ABSTRACT
Adding expressiveness to music involves performance skills that are not always instinctive. Even when notes, rhythms, and other components are performed flawlessly, the “artistic” performance requires additional special ingredients, including vague “gray area” skills and responses that are also challenging for the band director to describe and teach. This chapter is designed to demystify the teaching of expressiveness by providing directors with engaging activities to help explain the unexplainable. The material compiles ideas about music’s “intangibles” from other notable sources, and follows with detailed methods to engage students’ performance practices, shared experiences, and intellectual choices to promote artistry. Fluent expressiveness requires phrasing, musical direction, shaping, emphasis, and other practical ingredients; performers’ decision-making is guided by dynamics, musical markings, beaming, grouping, and context clues from other influencing factors. This chapter offers innovative exercises based on music’s connections to speech, reading, and punctuation, with a unique chart comparing musical markings to common punctuation. A special feature stresses the importance of delivery (the director’s “It-Factor”), highlighting analogies, stories, descriptions, and imagery. The band director is the special ingredient in the recipe for students’ artistic success. As with other chapters, there are numerous quick-fix suggestions to efficiently develop students’ expressiveness.
