emotional contagion

A conductor relies on emotional contagion.


Since the discovery of and research on mirror neurons, we've come to believe that they are partially responsible for emotional contagion.


Wait, I feel like I've written this before.  I have.  So I'll just paste an excerpt from my article, "Thoughtful Gestures," found in your April 2010 Choral Journal:

Contagion is a notion derived from medicine. Most people have experienced the sensation finding someone’s energy contagious, or read headlines around Inauguration Day about “catching Obama fever.”  Emotional contagion is “a multiply determined family of psychophysiological, behavioral, and social phenomena," meaning it, rather like a cold, can be caught from a wide variety of sources and manifest with many possible symptoms.  This relates to the mirror neuron system because “the basic emotional contagion system is thought to support our ability to empathize emotionally (‘I feel how you feel’) and has been linked to the human MNS,” meaning it is inherent in each of us. 

Entrainment is one symptom of contagion.  Research for this article came up with no studies linking entrainment and the mirror neuron system, but has already been applied to musical rehearsals: James Jordan discusses Robert Shaw’s use of entrainment with a pendulum.  Synchrony is another symptom of the contagion, as is mimicry.  This is the process through which Fuelberth’s singers would develop vocal tension in response to tension in their conductor’s hand [referring to s study which examined the perception of vocal tension in relationship to tension in a conductor's left hand].  People naturally tend to imitate others, and the performance of an expressive act can trigger the emotion associated with that act.  That is why “evolutionary theorists have argued that sad, frightened, and angry faces may trigger powerful emotional reactions, and that it may be difficult to extinguish such innate reactions.” This is, after all, what communication is for: the ability to give warning and to take heed without having to think about it probably lengthened the lives of our ancestors.  The range of individuals’ susceptibility to emotional contagion and their ability to infect others is wide, but can be increased with training

So, a conductor depends on emotional contagion.  When I wrote about Leonard Bernstein, I emphasized his ability to get performers to take on the responsibility of being artists, of engaging with the music in the moment they make it.  You can ask them to do it, if they're great musicians like the members of the NY Phil, and then trust that they will  But one of the jobs of a conductor is to live the emotional intention of the music in order to influence the performers, and that's where emotional contagion comes in.  

As empathy starts to take place, the conductor, then the performers, then the audience start to connect with the feeling in the air.  Sounds fruity, but it actually happens.  Well, it can happen.  Especially if:

• You allow it.  It's a choice--you won't necessarily get carried away by a dramatic moment.  But if you would like to, you can allow yourself to be affected.  You already know this, you've already made this choice sometime in your life.  You can develop your skill at it, and increase your empathy.  (More on this when I talk in greater detail about neuroplasticity.)
• There are multiple means of communication.  In a movie you get sound and light and story.  In a live theater performance, you also get the actual feelings of the actual people on stage--pheromones might be involved, so that even our sense of smell is helping us to empathize.  In a musical performance, it's more difficult.   Classical music takes some training to get into.  I mean, it's wonderful and anyone can love it, but the more you know about it, the easier it is to listen to.  The better you understand it, the quicker you can perceive the expressive intent of the composer.  You also, in a live performance, get the benefit of the emotions of individual performers if they are, as they should be, really living that expression and not just reproducing notes on a page.

Emotional contagion.  More science that shows why art is art.

music teachers, you're amazing

I'm going to be writing about music teachers in movies this week.  There will be many disparaging remarks made.  Before I do that, I want to make it clear how highly I respect real-life music teachers who spend every day in classrooms all over the country.  They work with kids, they wrestle with administrators, they seek repertoire, and try to make art in the middle of a bureaucratic nightmare.

I taught for five years, from 1999 to 2004.  I liked the kids, I liked making them sing, showing them how music was art.  I hated that administrative efficiousness, the heirarchy, the bureaucracy were valued over beauty, joy, and the experience of art.  I mean, I get that schools deal with huge numbers of kids with a wide variety of requirements, but can't they trust a teacher at least to be an expert in his field and even a thoughtful, insightful human being?  Bah!  I won't write about that because I don't want to.  I don't have the answers; I don't even have the patience to seek answers.  Suffice it to say I found it stifling to the point of torture.  I couldn't take it.  I couldn't do it.

I was unlucky, I think, in my situation.  There must be schools out there who value art and music, who understand that an individual teacher can be a great teacher without conforming to a specific paradigm, or who have a paradigm that more closely resembles me with all my highly skilled intensity and passion and commitment.  But all teachers must conform to some degree, and their tolerance for that is greater than mine.  So I admire their resilience.  I know a job I can't handle when I see it, and teaching music in a school is one.  To the people who can, I take my hat off.

In the, as they say, interest of full disclosure, I should also mention that my husband is a high school choir director and has been for over twenty years.  He's also a church musician and kick-ass pianist and all-around generally fabulous person with more patience and tolerance than I can ever imagine possessing.  His ability to put up with other people's bullshit (including mine, if I'm being honest) and still maintain his sense of humor and artistic integrity is awe-inspiring.  How he does it, I have no idea.

I adjudicate competitions and festivals, so I hear a lot of choirs and get to see what a lot of teachers do.  Most of the bad choirs are being conducted by people who were not trained to conduct choirs.  They were hired by people who didn't realize that there is actually training required to teach people to sing, and they themselves didn't know enough to argue.  So I try to help when I give them comments.  "Head voice," I tell them, "and quality repertoire."

Many of the people who were trained to conduct choirs are doing beautiful, amazing things.  I've heard school choirs that literally made me weep both from the power of their performance and for the joy that this kind of thing is happening in schools.  Middle school boys singing Faure, freshman girls singing Mendelssohn.  Bliss!

Yes, music teachers are amazing.  I thank them for putting up with our kids and our stupid, flawed educational system.  Thanks for sticking in there and making a difference!

Soon, I will be railing against depictions of music teachers in movies, mostly because the conducting is such crap.  I don't mean to say that music teachers aren't heroes.  I don't mean to say they don't deserve to have movies made about them.  On the contrary, they deserve to be depicted well--as good as they are--as opposed to the crap that gets slopped up onto screens every few years.

"maestro"

I got a t-shirt for my birthday a couple of years ago that says MAESTRO on it in a sort of Broadway playbill style font.  I think it's funny, so I wear it to the gym and, as below, when I romp my dogs.

Maestro is an Italian word that translates literally to "master."

A Google search tells me that it's derived from the Latin magister, which means teacher, tutor, or master.

And magister is derived from magnus, which means great or mighty.

All of these, sayeth the Great and Powerful Goog, are derived from the Proto-Indo-European root meg, which means great.

The leader of music in church used to be called the maestro di capella (the more familiar German term is Kappelmeister).  And maestro is short for that.

But why do we call a conductor "maestro," even when he no longer has anything to do with the chapel, much less master of it?  My opera singer friend  John tells me that it's an American thing.  Europeans don't address a conductor as "Maestro"--though certainly in our consciousness, we imagine obsequious violinists shaking hands with a man in white tie and tails, lowering his head and saying "Maestro..."

Opera singers, by the way, have a harder job than conductors do.  Opera singers are amazing people, and they will definitely get their own post some day.

In the meantime, why do we call a conductor "Maestro?"

I don't know.

It used to be common for composers to be conductors.  It was also common for composers to be teachers, so it would make sense to address a teacher as "Maestro," just as you might address your yogi as "Guru."  And why would we, in 2010, do  that?

I don't know.

Perhaps because conducting is such a mysterious art form, practiced by so few, deeply studied by even fewer, that we maintain a specialized title for members of a specialized field.  Further, perhaps we enjoy thinking of the conductor as someone apart from everyday life.  The Maestro.  Or, in my case, Maestra.

This is not the most informative post I've written, but I have looked for answers and no one seems to have examined the issue because the practice is taken so for granted.  If anybody else has an explanation, I'd love to know.

with my freeze ray

I need to be an evil scientist in my next life.  There must be a way for me to harness my useless excitement over other people's research.  Honestly, this kind of stuff thrills and tickles me: Biomotion Lab.  They study motion and what it communicates.  And my question is, "when will they start to study conductors?"  Because all we do is move and count on our ensembles to perceive stuff.  And it's sooooo interesting what they might be getting from our movement that we don't even intend.


I keep giggling and clapping like a pre-schooler watching Teletubbies.  Isn't it COOL?!


Check out the fun Biomotion toys--er, demos.  My favorite is the BMLrating, where you can choose any attribute you want to measure (I chose "engagement"), then watch hundreds of examples and rank them (I ranked them from "disinterested" to "interested.").  The computer then puts together the information and gives you a result where you can slide a scale to increase or decrease the attribute.  So it showed me a person walking, then I slid the bar over the scale to "interested" and the walker got faster, leaned more forward (and a bunch of other smaller, subtler changes that are hard to describe).  I slid the bar over to "disinterested" and the walker slowed and seemed to shift his weight back.  Awesome!


My ability to recognize sex was 62%, slightly below the world average of 65%.


I need a moment to giggle and clap some more.


The website says they're goals are to study

detection of animate agents

conspecific recognition

gender recognition

individual recognition

recognition of an agent's actions

recognition of emotions, personality traits and intentionality

face recognition

My interest is particularly in that penultimate one, of course.  Recognition of emotions, personality traits, and intentionality--WOW!  This is just walking, of course, but it's got to have ramifications into more elaborate gesture, too.  Doesn't it?  Also, is there correlation between weight and mood or sex and energy level?  Does a feminine motion look more relaxed?  I don't know!  But I'm glad someone is trying to measure this stuff.


Science and art!!!  We will stop... The world.

Na'vi

I haven't seen Avatar.  


I know, you can mock me later.  


My understanding is that the Na'vi have this thing where they say to each other "I see you," and being seen is a big deal.  Recognizing a person's value, their self, is powerful and important.  I just wrote about the responsibility of a conductor to humanity, and there's this huge movie that talks about valuing each individual's humanity... or Na'vi-ity.  Which is awesome.  And apparently everyone's seen it, except me and this guy:


The conductor of the Richardson Symphony Orchestra (have you ever heard of them?  Me neither.) of Richardson, TX, Anshel Brusilow, apparently had a kind of hissy fit, berating the orchestra for complaining about not getting paid.  


At the Minnesota Orchestra Blog, I find someone who agrees with me that conductors have a responsibility to honor the humanity of the musicians in the ensemble.  Sarah Hicks says that, though there was a time when conductors could hire and fire on whim, "this behavior is no longer considered normal or even appropriate."  Lord, was there a time when this behavior was considered normal or appropriate?!




According to his bio,  Brusilow's only actual training as a conductor was when he was a teenager, fully sixty years ago, which means his training is pretty spare compared to folks now who get DMAs in conducting before they get appointed to a position like that.  I do believe that people who actually specialize in conducting don't generally act this way.  "This" way being that which is more appropriate for someone who is blind because their head is buried in their own nether regions.  


There's Manuchehr Sabhaii in Tehran (Tehran!), who quit in part because the management was treating the musicians poorly.  His response was not "I'm so good that I'll put up with BS" but rather "I'm too good to tolerate an organization who doesn't have the same values that I do."


I do believe I've already written about this.  Training and artistry, vision that complements that of the organization.  Responsibility to humanity that we may be, you know, people.

I think a conductor should side with performers over management if a contract is not honored by management.  But even if the conductor thinks that management isn't too badly at fault and wants the musicians to be patient with them, he shouldn't speak to the orchestra with that kind of snide disrespect.


Unlike Brusilow, most us can't live for a year without getting paid.  If he doesn't need to complain about it, that should make him an advocate for the rest of us!  That's what we owe each other in this life--to care for others when we are healthy, to fight for others when we are strong.  When he tells them to "wake up" and "get a life," he clearly doesn't see them as human beings.  Because they do have lives.  Which is why they need to get paid!    


James Cameron and I need to sit down with this guy and give him a good talking-to.  

responsibility to humanity

I recently told someone that I believe pharmaceutical companies deserve to profit from new drugs they develop.  I think research is undervalued, and people who discover and/or create something new should be rewarded for their contribution to humanity.  I have personally benefited from pharmaceutical interventions, and I'm grateful to the companies to did all of that expensive research to come up with the drugs that helped me.

I'm grateful.  I appreciate (by both the American and British definitions of that word) the original work that went into the development of those drugs.  The final product was of value to me, so I'm willing to exchange money in return for what they provide.

However.

I want to believe that the individuals who do that research, who run those companies, feel about their work the way I feel about my work: that the only reason to do any work in the world is for the benefit of humanity.  I want to believe that someone who runs a company that makes billions of dollars every year will not just feel obliged, but will want to give back to the world, so that people who are unable to give much money can benefit from their work as much as those of us who have the capacity to pay what it is worth.

I'm a conductor.  I don't make anything useful.  I don't save lives or feed the hungry.  I'm an artist.  I provide a service, sort of, but it's not one that puts roofs over peoples' heads or ensures clean water in the developing world.  The risks I take are personal, philosophical ones--which aren't risks at all, compared to the risks taken by guys who fill potholes on highways.  We need those guys.  I'm grateful to those guys.  I'm content to pay taxes so that the government can pay them to do it.  They do it to profit from it, to take care of their families; but, I hope they also feel good that they make our lives better.

A conductor has a responsibility to humanity, as do all members of the human race, to use their work to benefit others.  Maslow's heirarchy tells us that, once food and shelter are provided, human beings have a need to express, create, and connect with others.  Conductor's don't address the essential necessities at the bottom of the pyramid, and frankly sometimes I have some guilt about that.  People are starving, but I make music!  Still, we do provide access to the top of the pyramid.  And even people who are just barely making ends meet will benefit from an opportunity to sing with others, or to hear great music being made.  Struggling to survive can sap your spirit, but art is nourishment that can refresh your humanity.  I hope that my work does that for someone someday.

I think people need to take care of one another.  I think that's the only reason any human beings are here on this planet, and that no matter what occupies our time, we all have the same purpose.  Conductors need to provide an environment of physical and emotional safety and support for their ensemble members, so that they feel free to make expressive music that touches audiences, so that the members of both the ensemble and the audience benefit from the uplifting, enlightening experience of great art.

My immersion in art makes me want to share my gifts with others; it has made me a more complete human being and inspired me to seek my fullest humane potential.  I hope that others feel the same way.  I suspect that if everyone got to experience art the way I do, they would have the same reaction I have had.  So I aim to bring my art to as many people as will let me.

it's no secret

I like John Terauds' blog because he writes about musicianship like it's a way of life.  Which it is.  I appreciate any blogging about conducting, and I enjoy the headline:

Empowerment the secret ingredient to happy results from conductor and orchestra

He has, in fact, hit the nail on the head (one of the nails, anyway) when he identifies empowerment, but allow me to quibble--er, I mean, clarify:

It's not a secret.  And it's not just a new generation of conductors who do this.

Jeffrey Renshaw, the wind conductor at UConn, played a DVD for his undergraduate instrumental conducting class.  It showed clips of different orchestras with different conductors playing some of the "Overture" from Candide.  A wide variety of interpretations were represented, and the penultimate example was Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic, in which he did his funky, odd-looking conducting, and the orchestra played the pants off the piece.  It was clearly the most lively, interesting, richly-textured, dynamically varied performance of them all.  The final example was of the NY Phil playing after Bernstein's death.  It was the same piece, but the conductor's podium was left deliberately empty in tribute to him.  It was even better than the performance with Bernstein on the podium.  Bernstein's gift--one of his gifts--was getting each player to give as he gave, to engage in every moment of the performance with artistic integrity.  It's what they do as solo artists.  Without a conductor, that's what these amazing professionals did as an ensemble.

Another mentor of mine, James Jordan, widely published author on choral conducting, has written even in his earliest books about the individual responsibility of each member of the ensemble to make music independently.  Specifically, he has described how being in a large group tends to make a person feel like he or she doesn't have to be responsible, since there are all those other folks to share the load.  That natural inclination to abdicate to the whole group is a problem all conductors combat, and always have.

"I can't crawl inside your head and make the music for you," I tell my college singers.  "You have to be musicians!"

John Terauds mentions a "long list of very successful and respected tyrant-micromanager conductors."  I have a theory about this.  One might get the impression that those conductors are "successful and well-respected" because most arts administrators and audience members don't know enough about conducting to recognize that tyrant-micromanager conductors aren't actually all that good.  If you ask a professional, specialist conductor (Dr. Renshaw or Dr. Jordan, for example) his opinion about a conductor on that "very long list," I bet he won't gush about success and respect.  He wouldn't bad-mouth a colleague, but buy that conductor a drink and promise him confidentiality, and he may shrug his shoulders and say, unimpressed, "enh.  He's okay."

Further, I suspect that these tyrant-micromanagers find success by playing on people's ignorance.  It's easy for people assume that if you are condescending and snobby about how much you know, then you must know more than they do.  If you treat other musicians with disdain, then it must be because you are better than they are, right?  And because conducting is such an esoteric field, few people know enough to explain or contradict.  Beware the unpleasant conductor!  He (there are so few prominent women conductors that it's just statistically more likely to be a man, though a woman has all the potential to be unpleasant that a man does) may be hiding his own insecurity, if not incompetence.  Also, so many undertrained conductors are on podiums that audiences keep getting exposed to mediocre conducting, with no one openly telling them "no, that's not what conducting is supposed to be!"  The guy on the podium must be what a conductor is.  Right?

Not necessarily.

There's a difference, and I'm glad to have this blog to explain it to anyone who wants to know.  Of course, my perspective isn't the only legitimate one; it's just the only one I've had time to write about so far.

So, to John Terauds I say: "you're right!" (well, more specifically, "I agree," which, of course, is the same thing as far as I'm concerned): humble, collegial, inspirational conductors are superior conductors to tyrant-micromanagers (in my opinion.  Because the resulting performances will be more colorful, vibrant, and alive with the artistry of each performer's deepest humanity!).  However, they aren't a new thing.  We've been around as long as there have been conductors.  I'm working to debunk the myth of the jerk who flails, and I thank you for giving me the chance to explain it better.