Real-Life Communication
You are the conductor of a symphony orchestra. You are expected
to be an expert communicator with the members of your orchestra as you guide
them through scores, arrangements and concerts.
Another part of your
job is public relations for your orchestra and the organizations that support
you financially. Your gift of the gab should serve you well because you love
to talk. You especially love to talk to people who want to know more about
your work and more about music!
You are asked to speak to a group of
young people who are interested in learning more about what a symphony orchestra
conductor actually does while they wave a baton at musicians. What is the
process that is going on?
You make some notes and begin to think about
what your audience will want to know. Will they ask about technical terms
and will they want to know how the musicians in the orchestra view you as
their conductor versus how the audience sees you?
On the day that you
are to give your talk, you find yourself standing in front of a class of teenagers
who have just seen a video of you performing with your orchestra. They are
clamoring to ask you questions. They are noisy.
You have brought your
baton and you tap it loudly on the desk in front of you. Now you have their
attention and all their young faces are turned toward you. You purse your
lips and place your index finger in front of your mouth to signal that they
must be quiet.
Hands go up. You point with your baton to a girl in
the last row. She smiles and asks you if you have to tell your musicians to
be quiet the same as you just told her class.
"Yes, I signal with my
baton, and I use my arms, legs, facial expressions -- everything to let my
orchestra members know what I want them to do, all without making a sound
myself," you tell the group. "Our audience cannot see my face or the expressions
I use."
You tell the students you're going to give them a list of terms.
"As I talk to you about different aspects of conducting, I want you to tell
me the term from your list that would best describe what I'm talking about
and what I'm doing. Once you see how it is done, I would like some of you
to try this peculiar game of charades."
You pass around lists of these
musical terms:
- Beat -- any pulsing unit of musical time
- Dotted rhythms -- certain rhythm patterns resulting from alternating
between long notes and shorter notes
- Hertz -- cycle per second (a guitar string may vibrate 440 times
per second producing the middle A note)
- Interval -- the distance between two notes
- Measure -- that division by which the time of dwelling on each
note is regulated
- Octave -- an interval whose two frequencies have a ratio of 2:1
- Pitch -- the quality of a sound, which depends on the number of
vibrations per second (a high-pitched sound has more vibrations per second
than a low-pitched sound)
- Rhythm -- the arrangement of beats and accents in a musical bar
- Score -- the original draft or its transcript of a musical composition
with the parts of all the different voices or instruments
- Space -- one of the four intervals between the five lines of a
staff
- Staff -- the five parallel lines and the four spaces between them
on which notes and other musical characters are placed
- Tempo -- speed at which a piece of music is played
- You begin to move your baton in time with your speech, then you alter
the patterns you create with your words and the inflections of your voice.
Next you speak faster, then slower and then faster. What two terms from the
list have you just demonstrated to the group?
- You motion to another person, and then another until you have three people
standing. You motion for two to whisper while the third speaks more loudly
to the beat of your baton.Now what two things are you demonstrating about
conducting?
- You ask a boy to hum bass and a girl to hum soprano and to alternately
hold their notes or stop humming as you signal. Which two terms are being
demonstrated here?
- A volunteer from the class stands up and uses a harmonica and then a tuning
fork to hit the same note, and after several tries, he does. Which term from
the list was the volunteer demonstrating?