North Carolina Music Educator Winter 2023

y Hunter Kopczynski
Body language is an important aspect of communication and
provides nuance, meaning, and depth to our words. How we
tilt our heads, engage our eyes, or hold our arms often says
more about what we believe than our words. Similarly, we learn
to read and interpret the body language of our students as we try
to gauge their comprehension. Body language and proximity are
important tools in classroom management and engagement. How
we move is a subconscious aspect of our daily lives, a significant
component of dialogue, and an indicator of honesty, empathy, and
passion for the words we are speaking.
Yet, when we start conducting, sometimes this level of honesty,
empathy, and passion is lost. Usually our gesture shows who and
when. Sometimes we are able to show what and how. But how
often does our conducting inspire a dialogue: a true exchange
of non-verbal ideas, where we give students the opportunity to
see and hear, why? How we carry our bodies to move our arms
not only impacts the sound of our ensemble but also student
engagement. Let’s consider conducting through a few unusual
lenses that will transform student engagement, your rehearsal
environment, and how students listen.
Body Language
We must engage and quickly connect with our students. As
mentioned, there are classic engagement tools rooted in body
language. Consider how you stand when speaking, opening your
torso and being aware of your shoulders, moving around the room
to refocus attention, and the use of proximity. But how often do we
connect this awareness to our conducting?
Everything we do in a rehearsal has the opportunity to engage
or disengage our students. We are fortunate to engage them
through how we deliver instruction but also the music itself. Each
level of engagement (the student, the content, and the delivery)
should be connected. The warm up/fundamentals time connects to
the repertoire we are working on. Similarly, how we move should
be related to the style of the piece we are rehearsing. When I say
how we move, I mean any movement – not just conducting.
I’m a fast talker and a fast walker – but if we’re working on
a slow chorale-like piece, I speak slowly and in the style of the
music. I walk slowly around the room, bring my arms up in a
Conducting
Communication
way that will inspire the students to think about the music before
they even take a breath to play. I want to connect my energy to
the music and engage students through the emotional and musical
space that the piece will create. Likewise, if we’re working on
a fast piece, I want the students to feel the energy, pulse, and
drive before I even get on the podium. The mood of the rehearsal
doesn’t start when you step on the podium, it starts with how
you interact with the students and the space. Likewise, the music
begins before the first note, and our students need to be engaged
with the music they are about to make well before the first breath.
Similarly, how we breathe
and how we engage our torso is
incredibly important to the sound you
will make. If we talk about breath to
our students, our gesture and how we
move must reinforce that. Gestures
must reinforce what we are saying,
otherwise we train our students
to not watch. Craig Kirchhoff,
professor emeritus of conducting
Craig Kirchhoff
at the University of Minnesota, refers
to the torso as “the ultimate source of
truth, energy, projection, conviction, and emotion.” 1 Your torso
and how you balance your weight through your core provide the
full range of human emotion: happiness, sadness, anger, empathy,
vulnerability. Consider how someone’s torso looks when they are
afraid, confident, or happy. A frequent Kirchhoff-ism is to “smile”
with your torso. The breath and its connection to your torso should
convey and engage students more deeply than “breathe together,
play together.”
The eyes confirm what the torso says. Truth exists in how
we look at someone. There is incredible communicative power
through eye contact. Of course, this requires understanding
and internalization of the music, but consider how much more
effective we are when our eyes are connected with the students’.
Eye contact opens endless opportunity for expressivity. The face
and eyes relay emotion in the music, but more importantly, they
offer students support and encouragement. The eyes are more
than a way to cue an entrance, but are key to providing feedback,
empathy, and celebration. Smile! Nothing is more powerful than
showing the joy you have in making music with your students.
By considering how we use our posture, torso, eye contact and
facial expression, we engage more deeply with our students and
allow them the opportunity to respond authentically to our gesture.
An engaging verbal conversation involves eye contact, body
language, and responsive energy, and these are also essential to
engaging and communicative conducting.
Directing Listening
Conducting is more facilitation
than direction. There is an analogy:
conducting can be like playing traffic
cop; stop, go, faster, slower. I try and
avoid directional conducting and instead
strive for communicational conducting.
Rehearsals are more efficient when
students understand their role in the
ensemble, what they have ownership
over (characteristic sound/individual
tone, notes, rhythm, individual
Travis Cross
dynamics, even pulse/tempo), and how
a conductor can influence their listening. One of the first steps to
direct their listening is giving them nothing to look at.
It is important to move about the room. Get off the podium,
even sit amongst the students. This allows you to hear individuals
without having them play by themselves. This allows you to
connect quickly with students, and challenges them to listen to
each other and not rely on you for the beat. Use unusual seating
arrangements – different instrument groupings, a large circle,
percussion in the front of the room – and have them start with a
breath rather than your downbeat. Encourage students to move
and maintain eye contact with each other while playing. Approach
band like chamber music, and your ensembles will listen better.
Groups who listen and respond to what they hear allow the
conductor to facilitate what the ensemble cannot perceive or know.
Even the youngest groups need not rely on us for pulse. Focus
their listening to the steady beat rather than watching you for every
beat. We can show them musical possibility and opportunities to
play beyond the page when students do not need to rely on us for
what their sheet music already says.
Encourage your students to watch your conducting to
understand how they should move their air, where the line is
going, and how to fit their sound within the ensemble. Assuming
students are playing with a good tone, when there are pitch issues
the problem can often be solved when the students know where to
blend. Use your gesture to show them where to fit their sound.
When a melody is broken up across many sections, use your
gesture to connect the line and direct the ensemble to listen for
line – to match what is happening before them and lead their voice
into what comes next. If tempo is slowing, get out of the way and
conduct smaller: this allows you to move faster, but students are
reminded to listen and move together. When the ensemble has a
thin sound at soft dynamics, elongate your torso and stand taller
while making your gesture smaller to remind students to use
more air. These are subconscious actions, but they will trigger a
response from your ensemble as we connect how we use our body
to how we facilitate sound and listening.
One step to being a better conductor is to ensure your ensemble
listens more, and consider how your conducting inspires listening.
By empowering the ensemble to respond to what they hear through
the focus and guidance provided by gesture, students are able
to develop their ensemble skills. An ensemble that aggressively
listens is given the autonomy to grow as creative and expressive
musicians, understanding that conducting focuses their listening to
what they cannot see on the page.
Conducting is a feedback loop: the
conductor prepares sound a certain
way, the student responds through their
playing, the conductor then affirms
or corrects. Travis Cross, director
of bands at UCLA, explains that
conducting is situational and gestures
are transactional. 2 Our role is to
translate and decode what only we can
hear in front of the ensemble, and then
offer visual stimulus to the ensemble
that influences how they listen. But are
we really listening to how the group
responds to our gesture? Did they do what we have shown them?
If not the entire group, maybe one student or section did. Focus the
ensemble’s listening there. If the ensemble did not respond to your
gesture, consider a different way to show it.
Conducting should be collaborative. It is a visual language
that allows us to exchange ideas, communicate, correct, and
respond. To maximize this collaboration, our gestures need to
be economical, efficient, and expressive. Consider if what we
are showing is helpful or actually training our students not to
watch. Conducting larger when the ensemble is dragging, for
example, is counterintuitive. Too much visual information can
be overwhelming and distorts their ability to really listen and
communicate with each other. This causes a break in the feedback
loop. “If you conduct everything, you end up conducting nothing,”
is absolutely true. Showing too much means the ensemble is
unaware of where to watch, so they stop watching all together.
Effective communication involves body language, facial
expressions, and engaged listening. When our conducting is most
effective, we communicate more information than simply what
the students see on their page. We inspire their concept of sound
by how we use space, we focus articulation and connect air and
lines in how we use our arms, we affirm and encourage by how
we use our face, and we challenge them to listen more deeply
and engage with each other. Conducting is more than a tool to
help the ensemble play together. It’s a way to inspire a mood,
affect sound in real time, focus listening, and most importantly,
it’s an opportunity to engage our students through meaningful
communication.
References
1
Craig Kirchhoff, Is Your Conducting Hurting or Helping Your
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Ensemble.
2
Travis Cross, The Conductor’s Role. (Texas Music Educators
Convention, San Antonio, TX, February 13, 2020).