Stupid Conductor Tricks

A post at From the Front of the Choir regarding training new singers to understand conductors' gestures reminded me to mention one of my favorite training exercises, which I call Stupid Conductor Tricks.

I often hear conductors yelling "Watch me" to their groups, but it seems to me that watching the conductor is a skill which has to be practiced just like anything else. The Stupid Conductor Tricks involve inserting random changes of dynamics and tempo and inserting fermatas in random places. Anyone who doesn't watch ends up singing an unintentional solo; kids think this is great fun.

Warn them ahead of time you're going to do it. You can do it with warm-up exercises at first, when they have no excuse for not watching; I often put fermatas in the middle of an exercise in order to correct the intonation or support of an interior note. But once they know most of the notes of the repertoire, the tricks work fine there, too, and serve for training the skill of glancing back and forth from the conductor to the music. You have to do it on a cappella music (or at least have them sing it without accompaniment for the purposes of the exercise), since you don't want them following the piano. With more advanced groups you can use changes of articulation and phrasing and so on: if you can get them to overdo the swell of a phrase in Brahms or Bruckner they'll be much better able to respond to more subtle gestures.

My group is sufficiently used to the technique that I can do it without warning them, which makes it easier to fix trouble spots, since I can freeze individual chords or slow down individual phrases without having to explain things every time (of course, it's still a train wreck the first time, but they know what I'm trying to accomplish and get with the program right away).