Musical Leadership: The Choral Conductor as Sensemaker and Liberator

The conductor role is complex and multi-faceted, yet, it has been researched only to a limited degree. The literature has a pedagogic bias, leaving less room for the conductor as artist, co-musician and team builder. The conductor view dominates and little attention has been given to the singer viewpoint: how do choral singers perceive the conductor and how is musical leadership experienced by those who actually produce the sounding music? This study seeks to answer these questions by capturing choral leadership as lived experience. The study is based on qualitative, in-depth interviews with 22 singers in Norway with college and university degrees in music. Based on the themes that emerge from the interviews, three conceptualisations of choral leadership are proposed: (1) the legitimacy model – why singers want a conductor, (2) the enactment model – the encounter between conductor and singers, and (3) the notion of elusive perfection – the balancing acts that conductors are continuously faced with. The holistic approach of the study sheds new light on several ideals and conceptions of choral conducting that are often taken for granted