Are You Choosing Your Gesture—or Is Your Gesture Choosing You?

One of the most humbling—and instructive—things I can do as a teacher and conductor is watch a recording of my own rehearsal or performance. In my Advanced Choral Conducting and Secondary Choral Methods courses, students regularly record their teaching and conducting. When I turn the camera on myself, I remember that I, too, am still a student. Seeing myself as others do reveals things I don’t notice while leading the ensemble.

Among those discoveries are gestures I hadn’t realized had become habits. Watching the recording, I have to ask: Am I choosing this gesture because of the music, or is the gesture choosing me?

A gesture can be beautiful and still tell the choir very little. When the same movement accompanies every phrase, regardless of what the music asks, it becomes part of the conductor’s baseline. The singers may see it, but they have little reason to respond differently.

The question is practical: am I choosing this gesture because of the music and the sound I want, or has the gesture become a behavior that occurs whether or not it is useful?

When a choice becomes a habit

We learn a great deal by watching other conductors. We see a movement in relation to a phrase and hear the sound that accompanies it. Something about that relationship catches our attention, and we take the idea home to our own ensemble.

We practice the gesture, find passages where it is useful, and learn to adapt it to different musical circumstances. By the way, that is transfer: applying what we have learned when the repertoire and context change. With practice, the movement becomes part of our conducting vocabulary. It feels good to use a gesture we admire, especially when the choir responds with the musical result we intended.

But that success can encourage us to use the movement more and more. Eventually, it may appear whether or not the music calls for it. What began as a specific expressive choice becomes part of our baseline. The gesture is still lovely, but its presence no longer signals a distinct musical intention.

I think of my baseline as the conducting vocabulary that establishes pulse and meter while communicating dynamics and articulation—legato, staccato, marcato, and their variations. From that foundation, a change in movement can draw attention to a particular musical intention. If that change becomes constant, however, the contrast disappears.

Mirroring is one gesture I find particularly easy to overuse, and I have to acknowledge it in my own conducting. Sometimes the alternate hand mirrors the entire beat pattern. Sometimes it joins only the lateral, outward movement—once every measure, every other measure, or at another recurring interval. Watching a recording makes that repetition apparent.

Mirroring can serve a musical purpose. But when it appears at predictable intervals regardless of the phrase, text, or sound, I have to ask what it is communicating. Am I using both hands because the music calls for that emphasis, or because the movement has become comfortable? If the alternate hand routinely repeats what the primary conducting hand already communicates, I may be giving up an opportunity for it to convey something distinct.

The question is not simply whether the gesture belongs in my vocabulary. It is whether I am choosing it here, now, for this musical purpose.

Begin with the sound

Before choosing a gesture, identify what you want to hear. “More expression” is too broad to tell us whether anything changed. A more useful target might be a stressed syllable followed by a lighter syllable, a phrase that grows toward a particular word, or a release that preserves the line until the final consonant.

Then ask what the singers need to see to produce that result. The answer may be a change in the size, speed, direction, or timing of the movement. It may also be less movement, allowing one purposeful change to become visible.

The score gives us the musical context. The choir’s response tells us whether our communication is working.

Before taking this inventory, I invite you to “listen to yourself on the answering machine.” For those who remember recording a greeting on an answering machine at home, hearing the playback could be an uncomfortable surprise. The voice on the recording did not sound like the voice we heard while speaking, and many of us would rather have recorded it again than listened to it closely.

Watching ourselves conduct can bring that same discomfort. What we see may differ from what we thought we were communicating. The invitation is to stay with the recording long enough to learn from it: notice what your hands are doing, listen to what the ensemble is producing, and ask whether the relationship between the two is the one you intended.

First, take a gesture inventory

The first exercise is simply to watch a recording of yourself conducting a complete piece with your choir singing. Watch your gestures while listening to the ensemble. Before trying to change anything, take inventory of what you actually do.

Which gestures recur frequently? Are they necessary? Do they communicate something unique, distinct, or expressive? Notice what happens in the music when each movement appears, and whether the singers’ response corresponds to what you intended.

Beyond the primary conducting hand’s beat patterns, cues, releases, and communication of articulation, what movements do you see? What is each movement’s function? Does it serve a purpose beyond feeling good to do? Could it serve a musical purpose if you chose more deliberately where and how to use it?

As you observe, acknowledge that some gestures are movements you like and that feel good to do. There is nothing wrong with liking a gesture. The question is whether it is effective: does it serve a musical purpose?

If we employ a gesture out of habit simply because it feels good, or because we admired its beauty in another conductor’s vocabulary, without connecting it to a musical intention, it becomes movement without musical meaning. Its beauty alone does not tell the singers what we want them to do.

This inventory is a chance to distinguish the gestures you have available from the gestures you use automatically. You may discover a movement you enjoy that could become more effective when you choose a specific musical purpose for it.