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This essay is part of an ongoing series on the Art of Rehearsal.
Last week, I wrote about knowing when to make certain kinds of decisions in a rehearsal, like knowing when to stop and fix, and knowing when to hold and when to fold. In the first, I concluded by providing a simple decision tree with a small number of factors important to consider when making tactical decisions like these.
At the top of this chart was the word “Frame” - for me, it’s a valuable way of analyzing a rehearsal that I regularly use when I watch my own rehearsals, when I mentor students, and when I coach my clients. And while I have my own spin on it, I give full credit to Dr. Robert Duke for coining the term.
Duke is one of the leading music education scholars in the country, based out of the University of Texas in Austin. 30 years ago in 1994, Bob wrote a terrific paper titled, “Bringing the Art of Rehearsing into Focus,” in which he provided a framework for effective observation of a large ensemble rehearsal. While many musicians are focused heavily on the polished final rehearsal, Duke looks at the rehearsal process as a worthy object of study. He encourages deep, detailed observations of conductors in rehearsal, noticing each step in the rehearsal process. To that end, he developed the idea of a rehearsal frame, which he roughly defines at the outset:
“The Rehearsal Frame is a model for observing and analyzing the structure of the teaching-learning process in music performance and in other complex skills.”
That’s a great start, but would that look like? Let’s take a look:
In the paper, he rightly identified an issue I explored at some depth in one of my own papers a couple of years ago: very little of substance has been written about the tactical decision making of conductors in a rehearsal setting.
His idea was to define a medium-scale unit of analysis in which to observe a conductor. A “Rehearsal Frame” in Duke’’s parlance might involve something like stopping to work on measure 127, fixing rhythms, creating precision, tuning chords, and refining style, before moving on.
For a complete overview, you can read the article through your library or by purchase. Duke continued to build on this work across a variety of projects while many other scholars have worked with this framework in subsequent research spanning 30 years. The project. among other things helps us to try to get at a fundamental question: What is a Rehearsal?
From that question flows others, such as:
What is the structure of a rehearsal?
What makes a rehearsal a good rehearsal?
How do students learn to lead rehearsals?
How do experienced conductors hone their rehearsal skills?
I see in Duke’s model some important similarities with the work of Gary Klein and other Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) researchers, best described by Klein’s bestselling book, Sources of Power. Klein’s model does in a general way what Duke’s does in a specifically musical way, which is to try to give an account of the process a person goes through when trying to make a decision or solve a problem.
Duke emphasizes that the Rehearsal Frame model is descriptive and not intended for conductors to think about in real time on the podium. Klein, whose book was published in 1998, just four years after Duke’s paper, goes out of his way to let readers know that they absolutely should not use his decision-making models to train people (that is, that they should not use it descriptively).
In short, there is a tremendously important difference between the skills and knowledge necessary to articulate a model of an activity, and the skills to perform the phenomenon under observation. Duke’s Rehearsal Frame is designed to help with the former but not the latter.
There is a great deal of value here for teachers of conducting, as well as for students, so long as they work with the framework in the context of observation. When I coach my conductor-colleague-clients, I have found success in using models like these to help guide conductors in how they can make good use of their time observing other conductors. I have been delighted to hear when clients have come back from observing a rehearsal, now with deeper structural insights into that conductor’s thinking, insights that they can then refine into materials for their own rehearsal process.
For all of its admirable qualities and its proven track record, I think that a close understanding of its intended purpose gives clues as to other cases in which it might be useful. The Rehearsal Frame model stems from a music education framework that was a product of its milieu. The Cartesian, brainbound conception of mind as computer reached its absolute zenith in the 90’s, the decade that gave rise to The Matrix, released in 1999 but written around the same time as Duke’s paper, interestingly. Interestingly, The Matrix brought ideas like the Brain in a Vat hypothesis into the mainstream, ringing in the new millennium with the notion that we could all be laying stationary in a tank of fluid, doing nothing but hallucinate our lives through a human-machine interface. In the world of the matrix, Kung Fu is little more than a data file ready to be downloaded into consciousness.
Fortunately, we have a host of good reasons to hold these ideas lightly, but they are helpful reminders about the dominant thinking of the time (and it is, frankly, an all-too-prevalent background paradigm even now). And in reminding us about the tension between brain, body, and mind, these ideas help put is in touch with what was at the time still a widespread notion of an authority-driven, lecture-style classroom, with sit-and-get lessons.
With this view of the classroom came other ideas: that students are empty vessels to be filled; that students just need to sit still in order to learn. Without addressing any of this directly, I nonetheless faintly detect in Duke’s outstanding essay an ambient sense that the type of “rehearsal” he has in mind boils down to students sitting inert up until a dynamic teacher gives evocative instructions. I’ve already written about the perils of defining rehearsal. I don’t think that this is Duke’s conscious view in the present, and I doubt if it was at the time, but it’s impossible to imagine someone writing a thoughtful essay and not sometimes reflecting the paradigm of the time.
However, even as the Wachowskis were writing, selling, and filming The Matrix, the first stirrings of a new milieu around human cognition and music education were being sent around via electronic-mail over the Information Superhighway. As one example, these new ideas tended portray students not as passive receptacles, but capable (en)actors and co-creators of knowledge and skill. Another of those stirrings came in the form of a paper by philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers called “The Extended Mind.” They ask an important question: "Where does the mind stop and the world begin?" and it is one of several strands of a vastly expanded conception of cognition that goes far beyond the brain, inhabits the body, and extends outward to our movement, our tools, our spaces, and even into our relationships. Annie Murphy Paul brilliantly and captivatingly describes her personal awakening to this enlarged concept of mind in the introduction to her bestselling 2021 book, The Extended Mind. Paul convincingly shows how scientists are learning ever more about the brain’s fundamental need for motion, gesture, tactile engagement, and interaction with other people in order to learn, think, and perform challenging intellectual activity. But from the beginning, she takes aim at the almost retrograde impulses that continue to inform everything from education to industry:
“we need ever more to think outside the brain even as we have become ever more stubbornly committed to the brainbound approach." (12)
I’m thrilled to see the book is continuing to receive attention three years on, and was particularly glad to hear a new interview by Dan Harris. It’s worth the listen:
The Extended Mind has important implications for the world of musical rehearsal, conducting, and music education. But to try to shoe-horn it directly into our world of music-making wouldn’t make much sense. For that, we need to find applications of these Extended Mind capacities.
Fortunately, two such books exist, both of which came out around the same time as Paul’s book. Grounding the Analysis of Cognitive Processes in Music Performance by Linda Kaastra and Musical Bodies, Musical Minds: Enactive Cognitive Science and the Meaning of Human Musicality by Dylan Van Der Schyff et al. I hope to share more about each of them in the future and their applications to active performing musicians engaging in rehearsal.
In the meantime, I’d like to openly place an open call to like-minded musicians to think with me about the rehearsal process and try to better map out the rehearsal process from the perspective of the practitioner. My hope is that there will soon be a serviceable prescriptive model that could help conductors organize and deliberately develop their rehearsal skills in much the same way that a body builder systematically attends to each muscle group. Robert Duke’s Rehearsal Frame is a great place to start the search.
1. Robert A. Duke, “Bringing the Art of Rehearsal Into Focus: The Rehearsal Frame As a Model for Prescriptive Analysis of Rehearsal Conducting,”Journal of Band Research, 30, no. 1 (Fall 1994), 78-95.
Cover Image: Edgar Degas, The Rehearsal of the Ballet Onstage, Oil on Canvas, ca. 1874, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436155. (Open Access)