Chapter 25. Music and leadership

This chapter views the choir conductor as the leader of a cooperative group, whose role is not simply to provide technical instruction, but also to motivate singers, provide feedback, express the pleasure of music. It assumes that every choir conductor pursues a specific plan of action and that his/her multimodal behaviour is aimed at fulfilling the goals in that plan. It proposes an annotation scheme for analyzing a conductor’s head, eyebrow, eye, mouth, trunk and hand actions in terms of their physical parameters, their literal and indirect meanings, and their goals within the conductor’s plan. The scheme allows for the outlining of the body styles of different conductors, distinguishing them in terms of the goals fulfilled in their conduction.