Imagery and Metaphor: Effective Wind Band Pedagogy for Expressive Musical Performance

Abstract

Much of the musical instruction time for a young musician is allocated to refine areas such as posture, tone, rhythm, and intonation, causing teachers of young musicians to spend less instructional time on coaching expressive skill development.  The purpose of this research was to examine the effects of metaphor/imagery statements upon music performance regarding specific expressive elements (i.e., crescendo, decrescendo, etc.) within the expressive properties of loudness, tempo, and style/note duration. The researcher examined verbal instruction using imagery/metaphor statements (MI) on the participant’s expressive musical performance. Sixty randomly sampled students, enrolled in two seventh-grade wind band programs located in the southeastern United States, participated in an expressive performance procedure (EPP) consisting of a pre-test recording, an instructional condition, and a post-test recording followed by computer analysis of the loudness, tempo, and style/note duration expressive properties.

            The results of the matched pairs t-tests indicated the MI instructional conditions affected the mean difference score sets with statistical significance (p < .05).  Furthermore, results suggested the MI conditions to be significantly effective in affecting all elements examined in the expressive property of loudness, expressive performance in a slower tempo, and in the multi-faceted style, marcato.