the sentence is not insistent not in the dynamic nor in the agogic way. In the natural speech the beginning of sentence is a bit slower, then it accelerates with crescendo till the main word, which has some amount of tenuto added to it. And finally the sentence dies dynamically out with light acceleration. It's a kind of "speech-gesture"

3. Pronouncing is too "accurate". Every single letter is well-pronounced. There is no such thing in human speech. Some words or letters are more blurred then others. This is the reason why I condemn too clean playing. It takes away one dimension in music. It's like a painting: there is well painted dominant in the center and blurred background in the rear of it. Too sharp background does not make good to wholeness of the picture. In worse case it can take the attention away from the dominant.

4 . There is no intonation at all. I mean the possibility to express the surprise or some other kind of emotion with speech. Computer does not know about emotions. In some amount you can express the surprise on guitar, too. It's not as obvious as in speech though. Guitar has it's own specific possibilities in this field.

That's about music. What about tehnique? It's nothing else, then the ability to pronounce well. Playing too technically means "overpronouncing" like speech-synthesizer does.

And here is my statement: competitions and schools are making people to play too technically. The result is too sharp and clear unmusical playing.

Allar Õunapuu, Tallinn 2004