The influence of vocal-motor training on the artistic expressiveness of students: a Russian-Chinese comparison

Abstract

The professional training of a singer combines two relatively autonomous processes: voice production and the formation of stage behaviour, in which bodily plasticity serves as a carrier of artistic meaning. The gap between a technically sound tone and convincing artistic expressiveness remains a persistent problem of university practice, and the ways of overcoming it differ markedly in the Russian and Chinese traditions. The aim of the study is to determine how purposeful vocal-motor training is connected with the parameters of students’ artistic expressiveness, and to compare the Russian and Chinese approaches to its organisation. Comparative-pedagogical and conceptual-categorial analysis, content analysis of curricula and normative documents, and modelling were used: the author’s model of vocal-motor training was built, correlating motor means with observable features of expressive performance. It is established that the Russian school traditionally embeds movement into work on the image through stage action, whereas Chinese practice more often separates vocal-technical and plastic training into different disciplines, which reinforces a mismatch between sound and gesture in some students. It is shown that transferring the motor component from an accompanying to a meaning-forming one changes the structure of the performing action as a whole: expressiveness arises as the coordination of the breath-support, intonational, and plastic lines. The obtained result means that artistic expressiveness is formed through a restructuring of the very way of producing sound by means of movement, rather than as a superstructure over an already mastered vocal technique.