In one of those over-stressed moments that tackle us from time to time, I started think about my career choice, and conducting in general. I started to develop this idea of the poor conductor/educator caged and held down. I wanted to visualize this situation and I reached out to my talented niece Alessia and asked her to draw my idea. This is what she sent me:
At first I was focused on the actual caged conductor and wanted to write about how I sometimes feel trapped inside a cage of paperwork, meetings, and everything nonmusical about my job. But honestly that is something we all must deal with, and well, to be blunt, that isn’t going to change. I put the drawing down and started to wonder about what it was that was really bothering me. A day later I came back to the drawing and focused on the ball and chain holding the conductor down, and how she used musical notation as the chain. Then I realized this picture represented how we can feel musically from time to time, and the steps I have taken over the years to give up some of the musical chains wrapped around me.
As conductors, we take on way too much responsibility. I honestly feel that in some ways we have become shackled by all the things we feel we need to control while in front of the group. It is time to let go of some of what we feel we need to oversee and give some of the responsibility to the students in the ensemble. Isn’t our goal to teach the students and not teach to the concert? This article contains several exercises and techniques you can use to help give your students more say in the music, and will lead to their being more responsible for more aspects of ensemble playing. These are long term teaching tools that will take some patience and time. Don’t give up on them! Take a leap of faith and help your ensemble learn how to create music.
I have made a conscience decision to give up two aspects of control over my ensemble. Those two aspects are intonation and pulse. That is not to say that I don’t have expectations as far as ensemble intonation go, and there have been growing pains. But I no longer spend much time tuning my ensemble at the beginning of rehearsal. Honestly, once you have tuned your ensemble to a wonderful B-flat or A, you have managed to prove that for one shining moment, you have one note in tune. That does not do a lot for the rest of your rehearsal unless your ensemble members have some fundamentals already in their grasp. The first is that instruments have a wide variety of flaws in their intonation, and the musicians in your ensemble need to know these. Do you or your students know what these are? Shelley Jagow’s Tuning for Wind Instruments is a very good guide to the intonation tendencies you need to know. The next step having your students do intonation charts as out of class assignments. Have each student explore the tendencies of their own instrument. Have them work in pairs and one man the tuner. It is very easy to subconsciously adjust the needle if they are looking at it, but a tuning partner will keep that from happening.
During your rehearsal, you will have to stop to tune pitches from time to time. Resist the urge to tell your students if they are sharp of flat. There are two better, and more educational approaches to help teach intonation that will have long lasting positive effects on your ensemble. You can have the student determine their own intonation, or you can have other students help. When a student plays a note out of tune, have their neighbor correct the intonation. The worst-case scenario is that the student is wrong and it becomes obvious when the player makes the wrong adjustment. Will this take time? At first, yes, but in the long term you will have to tune your ensemble less and less, as the students learn to hear and adjust on their own.
When it comes to pulse, you need to give the students responsibility for the pulse of the ensemble. To play together they must do more than just watch you flail your arms around in a futile attempt to keep them together. Teach your ensemble to feel the pulse, and teach them to feel the rhythm. Discourage foot pounding in rehearsal. I have heard far too many indoor sitting marching bands pound their feet to keep time, and it rarely works! And even if it does, the foot stomping takes away from the music. Have them develop a sense of internal pulse.
We all play with a metronome, and sometimes a loud pulse through the sound system can be used to keep an ensemble together. Does this help your ensemble develop a sense of pulse, or is this just the easy way to get them to follow the loud pings blaring over the sound system? Have you ever tried playing with a metronome on silent and after giving your ensemble a count off seeing where it goes? You know what will happen the first few times. The ensemble will not hold together because they don’t hear that loud pulse to lean on. Will that loud pulse be there for the performance? I hope not! Get your students to understand the fact that they are in control of the pulse for better or worse, and they need to learn how to be better at pulse. Teach them to count things in subdivision. This is step one in being more consistent with pulse. Teach them to hear the important instruments that are giving the pulse of the work being rehearsed and performed. And what should you do if the ensemble slows down? The easy answer, and the one even I do from time to time, is to conduct harder and bigger to try and get every one’s attention to let them know they are slowing down. The only problem with this solution is that you will slow yourself down by pounding out beats. If your ensemble slows down and can’t stay together, don’t conduct them. Make them do it themselves without you. It may completely fall apart that first time they don’t take you serious, but then do it again. Tell them to listen and keep time together. They will get it. Just give them time, and you will figure out that you don’t have to conduct everything!
How good is your sense of pulse? I do an exercise with my beginning conducting class. I have them all stand in a circle and using a metronome on silent I count off a measure and have them conduct a four pattern. I will count out loud with them for two measures and then I will tell them to close their eyes and keep conducting even when I stop counting. After a few measures I have them open their eyes. No two conductors are together. Once they close their eyes, and don’t have the pulse given to them, they fall apart. Then we add subdivision and when they start to focus it all comes together. Try something similar with your ensemble. Much like intonation, the long-term goal is good ensemble pulse without you being a crutch. This will take time. And this is not to say that pulse must be constant throughout music. The pulse should move and flow with the music. But don’t let lack of a sense of pulse dictate how the music flows.
Moving beyond those two basic areas, what else can we “give up” and let go of? Another area would be warm ups. What do you do for a warm up? To me a warm up is a chance to get the students listening to each other. It is a chance to help focus the ensemble sound. When visiting schools, I see a wide variety of warm ups being used, but there seems to be just as wide a variety of thoughts on what a warm up is. Is a warm up time for the students to get their fingers moving or is it time for the ensemble to open up and come together in sound. To me the answer is both. The warm up should be personal and ensemble based, more leaning towards ensemble based though. How long a warm up lasts also varies widely from program to program. I want to argue though that how long you warm up should vary from rehearsal to rehearsal. There are things you shouldn’t do when warming up. Don’t just do the same warm up every rehearsal. This will lead to students just going along with the routine and not focusing on anything.
In a perfect world, where we had so much rehearsal time, we could give our students plenty of time to play some notes on their own before we warm up as an ensemble. Then we could spend ten to fifteen minutes warming up the group and getting them going before we tackle the music we are learning. But that is obviously a dream, or it is? What if you do give the students a few minutes to blow some notes and get the air moving on their own? Then move on to something that makes the students open their ears and listen to the sounds around them. Do a chorale, or a slow scale, or maybe some chord building. I see ensembles blow through fast scales and wonder how that helps. Students are so focused on surviving the lightning fast finger moves that they aren’t listening to anything around them. That kind of routine is great for personal warm up, but not for ensemble warm up.
But back to the point of this article, and how you can let go of warming up the ensemble. Have you thought of letting students warm up the group? There are a few reasons why this will help. One is it gives the students an idea of what the ensemble sounds like from a place other than in it. These concepts of ensemble are easy to talk about, but give the students a chance to hear it from the front of the group, and give them a chance to be in charge of the sound being created. Have a rotation of students who will warm up the ensemble, and have a bank of warm ups for them to select from. And this will give you a chance to step off the podium and wander the ensemble hearing things that you probably have never heard before. Get off the podium and get in to the heart of your ensemble. It will change how you hear things as well.
There are so many more ways to let go, and I certainly can’t talk about them all in one article, but this is a start. Remember these are long term projects, and not things that you can instantly change. And honestly, not everything will work with every ensemble. As ensemble directors, we need to be open to change, and willing to fall flat on our faces when things don’t work. If your goal is to teach the music and perform concerts that sound very nice, without much knowledge being passed on, then don’t let go. If your goal is to teach music and teach your students how to create, then you need to let go of some things and let your students learn, take chances, and create on their own. In the long term your ensemble will come together in ways you can’t even imagine. I won’t lie, I still put myself in that musical ball and chain from time to time, but I strive to break out and learn more about me and my students every day.
