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    Choral Conducting

    Uploaded by

    Onum Gilbert
    This document provides an introduction to a workshop on choral conducting. It discusses the importance of developing conducting skills through formal training. It explains that conducting involves using hand and arm gestures to communicate with musicians instead of speech. The right hand beats time while the left hand highlights expressive qualities. It outlines important conducting patterns and techniques for a conductor to master, including maintaining clear gestures, recognizing pitch inaccuracies, using facial expressions to portray the music, and establishing rapport with accompanists.

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    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Choral Conducting

    Uploaded by

    Onum Gilbert
    3K views6 pages
    This document provides an introduction to a workshop on choral conducting. It discusses the importance of developing conducting skills through formal training. It explains that conducting involves using hand and arm gestures to communicate with musicians instead of speech. The right hand beats time while the left hand highlights expressive qualities. It outlines important conducting patterns and techniques for a conductor to master, including maintaining clear gestures, recognizing pitch inaccuracies, using facial expressions to portray the music, and establishing rapport with accompanists.

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    Choral conducting

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    This document provides an introduction to a workshop on choral conducting. It discusses the importance of developing conducting skills through formal training. It explains that conducting involves using hand and arm gestures to communicate with musicians instead of speech. The right hand beats time while the left hand highlights expressive qualities. It outlines important conducting patterns and techniques for a conductor to master, including maintaining clear gestures, recognizing pitch inaccuracies, using facial expressions to portray the music, and establishing rapport with accompanists.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as doc, pdf, or txt
    3K views6 pages

    Choral Conducting

    Uploaded by

    Onum Gilbert
    This document provides an introduction to a workshop on choral conducting. It discusses the importance of developing conducting skills through formal training. It explains that conducting involves using hand and arm gestures to communicate with musicians instead of speech. The right hand beats time while the left hand highlights expressive qualities. It outlines important conducting patterns and techniques for a conductor to master, including maintaining clear gestures, recognizing pitch inaccuracies, using facial expressions to portray the music, and establishing rapport with accompanists.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as doc, pdf, or txt
    of 6
    At a glance
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    Some of the key takeaways are that conducting involves using gestures rather than speech to communicate with musicians, and a conductor's style reflects their personality. Developing conducting skills takes practice and it is important to have some formal training.

    The downbeat marks the first beat of a measure while the upbeat is the beat before. An ictus is the point of emphasis in conducting patterns. A cutoff indicates the end of a musical phrase.

    A conductor should be able to read a full score to understand all parts, be familiar with different musical styles, use clear unambiguous gestures, recognize pitch inaccuracies, and maintain expressive facial expressions and confident posture.

    Choral

    Conductin
    g
    A workshop facilitated by

    Onum Gilbert
    Phone: (+234)7039059605
    E-Mail: [email protected]

    First edition: December 2010


    Introduction:
    As with every aspect of music, conducting is a skill
    that needs to be developed. Unfortunately, just hands full of
    conductors in most of our choirs and chorales today, have had
    one form of formal training or the other. The vast majority
    of these conductors, learnt on the job after series of
    embarrassments, some others, drew experiences from watching
    their local choirmasters/conductors. Some of whom may not
    have been very good role models. Enhancing ones conducting
    skills in such a circumstance could be very difficult.

    Conducting
    Conducting involves the use of musical sign language
    made up of hands, arm and facial gestures rather than speech,
    to communicate with the musicians in the ensemble or chorale.
    This tends to reflect the individual’s personality in the
    conducting as his feelings are articulated on the piece of
    music rendered. This is not to say that standard practices do
    not exist but that no two choirmasters can be the same even
    if the use the same standard.

    The functions of the right and left hands


    The function of the right hand is to beat time, while
    the left hand is to highlight in some way the expressive
    qualities of the music. The right hand indicates dynamics (by
    varying the size of the beat) and the left hand is employed
    by the conductor to deal with the beginning and end of a
    phrase.

    Important things to note


    Downbeat/upbeat: the downbeat is the beat immediately after
    the bar or in other words the first accented beat of a
    measure. While the upbeat is the beat just before another bar
    Ictus:
    Cutoff:

    Conducting patterns
    Timing;

    - 4/4 pattern can also be used in 4/2, 4/8 and fast 12/8
    - 3/4 pattern can also be used in 3/2, 3/8, 3/16 and fast 9/8

    - 2/4 pattern also used in 2/2, 2/8

    Skills/Technique:

    - Don’t sing with the choir

    Your singing distracts you from helping your performers,


    since you can’t hear well while you are singing along.

    - Be able to read a full score


    This would enable you to be able to sing all parts so you
    know when a part is going off, and you are able to make
    corrections where necessary.

    - Be familiar with a wide range of musical styles

    - Use clear and unambiguous gestures

    Maintain a clear gesture that your musicians will be able to


    understand. Your gestures should be able to make the
    performance better and not to mare the performance.

    - Recognize Pitch inaccuracy


    In other words, you know when the choir has gone off-key as
    most us would call it. And also to know if a modulation in a
    piece of music is been observed accurately.

    - Facial expression/posture

    Your face must represent the song/music so the choir can


    understand how to sing the song and also you must position
    yourself in such a ways as to portray self-confidence,
    leadership and seriousness. Don’t burry your face while
    conducting: This is, so that you can look into their eyes and
    communicate dynamics, new tempo, and rests. You are also able
    to identify choristers that are participating or not.

    - Establish a rapport with the accompanists

    To ensure smooth accompaniment of the music, correct tuning


    of keys, playing of intros, interludes etc
    Dos and don’ts

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