Gestural Kinesthesis and Conducting: New Methods and Approaches to Teaching and Evaluating Gesture
Emblems or non-verbal gestural illustrators intended to outline goal-oriented sound chunks are produced by conductors to relay various abstract representations of salient moments containing musical meaning and intent. Emblems are holistic and processed by the sound producing musician as a single audio-action unit. They are mutually exclusive in that multiple emblems cannot be processed simultaneously only combined to make a new holistically understood emblem. Like our visual perception of the Necker Cube or Faces and Vases, only one of the emblem’s audiomotor configurations can be recognized at a time. The perceptual constancy of an emblem is maintained across changes in size and effector muscles, like an individual’s signature the formal structure is maintained. The ideo-audiomotor capability of emblems involves the notion that the gestural motor chunk stimulus matches the auditory response goal.
|
The multi-functional act of emblematic conducting concerns itself with an awareness of performance flow across various dimensions of listening, the employment of significant gestures, artistic interpretation obtained from dissecting intricacies contained within a score and the utilization of auditory perception to express emotion and musicality. It is these interwoven functions of conducting that encourage a homogeneous relationship between gesture and sound. In rehearsal the conductor uses his imagination, raises each musician’s audio-visual awareness and raises his own auditory and kinesthetic-motor awareness. Particular attention to the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings embedded in the amalgamated roles of the conductor, teacher and leader, and the flexibility to employ the most appropriate role for the moment, whether in the classroom or the concert hall offers an appropriate framework for discussion.
Video Portfolio- Wendy J. Freeman
|
Contact |
Training environments that utilize real-time motion capture technology significantly increased the conductor’s ability to be self-aware in an objective and unbiased manner. Kinesthetic gestural feedback focused purely on the biomechanics of the movement promoted an objective awareness without other physical influences, like facial expressions. An increase in the perceived gestural conducting expressivity was observed in the expert panel’s evaluations. These evaluations support a parallel between the increased gestural point-light expressivity of the conductor and the ensemble’s improved sound expressivity. March-style wind band excerpts that contain salient sound moments are valuable teaching tools for encouraging the growth and development of both gestural expressivity and emblematic specificity. The between-method triangulations and qualitative data collected from the participants and musicians support this notion. One factor that contributes to an increased perception of gestural expressivity is the increase in variance or gestural variety a conductor exhibits for a set emblem. The evidence concerning the heightened kinesthetic awareness and variance of movement of the conducting participants was predominantly substantiated in the wrap-up interview discussions and learning session self-evaluations. The conductors who received training recorded increases in their perceived ability to kinesthetically perform the emblems.