Wood River (also belated!)
In her Wood River blog entry, Claire complimented me on the idea of jumping into three for a measure and pondered how conductors can better think outside the box. Well, to share my strategy, I prepare by making the most intuitive gesture that comes to mind as I sing the melodic line. As choral singers, we’re taught to minimize all body movement, and even as soloists, we’re only allowed the most controlled gestures. It’s quite therapeutic to dance and flail around practice room and probably helps internalize the piece a la Dalcroze. Who knows if this has a big impact on my conducting, but it certainly helps me to explore the tone of a piece in greater depth.
There are times, though, where I feel stumped to create a gesture, so I will systemmatically determine the “signpost” of the phrase. In a masterclass last semester, Met baritone Alan Monk talked about determining the arrival point of each phrase and assigning yourself some sort of expressive task for each unique phrase. My conducting mentor, Stan, supported this with the idea of mapping left hand gestures into the score. He shared his own symbol system for this, which was impressively complex. I understand that many conductors will mark their score with metric symbols or indicators, but it was very helpful for me to determine a role for my left hand ahead of time.
Anyhow, Claire, thanks for the shout-out. I really learned something from your commentary about conducting “without apologizing.” In the arts, talent is useless if you don’t “own it.” Because conducting is a new area of practice for us, it's tempting to be wimpy and shy on the podium, but if we don't have confidence in ourselves, no one else will buy it!