Las Amarillas (last one!)
I watched the video and felt that it was drum-major conducting from me! Bouncy, vigorous gestures are great for the football field, but probably not helpful for a choir. I need to find a way to communicate rhythmic vitality without jumpiness.
Stan, my conducting yogi, observed that I have too much upward energy in general. He had me practice hitting a music stand while I conduct and being careful not to recoil upwards. It’s a challenge to cultivate even, perpetual motion between beats. I think it’s symptommatic of beginning to think more about expression than the beat pattern- when you turn your focus away, things begin to slip and get sloppy.
Steph, Kristin, and I just taught the piece at Central High School this past week. I remember being challenged by the rhythms when I intially learned it to conduct in class. Parts of Las Amarillas have a 2-3 clave rhythmic motif, an Afro-Cuban convention which took me a basically a semester of percussion methods to figure out.
When I took the piece out again last week, however, the rhythms seemed much more organic. We performed it as a trio for the choir to hear how the parts locked together and led sectional rehearsals, which went really well for all of us. It think it was a matter of having time to live with the piece and absorb it. I am looking forward to conducting it again for “conductor’s choice” classes- I think I’m beginning to understand it vertically now as well as horizontally.