Why Healthy Gesture Matters
Conductors spend most of their time doing one of two things: getting ready to conduct, and conducting. Preparation is important, of course. It’s where we come to understand the score, the text, and the composer; where we analyze harmonic language, musical texture, and melodic line; where we identify likely trouble spots; where we mark entrances and breaths, and much more.
But in the end, preparation is a solitary pursuit. Once we unlock the score and unravel its demands, however, we still have to bring it to life. That happens in the company of others. Rehearsal is where music is birthed, where line is shaped, and where meaning is revealed.
One element links these two activities together: sound. Analysis gets the sound we want into our ears, but gesture is what evokes that sound from our singers. Little wonder, then, that conductors frequently obsess about gesture, or why so many master classes focus on refining it. Gesture is what brings the sound to life. There’s a reason that Russian conducting students spend an average of three hours a day before a mirror honing their gesture: they know that it is the key that unlocks the magic of music making.
Yet learning healthy gesture can be intimidating or overwhelming. No two conductors do it precisely the same way. No two books or videos agree on how to do it, much less how best to learn it. In this article, I’d like to briefly present four fundamental concepts that together offer a solid foundation to begin mastering this challenging but essential skill, as well as suggest some reliable resources for further study.
One: Healthy Gesture Flows from Center
One way to define a picture is by framing it. Everything inside the frame is picture, and everything outside the frame is not. In conducting, gesture is the picture and the rest of the body is the frame. We want our singers to focus on the picture without distraction. Since distractions are most commonly caused by the rest of the body moving (bouncing our knees when we breathe, rising off our heels when we conduct, etc.), we begin by quieting the body—the frame—so that the picture—our gesture—has no competition for their attention.
Engineers describe this reality as the improving the signal/noise ratio. Imagine trying to tune in a radio signal that’s surrounded by static. Difficult, right? But when we finally lock in the channel, the static vanishes and the signal comes in loud and clear. Less noise equals more signal. Quiet the body and the gesture speaks clearly. Reduce the noise and the signal emerges.
Martial artists and those who do bodywork have a different way to identify what we’re after. They call it flowing from center, a state of balanced, energized relaxation, or integrated poise. Center is easy to find. Put your thumb just below the bottom of your sternum and stretch down until your pinky touches your navel. Midway between the two, right where your middle finger rests, is center. Center is where our energy emanates and balances, where what some call “chi” flows from. This is the source of free-flowing healthy gesture for us as conductors. It’s where we want to live and work from.
Here’s one way to get there. Stand tall but loose, allowing your bones to hold up your body with your feet together. Now, flex your knees slightly until you feel your lower back open down and your spine lengthen. Then open your stance until your feet are directly below your hips. Bring your arms up softly, with your hands tilted at a 45-degree angle, until they reach center. Check to make sure that your shoulders are released, your back is wide and open, and your head is floating tall toward the ceiling. Finally, rock back and forward gently until you find a point of poise, or balanced repose. Your feet have long roots going deep into the earth. Your torso is light, buoyant, and flexible. Congratulations: welcome to center.
Two excellent resources to grasp the idea of center are the latest edition of James Jordan’s Evoking Sound (especially Chapter Two, “Alignment: Creating the Inner Space for Breath”) and Toward Center, by Jordan and Nova Thomas. Both are factual, reliable guides, available from GIA Publications, Inc. (www.giamusic.com).
Two: Healthy Gesture Lives on the Breath
Choral singing is breath become sound. The sound we create, sustain, shape, and release is impossible without breath. It is the raw material, the fuel, which we transform into meaningful beauty. There is more to the process, of course—phonation, articulation, diction, intention—but in the end there is never sound without breath. This is the fundamental, inescapable reality of our art.
Since this is so, healthy gesture must reflect and support this reality. Said another way, gesture lives and rides on the breath. We ignore this truth at our peril. If we impede the breath in our gesture, the sound we evoke will be inflexible and tight. If we don’t link gesture to breath, our choirs will likely sing under pitch, behind the pulse, and without color. If our breathing is locked or shallow, our choirs will inevitably follow suit with predictably bad consequences.
This is the case because of how our brains process visual input. Research has established that the old saw, “monkey see, monkey do,” is literally true. It’s scientific fact. Every human brain contains “mirror neurons,” nerve cells that respond automatically and empathetically to what they see. If you’ve ever found yourself stifling a yawn because someone near you is yawning (even if you’re wide awake and well rested), you’ve experienced the powerful operation of these mirror neurons. This is why Rodney Eichenberger reminds conductors about how choirs respond to gesture by saying, “What they see is what you get.”
There are three practical things we can do to ensure our gesture lives on the breath. First, we can be sure that our own breathing is correct: low, wide, and open, using the diaphragm and intercostal muscles. Second, we can make our breathing intentionally visible in our gesture, releasing the jaw and opening the mouth when we inhale, and blowing out (as if exhaling through a straw) while our choirs sing. Third, we can reflect healthy breathing in our gesture by where we place our arms and how we use them when we conduct.
A common fault I see in young conductors is in the relationship of their arms to the torso. Far too many keep their arms tightly pressed against the body in a cramped position. If our gesture is going to live on the breath, it must make the breath visibly present. One way to do this is to allow the arms to float up softly from our sides to center as we prepare to conduct, with plenty of space between our hands. I often remind conducting students to envision a circle of breath surrounding their bodies, and ask them to embrace the outside edge of that circle. Another way to end up in the right place is to imagine the presence of a grapefruit beneath each armpit. If we have sufficient “armpit space,” we’ll show the presence of breath even before we breathe.
Just as important is clearly understanding how the arm works. Many of us have an incomplete mental picture, or body map, of the arm. To check yours, try this: hold your right arm straight out in front of your body, and trace its length with your left hand, starting at the fingertips. Where did you stop? If you ended at the shoulder, you need to revise your body map, because the arm actually extends through the shoulder all the way down the collarbone, or clavicle, to where it joins the breastbone, or sternum, at the sterno-clavicular joint.
You can demonstrate this for yourself by placing one hand on this joint while moving the other arm. Do you feel the joint move? This is where your arm actually ends. Properly visualized (or mapped), the full arm encompasses four joints: wrist, elbow, shoulder, and at the sternum. If our gesture is healthy, these joints are open and able to move freely. If any of them are locked, however, our gesture will be locked. Similarly, if the back is locked, the breath will be locked as well.
To experience what healthy gesture riding on the breath feels like, try this: gently float your arms up to center as you inhale. Then, as you exhale, imagine breath flowing in streams out of your fingertips. Do this exercise a couple of times until you can sense energy moving from your center through the arms to the ends of your fingers (those who teach and practice T’ai Chi call this “feeling the wind in the fingers.”)
Breathing is a subject about which there is often more heat than light. Some reliable resources include The Structures and Movement of Breathing by Barbara Conable; The Musician’s Breath by James Jordan; and The Anatomy Coloring Book by Kapit and Elson. The first two are published by GIA Publications, Inc. The last is published by Benjamin Cummins and is carried by most Barnes & Noble bookstores. For more about mirror neurons, see the article “Monkey See, Monkey Do: The Choral Conductor and the Mirror Neuron System” by Riikka Pietiläinen-Caffery in the April 2015 ACDA Choral Journal.
Three: Healthy Gesture Resembles the Music
Like most young conductors, I began my career overwhelmed and confused. Although I diligently analyzed and marked my scores and did my best to show dynamics and give clear cues, I thought my primary job was to be a human metronome. No matter what else was going on with my singers or happening in the music, I made it my business to keep my patterns clear and unmistakable.
But when I began graduate study, I discovered that I had made a crucial mistake. I had confused conducting with time-beating. “Conductors don’t keep the beat,” my teacher told me, channeling Robert Shaw, “singers do. Conductors give the pulse away to the choir, and the singers catch it.” It turned out that my task was not time-beating at all. Instead, it was to “look like the music,” which was a very different challenge—and one that mystified me. I was a trained composer, who had studied melody, harmony, and counterpoint, but for the life of me I couldn’t imagine what the music “looked like,” and frankly I was clueless how to proceed.
In the end what saved me were two interventions by my teacher, Dr. David Rayl. First, he had me take a phrase from what I was conducting in lesson, and simply move while singing it. The goal was to physically express what the music held—without resorting to a pattern. Gradually my body unlocked (especially my lower back), and the dance within the music began to fill my body and emerged. As it did, I was able to allow my arms to respond to that motion, learning to flow on the breath and to occupy the three-dimensional space in front of my body: vertical, horizontal, and linear (front to back).
If you’ve never experienced what I’m talking about, let me encourage you to try. Take something you know by heart and love to sing—an art song, a phrase from an oratorio, or something similar—and sing it aloud while simply giving your body free rein to respond. Let your arms flow like water. Feel energy cascade through the four joints of each arm. Make circles, larger or smaller, faster or slower, depending on what the music leads you to do. The only thing you may not do is beat time or make a down-beat gesture of any kind.
If plainsong or chant is part of your repertoire, it’s excellent material to use while developing the capacity to respond to music somatically. Just be sure that there is never any stopping point, click, or ictus in your gesture when you do this exercise. If you’re really serious about this step, and truly brave, do it in front of a mirror. What you see may surprise you: the image will not lie.
The other thing Dr. Rayl shared with me was a definition he learned from one of his teachers, the American orchestral conductor James Dixon: “Conducting is essentially a series of preparation gestures.” Simple as it may seem, this insight finally liberated me from the tyranny of time-beating. More than that, it completely transformed my approach to conducting. No longer was conducting about me or the elegance of my gesture. It was about one thing and one thing only: what did my singers need, and when did they need it?
Consider this bit of conducting:
It’s a straightforward plagal cadence, a IV – I root position progression with a 4-3 suspension in the soprano voice, in 4/4 time. Doesn’t get much simpler than that.
But how should these two bars be conducted? Until I encountered Dixon’s definition, I would have beat two successive measures of 4/4 time, or a series of eight quarter notes, plus a preparation breath to begin with and a final release: ten gestures in all. Yet is that what the music actually “looks like”? Is that what it does? Who needs me, and when? That’s what matters. That’s all that matters.
The answer’s obvious. The choir needs to know when to start singing. They need to know when to move to the next bar. And the sopranos need to know when to resolve their suspension on beat three of the last bar. This means that all I really need to give them are:
a) A preparation and release for measure one (that’s two gestures);
b) A preparation on beat four to move to the next measure;
c) A preparation on beat two for the sopranos to resolve on beat three of measure two; and
d) A final release at the end of the cadence.
Not ten gestures. Five are all that the music and the singers require. It may not feel like we’re “conducting” when we do this. It may not appear flashy. It may even seem humbling at first. But this is what it means to resemble the music, and this is the great benefit that allowing music to dictate gesture provides conductors.
From an abundance of books, DVDs, and other resources on this topic, I would recommend starting with these: What They See Is What You Get, a video by Rodney Eichenberger, and The Anatomy of Conducting by James Jordan. Both are published by GIA Publications, Inc. Dr. Jordan’s book is accompanied with a very helpful “inside view” DVD recording as well.
Four: Healthy Gesture Gives Rather Than Takes
The conducting environment has radically changed in the past 75 years. When I began my studies, many conductors believed that they were in charge, that they were the ones who actually created the music, that their choirs were merely an extension of their will and intellect, an instrument. It was an autocratic model. They talked, we listened. They gestured, we sang.
The autocratic mentality extended to gesture and even to the language used to describe gesture. The onset of music was an “attack,” not a “release” of sound. The predominant gestures were hard, angular, and almost always hammered down at the floor or thrust with the heel of an open hand at the choir. Releases were no less violent: they were most often non-vocal “cut offs” that clicked the sound off as abruptly as turning out the lights. “We’re done. You can go now,” is what they signaled, and none too subtly.
Healthy gesture always supports and reinforces healthy singing. It lifts rather than pounds. It moves from one ictus to the next (because what we call the “beat” is actually what happens on the journey from one point in the pattern to the next one). It invites the singers to join in the song. It evokes vocalism. It gives singers freedom and permission to release the music that lives inside them. It is about collaboration, not the ego.
I can usually tell when I’ve crossed this line with my choirs. The sound tells me. I remember chiding my basses for singing a low note with too much edge and drive: “Guys, forte doesn’t mean angry, right?” To which one of them replied, “Then don’t give us an angry gesture!” Guilty as charged. We still laugh about it.
If our singers are shown what the music is, and invited to bring their breath and their imagination to create it, with gestures that evoke without ego or an insatiable need to control the outcome, we have come a long way on the journey to making music together.
[1]“Center,” for our purposes, can also be called the “midpoint.” It should not be confused with the “center of gravity,” which is lower in women, by virtue of their anatomy, than in men.
Jerry Custer conducts the Choral Union at Wayne State University in Detroit, where he teaches music theory and composition. An award-winning, Grammy-nominated composer, his music has been commissioned, performed, and recorded by choirs conducted by James Jordan, Joseph Flummerfelt, and Joe Miller, among others. With Blake Henson, he is the co-author of The Composer’s Craft: Practical Advice for Teachers and Students, and From Words to Music: A User’s Guide to Text for Choral Musicians (GIA Publications). For more information, go to www.geraldcuster.net, or contact him by email at custer@wayne.edu.
