Conducting

The Director's RolesI spent an hour and half earlier this week with a director of a women’s chorus helping her identify ways in which she can develop her own and her singers’ skills. It’s an interesting process – directors are by temperament inquisitive and enjoy analysing what’s going on in musical and interpersonal situations, but their role tends to focus this attention away from themselves and onto all those people who both outnumber and rely on them.

At the start of the session, I presented her with the diagram above as a starting point. There are multiple different ways you can divide up a conductor’s various roles, but this seemed as good a starting point as any – its purpose was not to provide an exhaustive theory of conducting, after all, it was just there to give focus and structure to our discussions.

What is the collective noun for charismatic directors?
Saturday saw leaders of singers from around the country meeting in Birmingham for my workshop ‘Conduct with Charisma’, which regular readers will have seen advertised on my front page for the last few months. As you know, I have been blogging on this subject since last summer – and I have been researching it for over 3 years now. It started out as an off-shoot from my choral conducting book, and has developed into a fully-blown fascination in its own right.

Charisma is one of those things that a conductor is supposed to have, but is usually placed in a box marked ‘magic – do not think about’. Not helpful, especially to someone starting out in the craft, since it can so easily undermine your faith in your own legitimacy as a director. (Or is it only me who worried about this?)

So the day’s central theme was to explore the social dynamics of charismatic encounters, to understand that it’s not just about what the director does, but about a particular type of relationship between leader and group, and within the groups itself, that arises in particular types of situation.

The current issue of Research Issues in Music Education has an article examining the various functions of a conductor. In some ways it is an exemplary bit of research: well-rooted in the literature, clear in its rationale and methods, logical in the the drawing of its conclusions. But in other ways it demonstrates the problematic disconnect between conducting research as it appears in doctoral programmes and education journals and the lives of real musicians.

It is something that all choral conductors will have experienced at some point: starting a rehearsal and finding the choir completely lacking in energy. Eyes are down, body language is closed, words are mumbled and the sound projects about 3 inches before falling to the ground. The question is: what does the director do to change this?

The first instinct is usually to inject oomph: with bigger, more emphatic gestures and a bright cheery tone of voice we attempt to chivvy the singers into life. If it is a usually responsive choir that’s just having a randomly dozy day, this will work just fine. But if the unresponsiveness is a common experience with the group, then chivvying becomes counter-productive. You can find yourself with one of two scenarios:

The title of this post is a parody of the title of a paper by Jürgen Streeck about how people use gestures in conversation. The substance of his study was to show that gestures are not merely part of the way we broadcast our ideas as we express them to others, but are influenced by the way our interlocutors are responding. If you only look at the person talking, he suggests, you won’t fully understand why they use the gestures they do. The gestures are the result of the listener’s need to comprehend as much as the speaker’s need to communicate.

This thesis has significant implications for conducting pedagogy.

A session at last month’s ABCD Convention that deserves a post of its own was the one in which Eric Whitacre rehearsed the National Youth Choir of Great Britain in his new piece ‘Alleluia’, in anticipation of its performance in the Gala Concert that evening. Whitacre is a composer that a few years ago would have been described as ‘definitely flavour of the month’, but is now reaching the level of popularity that Kathy Sierra characterised as the ‘koolaid point’.

That is, he is sufficiently successful that you get people reacting against him, dismissing him as some combination of too groomed in his presentation, formulaic in composition, or just plain over-sung. While some people swoon at the thought of meeting him, others grumble that you have to look like a film star to be a composer these days. So, it was interesting to see him in action.

If you came here via the front page, you will have seen the notice announcing a workshop next January on the thorny question of charisma. (If you haven’t seen that yet, here are the details). I’ve spent the last few weeks trying out various drafts of the flyer on some generous and helpful friends, and from their responses it’s clear that there is set of things that most people want to know next. So I’m answering them here.

On Tuesday evening I returned to work with Welwyn Harmony, whom I had last coached back in June. It was cheering to see that they had retained a lot of the things we had worked on last time, and indeed that they were generally singing with more freedom and resonance most of the time. Helpfully, they’d sent me some recordings from the previous two rehearsals, so I was able to plan not only specific areas for coaching, but also – since they had asked me to take a vocal warm-up – devise preparatory work to introduce some specific elements we would be working on.

The work was significantly more detailed this time than last, as befits a more developed phase in the rehearsal process. In June we were looking at big-picture dimensions of rhythmic characterisation, melodic behaviour and airflow. These themes arose again on Tuesday, but usually in focusing in on specific passages or moments, to integrate them into a broadly successful approach to the songs.