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Teaching a student to play with expressiveness is often a daunting task. Most students have at least some innate musicality buried in their souls, and a good teacher can usually find and nurture it. But what is the best teaching approach to use? Robert Woody recently published a study titled "The Effect of Various Instructional Conditions on Expressive Music Performance. (1)" This project compared the effectiveness of three approaches to teaching expressiveness to music students:

* aural modeling (AM)

* verbal or written instructions giving concrete verbal instructions (CM), for example, markings such as crescendo, ritardando, accelerando and so on

* verbal instruction using imagery and metaphor (MI)

Three piano melodies were given to 36 college music students, half of whom were advanced pianists, and the other half were deemed competent pianists. The melodies were given to three expert pianists who recorded their ideal aural models. The concrete musical instructions (notations on the score) were created from these models. Seven music professors were given the melodies and asked to provide examples of imagery or descriptive metaphors for each melody; a panel of 12 experienced musicians rated the best examples for use as the imagery and metaphor models (IM). Three expert pianists performed the melodies as they felt were indicated by the chosen imagery examples. The pianists performed each melody three times, and the nine performances were performed on an electric piano that interfaced with a computer and MIDI sequencer. These data were used to set ideal levels of loudness, tempo and articulation for each melody. These performances were also used for the aural model (AM).

Each student was given an unmarked copy of the three melodies and asked to play each into the sequencer. The students were then given each melody with a different teaching model. They were given time to practice and were encouraged to "think aloud" onto an audio tape as they received the instruction and practiced the melody. They then gave a final expressive performance that was recorded by the sequencer as a MIDI computer file. In the AM instruction the students had an unmarked score and listened to the expert model played on their keyboard. They could listen and practice as many times as they wished. In the CM instruction the students were given a score with all the expressive markings notated on the music. The MI model was an unmarked score with the printed text of imagery or metaphors printed oil the next page. (See Figure 1). (2)

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