Exploring the Expressive Beat with abcd

Course participants with their certificates

I spent the weekend teaching the Association of British Choral Directors’ Initial Conducting course, in its new two-day format. I wrote in the past about the educational value of the previous structure of four one-day sessions a month apart. The practical downside of it was that it was hard for people to attend to the whole course, and the whole-weekend format was devised in response.

When preparing for the weekend it felt at first like trying to fit a quart into a pint pot, but as there is the expectation that people will typically do the course more than once before being ready to progress to the Intermediate course, it turned out to be actually quite manageable. And the core practical work has always been strongly tailored to individual needs, with people at somewhat different stages learning together, so in that sense it hasn’t really changed.

One of the key elements of the conducting curriculum, once the standard beat patterns are established, is to develop an expressive beat. The patterns are not just about time-keeping, but also serve as the central medium of information about musical shape. This is most commonly discussed in the conducting literature in terms of dynamics (size of beat) and articulation (shape of ictus), but there are several other dimensions we found productive to think about.

Pattern

One of the most useful things to come out of the writing of my book on choral conducting was an understanding of how the basic conducting shapes themselves encode meaning about musical qualities. This continues to inform how I go about teaching standard patterns.

I start off by exploring two pairs of gestural motion, having everyone use both arms and saying the metaphorical association words out loud together:

Assertion – Anticipation = down – up
(bring the hands from above the head down to thigh level, arms straight – lift them back up again)

Introversion – Generosity = in – out
(arms wrapped across the body, hugging oneself – arms wide, offering a hug to someone else)

Initially the movements are big and mirrored; gradually we move to a more fluid motion, and change the order to:

Assertion
Introversion
Generosity
Anticipation

When you remove your non-dominant hand from this you have 4-pattern. Then you remove Introversion to make a 3-pattern, and remove Generosity to create 2-pattern.

One of the useful side-effects of this approach is that you don’t have the confusion of ‘which direction does beat 2 go in?’, since you’re using expressive labels that remain stable for each direction of beat in all patterns rather than numbers that shift about depending on how many of them you’re using.

More importantly, though, it develops awareness of the expressive qualities built into metre. All beats (in a constant tempo) may be the same duration, but they’re not all the same in character.

Active/Passive Beats

One of the things that marks a novice conductor is the way that all their beats have essentially the same size and energy irrespective of the musical content. They’re acting like a visual click-track. The problem with this isn’t so much that it doesn’t carry much musical information; rather, the problem is that it carries misleading information, implying that all pulses need to be executed with the same level of emphasis whatever the melodic contour, harmonic content or rhythmic profile.

A useful way to start getting a more inflected beat that responds to musical content is to think in terms of active and passive beats, that is, beats that invite a response and beats that just measure duration without requiring action. We think about this most often in terms of the distinction between cueing and marking time, but it actually obtains throughout the flow of the music.

We explored this idea in the context of melodic rhythm. Where there was an event in the music (e.g. a new syllable), it asked for an active beat. Where there was only a continuation of a previous event (e.g. a held note), it asked for a passive beat. Suddenly the singers had information not only about the tempo of the music, but also how it went.

As you get the hang of this distinction you can move beyond the simple active/passive duality to a more nuanced or granular scale, differentiating between differing levels of structural/expressive importance within the flow of the music, but the starting point establishing the central binary.

Joining the Dots

The first stage of learning to conduct is to get control of the ictus, the moment of direction change that articulates the event and is the building block of all conducting patterns. But the ictus itself contains relatively little information beyond the onset of the note. Of course, this information is very important: weight, speed, and shape all inflect articulation.

Most of the music happens between these moments though, and joining the dots is how you can start to shape the musical line and vocal legato (to the extent that these are different things).

Every gesture consists of an approach (prep), stroke (ictus), and rebound, and as pulses are strung together into musical tempi, the rebound from one ictus serves simultaneously as the prep for the next. The quality of these movements between icti determines the quality of your phrasing.

Just the instruction ‘think about joining the dots’ has an immediate impact on how people travel through a phrase. Towards the end of the second day we also started to explore how a conductor can prevent a breath point by the way they manage the flow over a barline.

And once conductors start to hear the difference they are making when they adapt their gestures to context, they have the traction to continue to develop as expressive conductors in their regular praxis.