Teaching Expression to Young Bands
Mike Pearce

Reprinted by permission. Colorado Music Educator, Spring 2001, David R. Mantano, Editor

Your middle-school band piece reads con espressione. Now what? Add a ritard? Have the students play a little more loudly or more softly? Go faster or more slowly? Ignore it?

Increasing numbers of contemporary band works for young bands have passages asking for more expressive playing. Some-times not marked, but equally compelling, are other pieces which have considerable expressive potential but rely on the director’s abilities to actualize it.

There are some techniques which may help increase your effectiveness in teach-ing musical expression.

Listen, Reflect, Imagine, Ex-periment

Decide how the piece should sound. Look for recordings of the work you’re studying, or of others by the same com-poser. Do some thinking and reflection. Play it in your head, imagining how it would sound if you made changes to dynamics and tempos, trying to capture the composer’s intent. When you’re trying out ideas, ask another musician to offer suggestions or have someone else conduct while you step back and listen. Tell your students what you’re doing as you look for the best way to convey the composer’s message. Let them know that while techniques for interpretation of some pieces may be obvious, others may be less abso-lute. Sometimes the process is not a search for the only correct way, but a selection of the most effective of several choices.

Phrasing, Breathing

Young wind players usually need guid-ance to plan their breathing so that musical phrases can be kept intact, built, or ex-panded. In large ensemble playing, sim-ply having students alternate breathing with their stand partners will often smooth out choppy phrases. Find the
places, such as just after a long crescendo and before the big climax note, where nobody should
breathe. Teaching students to mark breath-ing in their music pays off in performances when they
might otherwise get nervous and breathe in places that detract from the musicality of some pieces.

Help students learn techniques for building phrases, such as adding slight crescendos and diminuendos to give shape to repeated melodic sequences and to elimi-nate static sounds. Teaching students to be conscious of phrasing will engage them in the process of making music, not just ex-ecuting mechanical techniques.

Pay Attention To Composer’s Markings

While some leave you guessing, most composers provide detailed road maps for articulation and expression. If you help students faithfully execute all the crescen-dos, diminuendos–dynamics–ritardandos, and articulations found in the printed score, you will have done much of the work of showing them how to bring vitality and life to the music they’re playing. Take time to explain how to play fp, sfz and tenuto. so that students will begin to look at them as integral, vital parts of the music and not as curious decorations on the page. Trying to perform without paying attention to style and articulation markings could be com-pared to building a shiny new automobile but omitting the seats or wheels.

Teach students to play dynamics as indicated on their parts. If you go back and correct each poorly executed or omitted dynamic change, your band will get the message that they are important elements and not just options. With young players, playing extremes like pp and ff will prob-ably need to be adjusted for their strength and experience. A good rule of thumb is to instruct young players to think of ff and pp as their best loud sound and their best soft sound. Instruct them not to play more softly nor more loudly than they are physi-cally able.

Keep working until everyone can play the needed effects. Those not executing properly will tend to cancel or muddy the efforts of others, nullifying the effective-ness of staccato passages, sforzandos, cre-scendos, and the like. To avoid overwork-ing parts of your concert selections when you’re teaching articulation and nuance, practice them during your warm-up rou-tine.
For example, have students play crescendos on whole notes on the pitches of the B-flat concert scale. Practice ac-cents, legatos, fp, and others the same way.

Train Your Students To Watch

You may have vast interpretive pow-ers, but your ideas will have little effect if you and your band don’t communicate. Students need to learn to watch and listen to you and to each other. Most of us have watched performances where each student’s eyes were glued to his or her music while the director’s conducting in-dicated things the ensemble wasn’t pro-ducing. The difference can be so striking that it may look as though the director is visiting another galaxy, leading the Celes-tial Winds in an immaculate rendition of “Ethereal Highlights,” while the kids of the Muddletown Middle School Band sit in the gym at home, each in expressive isola-tion, trudging through a pedestrian rendi-tion of the “Mediocre Middle School March.”

At one music festival, a director had students seated in a somewhat random arrangement, with some of the players fac-ing 90 degrees away from the podium. Few seemed to be watching the conductor, who likewise wasn’t looking at them. The players’ approach, coupled with the conductor’s stare, fixed on his score, made it obvious that little communication was taking place and, not surprising, his group produced a less-than-memorable perfor-mance.

How can you teach watching and communication? Try having your band play a rhythm pattern, such as two triplets–quar-ter note–quarter rest, on each pitch of the B-flat concert scale in your next warm-up. Warn them that you’re going to change the tempo, then do it and see if they follow. On one pitch of the scale, don’t give them a downbeat for a couple of seconds and see how many fall into the silence. Done with humor, the exercise can help them learn to watch and inject some fun into your rehearsals.

Choose Music That Encourages Expression

Think over the kinds of pieces you typically program. Are they monostylistic, with few transitions and contrasting sec-tions? If someone described a piece that “sounds like you,” would it be alive with expressive potential, or would it be repeti-tious, wooden, mechanical, and mind-numbingly dull? Are your selections filled with nuances and opportunities for expres-sion and emotion, or are they mostly trite, popsy, or “cute?”

Without question, style transitions and interpretations provide some of the great-est challenges in rehearsal and preparation, but they also offer some of the most re-warding musical experiences. If you want to attract some of your school’s brightest students and keep them, engage them by offering music which is challenging, inter-esting, and musically significant.

You can tell by watching their inten-sity, but students will sometimes make it clear that they’re really getting it. One of my bands was rehearsing On a Hymnsong of Philip Bliss and, of course, we worked hard to capture its expressive possibilities. During one day’s rehearsal, we finished the piece and, as we often do when a piece ends quietly, students were told not to move after the final release, but to let the mood linger. During the ensuing silence, a flute player quietly said, “That’s purty.”

Plan Your Rehearsal And Per-formance Sequence Care-fully

Possibly the greatest reason for the failure of groups to play expressively is poor planning by the director. If the performance is only days away and the group is still struggling with notes, rhythms, and tempos, the likelihood of the ensemble playing confidently with expression is dim, at best. If the notes and rhythms are under control a couple of weeks ahead, there’s time to work toward more nuance and expression and do something significant with the music.

Conclusion

Try these approaches and see if you don’t see improvement in your band’s abil-ity to play expressively:

• Listen, reflect, imagine, experiment
• Teach phrasing and breathing
• Pay attention to the composer’s markings
• Teach your students to watch
• Choose music that encourages ex-pression
• Plan your rehearsal and performance schedule carefully

Good luck as you try to help your students experience the challenge and thrill of playing music well and expressively, the way it is intended to sound.