NAfME-Collegiate guet article
Conducting for Sound: How Expressive Conducting Can Affect Ensemble Sound
by Abby Meeds, University of Missouri - Columbia
There are many factors that contribute to an ensembles’ sound. We spend most of our musical lives practicing things like tone, vowels, and diction. As new music educators begin to make the transition from ensemble member to ensemble leader another contributing factor to sound is thrown at us: conducting. The art of conducting is a continuously growing set of skills for an individual. One element that sets apart the greatest of conductors is expressivity. Proper expressive gesture can influence not only audience perception of an ensemble, but also the ensemble’s sound. Expressivity is typically associated with veteran conductors, my goal in this article to outline some of the features that create expressive conducting in ways that resonate with young technically oriented conductors like myself.
Let’s explore three big questions. What factors contribute to an ensembles sound? Which of these factors can we as conductors influence, and how? Lastly, how does one become expressive?
We’ll start by looking at two aspects of sound (psychological and physiological/Figure 1A) and two aspects of conducting (mechanical and expressive/Figure 1B) and compare elements of both. Alan Gumm (2012) depicted a guide for creating expressive conducting through six different functions: Mechanical Precision Function, Expressive Function, Motivational Function, Physical Technique Function, Unrestrained Tone Function, and Psychosocial Function. While exploring Gumm’s functions we’ll connect them to different aspects sound.
The mechanical precision function contains basic conducting elements such as beat, meter, and time keeping (Gumm, 2012). While these elements are not strictly expressive it is necessary for an ensemble to have a clear understanding of them in order to
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create sound at all, let alone expressive sound. It is also important to note the cons of relying solely on mechanical precision in that choirs will perform with better precision without a conductor than with a strictly metric conductor (Acklin, 2009). When using mechanical precision to influence sound conductors should focus on physiological aspects of sound especially such as diction and posture. One can accomplish this through precise cutoffs for hard consonance such as t, k, or s; and consistently modeling proper singing posture on the podium.
Physical technique entails a conductor’s focus on energy levels, musical strength, and the direction of motions required to produce a particular sound (Gumm, 2012). One interesting aspect of physical technique lies within the conducting plane. Silvey and Fisher (2015) depicted the correlation of height of conducting plane and expressivity. They found
See MEEDS, p. 57 MISSOURI SCHOOL MUSIC | Volume 71, Number 3
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