Student Participation in Decision-Making Processes Concerning Musical Performance

The study was designed to determine if students who participated in decision-making processes about musical performance would more easily perceive expressive phrasing (as performed by others) and perform music more expressively than students who were given all directions for performance by a conductor.¹ A secondary purpose of the study was to develop an outline that might help students analyze expressive elements in music, thereby enabling them to perform more expressively. The subjects, thirty-eight high school string orchestra students, were divided into control and experimental groups by the use of stratified random selection. Statistical analyses of data revealed that first, involving students in decision-making processes did not significantly increase their perception of expressive phrasing or their ability to perform expressively, and second, it is possible that students' expressive performance might significantly be increased if they are given the opportunity to analyze objectively expressive elements of music.