Positioning “conducting studies” in 2020 – where are we and where can we go?

Abstract

This special edition positions “conducting studies” in 2020 as a dynamic, multifaceted and multi-disciplinary research field. Shifting the focus of “conducting studies” beyond the longestablished paradigms of (auto)biography and standard technical manuals, it presents distinctive new scholarship drawn from the Oxford Conducting Institute’s (OCI) international conferences. The three OCI conferences to date have provided a melting pot for discussions between practising conductors, those engaged in practice as research, theorists, and musicologists. The range of topics and methodologies captured in the conference programmes (2016, 2018, 2019)1 provides a valuable representation of the ways in which research is developing. The diverse range of methodologies generated across themes and topics signals the potential for dialogue and strengthened links between practice and research: practitioner-researchers are featuring more strongly than ever before. Interdisciplinary tools and approaches are informing and shaping new understandings of an array of issues, including: gender; performance psychology; technologically informed and measured research on gesture, tempi, dynamics, articulation and diction; performance traditions; acoustics; audience response and so on. This special edition therefore shows that conducting studies in 2020 is both building on – and breaking away from – the structures that have determined its preoccupations and characteristics. Fascination with conductors – what they do, and how and why they do it – has occupied writers since the “baton” conductor took centre stage in the mid-nineteenth century.