Conducting

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'.

I had a note recently from a conductor of a community band about his dilemma of whether he should continue working with them. I say 'note' - it was actually a lengthy reflection on the situation as it has developed over the decade he has been working with them. So I can only summarise here. But I think I can pull out the key points, and they are questions that face many musicians at various points in their lives, so worth mulling over together.

So the situation, in brief, is this. During his tenure, there are significant ways in which he feels he has succeeded: the band's performance standard is better, they are tackling more interesting and/or more ambitious music, and membership is up.

But he is worried that this process has also involved a degree of loss of some of the qualities that he valued on first acquaintance with the band: musical leadership and organisational management are more top-down these days, with the players seeming less in involved in things like suggesting music or finding gigs. He is worried that people are having less fun - there's less laughter in rehearsal, less buzz, less vibrancy.

In my recent post about the nature of conductor-choir attention, I was focusing primarily on the flow of information between director and singers. How if the conductor is thinking about ‘depicting’ the music to the choir more than they are noticing how the choir is (how they sound, how they look), then that limits their opportunity to adapt in real time to the needs of the emerging music.

It occurred to me as I was finishing that post that there’s also a technical factor at play here. I noted that you can tell when a director is really listening hard, from their body language - the whole posture and gesture space becomes more integrated, more connected, visually ‘quieter’. A director looks at their best, that is, when they are not thinking about how they look, but instead about how their choir sounds.

Circles of involvement: increasing levels of engagement as you head inwardsIn my last post on this subject, we had got as far as feeling sympathy for people who don't volunteer for jobs to keep the choir running, as part of an understandable desire to husband one's energies and attention. Now we need to figure out how inveigle them into making the effort.

I should add that one of the reasons I am finding this a valuable subject to write about is because it is one that doesn't come naturally to me. I have phrased it as 'daring' to delegate, because my first instinct has tended to be to hope people won't mind my asking. I am much better at this than I used to be, but I still feel like this is a work in progress in my own life. So I am writing to consolidate and develop what I have learned as much as to help those who find themselves in similar situations. But then, you knew already that's why I keep a blog, right? It's not just for you...

Our goal, then, is to create a culture of volunteering, that encourages people to move inwards on our diagram of involvement. It is worth revisiting Kotter's model of organisational change here, as this is a classic case where you need something to build urgency to motivate the change before the transformation can happen.