Abstract:

Promoting the teaching and learning of Conducting for blind students is a call to adopt reflections outside the hegemonic thinking of musical performance, centered for and by visuality.

The Conducting art is structured by the dialogical amalgam of theoretical and practical elements. First, the mental action, constituted by the understanding of the ideas contained in the archetype of a composition, is very relevant in the interpretative construction of a particular musical work. Second, analyzing and crossing the information obtained is associated with this process, which grounds paths or performative decisions to be made before the execution of the composition. Finally, the practical translation of this theoretical architecture is personified and expressed by the body action, responsible for reflecting the technical and artistic gesture of the conductor.

In this interaction between (mental and corporeal) actions, speech and thought, reasoning, memory, perception, attention and imagination are examples of inherent and active processes about these actions. In other words, by being blind, the student is not devoid of cognitive processes, but only need the necessary stimuli to achieve the proper development of the technical-performative foundations of conducting. Therefore, the axis of the dependence on visuality is moved to an acquisition of the technical and performative knowledge of conducting.

My teaching experience allowed me to punctuate three difficulties that the blind students presented when practicing the technique of conducting:
1) Body attitude is always static, even with the musical discourse in progress.
2) Gestural geometry becomes inaccurate as movements are repeated, sometimes too open or closed, below the waist or too high, always with robotic gestures.
3) Difficulty on establishing a precise relationship between gesture and sound response - dynamics, character design, Legatos and Non-Legatos – namely, which gesture will be responsible for causing certain sound responses.

The attempt to dilute these difficulties culminated in the didactic-methodological procedure that I call Mirrored-Practice. This principle allows, from the interaction with another (sighted) student:
1) the promotion of the assimilation of technical movements as the action is performed,
2) the inclusion and integration, as students participated in the same practical activity without restrictions and
3) the teacher to evenly distribute his attention in a class with a high number of students.

This didactic-methodological structuring has as its principle the Lacanian “Mirror-Stage” Theory. In summary, the Lacanian Theory is sustained by the act of seeing. However, this conception has been transposed: to see is not necessarily to look, but to interact; and the Lacanian Mirror does not mean that the subject is before the object itself, but in experience with another subject.

By gathering all these theoretical reflections, my life experiences as a professor and an artist, and the feedback demonstrated by my students, it is possible to underlie and corroborate with the feasibility of the Mirrored-Practice methodological procedure. More importantly, this didactic tool allows the accessibility, for blind students, of the Conducting teaching and learning.

Keywords:

Musical technical studies and blind students, Conducting teaching and learning, Conducting and Blind Students.