Conducting

Assistant director James leading the warm-up
Tuesday night took me back down to Bristol, this time to the heart of the University district, to work with a relatively new mixed group, Bristol A Cappella. I mention the university not because the chorus is particularly connected with it (though a handful of the members are), but because their rehearsal venue is within a very few minutes’ walking distance of two of my addresses from my student days. The journey there had that odd quality of deep familiarity and strangeness you get returning to places you used to know well but have not seen for a long time.

Anyway, once inside a building I had walked past hundreds of times but never previously entered, it became much more like any normal coaching visit, with a group of willing singers and the opportunity to mess with their heads.

In the event, the head I ended up messing with the most was their director’s. Iain Hallam had the personal courage and trust in his ensemble to put working on his technique firmly on the agenda as part of our work, and that turned out to be a most productive way in to helping his singers achieve more.

Feeling the love: bestowing a hug and a box of Cadbury's Heros on our guest

Introduction

The weekend of 17-19 July was the culmination of my biggest project for 2015: planning and then leading a training weekend for the chorus directors of the Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers. I didn’t do it all by myself - I had the support of the organisation’s fabulous events team, who managed all the logistics and communications with delegates, and of a glorious faculty drawn from LABBS’s most skilled and successful directors to help devise and deliver the curriculum. But, still, the project was my baby, and took up a lot of time and attention in the 6 months leading up to it.

Apologies if I sound smug at any point when talking about it. It is merely that I am immensely pleased by how it all went. The director education programme doesn’t get the budget for a big event every year, so it mattered to me that we made the most of it.

This is an addendum to my post on preparing music to direct. I had a response from a director saying that his section leaders are charged with demonstrating their parts in rehearsal, and that he thought his time would be better spent doing various analytical tasks such as harmonic or voicing analysis. Now, I’m not one to discourage harmonic or any other kind of analysis, so please do continue doing this. But his comment made me articulate to myself why you still need to be familiar enough with all the parts to be able to demonstrate them in rehearsal.

When I’ve asserted this before, it has been in the context of why you need to know all the parts, and the ability to demonstrate them has been the measure of when you know them well enough. But this comment focuses the attention on why you also need to be able to demonstrate anything your singers might have to sing as a distinct desideratum in its own right.

I wrote these notes for delegates at the Directors Weekend I am working on for Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers. Those delegates will all have a session of hands-on coaching with a chorus, and I wanted to give them the best chance to go into that session well-prepared and therefore able to get the most out of it. But once I’d written the notes, I thought I may as well share them here, since they are valid - and I hope useful - for general music-making, not just for this event.

This is a description of what experienced directors typically do on meeting new music, although they may do a lot of it intuitively without laying it out on a checklist. I am listing it out systematically as an aid particularly for newer directors, but it’s also good for the more experienced to review what they do from time to time.

There are two main types of preparation you need, the first to inform your practical work of supporting the singers in learning and performing the song, and the second to inform your artistic work of making and communicating interpretive decisions.

How to hear your choir more perceptively is a theme I have explored before, both in its own right and in relation to elements of conducting technique such as stillness and mouthing the words. And my recent visit to the White Rosettes, with its opportunity to observe how a director can listen the music into tune, came at just the right moment for me to try and frame how these thoughts fit together as part of a practical guide to expressive gesture.

The issue is one of attention. If you’re entirely focused on your projection of the musical soundtrack inside your head, that will be too loud for you to really hear or respond to much of what is coming back to you from the choir. (You get the same issue with instrumentalists of course - often the issue going on behind a spirited but technially splashy and/or sketchy performance.)

Third in a series that starts here

The fluid interplay between Simon Halsey's speech-accompanying and conducting gestures was a fascinating case study in the research that feeds this post

The very term ‘expressive gesture’ encapsulates the idea of musical thought made physical. And it is an interesting question as to how this happens. Often in conducting manuals, you get lots of useful detail on technique such as the conventions for indicating musical structures such as metre, but notions of creating musical beauty are sealed off in a box marked ‘Magic: do not open’.

To an extent, this is not as much of a cop-out as it may seem. Spontaneous, speech-accompanying gesture is something we all do intuitively as part of the act of thinking and communicating, without needing to be taught how to do it. And musicotopographic gestures (i.e. those than emerge as part of the act of thinking in music) are equally spontaneous and intuitive. This is why I argued that the most important first step in developing expressive gesture was to develop the musical imagination.

Second in a series that starts here

Our conducting gestures are only ever as expressive as the musical thoughts that generate them. So the place to start in refining and developing our gestures is to work on what is inside our heads. Which sounds a rather abstract thing to do, so here are some specific activities that will service that aim.

How can a conductor learn to communicate more expressively with their gestures? The temptation when we first ask this question is to focus on what we’re doing with our hands, but I’m increasingly of the mind that these are a relatively small part of the process. Moreover, while we will certainly need to give attention to this part of it, if we start here, we won’t get any further.

This is the first of a series of posts looking in some detail at ways to increase the expressiveness of our conducting gestures. As the introduction, it will give an overview of the key elements, with subsequent articles exploring practical approaches we can take to develop each element.

I will try to avoid digging too far into the theoretical background that underlies the practical suggestions. Much as I enjoy a good bit of theorising - not least because my idea of a good theory is one which helps you operate better in the real world - that’s not my primary purpose here. But if at any point in this series, you find yourself thinking, ‘But, why?’, then you may find that Part 3 of my book on choral conducting, and particularly Chapter 10, helpful.

So, an observation that serves as a useful starting-point: