Prelude: Visual Score Study/ Baton Placement and Alexander Technique, part 2

The afternoon sessions of this past week were spent in what was called "Visual Score Study/Baton Placement". For the uninitiated, the score is the music the conductor reads from. It has all the music the different instruments in the orchestra are playing. It looks kind of like piano music except instead of two lines of music there's 10-20 depending on the piece. A conductor has to know what is going on in every instrument all the time in the music, so a lot of what a conductor has to do the study scores. A baton is the stick a conductor uses.

So from the title of the class you would think that we would be learning to read and study scores and then figure out what to do with the stick. Well, I guess we kind of did that, but it was accomplished indirectly.

Harold Farberman is the teacher and will be for the whole institute. He's conductor and composer. He's conducted all of the world and is well known in music world. He's knows what he's talking about because he's done it and been successful. He's also very direct and blunt. If he doesn't like something, he will tell you. Occasionally he's nice about it, but mostly he's not.

So we were told to have something prepared to conduct for the first day of class. So I worked on the 1st movement of the Mozart Symphony we're doing. I was pretty sure we wouldn't have an orchestra to conduct since this was just the prelude week, but I figured we would have some sort of musicians to conduct; maybe a string quartet and piano. I was wrong.

Farberman comes into class, starts talking about the institute, what we're going to do, what to expect. He talks a little bit about conducting technique, how to hold the baton, basic stuff. Then he breaks us up into groups of 3 and has each group come to the front and he calls a out patterns for us to conduct and then has everyone vote on the person they thought was the best of that group. Eventually he takes the best of each group and goes through the same process until there's only one person left, the "King of the Hill". So then he starts telling the person who won everything that's wrong with their technique. Not completely unexpected. But I thought there would be more instruction before the critiquing started.

After this he started from his class list and randomly called someone up to the front and asked them to conduct what they had prepared. (!) So there's no strings or pianist... he wants us to sing and conduct. This is not foreign to us, we do it all the time when we practice/study. It's just now we have to do it on a stage in front of people we just met and a guy that's just ripped apart the elected King of the Hill... ok... needless to say there were more than a few train wrecks. He was at least easier on those that obviously had less experience or were just beginners. He was pretty hard on the ones with experience.

I was one of the fortunate ones to go up the first day. I was of course nervous, and things didn't happen exactly like I wanted them to, but all in all I think I did an ok job. He was hard on me, but it wasn't as bad as some of the others.

It isn't unusual for music teachers to be hard on their students. So I was prepared for that.
It's not hard to deal with when you know the teacher just wants you to learn and get better. The music business is tough and if you can't take hard criticism from someone helping you, you won't be able to handle it when someone that doesn't like you criticizes you. So I understand the whole process, but that doesn't mean I like it when it's happening. But I'm here to learn and Farberman said you can't learn until you fail, so that's what we're doing everyday, failing to be decent conductors.

The rest of the week was very similar. We would sing and conduct and he would point out our failures and show us how to do it. The good thing is that everyone has improved. So he got a little nicer towards the end of the week.

On Friday, we finally had a little relief. The first half of the session was Q&A where we could ask him questions about conducting. It was interesting and most of his answers had a story from his experience that went along. The second half of the 3 hour class we looked at examples from his book and he had some of us try (and fail) to conduct some of the examples. So what everyone thought was going to be a nice easy Friday, turned into a big ball of stress, since none of thought we were going to have to do any conducting especially, unprepared examples from his book.

It was a good week and I know I learned a lot. The biggest change I made was I've gone from conducting left-handed, to right-handed. Apparently, I was using my right hand more than my left hand that was holding the baton. Farberman told me I look like a right-handed conductor holding the baton in the wrong hand. He also said he thinks I have a lot of interesting things to say musically, I'm just doing everything "bass ackwards". So I changed hands Wednesday and Thursday he didn't say anything about it. He just said I look too comfortable... So I guess that's good, if that's all he had to say...

Brandi and I went on a long walk around campus today and finally (!) got some pics of the Gehry building. It's amazing and I'm pretty sure the pics won't do it justice, but we'll try to get those up soon, along with our collection of pics of oddly shaped trees.

-Jeff