CJ Replay: The Conductor’s Face

“As choral conductors we are called upon to grasp hold of a composer’s intentions and then communicate those intentions first to our choirs and then, through performance, to our audiences. The conductor’s primary tools of communication are gestures, though in our rehearsals we rely heavily on words often far too heavily. Ab, the patience of a choir! But, relative to our role in performance as non-verbal communicators, we have been bombarded with how-to-do-it books on conducting. In them we are given endless coaching on the use of our hands. We encounter page after page of charts, graphs, patterns to trace, musical illustrations with technical problems to solve. All this is fine; few of us suffer from too much technique. But does the highest level of conductor-to-singer communication travel by way of the gesture? Is it through the sweep of the hands that mind meets mind and heart meets heart? Does not the ultimate contact between singer and conductor occur when face meets face? “Watch the stick? and “keep your eye on the conductor” are our unending saws, but is it not our faces that our singers really watch? Gestures? Yes, but only peripherally. The focus is not eye to hand, but eye to eye.”

 

(from the Choral Journal article “Right Face,” by David H. Williams)