First Suite in Eb for Military Band: Gustav Holst (Mock Conducting)

I am a freshman music major in the Mary Pappert School of Music at Duquesne University. I had the opportunity, as a freshman, to start conducting early in my education. For my first semester I analyzed and worked on conducting the famous First Suite in Eb for Military Band by Gustav Holst. I would love to hear constructive feed back on my conducting, not the players. The musicians read this at sight for my mock conducting scenario.

Special thanks to Dr. Robert Cameron for helping achieve this huge step forward in my education as a conductor and the Duquesne University Wind Symphony for supplying their talents as musicians for a great experience.

Category:

Music

Tags:

• instrumental music
• classical
• music
• asian drama

[LS6Silverado]

Palm foward to much at the wrong parts in the school...something that helped me is listen to them as your performing on stage not in a room...

[wtfmate09]

Overall, as a freshman, this is quite an impressive. My assumption is that you have not taken a conducting fundamentals course at this point, and yet it still looks good overall. Kudos.

p.s. Very sorry for the lengthy comment, but I hope it helps nonetheless. Feel free to email me: jfloyd04@uafortsmith.edu

[wtfmate09]

Also, the palm facing forward (2:43, 4:26) is a very aggressive gesture. the players themselves will almost always take that gesture as “Too much! Back off now!” as opposed to “Gently, please”. I would recommend replacing it with a palm-down gesture, something that still indicates soft dynamics but doesn’t make the player think they were too loud and need to back off quickly.

[wtfmate09]

Concentrate on your ictus hitting in (relatively) the same point every time. At points, your wrist gets a little out of control (1:58) which causes the actual point of your beat to become lost in the baton flip. The little “digging” motions are not very easily visible unless they have some sort of vertical movement to accompany them. This really seems to cause you some problems around 4:55 when the beat becomes almost totally lost in the huge movements in you arms.

[macintoshfan9999]

Great job! Seems like the lessons we took together paid off well, I'd suggest not pointing at yourself unless you are trying to get an out of sync group back on track (at least thats what I saw...) Other than that great work!