© Shulamit Hoffmann 2024
A staggeringly high number of adult choristers in the United States (some 32.5 million, according to Chorus America, 2009) are reported to sing regularly in amateur ensembles. Many of these ensembles give concerts, often for a paying public. Yet delivering effective and affective performances can be deeply challenging, especially for amateurs. Amateur choirs negotiate the complexity of singing for pleasure while meeting the manifold requisites of choral music and pleasing a public through performance. This can readily create a tension between the disposition of the amateur, based in the motivation of the performers’ own pleasure and leisure, and the aptitudes and proficiencies necessary for effective, expressive performance. At this nexus of leisure and skill lies the challenge of expressive, affective, and effective performance. Uncovering what choral expression is, locating where it resides, cultivating expressive intention, and realizing expressive performance is a tall order, especially for amateur ensembles and their conductors.
Obstacles notwithstanding, expression is often reported to be the most worthwhile and meaningful aspect of performance for both amateur performers and audiences. This is hardly surprising, as expression has long prevailed as the central impetus for music’s creation and the communicative as music’s purpose. Nevertheless, despite the ubiquity of the term in music scores and in music teaching, and despite a recent upswing both in psychological research and in music performance research on expression, it remains as elusive to define as it is difficult to achieve. For all these reasons, then––expression’s elusiveness, its difficulties, and its personal meaningfulness––expression in live choral performance, especially by amateurs, is worth exploring.
Most conductors readily agree that music and text are the two primary expressive modes in choral performance; these often take the lion’s share of rehearsal time and attention. But what of that most indefinable, yet prized component of expression, the performance persona or character of the ensemble, that makes a visual or theatrical statement about the feeling content of the music and text? Convincingly creating and portraying credible character demands as much craft and technique as do the musical and textual requisites of intonation, rhythm, diction, tone quality, and blend. These latter, however, can take so much attention in rehearsal that the theatrical portrayal of character may receive short shrift. Yet it is the portrayal of character that can make the most impact on an audience.
I suggest a basis for defining expression and strategies that conductors use with their ensembles to cultivate performance persona or character alongside musical and textual expression, in order to achieve affective, emotionally contagious performances.
1. Live choral performance expression
i. Expression? Philosophical and practical definitions and experiences.
ii. What is art for? Aesthetic experience: beauty, emotion, and feeling.
iii. Communication of what, to whom, and how? Composer-text-performer-audience.
iv. Too much passion? Self-expression and artistic expression.
2. Strategies for the pursuit of expressive performance
i. How to bake the cake: Negotiations between technique and expression.
ii. When eyes speak: Putting down the burden of the book.
iii. One for all and all for one: Building community for expressive intention.
iv. Conductor charisma: Emotional transparency.
v. Leadership: Prescription or invitation.
vi. Interpretation: Who decides.
v. Heightened expression in live performance: L’audience assisté!
3. Expressive performance’s meaningfulness to performers and to audiences.
The importance of emotional response to choral performance is confirmed by a current audience impact study (Chorus America, 2015) in which 23 choirs ask the following questions of concert audiences:
“At any point during the concert did you lose track of time and get fully absorbed?”
“Overall, how strong was your emotional response to the concert?”
“What words best describe how the concert made you feel?”
At a time of dwindling classical music concert attendance nationally, amateur ensembles may still cultivate audiences at the local community level. Performances that are expressively convincing and contagious, in which audiences feel they have received true value for the price of admission, assure the viability and sustainability of live choral concert performance.
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