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Some Notes On Conducting

1936; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 22; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3384643

1945-0087

George E. Hubbard,

Neuroscience and Music Perception

URING REHEARSALS or public concerts many of us have realized that the performers were giving ragged attacks and releases, disorganized tempi, and other discouraging types of musical performance. Our gorge has begun to rise-all too rapidly. We have said to ourselves: group knows the music-certainly we've spent enough on it. We have told them often enough how to play (or sing) these particular passages. It cannot be my fault. This group is really stupid today. And we go on and on until we are in such a dither that the result is we stop then and there and deliver a scathing lecture on inattention, careless study, and poor performance. We may feel a lot better afterwards but the chances are that the performers will not. In fact they are most likely to be bewildered and discouraged. It is quite possible they have followed our conducting so well that they have found themselves making mistakes-to their own surprise and chagrin. Conducting is like that. The following notes are the result of careful observation, made over a period of several years of conducting. The groups have been made up of children, high school students, college students, professional musicians, and musical amateurs. These notes are an attempt to organize an account of various phenomena which are present in every rehearsal or concert but which have usually been left to the intuition of the conductor no matter how well trained he may have been in the technique of the baton. There are certain matters of practical psychology which come to mean as much to the experienced conductor as the mechanical technique he has so carefully acquired. A knowledge of mental and physical sets, a sense of timing acquired along with this knowledge, and the use of facial expressions as subconscious influences upon a group of performers-these involve a great deal more than a mastery of the mechanical movements of time beating. It is to these matters of psychology that we can turn with profit when analyzing a performance which we realize is not as good as we reasonably expected it to be.