Conducting

One of the most enlightening books I have ever read is David McNeill’s Gesture and Thought. I drew on its theoretical findings for my central discussions of conducting gesture in my recently published book on choral conducting. It is a wonderful thing when you find a theory that explains so clearly things that you see in real life.

Tone Bianca DahlOne of the sessions at the ABCD Convention at the end of August was workshop on communication between choir, conductor and audience led by Tone Bianca Dahl. Tone teaches choral conducting at the Norwegian Academy of Music, and her book on this subject has recently been translated into English. Her central question in the presentation was: what creates the magic?; and can we create it at will?

Farnham Youth Choir in open rehearsalThe August bank holiday weekend always has far more fun things going on than one could possibly go to, and this year I spent it in Winchester at the Association of British Choral Directors Convention. I was presenting on the Sunday morning, but had the rest of the time available to hear other people’s sessions, mooch about the Exhibition, go to the gala concert and generally have a fun time hanging out with a bunch of interesting people.

I spent a happy day on Saturday coaching Bristol Fashion chorus and their director of two years, Craig Kehoe. As I was there for the whole day, we had plenty of time to explore their music in some depth, including work on different types of swing, embellishment strategies, the relationship between emotion and vocal colour, as well as some of the more colourful harmonies.

The area I spent most time thinking about on the way home, though, was our exploration of the relationship between Craig’s gestures and the singers’ voices.

‘Don’t think of pink elephants,’ is the phrase Bill Rashleigh uses to get directors to think about the vocabulary they choose. Obviously, everybody immediately does think about pink elephants. A similar thing is likely to happen, he suggests, when a director says, ‘don’t sing flat’. ‘Hmm, flat’, goes everyone’s brains, and the pitch follows the thought obediently downwards.

So, the initial message is that we should couch our requests in positive rather than negative terms. Say what the music needs, rather than what’s wrong with it. This is good advice from Bill, and I’ve found that learning to follow it has had a number of useful effects beyond the simple one of avoiding evoking counter-productive thoughts in rehearsal:

The posture of the conductor will set the example for the choir. Usually stay erect, with the body expanded. Women directors should stand with their feet only as far apart as is necessary to maintain good balance.

Paul Roe, Choral Music Education

ChoralReef has a fascinating post about gender and conducting, ranging from generic questions of gestural clarity, to different types of leadership style, to the question of ‘girly gestures’. Here it homes right in on the key issue that women face when they become conductors: if we do it the same as guys do, then we’re branded as inappropriately unfeminine, if we do it differently, we’re girly and not to be taken seriously. One of the commenters on the post replies with the opinion that female conductors should ‘leave their gender at the door’. This is just such one of those ‘well, yes, but….’ type suggestions that I wanted to spend a bit of time contemplating it.

‘Backing off’ is a standard metaphor for asking people to sing a bit quieter. In fact, it is so standard that we mostly don’t notice that it is a metaphor. But when you think about it, we don’t usually want people actually to move further away from us, we simply want them to sing in a way that gives that impression – i.e. with less volume.

But in real life of course, ‘backing off’ is also not just a spatial thing, it is also about attitude and behaviour.

I spent a happy four hours with Amersham A Cappella yesterday afternoon. They invited me down not only to coach the chorus, but also to work with Helen, their director, and Rose, assistant director, on conducting technique. It takes a certain amount of courage for directors to put themselves on the line like that in front of their singers, and it is a testament to the spirit of trust and mutual support within the chorus that their directors felt willing to do so.

But it really paid dividends. I’m not knocking dedicated training events for directors – they do lots of valuable things that you can’t necessarily achieve working with a conductor’s own ensemble – but equally there are things that you can only do working with both director and their singers together. Such as: