One of the more challenging things a musical director does is teaching non-professional singers to be expressive. We teach so many mechanical skills - the notes, the rhythms, the entrances and the lifts, how to form vowels with the lips, tongue and throat; the list goes on and on. If your choir is working on all of these things they will sound good, but maybe not great.
If your singers can also express emotion, something truly amazing can happen. Have you ever noticed how sometimes "magic" happens seemingly on its own, and you touch something beyond yourselves? Maybe the mood of the singers is right, the acoustics are particularly good, and the nuances become evident to the average singer so each can lend more attention to the emotional content of the material. We all love these moments. This is where you want to be every time you sing.
Get To the Point
A great choir is a bunch of regular people who master the little details regardless of the conditions and endeavor to "get to the point" every time they sing. They don't have to all be great divas. Your singers must realize their primary job is just this. They need to reach into the heart and soul of a piece and craft a sound that will project that core emotion into the heart of the listener. As a singer, you can't do it reliably by merely going with the flow or hiding in the ranks. You need to be the flow.
Yes, it is craft. Your singers should not be emoting, drawing pictures for the audience. Instead, they want to be mindful of the emotional center of the piece and employing the appropriate mechanics to express it. This cannot be done without conscious effort and practice. When you sing a sad piece 100 times, it will not make you feel sad anymore. Chances are good you'll be half asleep and forget to apply the technique needed to express the core emotion. And if you have let practice go by without working on this aspect - it's not generally going to happen spontaneously once you're in front of 100 people.
We have one song that's about fierce jealousy. At one rehearsal we spent some moments recalling expressions of this emotion we'd witnessed or experienced, and considered how it affected speech. The jealous or angry person puts a sharp edge on all consonants - he or she works the words much harder, actually turning them into weapons. If this aspect is missing from a song about jealousy, it simply won't do the job.
As an a cappella singer, you have nothing to inspire you but what you find within. There are no sad violins or grinding electric guitars to grease the skids for you. It all comes from inside. You are it.
A Case Study
I told this story before, but it's a good one: After one of our programs, a woman came up to me and complained about a song we'd sung, Monk's "Round Midnight". She really liked our show, but said we should never had sung that song, adding it was terrible that we'd done it. I thought we'd done a good job with it and had to ask her why she felt this way. She told me very clearly that it reminded her of her longing for her lost husband and had made her cry. Now I understood - our little arrow had hit the mark and opened her heart. This is so important, and by this I don't mean our mission is to bum people out. I mean to put them back in touch with themselves, so they can be human to others, so they can empathize with others and be better human beings in every part of their lives. With art and song, we have the power to do exactly this. It's huge!
Hit the Spot!
This is such an important aspect of what your choir is doing - in fact there's really no other good excuse for standing in front of an audience if you are not aiming for this. "Magic" will not happen for the audience just because you're covering a particular song. In fact, if your message does not "hit the spot", your audience will not experience "flow" - they will not forget themselves and arrive at a place where time no longer exists. This is the place where the whole world can be healed.
This is what you are doing.
