Gestural Musings: Intro and Framework

EDIT: I originally posted this as Conducting Gesture 101, but I’m going to do separate sets of blogs posts on gesture. Gesture 101 will be about refining basic mechanics, and Gestural Musings, of which this is the intro, will be more about the science, philosophy, and pedagogy of gesture. OK, now you know 🙂

My pedagogy for gesture is organized around two basic ideas. The first is taken from information theory. In his foundational document “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” published in 1948, Claude Shannon wrote:

 “The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. The significant aspect is that the actual message is one selected from a set of possible messages. The system must be designed to operate for each possible selection, not just the one which will actually be chosen since this is unknown at the time of design.”

That’s a lot of words, but what I’ve been able to take from it is:

1. We need to be able to reproduce at the end more or less what we meant at the beginning
   The messages will have meaning, but that meaning will be from a predetermined set of meanings
   We don’t need to necessarily communicate specific content so much as trigger the recall of content
   We need to be able to communicate clearly anything we might ever need, no matter how infrequently we might need it

To help us understand the basic process of communication, Shannon included this chart, which I think helps immensely:

In conducting, we could edit this to look like this:

Basically, our job is to make sure that our brain creates gesture that is clear enough to be observed by the singers’ eyes so that it can be accurately interpreted by the singers’ brains. That seems simple enough. Shannon’s indication that the messages need to have predetermined meaning actually makes this simpler. We have conducting patterns because that allows a universal understanding of metric structures. Ever try to sing or play for a conductor who was in the wrong meter? It’s like you’re being lied to, because you already know what the various available signals should mean! But simple doesn’t necessarily mean easy. Keeping time and being a clear and expressive conductor are a long way removed from each other, and music is complex, and every composition needs different things, and every choir needs different things…

To help deal with this problem, I have borrowed an idea from Bloom’s Taxonomy, namely the dividing of objectives into three domains: cognitive, psycho-motor, and affective. In short, cognitive deals with communication of information, psycho-motor deals with communication that causes physical action, and affective deals with communication of emotional content. It is in balancing and prioritizing the communication in these domains that we break away from being technicians and find our art as conductors. Each of the next three posts in this series will deal with one domain, and from there we’ll look at ways to avoid “noise” in the signal chain by improving awareness of our gestural clarity.

The next post, further exploring the Cognitive Domain, is HERE.

Have ideas about ways understand our gestural language? I’d love to hear your thoughts or questions in the comments below!