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During her keynote address at LABBS Harmony College, Blair Brown briefly explored the issue of the gestures singers use in performance. It came in the context of the over-riding principle that our performances should be honest and meaningful, that we should bring our best selves to the stage in order generate a genuine human encounter with our listeners.

All too often, she observed, a singer’s gestures can become conventionalised, using standard forms that thus appear to betoken a sense of ‘I’m doing this because it’s what people do,’ rather than being personally meaningful. Blair described the style of ‘churning’ hands one often sees in quartet performances as ‘transactional’ and attributed its use to a desire to impress rather than to connect. As such, it can be a barrier to communication.

Now, I’m sure her conclusion is correct – that clichéd gestures become a distraction from the heart of a song’s message – but I think I’d be less critical of the intent of those who use them. For sure, people singing in a barbershop contest want to impress (they know they are being judged!), but I suspect their adoption of mannerisms they have seen other quartets use may not be simply tactical, but is part of learning to feel their way into the style.

One of the conclusions of my book on choral conducting was that the body language associated with a musical praxis is part of the means of storing and transmitting its non-notatable stylistic features, and I am sure this is true of genres that are not conducted as much as it is in choral styles where there is interchange of bodily habits between conductor and singers as well as between the singers themselves.

This is not to say that I think these churning gestures are particularly valuable to the style; I approve of the efforts of those who seek to develop a more varied and individualised approach to physical performance. But, as I wrote about a similar issue in classical vocal recitals some years ago, I suspect the issue is not just about how we use our bodies, but how we’re thinking about the music. To produce more visually interesting performances, we need to have more musically interesting thoughts.

Having been thinking about the relationship between gesture and thought on the Saturday at Harmony College, I was primed to find interesting resonances during conducting coaching sessions with the Directors Stream on the Sunday.

One of the things that as directors we always need to keep on top of is decluttering our gestures. Just as with our houses, this isn’t a one-time thing, but ongoing: even as we clear out the stuff we don’t need, new stuff is appearing, often initially for a particular purpose but also often staying around far beyond its useful life.

The difficult thing about removing unnecessary gestures is that if we do it simply by trying to inhibit our body parts, we often find that we inhibit our expressiveness in the process. It’s partly that we’re using a lot of cognitive capacity that should be thinking musical thoughts to hold body parts in quiescence. But it’s also that gesture is part of how we think and if we just remove it we will find it hard to have the same thoughts as previously.

The classic experiment that explored this showed that not only did people who were prevented from gesturing while speaking find it harder to frame their ideas, but they also started using much more overactive facial expressions: they needed the movement to think and if they couldn’t use their hands, it broke out elsewhere.

I was reminded of this while working with a conductor who wanted to free himself from a perpetual adherence to pattern. Useful as patterns are (and I would always recommend them as a starting point for conducting), he felt he was getting blocked in expressively by them. And in the song we worked on, I could see what he meant: it was in a fairly brisk 4/4, but once the metre was up and running the singers didn’t need to see every crotchet.

Fortunately we have a standard technique to use in these situations to adapt pattern without abandoning its useful musical information: merging beats. In this case, switching into 2/2 as default, keeping 4/4 for moments where there was particular detail that would benefit from it was the solution.

But on the first attempt to do this, a fascinating thing happened: just like the experimental subjects whose hands were tied, his face started to become overactive, and (unlike them, as they were seated during the experiment), he moved from a previously balanced and stable posture to intermittently standing one leg. The motions removed from his pattern were breaking out elsewhere.

This was a beautiful illustration of the way he needed not simply to change his gestures, but also to develop how he was thinking about the music. On the second attempt, having clarified this need, everything clicked: the brisk 4-pattern merged into a more flowing 2-pattern and the overall expressive freedom of everyone in the room opened up quite delightfully.

The question we face, then, when we want to develop more refined and meaningful gestures, whether as singers or as conductors, is not: what do I do with my hands? It is: how do I think about this music? The hands will collaborate with whatever the brain is doing, because they are integral to the process of generating thoughts.