Do I Have to Use Beat Patterns?

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four-pattern
One of the areas of choral directing in which there is the greatest disparity between text-book ideas of good practice and what happens in real life is in the use of beat patterns. The orthodoxy is that they provide the correct method for conducting a choir, and they provide the foundation of most approaches to teaching the craft, yet the literature remains full of rude comments about the technique of choir leaders who depart from them – real conductors, it seems, are quite happy to ignore the othodoxy.

As in most well-entrenched debates, each position has its virtues, and real life tends to involve finding a way to sail a coherent course between the polarised points.

The Case for Patterns

  • They provide a lingua franca common to musicians across the western art tradition
  • They reflect and articulate the underlying rhythmic structure of the music
  • They provide a clear framework to help all the performers keep together

The Case against Patterns

  • They box in the directing technique, and inhibit the conductor’s expressiveness
  • They may not reflect what is actually the most interesting musical feature at a particular point
  • They encourage conductors to ‘beat the music to pieces’, as William Ehmann puts it

What happens in Real Life

In real life, nearly all directors use some elements of pattern at least some of the time, but improvise freely around the basic shapes in order to make sense of the specific musical detail. I’ve written at length about four case studies in my book on choral conducting, so won’t repeat the detail here.

But you find that even the most text-book conductor sometimes has a ‘down-beat’ that comes from below and behind (what I came to call the ‘shovel ictus’), and even the most free-style director retains the constituent elements of pattern of approach, ictus, rebound, with the direction of the beat encoding meanings of musical tension and release.

Learning patterns is useful, in the same way that learning scales and arpeggios is useful when studying an instrument. It gives you a well-practised gestural vocabulary that maps well onto patterns of musical shape. And unless you are actually fluent enough at pattern that you can use it at will, any choice not to use it isn’t really a choice at all – it’s just a skill deficit. But just because you can use pattern doesn’t mean that sticking to it at all costs is going to be helpful to your singers.

Hi Liz,

I've been reading your blog for a while and I've been on the brink of leaving a comment for some time now. Beat patterns have finally pushed me over the edge!

I sing occasionally for a conductor who beats using the conventional pattern but back to front. Most of the time this doesn’t matter but of course at the times when you really do need to know where you are it can be fatal to take a look at him.

I always look forward to seeing what you have written when I see a new post appear in my feed reader. Long may you continue.

Best regards,

Roger

As a singer, I need more than anything else to be able to find the beat. Our choir sits on both sides of the sanctuary; there's no way we can be precisely together if we don't have the conductor to follow. And nobody wants to sing nothing but robotic tempi, so we need to be able to follow rubato, accelerando, ralletando, etc.

It's good to be able to discern the beat well enough to be sure that the consonants will precede the beat properly. Just think how often repeated glorias result in lagging choirs...

I've never had a problem with a conductor beating the music to death. Rather, the issue has always been trying to figure out where in the flowery gesturing there's information on what I'm supposed to do.

Musical interpretation? We're supposed to be working through that in rehearsal so that the only issue in performance is how the moment happens to steer the conductor to ask for more or less than we planned.

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