The Power of Gaze in Music. Leonard Bernstein’s Conducting Eyes

Isabella Poggi,Ylenia Leone,Loredana Ranieri,Alessandro Ansani

doi:10.3390/mti4020020

Abstract

The paper argues for the importance and richness of gaze communication during orchestra and choir conduction, and presents three studies on this issue. First, an interview with five choir and orchestra conductors reveals that they are not so deeply aware of the potentialities of gaze to convey indications in music performance. A conductor who was utterly conscious of the importance of gaze communication, however, is Leonard Bernstein, who conducted a performance of Haydn’s Symphony No. 88 using his face and gaze only. Therefore, a fragment of this performance is analyzed in an observational study, where a qualitative analysis singles out the items of gaze exploited by Bernstein and their corresponding meanings. Finally, a perception study is presented in which three of these items are submitted to expert, non-expert, and amateur participants. The results show that while the signal for “start” is fairly recognized, the other two, “pay attention” and “crescendo and accelerando” are more difficult to interpret. Furthermore, significant differences in gaze item recognition emerge among participants: experts not only recognize them more, but they also take advantage of viewing the items with audio-visual vs. video-only presentation, while non-experts do not take advantage of audio in their recognition.

Highlights

If music is made by musicians’ souls and bodies, the ways in which musicians make music in an ensemble is influenced by its participants and, if there is one, by the conductor’s body
A hypothesis to account for this lies in the type of work that the conductor carries out with a choir, which is often continuous, or at least more assiduous than the one the conductor usually has with an orchestra
Some signals have interactional functions while others have technical functions, and the emotion displays performed by gaze, again, like those found in previous analyses of other conductors, can express either the outcome of the ongoing performance (Outcome Emotion Expression), sometimes fulfilling a feedback function, or the emotion to be stamped in the music played

Summary

Introduction

If music is made by musicians’ souls and bodies, the ways in which musicians make music in an ensemble is influenced by its participants and, if there is one, by the conductor’s body. The role of body movements in conducting is self-evident when it comes to the conductor’s hand gestures. Extensive literature has tackled the ways in which performers’ movements influence the perception and the subjective experience of music [1,2,3], the functions of performers’ movements, body communication among co-performers [4], body movements in singing [5,6] and in musical teaching [7]. Some musicians and musicologists cite the magnetic force of gaze of some conductors: for example, [8,9] the eyes of Antonio Guarnieri (1880–1952), who used very few and narrow gestures, but conducted through his sharp and penetrating gaze, that “bewitched” the orchestra.

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion