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Under the Hood: Gestures and the Unspoken

Jonathan Icasas, 04/14/2012

When we attend a symphony orchestra concert, the "shape" of the music we hear is often sculpted by the hands of not just the musicians but also the conductor, too. Sometimes we find ourselves mimicking the conductor's gestures in our own inspired enjoyment but it's also rather fascinating to think about just how much influence these gestures have.

And it's not just in the hands--it's communication that involves the whole body. At the end of our concerts, I'll occasionally hear people commenting that it seemed like Adam was dancing on the podium and if you saw the view from our side, you'd see a giant smile on his face, too--but if you felt a sense of dancing, well, didn't the music feel like a dance at the time? We hope so :) So what goes into shaping a piece for performance?

In rehearsal, we'll occasionally stop and take some time to understand the shape of a given passage by using some form of description, often through verbal descriptions of visual elements and sometimes through abstract concepts. Or, we could also find an understanding by evoking sentiments from our common personal experiences, too. From there we can usually fine-tune the sound that we eventually hope to communicate by watching Maestro Stern's movements. It's much easier and more natural than saying "play this at this volume and taper it at this rate until you end at this volume."

Sometimes, though, this is also the most efficient way: during the rehearsals of our last concert, during the Sibelius, we thought about swiming in gravy to help turn a visually frantic passage of sixteenth notes on paper into what we hoped to be a thick and hearty sound and for this concert we're imagining the heave of a hammer as we pay Aaron Copland's "John Henry." On the other end, a few rehearsals ago we spent extensive time with more technical instructions to properly convey the style of Haydn's Symphony No. 96. "These quarter notes should be played as eighth notes," and so we were pencilling tails onto certain quarter notes in our parts, and later on we would pencil-in the word  "bell" to describe their distinct taper of sound during a passage of half notes.

It's all in the character of the piece, maybe even the moment, but if you watch the conductor closely, you'll see these expressed in motion, motion translating into sound, and all of these forms of communication happen without uttering a word. We invite you to do this at our next concert, to not only hear the difference between "heavy" and "light" playing, or even long and short notes, but to see it.

To go along with that, here's an in-depth article by The New York Times on the various styles of conducting: The Maestro's Mojo.

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You can get tickets for our upcoming concert, where you'll hear Haydn's Symphony No. 96 and Aaron Copland's "John Henry" (among others), by clicking here!

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