Conducting Video Lesson: Battle of the Bands

Hello everyone, my name is Adrian Casas, I am a violinist and conductor from Virginia, Canada and one of the questions I get asked often is, is there a difference between conducting a band, an orchestra, or a choir? And the short answer is no. And what I mean by that is you wouldn't change your basic technique if you're in front of band, and then if you're in front of an orchestra, or if you're in front of a choir. If you know about conducting methods, that doesn't mean that you will go at least a bit green on one and then you will do Elizabeth Green on one and Saito on the other one and so on and so on and so on. You would probably used your same basic technique that the one that you know. However, make sure that you know your instruments because different instruments have different attacks and different release, and composers will use that advantage to create the acoustic environment that they are looking for.

If you are in front of a choir, you would probably have texts in front of you and texts is important because the syllables and the vowels and everything will have a different release as well. So what I've recommend is to go to one of my initial videos when I talk about the beat and what you will notice in that video is that, what happens before the beat is just as important at what happens after the beat. So how you set up the beat point or the atrius point if you want to call it. Is just as important as how you come out of the beat point. For example, in a Beethoven symphony number one, the first note that you have, you have a combination of different attacks and different releases. For example, you have a long note from the woodwinds and the same time you have pizzicato from the strings.

So how you going to make sure that the woodwinds have enough air and enough air control to play out that number don't play it as the waist it's intended at the same time being together with the strings. Just like the example in the Tobin number one, there are tons of examples out there when you will have different combination of lengths of notes and different attacks in different release, it releases happening at the same time. One more thing that you will want to remember is, if the Baton stops, the sound stops. You can use that as an advantage for your instruments and the musicians that you're working with but if you don't use it wisely then it might become a disadvantage. Feel free to comment down there and give us some examples of what you will have a different attack and different release and how you came ... how did you solve it in your conducting. Thank you very much for watching and stay safe.

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