This ebook, An Alexander Technique Approach to Conducting (Conductors’) Technique, is published on this website in a PDF format. It is very detailed and practical, and it will give you the physical tools you need to take the limits off of your ability to create the accurate conducting technique you want without sacrificing your body.
This ebook is also for sale on all AMAZON websites in a KINDLE format.
Located in Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S.A. (MOVEMENT THERAPY)
If your technique is good enough for you conduct a piece with ease, what stands between you and conducting the piece magnificently expressively? Fear of breaking the rules stands between you and unfettered expressive conducting.
Fear of what rules? Fear of conducting without a net. What do I mean? I mean fear of conducting without any set rules, of conducting without all of your conducting teachers sitting on your shoulders telling you what to do where.
If as a conductor you say to yourself, “I’m throwing out everything I was ever told I had to do by my conducting teachers who set strict limits on what is musical conducting”, then what are you left with? YOU ARE LEFT WITH THE FREEDOM TO EXPRESS YOURSELF WHEN YOU CONDUCT WITHOUT ANY PHYSICAL, PSYCHOLOGICAL, OR SPIRITUAL LIMITS.
Why do we see many conductors rarely doing this? What you do see among a lot of wonderful conductors are those who conduct by all of the limiting rules they’ve been taught, but they do it so incredibly well with extraordinary technique, able to get what the conductor wants from the performers!
Now, I want to clarify something here. I’m not talking about conducting a piece so eccentrically that it totally departs bizarrely from what the composer intended, or so eccentrically that the listeners can’t connect to the performance.
I’m talking about conducting with such fearless unguarded emotion being expressed through the notes, that the conductor and the audience know they’re in the presence of a performance where the conductor is communicating everything he or she is intending through the notes, forte, piano, crescendo, decrescendo, color changes, rubato. All of the above is incorporated at their most subtle and to their greatest expressive extreme.
For the above to happen, the conductor has to know, to be shown, that it is nearly impossible to be too expressive. When I ask a conductor to demonstrate conducting a piece with too much expression, what I typically get is a conducted piece with just the right amount of expressiveness in it.
Here are two other non-musical examples of expressiveness, of freedom, where the person asked to exaggerate creates an incredibly more interesting activity: walking and public speaking. When I ask a public speaker to wildly experiment with speaking faster/slower and louder/softer, it is amazing how much more interesting the speech is.
When I ask someone I’m teaching how to walk with the principles of the Alexander Technique, to swing their arms too much, it is usually for the first time in that person’s life that he or she is truly swinging their arms enough. To the walker, he or she may feel like they’re doing something from the Monty Python’s Ministry of Funny Walks, but they truly look free with their walking arms swinging easily
So, why do a great many conductors conduct with what I call flat expressiveness? (I consider conducting everything too loud as flat expressive conducting.)
THEY DO SO BECAUSE THEY ARE PLAYING IT SAFE LITERALLY AND FIGURATIVELY. FLAT EXPRESSIVE CONDUCTING IS NEITHER RIGHT NOR WRONG, AND WHEN TIED TO GREAT TECHNIQUE, THE LISTENER IS BLINDED BY THE FACT THAT THE PERFORMANCE WASN’T ALL THAT INTERESTING – WAS NOT INSPIRING!
I want to define GREAT TECHNIQUE here in the Alexander Technique sense. Great technique is the ability to conduct the greatest orchestral and/or choral literature with ease without harming your body over your years of conducting. Traditionally great technique is defined as being able to conduct the great pieces with ease and accuracy with minimal concern for the wear and tear you’re causing your body. THIS WEAR AND TEAR IS UNNECESSARY WHEN A WHOLE BODY CONDUCTING TECHNIQUE PLACES CARE OF YOU FIRST.
I you usually play it safe, why? What is the payoff? Let me flip this over. What is the great danger in conducting massively expressively? I’m really exaggerating in this article, (or maybe not. Ha!ha!)
This is a very good place in this article for me to be an Alexander Teacher. Conducting “massively expressively” is about expressing yourself musically, BUT NOT ABOUT SHOWING THE AUDIENCE HOW TENSE YOU CAN PHYSICALLY BE TO CONVEY MUSICAL CONTRASTS AND FEELINGS.
DO NOT CONFUSE INTENSITY IN PERFORMANCE WITH INTENSITY IN PERFORMANCE. Intensity in performance is pure contrasting expression heard, when the orchestra and/or choral group is being listened to by an audience with its eyes closed. Tension in a performance is when the audience closes its eyes, and realizes you’re just not all that interesting of a conductor.
If you conduct the right notes in a piece with flat expressiveness then you are neither right nor wrong. This means you’re not wrong. NEVER UNDERESTIMATE HOW POWERFULLY THE TRAINING CONDUCTORS GO THROUGH THAT TEACHES THEM TO ATTEMPT TO ALWAYS BE RIGHT IS!
NOT BEING WRONG WHEN YOU CONDUCT IS NOT BEING RIGHT. It is time to take the lid off of your expressiveness, and show yourself and the audience who you are when you conduct.
