Giving your choir the finger

Date: December 23, 2009

A scintillating blog post title involving a brief discussion on the effective conducting of a choral pianissimo.

I guess we encouraged his quirky behavior because the Lauridsen piece gets much louder toward the middle and he did the following: as we continued to sing, he held up one finger on each hand, then another, then another, until all 10 fingers were up. And with each finger, we responded by growing louder and louder until we arrived at the mf (mezzo forte) indicated in the piece. CRAZY! We knew exactly what he wanted, even though we had never seen these gestures before and he didn't have to say a word!

Read more about the finger here.

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Allen H Simon on December 23, 2009 9:09

A perfect example of why instrumentalists hate choral conductors. Just make up your own gestures.

Jane Schaefermeyer on December 23, 2009 19:11

Perhaps it depends on the conductor more than the gestures? :)

Martin Banner on December 23, 2009 15:07

Are you suggesting that instrumentalists hate some choral conductors because they don't stick to basic recognizable beat patterns? That didn't seem to be a problem for Leonard Bernstein, among other "world class" orchestral conductors. Yes, there are lots of terrific orchestral conductors who really stick to traditional beat patterns (James Levine at the MET Opera, Zubin Mehta), but there are a number that come to mind who dance all over the place and draw strange images in the air. If instrumentalist hate some choral conductors, I can think of a number of other reasons this might be true.

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