Klarinet Archive - Posting 000578.txt from 2005/03

From: "Lelia Loban" <lelialoban@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] OT: good or bad conducting
Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2005 10:43:03 -0500

Patricia A. Smith wrote,
>I would be interested to read other folks'
>ideas with what constitutes good/bad
>conductor/teachers (sometimes they ARE
>both, sometimes not), and have some of
>my own as well (though I do plan to omit
>the names to protect the guilty and the dead!)

Probably a lot of different methods, as taught by various schools, can work
well, in the hands of a sufficiently dedicated and talented conductor.

The Hogwarts School teaches a precise wand, er, baton technique: "Swish and
flick!"

At Castle Dracula, the students use no baton and learn to stand tall, lean
forward with a hypnotic glare, curl the left hand into a fist and shake it
in a frenzy, while pointing the long, commanding finger with the right!

On the Mothership, they teach little gray aliens to scare the musicians
into obedience by conducting with an anal probe instead of a baton.

And then there's the French Foreign Legion School, whose graduates conduct
with swords and have earned a reputation for combative (or even
adversarial) relationships with the Musicians' Union.

In Yoda's Swamp, student conductors never wave the baton. They raise it
slowly, close their eyes and use the Force.

Some musicians say it's hard to follow the beat of graduates from Baron
Frankenstein's Laboratory, who tend to go to one extreme or the other.
Either they plant their feet, stand rigidly and chop at the air with no
regard for the time signature, or they hunch down, drag their knuckles and
hop and flail all over the place: "It'th alive! It'th alive!"

Lelia Loban
"Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be
perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely
deaf."
--Oscar Wilde, _An Ideal Husband_

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