The CTE of Music: A Holistic Framework for Musicianship

Musicians jamming together

After years of learning the bass guitar, performing with musicians across genres, and teaching students, I began searching for a simple way to describe what makes a musician musical.

Eventually, I realized that musicianship can be understood through three interconnected pillars:

Comprehension, Technique, and Expression.

I call this the CTE of Music.

If you come from a programming or data background, “CTE” might remind you of Common Table Expressions in SQL. While the acronym is playful, the idea is serious: just as views in a database build on one another, each musical pillar strengthens and informs the others. However, unlike SQL queries, these pillars don’t form a straight pipeline—they form a dynamic, living cycle.

Comprehension: Understanding Music from the Inside Out

Comprehension is more than knowing keys, scale degrees, or chord progressions. It’s the ability to sense the musical environment you’re in.

This includes:

• Hearing the tonal center, cadences, or raga

• Recognizing rhythmic patterns and grooves

• Understanding stylistic vocabulary

• Feeling how the band is interacting in real time

Importantly, comprehension isn’t limited to analytical theory. Many musicians build it intuitively, through repeated listening, imitation, and embodied learning.

Whether you learned music through notation, ear training, or oral tradition, comprehension is what allows you to know what’s happening and why it fits.

Technique: The Ability to Execute Musical Intention

Technique is the physical and mechanical capacity to produce the sounds you imagine. This includes:

• Instrumental control

• Timing and precision

• Breath support for vocalists

• Familiarity with idiomatic vocabulary

• Consistent tone production

But technique isn’t a set of generic exercises. It is always contextual: the “right” technique for jazz bass is not the same as for metal, Carnatic violin, or punk rock guitar.

Strong technique creates freedom. It lets you translate ideas directly from mind to instrument with minimal friction. Weak technique creates bottlenecks that limit expression.

Still, technique does not have to be limitless. Some musicians intentionally embrace simplicity or rawness—their technique serves their aesthetic.

Expression: The Personal Voice of the Musician 

Expression is the emotional and aesthetic layer—what makes a performance feel alive. It reflects the musician’s taste, personality, and history.

Expression includes choices like:

• Inventive melodic, harmonic, or rhythmic ideas

• Dynamics, phrasing, articulation

• Space, silence, restraint

• Controlled tension and release

• Interaction with other musicians

Expression isn’t something that appears only after mastery. Often, it’s the engine that motivates a musician to develop comprehension and technique in the first place.

Over time, the pattern of expressive decisions a musician makes becomes their signature style.

How the Pillars Interact

CTE is not a staircase where one skill comes after the next. It’s a three-way loop where each pillar constantly shapes and strengthens the others.

• Comprehension guides what to play.

• Technique enables how you play it.

• Expression gives meaning to why you play it.

• And your expressive attempts feed back into developing new comprehension and technique.

When musicians play together, this cycle multiplies. Each person is listening, responding, adjusting, and shaping the music in real time. This musical dialogue — often described as "call and response" — is where true ensemble magic happens.

At the center of the entire framework lies a fourth dimension:

Communication

While Comprehension, Technique, and Expression describe what’s happening within a musician, Communication describes what happens between musicians — and between musicians and the audience. This real-time exchange between musicians and the audience is where comprehension, technique, and expression merge into a shared language.

Communication is the living center of the CTE model. It connects internal skill with external interaction.

a. Communication With Other Musicians

Music is a conversation. Great ensembles constantly exchange ideas through:

• listening and responding

• adjusting dynamics, timing, or feel

• leaving space for others

• signaling transitions and changes

• supporting or contrasting each other’s ideas

In improvisational traditions like jazz, blues, Hindustani, or Carnatic music, this real-time interaction is the music.

b. Communication With the Audience

The audience completes the musical circuit. Musicians read and respond to the audience’s energy by:

• shaping emotional intensity

• pacing the set

• using dynamics to keep listeners engaged

• altering phrasing or delivery based on the room

Whether it’s a jazz club, a rock show, or a classical hall, great performers sense what the audience needs.

c. Communication With the Music Itself

This is the most poetic dimension.

Musicians communicate with the music by:

• honoring the tradition of the style

• letting the composition guide their choices

• responding to the emotional contour of the moment

• allowing intuition to take over

This is the feeling musicians describe as “being inside the music” or “the music playing itself.”

Communication transforms musicianship from a solo activity into a shared artistic experience.

Putting it all together

The more balanced a musician is across all three pillars, the more fluently they can participate in musical communication. Even a small improvement in one pillar often unlocks new possibilities in the others.

Next time you listen to a band or attend a concert, try observing this interplay:

• How the hi-hat and rhythm guitar lock in

• How the bass and kick drum converse

• How the vocalist phrases around the music

• How each musician leaves space for the others

Once you notice it, you’ll hear music with new depth.

Final Thoughts

The CTE framework is not a rigid model—it’s a guide for understanding and developing musicianship holistically.

For musicians, it offers a way to structure practice, reflect on strengths and weaknesses, and grow intentionally.

For listeners, it reveals the unseen layers of communication happening onstage, especially in improvisational music like jazz, Hindustani, or Carnatic traditions.

Music is more than notes. It’s a conversation built on understanding, ability, and emotion. The CTE of Music shows how understanding, ability, and emotion combine to bring performances to life.