Real-Life Communication

You are the conductor of a symphony orchestra. You are expected to be an expert communicator with the members of your orchestra as you guide them through scores, arrangements and concerts.

Another part of your job is public relations for your orchestra and the organizations that support you financially. Your gift of the gab should serve you well because you love to talk. You especially love to talk to people who want to know more about your work and more about music!

You are asked to speak to a group of young people who are interested in learning more about what a symphony orchestra conductor actually does while they wave a baton at musicians. What is the process that is going on?

You make some notes and begin to think about what your audience will want to know. Will they ask about technical terms and will they want to know how the musicians in the orchestra view you as their conductor versus how the audience sees you?

On the day that you are to give your talk, you find yourself standing in front of a class of teenagers who have just seen a video of you performing with your orchestra. They are clamoring to ask you questions. They are noisy.

You have brought your baton and you tap it loudly on the desk in front of you. Now you have their attention and all their young faces are turned toward you. You purse your lips and place your index finger in front of your mouth to signal that they must be quiet.

Hands go up. You point with your baton to a girl in the last row. She smiles and asks you if you have to tell your musicians to be quiet the same as you just told her class.

"Yes, I signal with my baton, and I use my arms, legs, facial expressions -- everything to let my orchestra members know what I want them to do, all without making a sound myself," you tell the group. "Our audience cannot see my face or the expressions I use."

You tell the students you're going to give them a list of terms. "As I talk to you about different aspects of conducting, I want you to tell me the term from your list that would best describe what I'm talking about and what I'm doing. Once you see how it is done, I would like some of you to try this peculiar game of charades."

You pass around lists of these musical terms:

• Beat -- any pulsing unit of musical time
• Dotted rhythms -- certain rhythm patterns resulting from alternating between long notes and shorter notes
• Hertz -- cycle per second (a guitar string may vibrate 440 times per second producing the middle A note)
• Interval -- the distance between two notes
• Measure -- that division by which the time of dwelling on each note is regulated
• Octave -- an interval whose two frequencies have a ratio of 2:1
• Pitch -- the quality of a sound, which depends on the number of vibrations per second (a high-pitched sound has more vibrations per second than a low-pitched sound)
• Rhythm -- the arrangement of beats and accents in a musical bar
• Score -- the original draft or its transcript of a musical composition with the parts of all the different voices or instruments
• Space -- one of the four intervals between the five lines of a staff
• Staff -- the five parallel lines and the four spaces between them on which notes and other musical characters are placed
• Tempo -- speed at which a piece of music is played

1. You begin to move your baton in time with your speech, then you alter the patterns you create with your words and the inflections of your voice. Next you speak faster, then slower and then faster. What two terms from the list have you just demonstrated to the group?
2. You motion to another person, and then another until you have three people standing. You motion for two to whisper while the third speaks more loudly to the beat of your baton.Now what two things are you demonstrating about conducting?
3. You ask a boy to hum bass and a girl to hum soprano and to alternately hold their notes or stop humming as you signal. Which two terms are being demonstrated here?
4. A volunteer from the class stands up and uses a harmonica and then a tuning fork to hit the same note, and after several tries, he does. Which term from the list was the volunteer demonstrating?

• Want to learn more? Check out this URL:

  How to Practice Conducting at Home
  Internet: https://www.gianmariagriglio.it/how-to-practice-conducting-at-home/
  

  • Want to see what a pro would say?