Translating Emotion to Expression: Five Strategies to Try

ChorTeach is ACDA’s quarterly online publication, designed for those who work with singers of all levels but specifically K-12 and community choirs. A full annotated ChorTeach index is available online at acda.org/publications/chorteach. Over 160 articles are organized into seventeen categories. For more information, email  or visit acda.org/chorteach. Following is an excerpt from an article in the Summer 2023 issue titled “Translating Emotion to Expression: Five Strategies to Try” by Christopher Loftin.
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Students are constantly looking for positive ways to express themselves. They want to feel valued, heard, and understood. Due to tragic events in schools every day, more research and attention are on social-emotional learning, trauma-informed pedagogy, and culturally responsive pedagogy. All these philosophies put the whole student and the whole singer at the forefront of learning. Each day, students bring their experiences, traumas, expertise, and assets to our classrooms. This is a great opportunity for choir directors to allow students the chance to channel their emotions in a healthy way that impacts audiences. The challenge for choir directors is how to engage students in the process of translating their emotions in a way that ultimately reaches the audience. Translating internal emotion to external expression in a way that is unified, free from vocal or visual distractions, and congruent to the song’s lyrical, musical, and contextual intent is a tall but exciting task.

This article breaks down vocal and visual expression into five “rules” or principles that streamline instruction and allow students the opportunity to create expressive decisions for themselves in a healthy manner. I constantly refine these rules: adding, removing, and clarifying principles, so the rehearsal is more impactful for students and myself. There are many more strategies available, so it is vital for the director to decide what works best for their ensembles. The strategies in this article are not meant to “technique” emotion or expression. Instead, the purpose of this article is to provide a simplification of the many individual tasks we ask our students to do on a regular basis into categories they understand.

As directors, everything we say and do matters because it creates a response from our ensembles. This applies to us as coaches as well. Research suggests that 93% of what the audience receives is nonverbal communication, which is why conducting clarity is so important. However, this makes the 7% verbal communication that much more important. How many times have we said to our chorus, “Lift that phrase ending,” “Stronger ‘c’ on the word ‘can,’” or “get louder here?”

Choir directors can easily fall into the trap of spending too much time talking about individual spots in music, as opposed to teaching bigger “rules” or patterns. Therefore, about five years ago, my co-director, Jason Martin, and I created a system of five basic rules of articulation, which helped our choruses take more ownership of their learning and increased their retention.

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*Visit acda.org/chorteach for the full article. Choose the Summer 2023 issue.