Undergraduate Choral Conducting Blog

I learned today that it is essential to simultaneously execute the plan in your head and listen to the group. I tend to focus on only one or the other and need to work on balancing the two. On Friday, for example, I learned that it is possible to worry about executing a plan so hard that you actually lose sight of where you are in the music. I know I could have had more success if I had worked harder to ingrain the excerpt into my head.

That said, I am glad I needed extra help with the 2 beat fermata because my mini-lesson was very helpful to me. I had thought about the motions of the fermata, but did not spend enough time breaking these motions into substeps that occur on specific parts of beats. Now that I am thinking about subdividing my conducting motion, fermatas become much more complex because their location within a measure changes my conducting motion to a greater extent. While I will explore subdividing my conducting patterns, I am always cautious of compromising musicality for exact precision. These two elements have an interesting relationship -- they aren't contradictory, but I don't think the two go hand in hand.