Conducting

Every so often, you hear someone articulate the idea that ‘So-and-so is a very good director, but their choir isn’t very good’. And when I hear this, my brain goes into melt-down at the sheer invalidity of this concept. The only measure of a conductor’s quality is the standard of performances they elicit from the musicians they work with. If your ensemble isn’t very good, it’s because the director isn’t very good.

Okay, so there are some caveats here. I anticipate your objections.

The raw material makes a difference. A director who is working with novices will not, from a standing start, produce results as good as one working with experienced musicians. This is particularly true of instrumental groups, but also a fair generalisation for singers. You’d expect auditioned choirs to achieve more than non-auditioned, as they have filtered out all the people who lack whichever set of skills you test for at audition.

Delegates and singers

I spent yesterday down in Saltash, near Plymouth, running a workshop for choral directors from the area. It was organised and hosted by Brunel Harmony, who also provided singers for the directors to be coached working with, and involved 19 current, assistants and aspiring directors from 10 local choirs and choruses, with levels of experience ranging from decades in the job to complete novices.

It can be quite difficult for people living in the country’s peripheries to get up to training events, which are - not surprisingly - usually held in more central regions. So it makes a lot of sense to import workshops instead of travelling out to them, not just logistically and economically, but also in terms of the opportunities for networking. However exciting it is to meet conductors from across the country, it is more useful, on a day-to-day basis, to get to know your neighbours.

The recent kerfuffle about conducting and sexism, along with some thought-provoking posts over on the Thoughtful Gestures blog, have reminded me of some thoughts I put together for a lecture last year at a girls' school entitled 'Where Have All the Women Gone?' Having revisited my notes I find there's actually more I might want to write about here than I remembered, but for today I'll stick with Prototype Theory.

This is an idea first developed by psychologist Eleanor Rosch in 1973 to explain one of the fundamental ways we organise our perception of the world into categories. And in each over-arching category, there will be some examples that seem more typical of that category than others. One of her early studies found that there was a considerable consensus that, while hat stands might logically belong to the category of 'furniture' people would think of tables or chairs much more readily as representative of the class.

One of the delightful by-products of being a tutor on courses such as the British Kodály Academy’s is that when you’re not delivering sessions, you get to sit in on other people’s. Indeed, I had the honour of teaching László Nemes the term ‘gatecrash’ to describe my attendance at his conducting class one afternoon. (His English is excellent, so one can only assume he is too polite to have needed this word before.)

There were three specific details in the work he did with the course participants that caught my attention.

Elbows are not useful body-parts for the choral conductor. Or at least, they are not helpful if they assert their presence in the conducting process. Clearly, having a joint between shoulder and wrist is useful, not just for the choral conductor, but for any human being who wishes to do things like scratch their head or put on a cardigan.

But the moment the elbow starts to be perceptibly present - if it flaps or sticks out - it starts to spoil the choral sound. Conductors who have sticky-out elbows produce a sound that is shallow and unsupported, the upper parts shrill and the lower parts foggy.

Conversely, conductors whose arms operate as integrated units, a clean line from shoulder to fingertip, undistorted by the protrusion of intermediate joints, produce a clean, resonant sound, with all parts integrated into an undistorted sound.

Like others who blog, I was very torn about whether to comment on the recently-reported comments of Jorma Panula about female conductors. As one friend put it, 'Oh for God's sake. Why do the press even give these dinosaurs the publicity?' There is this fond hope that eventually we will outlive everyone who hangs onto these views and the world will be a more benign place, and in the meantime the kindest thing to do is just ignore them.

But the comments thread that ensued after the Artsjournal article suggests that this fond hope is but a delusion. I have a hunch that women of the 1930s were saying similar things about ageing Victorian relics even as misogyny was on the rise once again. So, sorry folks, but we're going to have to take a look at this. Not at Panula, who, frankly comes over as a caricature of himself, but at the arguments that emerged in the responses on the artsjournal report.

When you get an email with the subject line 'quick question', you sometimes know that, while the question might be quick, finding the answer is actually your whole life's work. A recent email from a conductor I've been working with contained the following question:

I was thinking about what you were saying about using too much of my body. It was something I had been aware of, and I intend to work on it. But I was trying to work out how it came about. I think it’s a question of rehearsal technique – trying to convey the ‘shape’ of the song to the chorus without having to break it down. When I start a song, how is it best to teach the overall shape? Would you do it verbally? Break it down section by section? I think I was being lazy and trying, perhaps, to achieve too much too quickly by showing them rather than explaining it very well.

Now, some directors don't have this problem. They find standing still and beating time without flapping round like a tent in a hurricane comes naturally. For many of us, however, the challenge is how to keep our physical expressiveness under control.

On Wednesday I had a return visit to work with the Belles of Three Spires in Coventry. As with my previous work with them, it was a nice balance between work with the singers on musical detail and work with the directing team on aspects of conducting technique.

The first part of the evening was spent delving into the nitty-gritty of a song they had learned to that stage of basically-solid-but-not-yet-nuanced. The process was one of connecting the detail of arrangement choices to the narrative and emotional state of the song's protagonist - i.e. a process of characterisation. That makes it sound very grown-up. But it was a playful song, so that gave us the excuse to use lots of highly frivolous metaphors. You know you're going to have a laugh when the rhythmic flavour a song needs is 'giggle'.