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This essay is part of an ongoing series on the Art of Rehearsal.
Last week presented a confluence of a recent book release and a major book completed that gave me an interesting to revisit intuition as a core component of tactical decision making in rehearsal. But what is it?
Completed: I started reading Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow in June 2019, picking it up at a beach bookshop while on vacation in Delaware. (I have weird taste in beach books!) 5 years and 418 pages later, it was great to close the book with a better conception of the workings of the human mind. More on that below…
Released: Róisín Blunnie and Ciarán Crilly produced an edited volume titled Perspectives on Conducting, a welcome contribution to conducting literature. It lives up to its description in presenting an intersection of research and practice, including a diverse array of perspectives, and eschewing the usual preference only for elite conductor opinions, managing instead to describe the practices of conductors in a wide variety of musical sub-specialties (and musician expertise levels (from youth orchestras to academic settings to professional orchestras).
Of interest to me in the latter book was a chapter by Dr. Hannah Baxter titled “Intuition: The Missing Piece?” I think Baxter gets the question exactly right - implying a firm yes. Intuition is a tremendous source of strength but which has received scant attention from literature on musical performance, music education, or most musicology.
Baxter uses an interesting definition for intuition to help ground her discussion. She defines intuition as:
“...the ability to understand something without the need for analytical reasoning, bridging the gap between the conscious and unconscious/subconscious.”1
JoAnn Falletta is one of many conductors whose insights appear in the chapter on intuition in Perspectives on Conducting, out this summer from Routlege.
She uses this definition to survey conductors from JoAnn Falletta to Mark Elder as well as many excellent but less well-known conductors and teachers across the globe about how intuition shows up for them, from rehearsal, to performance, to programming.
Things got interesting when she invoked Kahnemann in setting up his well-known comparison between the quasi-fictitious “System 1” and “System 2” - the parts of the brain responsible for fast, intuitive judgements, and slow, careful reasoning, respectively.
When not on the podium, I’ve spent the last several years attempting to get a basic handle on some of the aspects of neuroscience and psychology that are relevant to the conducting profession, and that has led me to a variety of interesting places as both a learner and a teacher. Baxter’s highly thoughtful and helpful chapter is encouraging as a demonstration of the direction that I hope conducting studies will continue to work into and towards: placing the experiences of practicing conductors in conversation with leading cognitive science.
What is Intuition?
Baxter’s chapter whet my appetite for more work in this direction. What might that look like?
As someone who has been reading at the intersection of conducting and cognitive science for the past three years, it probably begins where Baxter left off in Kahneman’s passage on Thinking, Fast and Slow:
With a researcher by the name of Gary Klein.
Kahneman’s chapter on the topic was titled “Intuition: When Should We Trust It?” and in it, he introduces him as a longtime friendly antagonist caught in a productively adversarial, multi-decade dialogue about the intuition, analysis, and the nature of expertise. It was thanks to this chapter that I went on to read Kahneman’s most well-known work on the topic, called Sources of Power, in which he describes nine core human capacities, and in which the “Power of Intuition” figures prominently. So prominently, that he later wrote another book about it with that exact name: The Power of Intuition.
In the latter Klein offers this definition:
“the way we translate our experience into action.”2
This grounded definition seems to be driving at a de-mystified sense of the word, and both of these books do exactly that: remove the mystique and the magic, focusing instead on measurable, if non-conscious human activity built on regularities, opportunities, and expectancies, generated from familiar cues. Perhaps my favorite definition of intuition thus far comes from Joel Pearson’s new book on the topic: The Intuition Toolkit
“the learnt productive use of unconscious information to improve decisions or actions.”3
Pearson has managed a feat here by succinctly building on Klein’s earlier definition but expanding it to include a range of conscious activity that can be performed on and around the unconscious activity. Malcolm Gladwell famously called our subconscious “the locked door,” but on Pearson’s account, there might be a few ways to slide some paper under the door, or to put an ear to the door for some helpful signals.4
I don’t know what the best definition of intuition is when thinking in terms of a conductor improving her craft on the podium, but I have a feeling that the next decade will be a time in which more and better answers to these types of questions begin to enter into professional… consciousness.
"My response to those sounds at the frst rehearsal is intuitive, because I need to immediately assess how it compares to what I’d hope it would be.”
—Sir Mark Elder
1. Hannah Baxter, ”Intuition: The Missing Piece?” In Perspectives on Conducting. (New York: Routledge, 2024), 120. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003299660
2. Gary Klein, The Power of Intuition: How to Use Your Gut Feelings to Make Better Decisions at Work. (New York: Crown Currency, 2004), xiv. Link
3. Joel Pearson, The Intuition Toolkit: The New Science of Knowing What without Knowing Why. (Simon & Schuster Australia, 2024). Link
4. Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking. (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2005). Link
