| The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of psychological conducting, as outlined by Elizabeth A. H. Green in The Modern Conductor (1987), on the conducting abilities of students in a beginning undergraduate instrumental conducting course. The students were enrolled in two sections of the same introductory instrumental conducting course at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign during the fall 2007 semester (N = 32). One section served as the control group (n = 16) and one section served as the treatment group (n = 16). The course syllabus, schedule, and class activities for each section were identical, except that students in the treatment group wrote and conducted psychological conducting exercises as part of the course curriculum. Each student conducted a pretest and a posttest consisting of the same four musical excerpts. Video recordings of the pretest and posttest were sent to a panel of three expert conductor-teachers who evaluated each subject on four technical and four expressive parameters using the researcher-designed Conducting Ability Measure. The results of the ANOVA with repeated measures showed that there were no significant differences in the total overall mean gain scores of the control and treatment groups. The control group had a higher mean gain score for the left hand parameter for each excerpt and an overall higher mean gain score for the releases parameter. The treatment group obtained higher mean gain scores than the control group on the beat-pattern, dynamics, articulation, phrasing, and total expressive parameters, although these differences were not statistically significant. Results of reliability analyses showed that the Conducting Ability Measure was a highly reliable instrument for ranking the performances of the student conductors. |
