If this is your first time to visit my blog, welcome! My name is Jordan and I’m a conductor, teacher, and music-lover. This is my blog, the Conductor’s Notebook. To get an overview, visit About the Blog.
The following is an adapted version of a thread that originally appeared on Twitter in June 2022:
I’ve been writing a lot recently, and most of it about a passion of mine, which is the rehearsal process. But, what exactly is a rehearsal? This might seem like a facile or even pedantic question, but it’s a big one for professional conductors and music educators alike. It’s difficult to determine how to have a good rehearsal if we don’t first agree on what a rehearsal entails.
Music, like many disciplines, sometimes suffers from a pileup of overlapping meanings for the same or similar words. This is made worse by some of our better literature, which is often neither consistent with the world or itself. One example is the concept of Rehearsal. What is it? This pretty basic question is surprisingly difficult to answer.
Within music, rehearsal remains ambiguous. It can refer to the act (let's rehearse this passage) or the activity which is a session containing many instances of the act (rehearsal is at 7 PM). One definition is a container for the other - similar to a synecdoche.
Yet, somehow "I'm going to a rehearsal with my children's choir" and "I'm going to rehearsal at the Met" are both perfectly formed sentences. Those usages share something in common, vastly different though they may be.
Paul Scanling did a nice job of identifying two of the commonalities: productivity and purpose.
Rob Dietz agrees that it has something to do with goals, prioritizing, and coordinating between individuals - work that can't be done alone.
Jamie Kennedy, a scholar and professional trombonist in Brisbane, has a nice definition: "the personal and interpersonal process of progressively constituting and reconstituting musical performance."2
Curiously silent on the matter: both of the relevant Harvard and Oxford dictionaries. There are other oddities. Grove has an entry, a decent one, but it is almost entirely focused on opera, without ever really declaring it so. They do a good job outlining some of the general difficulties on documenting the topic.
Conductor Emily Freeman Brown is to my knowledge the only source that has tried to really pin down some of the more subtle distinctions. Terms such as "rehearsal technique," "rehearsal strategies," and "rehearsal plan" have entries. Progress! More clarity is still required.3
“A gathering of musicians in order to practice the music for a concert performance. (Fr. La répétition, Ger. Die Probe, It. La prova, Sp. ensayo.)”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de musique, trans. William Waring
Rousseau had an entry for rehearsal (répétition). This translation is not good, but, he seemed to capture the importance of a musical rehearsal as a workshop environment when working on a new work with the composer in the room.
Scholar, conductor, and journalist Elliott Galkin wrote a commendable tome on history and theory of conducting, but weirdly doesn't dwell much on rehearsal. Rehearsal is a context for conducting, and not an object to investigate.4
But, he did notice a parallel set of omissions when tracing the history of conducting. Conducting is a bit more understandable as the "baton conductor" (as Galkin calls it) is a more recent phenomenon. But group musical preparation is much older when looking at other cultures, still quite a bit older in Eurocentric traditions, and also more ubiquitous: string quartets lack a conductor but do not lack for rehearsal, for instance.
What's the story here? I think it as at least partially due to the limits of language to describe music, which (as an act, i.e. performance) is a fundamentally different way of knowing.
It's also so central to the culture of music-making that it's often difficult to see. We feel its effects without clearly seeing how it works. Or, we know we're in rehearsal because we showed up to the time and place on the rehearsal schedule, with further associations building in our unconscious.
Lastly, I think it has to do with the materials-ontology of music that reifies the composer and “the work” as the alpha and omega of music, ignoring all of the many other aspects of music-making that Small glorifies in Musicking.
As I have travelled the country to talk to conductors about developing their rehearsal technique, I always like to ask the room about the training they received in their degree programs. You would think it would be front and center in any musical degree program, so central as it is to musical life, but many students can get a diploma in music from a reputable institution without ever receiving any training in rehearsal technique, other than experiential learning. It’s just not a thing. And the few that do, don't get very much at all. As with any skill, rehearsal requires experience, as well as a basis for that experience.
If we can’t agree on a definition, or even that there needs to be a definition, then we will struggle to pin down its attributes and train them effectively.
In the meantime, many of us will go on rehearsing and honing our craft. For my part, I’m going to keep chipping away at that question, rehearsing with as much vigor and skill as I can muster, and learning from others as I share what I’m learning.
I’m unsure about many of the fundamental questions that have continued to come up in my research, which has included rehearsal observations, interviews, and literature review. What I am sure about, is that we could do this work a little better if we could become a little more systematic about how we develop this important and often overlooked skill.
To do that, we will need an agreed-upon system!
1. Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2013), 31.
2. Jamie L. Kennedy, “Learning In Professional Orchestras” (Griffith thesis, Griffith University, 2020), 104. https://doi.org/10.25904/1912/3952.
3. Emily Freeman Brown, A Dictionary for the Modern Conductor. (Rowman & Littlefield: 2015), 285.
4. Elliott W. Galkin. A History of Orchestral Conducting: In Theory and Practice, 3rd ed. (Pendragon Press: 1988).
