Shaping Expressive Performance: A Problem-Solving Approach

Abstract

ears ago, I developed and taught a four-month series of lessons designed to help eighth-grade singers gain skills related to phrase shaping. Using poetic accent (i.e., speech inflection) as a frame of reference, the students made decisions regarding musical emphasis, de-emphasis, and phrase climax. A typical activity consisted of my giving them a phrase from a well-known folk song, allowing them thirty seconds or so to decide how to shape the phrase, and then having the entire ensemble sing the phrase with no direction, coaching, or conducting from me. As I stepped aside and allowed them to determine how to shape phrases on their own, I found that although there were perceptible differences from student to student, there was usually an apparent collective interpretation regarding which syllables to emphasize, which to de-emphasize, and how much-and such interpretations were surprisingly appropriate. I began to wonder how my students were able to do such a thing. What skills did these eighth graders possess that could immediately bring about such a high level of agreement? They were using speech inflection as a basis for their phrase shaping, which involves a complex interweaving of volume, intensity, tempo, pitch, and even color. But despite its complexity, most people helping c oral

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 19 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.