Vocalizations in orchestra rehearsals: Sequential organization and interactional functions

Vocalizations are a central resource for instructing in orchestra rehearsals. Conductors use them to make the musicians understand what they want to hear, i.e., through singing and rhythmic vocalizations they imitate or depict the envisaged musical qualities. In this contribution, I examine what vocalizations of orchestra conductors look like and how they are embedded in the instructional interaction between conductor and musicians. Based on a corpus of orchestra rehearsals in France and Italy, the paper uses multimodal conversation analysis to describe the vocal resources used by the conductors for singing, the interactional and sequential organization of vocalizations, as well as their functional properties. Vocalizing appears to often be accompanied by other semiotic resources, such as gestures and gaze, in order to form vocal-gestural demonstrations that embody musical aspects, e.g., tempo, phrasing, articulation, etc. The analysis reveals that vocalizations are employed by conductors for various purposes that exceed the simple action of imitating the music. Data are in French, Italian and English. • Conductors vocalize using arbitrary but similar syllables and onomatopoeic patterns. • Vocalizations are closely tied to and timed with prosodic and gestural events. • Vocal depictions provide gestalt-like information about music character. • Vocalizations indicate correctable aspects prospectively and retrospectively. • Vocal demonstrations specify verbal instructions and monitor musical performance.