Abstract
Research conducted on the development of expressive performance capabilities suggests that children can learn to demonstrate expressiveness in their music-making. Expressivity includes musical interpretation, performance technique, and musical and personal creativity. This article examines creativity as an important component of musical expressivity in relation to (1) musical structures, (2) the emotions and sensations evoked by music, and (3) communication with ensemble members and the audience. Included are practical examples and ideas for teachers to help their students learn about performance expressivity on instruments and with voice, along with exercises to help them become creatively expressive performers.
Creativity is part of expressive performance in the arts. How can we help our students to use creativity in their development as performers?
Musical expressiveness describes the way that performers add finesse to the music that they perform. There is a sort of magical aura in the way we honor the evocative power of the expressive performer. We say, “That (trumpet player, guitarist, bassoonist, singer, conductor, etc.) was SO expressive!” On the other hand, we say that a performance is “phoned in” or that the performer “plays like a stick of wood” if the performer plays/sings/conducts with no expressiveness. Musical expressiveness is as important to a performance as technical prowess.
Musical expressiveness can and should be nurtured, and young performers will need to develop a “toolbox” of strategies to develop themselves in this way. This article explores teaching for musical expressiveness through encouraging creativity in relation to a performer’s understanding of musical structures, the emotions and sensations evoked by music, and communication with ensemble members and the audience. Also included are pedagogical ideas that teachers can use to help students become more expressive performers. The more practice and guidance students have, the more they will be able to make use of the valuable tools in their “expressivity toolboxes.”
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“Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” with Young Performer Decisions
A Typical Three-Note Motif Found in Baroque Music
Musical expressiveness can be seen as a performer’s effect on the listener through manipulation of any musical moment. This manipulation can be the result of an intention to communicate something found within the music or something through the music. A performer manipulates musical moments by changing tempo, dynamic level, articulation, and tone quality toward that desired end. 1 Investigators Alf Gabrielsson and Patrik Juslin found that listeners believed performers could be expressive by heightening tension and release, through sensations of movement, or by evoking extramusical qualities, including energy, beauty, emotion, personality, events, religious beliefs, or social conditions. 2
Researchers Brenda Brenner and Katherine Strand found that studio teachers believed that young performers needed performance technique, the ability to interpret music, and creativity to become expressive. The teachers surveyed believed that creativity was intertwined with technique and interpretation in such a way that expressiveness could not happen without all three ingredients. Performance with poor technique or interpretation, no matter how creative, is likely to sound unappealing. Similarly, performance with excellent technique and interpretation but without creativity does not inspire. 3
While music educators have developed many techniques to teach performance technique and interpretation, much less is known about how to help young learners be creative performers. The studio teachers in Brenner and Strand’s study defined creativity with the terms using imagination and adding personality. A third term, spontaneity, was used by Roger Chafin and his colleagues as a definition for creativity. 4 With imagination, personality, and spontaneity, a musical performance can become an embodiment of an individual performer’s or a group’s outlook and character. 5
Musical imagination is the ability to imagine the possible ways that the music might sound before and during performance. Authors Rena Upitis, Patricia Shehan Campbell, and Katherine Strand have written about the free-flowing musical imaginations of preschool children, who are able to invent music and perform known tunes with great creativity. 6 Phrases like “finding my voice” or “expressing myself through music” are used to describe adding personality, where a performer does something beyond interpretation to make a performance unique. Spontaneity involves the moment-to-moment decisions that a performer makes in a well-prepared performance. 7 If music is prepared well, performers can be spontaneous in response to the musical moment, space, and social elements of the performance.
Adding imagination, personality, and spontaneity might be a point of contention for ensemble directors because such individual creativity within a group structure could mean chaos. Directors may feel that it is their responsibility to be spontaneous while the ensemble is responsible for following the director. Rather than encouraging ensemble members to develop their individual personalities, they can encourage them to become full participants in the development and expression of a collective personality. Many renowned musical groups, from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to Anonymous 4 to Arcade Fire, can be described as having unique personalities. A director can invite ensemble students to participate in decisions about the ensemble personality they want to create for themselves and the characteristics that will allow them to express that personality through their performances.
Issues Impacting Creativity
There are three issues that can influence a young learner’s ability to learn creative performance. First, the development of technique affects a performer’s ability to perform expressive musical gestures. Any student needs to have the technique sufficient to enable him or her to be expressive with their repertoire. For example, a young child must be able to access his or her head voice in order to sing a song with a one-octave range. A beginning violinist must be able to hold the instrument correctly to perform “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Teaching students to perform with technical accuracy goes hand in hand with helping them to be creative performers.
Creative expressivity also depends on the learner feeling safe in experimenting with expressive musical gestures and in trying out musical ideas without fear of being negatively judged. What peers and teachers might consider “mistakes” with odd-sounding musical gestures should be treated like good learning opportunities. This attitude has to be developed by teachers and students alike.
Students will also need to know their personalities by developing the ability to self-reflect upon and describe their personality characteristics in relation to the music they perform. 8 At first glance, this issue may appear to be outside the boundaries of teaching music. However, music teachers sometimes argue that musical engagement allows children to express themselves, indicating that we deal with developing the whole person in music classes. A benefit to incorporating self-reflection and discussion is that encouraging self-knowledge may also lead to higher self-esteem for our students. Our youngest learners, those in preschool and early elementary grades, can be fearless about experimentation. However, they may have limited self-awareness in comparison to older children. Teachers should encourage these students to experiment with expressing various aspects of their personalities, such as their sense of humor, or beliefs (e.g., about friendship) as they play and record themselves and take time to reflect afterward about the ways that the one aspect of personality was communicated through musical choices. By the time children reach upper elementary school, they may be more self-aware but less likely to experiment with musical moments. Developing performers sometimes recoil from anything sung or played that sounds “wrong” to their ears. The teacher may need to constantly bring joy to students’ expressive attempts so they remain willing to experiment. For example, the teacher might make an analogy between learning to perform expressively and learning to play a video game: In video games, players learn more about playing with each attempted character movement and remain motivated because they sense progress. 9
The issues that face teachers in encouraging expressiveness can be addressed through thoughtful pedagogical practice. The following exercises and activities are provided to help any music teacher foster musical creativity.
Creativity and Musical Structure
Creative expressiveness in relation to music structure involves manipulating characteristics that influence form in a musical piece, such as rhythm, melody, and harmony. Musicians make decisions about how to express the form of individual phrases, subsections, and whole pieces. With young students, musical structure can be related to experiences from daily life, imagining music in physical form. For example, they can compare the ABBA form of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” to a sandwich. The music teacher can tell students that the A section is “some type of bread” and that the B section is a “mysterious and delicious filling” of their choice. The teacher might ask students to decide what type of bread their sandwiches have (for example, rye, white, or whole wheat; plain or toasted). Next, the teacher might ask, “What filling would you like in your sandwich?” The children may decide that there is a thick slice of cheese for the first statement of the B section and play this portion forte. Then the children may decide on a thin sliver of cheese for the repetition of the B section and so play this portion pianissimo (see Figure 1). By using familiar experiences and limiting choices to one expressive experiment at a time, teachers can help children to learn strategies for making expressive choices.
Similarly, asking students to imagine characters, settings, and a story can be an effective way to help them develop their imagination about musical form. Advanced students can be asked to create a whole story in which characters, scenery, and action inform the way that portions of a larger work can be performed. One example could be a middle/high school honors orchestra playing Copland’s Rodeo. The orchestra director can ask students to envision the town and people that this music evokes. The students might speak in small groups for a short while and then decide on a setting with blowing tumbleweeds, whinnying horses, swinging bar doors, and characters including dirt-covered cowboys and a flirtatious barmaid. Next, they can break down each section of the larger work into interactions between the characters within the setting. Perhaps they will decide that the first section of the music should sound like a cowboy riding a tired horse into town. Another section may take on the character of a barn dance, and so on.
The orchestra director needs to ask students to talk about the characters and story line and then ask them to discuss what articulation, tempo, and dynamic levels should be given to the sections of music to express these things. Ensemble directors sometimes consider talking to be wasteful, taking valuable rehearsal time away from making music. However, asking the students to imagine the characters and actions and then discuss how to shape phrases and sections allows them to move beyond thinking about whether their F-sharps are in tune or whether they are playing melody or accompaniment. They begin to think creatively about what they want to express through their music-making. At the same time, these conversations can help students understand the musical levels of phrasing in any piece more intimately.
Shaping phrases can be directly related to prosody in language—the intonation and pacing we use to express ourselves when we speak. 10 In English, we use short pauses at the ends of phrases, emphasize syllables in words through dynamics and slight elongation, change our vocal timbre, and change pitch at certain places in sentences to give meaning and emotion to the words we say. To encourage singers to think about prosody, teachers should ask them to consider the sentence structure and spoken expression of poems in their songs. 11 If, for example, a song included a poem like one by Philip Levine that begins “Some days I catch a rhythm, almost a song in my own breath . . . ,” 12 the teacher can ask singers to practice speaking the text with no expression, then to experiment by deciding which words to stress, then to add tempo and dynamics, and then to explore the tone qualities—all with the intent to express what they might want the poem to say to an audience. They might decide that they want the text to sound like the speaker is discovering him- or herself. With that image, they might decide to stress the “catch,” “rhythm,” and “my own” to sound like “Some days I catch a rhythm, almost a song in my own breath.” Then they might decide to speak the first phrase quickly and then have a long pause before adding the second phrase in a whisper. Considering the text away from a musical line will help the singers deepen their understanding of the melody and accompaniment as well as the meanings within the poetry.
For instrumentalists, a teacher could ask the students to sing musical phrases in order to discover the inherent prosodic structures of the musical line. 13 Teachers can even have students write and sing lyrics to their phrases and then discuss how adding words provides new ideas about how to be expressive. One example, common in Baroque music, is the three-eighth-note motif (see Figure 2).
Students may sing “da-da-da” and decide that the motif could be “Da-
In working with prosody in a larger class or an ensemble, a teacher can have instrumental students invent lyrics to a melodic line individually in a piece being performed by the group and then hold a competition to see whose words the group considers the most inventive and appropriate. The opportunity to think about the musical phrase and text, sing the musical lines, and find words to fit the desired character of a piece will reinforce a successful and highly creative performance.
Creativity and Emotions
Creativity in relation to the emotions and sensations evoked by musical experience involves the performer’s ability to display some level of empathetic intelligence. 14 Writer Frederick Seddon explains that performers should be able to imagine, intuit, and evaluate the evocative nature of the music and reinforce those characteristics in order to heighten the sensations and emotions that the music can convey. 15 For example, if a piece of music is to create a sensation of high energy, performers should be able to imagine that sensation of high energy, analyze the music to find which characteristics create that sensation, and learn how to heighten those characteristics that evoke flying, frenzy, nervousness, or jubilation—whichever they decide to express.
Teachers can help young performers imagine the mood, or attitude, of any piece of music and then help them explore ways to convey that mood as they perform. Guided conversation can help young performers become aware of possible emotional characteristics and describe their own emotional states as they sing or play. Once the students can articulate these emotions, they can use their knowledge to become more expressive of the emotions in their performances. 16 To do this, young musicians will need to develop their vocabulary of emotive terms and gain understanding of the terms.
To help teachers, several lists of attitude vocabulary can be found online, like the “Vocabulary of Attitudes to Identify Tone,” 17 with lists of adjectives describing things like “Attitudes of pleasure: Peaceful, satisfied, contented, happy, cheerful, pleasant, bright, sprightly, joyful, playful, jubilant, elated, enraptured.” Children’s books can be used with younger performers. For example, The Maestro Plays by Bill Martin and illustrated by Vladimir Radunsky is full of bright pictures of musicians performing on a variety of instruments and singing, with phrases like “The maestro plays proudly. He plays loudly. . . . The maestro plays reachingly. He plays beseechingly.” 18 Music teachers can use these lists of adjectives and adverbs to help students develop a vocabulary of emotive terms and explore different ways to play anything from a scale to a melody to an ensemble piece. Teachers can also ask students to keep expressivity journals where they describe the emotions and sensations of their music, which also helps to fulfill requirements to write and read in music classes.
Another creative exercise is for the teacher to ask students to write an adjective on a slip of paper and then put the paper into a bag. Students take turns choosing a paper from the bag and creating short improvisations based on the adjective they select. The rest of the class must guess the adjective being illustrated. This exercise could also be used on pieces of music students are learning. The teacher can ask students to split into small groups, each group tasked with deciding on descriptors for the sensations and emotions they believe the music illustrates. Then, small groups can perform for each other and guess the descriptors that were chosen, reflecting on the success of the expressiveness in the performance.
Creativity and Communication
Performance that is expressive in relation to the audience involves the performer’s ongoing “mutuality, exchange, and interaction” with ensemble mates and listeners. 19 Teaching for this type of creative expressiveness involves helping students engage with their audiences intentionally and in ways that are appropriate to the setting, music, and type of ensemble. Young performers should become aware that they have a responsibility to communicate with their audiences through their music, body language, and facial expressions.
One way to help them develop this skill is for the teacher to have students consider what they want the music to communicate to an audience or what they wish for the audience members as they perform. The writer James Nicola described a group of performers’ thoughtful intentions in his book, Playing the Audience: The Practical Actor’s Guide to Live Performance, in this way:
When the actors went onstage at the top of the show (but before the house went fully dark) they each took a moment to look directly at the audience, embracing the pain of the world, or channeling it, or just saying hello. This action initiated the rapport with the audience. The cast’s purpose was to incant the spirit and story of Hamlet in the hope that mankind today (the audience) might not be doomed to repeat the tragedy.
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Communicating with an audience during performance involves high-level thinking; it is much more common for young performers to focus on playing the right notes or their own emotional responses to performing. Students need to learn about communication and then practice performing in new spaces and with supportive audiences so they can focus on appropriate audience communication while they perform. Teachers can help students realize the importance of communicating with the audience by demonstrating performances without communicating appropriately, first by performing with no facial expression, physical motion, or intention toward the audience; then performing with too much of each; and then performing a third time with an appropriate communication. The teacher can then lead students in a discussion to help them articulate the positive and negative qualities of each performance. Considering the impact from the perspective of an audience allows them to think about effective communication when they perform.
A teacher can also use singing with instrumentalists of any age to help them focus on communication. This will take their attention away from playing the right notes—out of their comfort zones and into the realm of communicating with the voice, the body, and facial expressions. Once instrumentalists can sing their parts well and with conviction as an ensemble, they will become more aware of what they want to communicate when they pick up their instruments once again.
It is useful to separate ensemble students into chamber groups to learn how to communicate with each other and the audience. This can also provide students a democratic structure in which to practice thinking about communication. 21 The teacher should ask each chamber group to talk with each other about what they intend to communicate through a piece of music and consider the places in the music where they need to communicate with each other (e.g., the opening, beginnings, and endings of musical phrases; points of tension and release). Once rehearsed, students can perform for each other and give feedback on the impact of their communicative decisions. The teacher can also ask members of each group to take turns “leading” their chamber groups. Ultimately, the group members can develop unifying physical gestures, communicating to an audience that the musical message of the group is a single entity.
Students can video record their practice performances and reflect on the success of their physical expressiveness on the whole performance. Many times, what feels to the performer like overly exaggerated physical and facial expressions is exactly what an audience believes to be appropriately expressive. Students need to see and hear from the perspective of the audience, articulate how to move in order to express their music effectively, practice those movements, and reflect again on their successes over several experiments. Such practice will allow them to focus on their communicative intentions during musical performances.
A Lifelong Benefit
Teachers have many opportunities to teach young performers to be creatively expressive by helping them learn how to incorporate imagination, personality, and spontaneity in relation to the musical structures; the emotions and sensations evoked by music; and communication that they develop with each other and the audience. By helping them develop strategies to become creative in their expressive performances, teachers can help our young performers develop expressive skills that will be of benefit throughout their lives.