If this is your first time to visit, welcome! My name is Jordan and I’m a conductor, teacher, and music-lover. This is my blog, the Conductor’s Notebook. To get an overview, visit About the Blog.
This essay is part of an ongoing series on the Art of Rehearsal. You can now receive rehearsal ideas in your inbox. It’s a new project I’m calling the Art of Rehearsal Newsletter — See below.
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The Summer Olympics are set to close this weekend, reportedly with a death-defying stunt off the side of the Eiffel Tower. Every time I see the Olympic rings, I’m reminded of a Venn diagram I once made to try to convey some elements of rehearsal for a music education conference where I was teaching rehearsal technique. I introduced the idea by analogy to the olympic rings.
So with all of the recent explosion of interest in memes generated by the Vice President, including her love for Venn diagrams, it seemed like a great time to describe the art of rehearsal in terms of some of its constituent skills. We’ll get to my diagram before the end, and close with a 3-minute masterclass from Sir Georg Solti that brings it all together.
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TLDR: Every conductor seeking to improve their Craft During Rehearsal needs to develop skills in six Key areas:
Preparation • repetition • Detection • Diagnosis • Prescription • Direction
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In future essays I hope to dive a little more deeply into each of these skill areas, but for today, I’ll briefly introduce them in six short sections, like a pack of mini-muffins.
But first, a warning: If I could offer just one piece of advice from years of experimenting with and teaching these ideas, it would be: do not try to consciously think through these steps in real time on the podium unless you are a first-year teacher with a B.M., or a first-year M.M. conducting student getting some of your very first rehearsal opportunities. For those early career folks, this might be an extremely useful procedure list of steps keep on a sticky-note on the podium, anchoring you back to what you’re there to do in moments where you lose your moorings.
Meanwhile, for the rest of us, it would not only not help, psychologists who study these types of things show that it might even be harmful and slow us down. Be warned!
Instead, for most readers, the value here is twofold:
As with the Rehearsal Frame Model, it is to make us aware of what to watch for when observing - either other conductors when attending their rehearsals, or ourselves when reflecting on a video recording of rehearsal.
Additionally, this can serve as a sort of rehearsal skills inventory, giving experienced conductors a chance to think through which skills are working well and which have room for growth, so that additional resources are available when we get on the podium. Here we go:
Preparation
STEP ZERO: Preparation is what I call “step zero” because in my view, these activities are not part of rehearsal but a prerequisite for rehearsal. Here, I’m thinking about all of the other things that need to happen before a conductor arrives at the first rehearsal and gives the first downbeat. Every other step will also refer to skills, each of which require development in general, and preparation in particular. But I include this step separately to outline a few additional areas or buckets of preparation not fully captured in those other steps.
Here are three buckets to think about:
Core Prep: Preparation for rehearsal certainly includes at least two things: score study and rehearsal planning. These are non-negotiable. More here.
Concert Prep: To get ready for a specific concert cycle, preparation may include bowings (either generating them, or familiarizing with what the concertmaster is doing), other markings (for instance, marking brass parts in composers like Mozart, Beethoven and also Sibelius), as well as communication with the librarian, concertmaster, and other musicians, to name just a few elements. (I am completely leaving out other administrative duties and focused narrowly on musical tasks to prepare for rehearsal.)
Deep Prep: Additionally, it is worth thinking about the deep knowledge and skills that make this work possible in the first place. That would include musical skill development dating back to college (and even further back). It might include professional skills like pedagogy and management. And it even includes personal knowledge to do with EQ, communication, relationships, as well as reading literature, history, and/or other sources of inspiration or understanding that might shed light on moments of profundity in rehearsal. It certainly includes ear training, style, knowledge of instruments, and the work you’re doing here by thinking about the guts of the rehearsal process.
Repetition
STEP ONE: We have now arrived at the first rehearsal, assuming that we know our scores thoroughly, and we’re ready to conduct a complete, concert-ready performance. What now? Now, it’s time to make some music.
Above all, we need to be able to conduct the piece at concert level, at the very first rehearsal. The musicians may to some extent be able to get away with some natural uncertainty during the read-through, particularly at the student level. The conductor may not. Above all, our physical conducting skills must support us, and our specific score preparation including physical conducting preparation will be the steps to support us.
Why call it Repetition? My nephew is currently a junior in high school and a section leader of his very good marching band (and we are very proud!). “Reps” are a well-known part of marching band and drum corps parlance and equally well-known to gym rats.
For a deep dive on the definition of rehearsal and repetition, see: “What is a Rehearsal?” For even more, see Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan by Tiffany Stern.
Meanwhile, in short: it’s important to have some sort of word to identify individual times that the ensemble begins to perform a passage in the context of a rehearsal. “Performance” has too many other meanings, so I find it easier to have another name for all of those dozens of miniature performances inside a rehearsal - which I refer to as repetitions or “reps.”
Detection
STEP TWO: Once the music begins, we continue to conduct, but our ears must be open from the very first note to all of the sounds. At a minimum, this includes:
Errors: Cases of wrong notes, incorrect articulation, notes that didn’t speak, missed markings, etc. The usual suspects.
Inconsistencies: Musicians were not necessarily “wrong” in an absolute sense, but are not unified in approach. Examples include tuning, differences in dotted rhythms, and coordination between different sections.
Interpretative Differences: Musicians were not wrong in even a relative sense, but their performance was inconsistent with your interpretative vision for that moment. Examples might include note lengths, color, shape, and phrasing.
Successes: We also need to be open to what went right! First, We never want to waste time on what is not broken. A rehearsal plan is important, but if it turns out to include stopping for something that wasn’t a problem, as Marin Alsop says, “You need a new plan.” Equally important, there are cases where we want to reinforce what did work so that the musicians know to use the same approach in other similar cases. Lastly, we may or may not say anything at the time, but we want to observe reflectively what worked so that we can invoke that approach again later if called for.
Diagnosis
STEP THREE: With all of these other issues out of the way, Diagnosis is the time to analyze all of those dozens of musical items you heard during that repetition. For the time being, I will put aside the question of how to sift through them and select something to work on - a question for another day. Assuming you’ve highlighted 2-3 problems from step two that you’d like to stop and work on, your next task is to diagnose the problem.
Ask yourself: What went wrong here? What is the cause? Who is responsible for what in this situation?
Pro-Tip: If you find it difficult to answer these questions in real time, try recording your rehearsals at least once a week and watching at least 20 minutes, slowly, pausing often, investigating what you hear, what you see, and researching answers to questions that you couldn’t think of during rehearsal. Bring the pedagogical information back to your students, and thank yourself for helping you navigate with ease for the rest of your career once you’ve solved that particular puzzle. (Bonus: write it all down, preferably in a notebook.)
Note on recording tech: Mike Lebrias has some great advice for microphone placement ideas, and affordable and simple gear. On his advice, I ordered this simple wireless lavalier mic set that work pretty well, but YMMV. One of my coaching clients ordered something similar and it worked pretty well!
Prescription
STEP FOUR: After determining what kind of illness the patient has, the next thing is to determine what kind of medicine is appropriate. Pill? Shot? Spray? Daily dose or one-and-done?
In a musical context the “medicine” may merely be a single, brief comment: “cellos, that was close, just make sure to anticipate your entrance just a touch more and we’ll have it.”
When this category (prescription) is not understood, it sometimes collapses in with diagnosis and less experienced conductors imagine that giving the diagnosis is the prescription.
In fact, with the partial exception of professionals, music mostly requires at least a little more, if not a lot more from us! More than likely, a successful prescription will be more sophisticated in the middle of a detailed rehearsal and require us to isolate some music, offer suggestions, ask questions, check the notation, etc. I will certainly return to this issue as it is huge. But let’s start by noticing that it exists.
The key thing to be aware of is that noticing what the problem is, and knowing why it is happening, are both separate skills from being able to prescribe a solution.
Direction
STEP FIVE: After coming up with solutions to our problem, it’s time to speak up. When we do that, it’s important to remember that the medicine itself involves speaking to other people and asking them to do what you need them to do next. In other words, we have to give directions.
In order to do that well, we will need to take our prescription from step four and determine how to share that information with our ensemble. This is easier said than done! There are many dimensions to consider, but one of them involves the sequencing of the information you share. Many conductors, from Mei-Ann Chen to Ari Contzius, recommend a simple sequence:
Who: First, call to the group of players you are addressing.
Where: Then, identify the bar number, reversal letter, and maybe even beat number.
What: Finally, share what’s been going on in your head, including what the problem seems to be, the cause you’ve identified, and what you’d like them to do about it.
Putting it Together
Now, the next time you go watch another conductor work or check out some rehearsal footage, see how if you can take a look at these different steps and make note of how the conductor approaches this information. What you will quickly find is that these steps aren’t really steps at all. I typically call them “phases,” which to me seems to indicate that their boundaries are a little fuzzy, and certainly overlap, like the olympic rings.
Indeed, these steps or phases overlap so radically that some conductors manage to cover all five simultaneously. To close out, observe this 3-minute masterclass in the equivalent of a perfect eclipse of all five phases, from Sir Georg Solti:
Finale
I’m starting a new experiment. If you’ve enjoyed this article and you’d like to receive a monthly newsletter featuring information about the Art of Rehearsal delivered directly to your inbox, you can learn more and subscribe to the Art of Rehearsal Newsletter by following this link. I’m officially opening sign-ups starting today and I plan to send the first issue over the weekend. I hope you’ll sign up and then let me know what you think. Thanks!
