Offenbach! Orpheus in the Underworld! Orpheé aux Enfers! THE CAN-CAN!\n\nAnyhoo, this was our final for the semester in two ways - first, to conduct it, but secondly, to arrange it without using a notation program\'s \"transpose\" feature; it had to all be transposed by us. Think about it - what are you going to look like as a conductor if youthink there\'s a wrong note and you have to count half-steps in all the parts to figure out what the problem is?\n\nAs for the arranging part, I had to break the monotony, so I turned things around by giving the melody to the low brass and the bass line to the violins. Also, for the heck of it, I gave a gliss to my standpartner and friend and a tongue slap to the saxes.\n\nAnyway, all that aside, if this feels a little contrived, that\'s because we were all given rather strict guidelines as to which gestures we could use. I\'ll be doing the same excerpt in the fall with different gestures, but again with similar levels of constraint.\n\nFirstly, we had to have a \"big\" and a \"small\" face where the \"big\" face had arms spread out and a large pattern, and pull everything back and up for the \"small\" face. That includes ictus table, eyes, head, left hand, etc. However, the idea was to be brought higher up if you think about where the weight falls on your spine. If this doesn\'t make sense, comment, and I\'ll try and explain further.\n\nSecondly, we were to crescendo over 8 bars into the B theme. This was to be done by evenly lowering the ictus table, growing the beat pattern (string players, Ithought of it like bow spacing during a crescendo - you go out more each time, but you have to come back to the same point), and also show it in our face and torso. This is perhaps the strangest thing, morphing sub. piano eyes to intense eyes because both want to open up, so how do you morph fromopen to open? It\'s really quite subtle and, I found, very much a matter of finding which muscles are really opening your eyelids and how. For the torso, it\'s a similar predicament - for piano, even if you want to hunch, it looks better if you bring yourself up (try it), but for a forte gesture, you want to have your chest forward and present yourself with lots of gusto and bravado, which means a jutted-out chest. The thing I found was that the key is in the shoulders and where they are in relation to the chest - a piano gesture wants to bring them forward, and a forte wants to bring them back. At least, this can be said in this circumstance; the blessing and the curse about conducting is that it is very rare when two of anything are going to have the same gesture in two different spots.\n\nFinally, in the B section, we were supposed to conduct a two-pattern while showing the accents with a pretty dumb left-hand gesture : straight up, straight down. With permission, I was allowed for the sake of the practicum to deviate from that if I wasn\'t getting the sound I wanted, which you can see, I wasn\'t exactly. If done right, which I didn\'t do here, a karate-chop kind of gesture can give some pretty good bite to the sound. The reason I was hunching over, by the way, was because I wasn\'t getting any eye contact. Perhaps the better thing to do would have been to move up so that they have to look up to see me and can\'t just look out of the corners of their eyes?\n\nOne really important part about accents : the sound you\'ll get is how you leave the ictus table. If you leave with weight, you\'ll get a weighty sound; if you leave like you\'ve just touched a hot stove, you\'ll get more front end on the note. What I notice about my own gestures is that instead of just moving sharply and letting my hand hang, I keep it moving, which gives me some pretty large and, after a while, meaningless gestures. I think that if I were to have left my hand hanging in one place, it would have had more spring-like potential energy to it.\n\nFinally, we were supposed to have a \"finishing move\"that we used for the stinger. I spent more of my practice time getting used to the left-handed accent gesture and figuring out how to make it less lame, so my finishing move ended up being kind of contradictory and uncomfortable. I tried to cue the saxes for their tongue slap (oops) and alsogive length to the stinger (oops).WHAT I DID WELL :\n=================\n\nI was confident enough in my gestures to be able to change my gestures depending on what I was hearing.\n\nWHAT I COULD DO BETTER NEXT TIME :\n==================================\nYou\'ve seen those cartoons where the person starts shaking in their legs, and when they stop their legs, they start shaking in their head, and when they stop their head, they start in their arms? I feel like that\'s what happened to my swaying tendencies - they went out of my legs and into my torso.\n\nAlso, I could definitely spend some time really separating \"loud\" from \"angry.\" Class, Conducting