Do Gestures Matter? A Research-based Approach to Conducting Gesture By Jeremy N. Manternach, Ph.D.


Editor’s Note: This article appears as one of a series written especially for Ala Breve by experts in the field of music education.


Teacher-conductors often have intense beliefs as to what constitutes a “good” conducting gesture.


That said, various


accomplished conductors’ firmly held beliefs are often at odds with one another. In many instances, conducting students are asked to unlearn much of what a previous instructor had taught them in favor of the “proper” technique. Herein lies the rub. Holden (2003) has pointed out that “any discussion of conducting technique can be problematic” (p. 3) because there are so many disparate opinions regarding its definition. So is the old adage true: the only thing two conductors can agree upon is the incompetence of a third? Maybe not. Over a number of decades, researchers in the social and neurosciences have examined human interaction in a variety of situations. These researchers have found that human beings tend to imitate one another. Among their findings, participants have been shown to imitate various gestures (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999), postures (LaFrance 1979; LaFrance & Broadbent, 1976), facial muscular activity (Dimberg, Thunberg, & Elmehed, 2000), and arm tension (Berger & Hadley, 1975). These imitative behaviors have been more likely to occur when there are high levels of rapport. In many cases, the research participants were not even aware that they had imitated another person.


Hoffer has


speculated that “When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other” (quoted in Emotional Contagion, Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1994, p. 16).


Maybe these findings don’t surprise us.


We watch scary movies in order to experience fear ourselves. Our scalp seems to get itchy the moment we hear about a local elementary school’s problem with lice. We flinch and can almost feel the pain when a kicker is flattened by an unseen blocker.


Simply observing


someone who is yawning is often enough to cause us to yawn ourselves. In some cases, we need only read the word “yawn” (Did it work? For a fun challenge, try visiting http://www.dontyawngame.com/). In his book, Mirroring People, neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni (2008) asserted that such responses may be related to the human mirror system. First discovered in macaque monkeys, this system is said to


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contain neurons that fire while both observing and performing a task. In many cases, he asserts, these mirror neurons cause us to simulate others’ actions, leading to physical responses.1


Regardless of the cause,


researchers have thoroughly documented the human tendency to imitate one another, referring to it as “the chameleon effect,” “the perception-behavior link,” or “emotional contagion.” So what? How does this information affect our pedagogy? If this relationship occurs in daily human


interactions, might it also occur in musical settings? Some teacher-conductors have proposed just that. Axel Theimer and The VoiceCare Network2


, Rodney Eichenberger,


James Jordan (1996) and others have argued that rigid and/or muscled conductor gestures and postures can cause singers to vocalize with more tension. Eichenberger has even created a well-known instructional video on the topic, entitled What They See is What You Get. Karl Gehrkens, former professor at Oberlin College, claimed that conductors rely on “instinctive imitation; that is, his methods are founded upon the fact that human beings have an innate tendency to copy the actions of others, often without being conscious that they are doing so (Gehrkens, 1919, p. 3). These teacher-conductors have relied on


their own experiences or research outside music to back their claims.


Much of the


research in musical settings has seemed to target ensemble expressivity or timing. More recently, however, researchers have taken a different tack, testing whether choristers would directly or indirectly imitate the gestures and tensions of a conductor. In one of the first studies on this topic


(Manternach, 2012b), participants moved their head or shoulders more during inhalation while watching a conductor who modeled upward head or shoulder movements during his prep gestures. In another study, Daugherty and Brunkan (2013) found that singers tended to round their lips more when a conductor modeled an /u/ (“ooh”) vowel while they sang a short melody.


In a


replication of this study (Manternach, 2012a), singers not only imitated conductor lip rounding, but also showed a tendency to imitate conductor eyebrow raising over time. Perhaps most interestingly, some singers


changed their behaviors without reporting that the conductor had made any changes. It is possible that these results represent other-than-conscious singer behaviors. Other researchers have measured indirect


imitation of conductor muscle tension. Fuelberth (2003) investigated whether singers would respond differently to various left hand crescendo gestures as they sang a short folk song. She found that a left hand fisted or stabbing gesture corresponded with the highest ratings of inappropriate singer tension. Most recently (Manternach, in press), I used surface electromyography (sEMG) to measure singer extrinsic laryngeal muscles as they breathed while watching various conductor prep gestures. Singers engaged one neck muscle (the sternocleidomastoid) slightly more vigorously during some occurrences of a conductor “fisted” gesture compared to one with an open palm. On a related note, singers also engaged a muscle at the base of the tongue (the suprahyoid, a laryngeal lifting muscle) slightly less vigorously when the conductor used a prep gesture that initially dropped (thus simulating a 4th


beat of a


standard four-beat pattern) rather than one that went straight up and returned to the conducting plane.


It is possible that the


slightly longer duration of the dropped gesture allowed for less muscle engagement. One may argue that these are laboratory


results gathered in artificial settings. They involve participants who sang for a pre- recorded conductor and may have been wearing measurement devices. True enough. They used “reductionist” research designs. However, such designs allow us to isolate one conductor behavior.


In doing so, we can


eliminate variables and be sure that singer changes were related to the variable we want to study.


Should these results reflect real responses to conductor nonverbal gestures, what are the implications for a choral teacher-conductor who is standing on the podium? Consider a few questions: How do you demonstrate breathing to


your choirs? Do you show the breath with a head and/or shoulder lift or take a noisy breath in order to “help” your students know when to come in? Do you furrow your brow or flex your arm muscles in order to show dynamic


May/June 2015


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