Gesture

Four hours of rehearsal yesterday - Broadway, folk tunes, sacred anthems . . . and private piano teaching today . . .

From my current perspective, it seems that the root compelling thing in a performance of a piece of music is the grasp of gesture. If a performance conveys shape and movement, it acts upon me and I am moved. Tired and out-of-tune voices might be okay if the way they move through the music has purpose. I might experiment with having students focus on conveying the gestures of a work before thinking of the dynamics and tempi written in the score. Those markings can be used to refine the students' understanding of the gestures after they have really engaged with the basic gestures.