Sociey for Music Teacher Education Daniel Hellman, SMTE Chair
Making Emotional Expression an Explicit Part of Music Teaching
Bringing musical experiences to fruition is one of the most powerful, stimulating and rewarding experiences that a person can have. Past experiences of tension and release, a sense of longing, a spirit of nationalism, a feeling peace, an expression of love, a sense of nostalgia are what often drive us to want more music in our lives. The drive for music has a biological basis rooted in our evolution (Hodges & Sebald, 2011). Music helps us to connect with people and bring ourselves pleasure. In music teaching, the emotional aspects of teaching usually receive less explicit attention in instruction than the technical aspects of music making as documented by music education researchers (Hallam, 2010). However, making emotional communication a central part of music teaching can provide important motivational and leaning benefits for students.
Psychologists have found that the intensity of emotion in music is related to our subconscious expectations of what comes next and our ability to recognize intended emotions (Hodges & Sebald, 2011). Typically, we derive pleasure from a musical phrase that does not cadence as we expect it to or an unusual
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metric pattern. The greater our level of experience, the more we crave unexpected subtleties. We also derive pleasure from our ability to recognize emotional cues in music. We are likely to associate sadness with a legato articulation at a slow tempo and a soft dynamic because of our experience with music and sadness in human expression. The ability to recognize these important details is what makes music fascinating.
While emotional responses are largely subconscious, learning experiences that increase our range of musical experiences, stimulate active involvement in making interpretive decisions, and increase the recognition of emotional content in music have potential for heightening emotional awareness and satisfaction. Exposure to a wide array of musical repertoire and engagement in active decision making about emotional content can heighten these experiences.
Teaching students to listen, think and feel critically in relation to the music that they are learning can be challenging. In the midst of preparing for performances, setting aside the time that might be necessary to help students
develop insights about emotional content is challenging. The technical difficulty of a piece for a student may not allow for much surplus attention for students to be devoted to expression. Involving students in discussing emotional content may introduce feelings of uncertainty and unpredictability for students as well as teachers. However, awareness of emotional expression and how it connects to other aspects of music making may be the most significant ideas that students can transfer to their daily lives. Regardless of the future direction that students take, they will be involved with music in their daily lives in some capacity, and emotional aspects will be an important part of that involvement.
Emphasizing what drives a musical piece, how it is constructed, what makes it distinct can help students to channel human emotion and use it in creating, performing and responding to music. Verbal directives, visual and aural modeling, and recordings can be successfully used as strategies to describe musical features
See HELLMAN, pg. 40 39
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