I know. We work magic. We make your whole day worthwhile. We light up the room. We have you leave rehearsal with a spring in your step. We cause you to forget your troubles and float on clouds of inspiration. We fill your souls with good things.

Well, that’s on a really good day. Mostly we try to have good days.

But seriously: did you ever wonder about this—what your conductors really do?

Despite the creativity which we are purported to possess, and which does exist, choral conductors actually have a really weird job, most of the time. There are the mechanical things that conductors do, but I’d like to start with Frank Zappa’s astute definition of a composer:

A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.

I love that definition. We might rework it in the case of a choral conductor, to say something like this, and I’m using female gender for contrast:

A choral conductor is a woman who goes around forcing her will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting singers.

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What we conductors do is part technique and part alchemy. We are, one might say from a particular viewpoint, spiritual intermediaries. Another way to describe us could be as energetic agents, or perhaps emotional catalysts, or even acoustic-vibrational shamans. Why do I say this, in all seriousness?

Well, think about it for a moment. Let’s take Frank Zappa’s image and run with it. We conductors take a musical object that (usually) one person or creative team has produced, which in turn (sometimes; in the case of pop songs, usually) has been reworked in a form that a choir can reproduce. So that’s one or possibly two stages removed from the act of creation of the work in question; think of a Roger Emerson choral version of a Beatles song like “Drive My Car.” Then we attempt to bring that sound into being with a group of other people in front of us, channeling the sonic and emotional experience of that initial object into something that still another group of people comes to enjoy in a concert setting by sitting there while we in the choir do our energetic thing.

Isn’t that weird?

It’s very different from James Taylor getting on stage and singing “Fire and Rain” with a guitar. That’s all his own stuff, direct from the source. We choral conductors are less like songwriters and more like train conductors (interesting that we use the same noun), or musical tour guides, doing what we can do get everyone to the right place at the right time, hopefully all in one piece. We have the added requirement that everyone pretty much is supposed to do the same thing at the same time, with particular material, with the intention of creating a particular musical and emotional effect.

Some conductors are also composers or arrangers, as in Paul’s choral setting of Goin’ Home or my new Yehi Or Chanukah. In those cases, the distance I’m describing between the act of initial creation and the performance on stage is somewhat lessened. Still, we have all the other tasks to do, perhaps the most important of which is inspiration.

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The duties of a choral conductor are extremely varied. As with any public-facing role, it’s not just what happens in the 90 minutes that we are in front of you. First, there’s the work that we do behind the scenes—a lot of it, if, as a conductor you care about your final results in concert. Then there’s the more visible, public stuff, such as clock management, waving your arms, commanding attention, inspiring singers, clock management, bringing a hopefully appealing combination of musical quality, humor, stories, a clear beat, ability to hear what’s going on… and, oh, did I say clock management?

Planning matters, up to a point. The legendary Robert Shaw purportedly spent 40 hours planning every hour of rehearsal that he would lead. Everyone I’ve ever met who worked with Shaw remembers it as life changing. I was once in a workshop where the leader replicated one of Mr. Shaw’s famous ear-training exercises, where we took 16 beats to all go up a single half-step. I felt like my brain was going to explode, and it was really hard. I’m sure it pays off if you do that sort of thing regularly. I’m no Shaw, but the lesson is clear: you still gotta do the right amount of background work for the situation you’re in, and each situation is its own creature with its own demands.

Clock management is the skill (and, I suppose, the art) of getting the most from one’s allotted rehearsal time. This is a sort of dance, in practice, or perhaps more like surfing. For example, as the conductor you can’t go too far in the direction of spending time on just one voice part for too long, or the other parts will get bored and your rehearsal will tip over. Each song is its own laboratory, presenting its own challenges. How much time do you spend on Swahili diction and how much on having each song learn its part? (As we sometimes discover on the fly, how many measures can you really teach each voice part before the other singers get restless?)

To get really granular: how much new material can you teach the basses in the middle section of Rutter’s Shepherd’s Pipe Carol before you have them sing it with the tenors (who learned their lines right before you worked with the basses), so that the tenors don’t forget what they learned three minutes ago? And then how long can you leave the sopranos and altos out in left field before you bring them all back at letter C to try to hear a few bars with everybody singing? Yes, and how many times must you run the piano transition from the previous section so that everyone feels comfortable coming in on the right note when they start the next section? And how much of a new song can you hope to teach in the 15 or 20 minutes you gave yourself to work on that song, since you have at least three other songs on which you want to try to do meaningful work before today’s rehearsal is over? The answer, my friend, is… plan all you want, and then make micro- adjustments on the fly, smiling all the while.

I think about this stuff all the time, and I’m sure my colleagues on our team do, too, in their own ways. I’m lucky in that I’ve been doing this sort of thing long enough—including that very first Chicago a cappella rehearsal in 1993, for which I did Shaw-like obsessing (not 40 hours, but maybe five)—that sometimes I can coast by with spending only 5 or 10 minutes on a rehearsal plan, assuming that my previous weeks have gone well and that I’m working through the material in a methodical way.

Also, sometimes one finds new tools that help, especially with smart younger colleagues who can cajole you into trying new technology. I share the conducting duties in our Evanston choir with Hannah Dixon McConnell, who is a wonderfully collaborative spirit, and she suggested this spring that we create a Google sheet (like an easily sharable online Microsoft Excel document that needs no annoying passwords for access) in which we would log our progress on all of the sections of each of the songs that we touched in a given rehearsal. This allows us both to see how the whole choir is doing, and to monitor progress even from those days when we’re not there, and it affords us the flexibility to spend extra time on a hard piece like the Rutter if the situation warrants it. This ended up being so useful that I’ve cloned the idea for the Gold Coast and Hinsdale choirs that I share with Amy and Daniel, respectively.

You still get the occasional curve ball. There was one day recently where I was wildly optimistic about how much of Jingle Bells Hallelujah we were going to get through, so the lack of progress derailed my plan and then I had to account for it in the next rehearsal. This is why more planning is usually better, as long as you don’t overthink it. At least now I can log the progress in the Google sheet so I don’t forget where I left off!

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Now we get to another part of the choral conductor’s job: picking music. Linda Powell and I do this for the Sounds Good Choir spring and fall sessions, and Sandy Siegel Miller and I do this for Good Memories and for all of our Summer Rocks choirs. So if you’re in a choir with Amy or Daniel or Paul or Hannah and you don’t like the repertoire, don’t blame them… you can come directly to the ones who picked your program! Each of these program-picking teams has the process pretty much down to a science, from years of doing it together. It’s really fun, and it’s hard work, taking patience and persistence to get a good program mix.

One of the qualities of a good program is that it is chosen in a manner that fits the performers whom you are leading. For Sounds Good, Linda and I make sure to pick programs that have varied moods, speeds, difficulty levels, and so on. The difficulty level is key, because music that’s too easy can be boring, and music that’s too hard can be demoralizing. It’s the overall mix that matters; ideally a program will have a little “give” in the sense that, for example, if Jingle Hallelujah ends up taking more rehearsal time than you might have expected, a piece like Umoja Tunaimba actually might take a little less time, and so there are some built-in safety valves like that. This is true within the individual rehearsal and also over the life of a whole 8- or 15-week session.

And it’s a learning curve, one that can only come through trial and inevitable error. I’ve programmed my share of concerts where I was way too ambitious overall, with the sobering result that the concert was, let’s just say, not where it needed to be in terms of preparedness for the desired impact. The low point in my career in that regard was probably the concert of nothing but obscure 20^th-century Scandinavian a cappella choral music, which I programmed for Chicago a cappella in the early years. I remember the polite but pointed comment from a well-respected conducting colleague after that show: “Wow, that sounds like it was really hard.” Ouch. The comment that you want to hear instead, of course, is “Wow, that was wonderful – the concert really spoke to me and warmed my heart,” or something like that. I would have settled for “Gosh—even though I can imagine that this was a challenging program to learn, the repertoire really touched me.” Lesson learned: that program was way too difficult for the rehearsal time that we had. So that combination of musical material went in the mental filing cabinet under Things Never To Attempt Again. I can laugh about it now, but I wasn’t laughing that day!

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Then there’s the feeling aspect of being a conductor. When I say to singers in rehearsal that “you are the conduit for emotion,” or something like that, I really mean it. Each singer’s internalizing of the feelings in the lyrics to each piece is a big part of the choir’s impact on stage.

Let me be a true nerd for a moment, because I want to share something that has inspired me for more than half of my life. Quoting Eugène Véron’s famous 1882 book on aesthetics, Leo Tolstoy wrote the following in his essay, What Is Art? (emphasis added):

Art is the manifestation of emotion transmitted externally by a combination of lines, forms, colors, or by a succession of movements, sounds, or words subjected to certain rhythms.

Isn’t that cool? In other words, with an artistic experience, it’s the feelings that get transmitted from one human being to another.

The songwriter Paul Simon once wrote, “I don’t want audiences to feel a specific thing—I just want audiences to feel.” I can understand his saying that, and I appreciate his wanting to have his music open up the audience’s hearts. However, as a choral conductor I don’t quite agree with him. I believe that a choir can carry the audience along the emotional journey that our lyrics and music convey, and the more specific the better—because great art, in my experience, does take you on a journey that’s worth the ride, and a choir can move the emotional energy in the room through its unified singing toward a particular emotional end. I suppose I may be a control freak (or perhaps otherwise deluded) in thinking that I can have any sway over what other people feel, but I’ve spent decades trying to do just that through this miraculous medium called choral music!

In this context, we conductors have to literally embody the music—by our beat patterns and other hand and facial gestures, and by internalizing the tempo and mood and impact of the music in such a way that we can communicate its essence to our singers and through our singers to the audience. This is what I meant earlier by our role as spiritual intermediaries. In another installment of this blogpost, I’ll expand on the actual conducting part—our beat patterns and such.

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In some ways, to sum up, what we conductors do remains a mystery. I can’t tell you exactly why Daniel does that particular thing at measure 37, but it sure got me to do something cool with my voice. And I don’t know exactly why Amy held that chord like that, but it worked. I don’t know everything that’s going to happen in performance, and that’s the way it should be; we are living, breathing human beings with pulsing hearts and emotions coursing through us, singing together in this one moment that will never be quite like any other moment ever again.

We trust the conductors in front of us to do something magical, and that’s as it should be. So we don’t need to over-explain it. And anyway, as Thelonious Monk famously said, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”

I think we can leave it right there.