i may as well try to put some of the more technical bits of the class, even though they don't translate well without a video of some sort.
1. my notes say simply "center/roundness." what i get for not writing these entries sooner is having forgotten a lot of what happened, but CSC was always talking about the fact that we hold the music in front of us. it's quite important to always have a sort of groundedness. this is something i struggle with every time i'm on the podium. it's tempting, especially at beginning levels for people who feel like they have a lot to give, to try and demonstrate everything, which not only is very difficult but rather excessive. most orchestras do not require one to give most things, and to try to do so is very confusing to look at, not to mention it betrays your lack of confidence in the orchestra to count their rests.
feet in the same place, and a "round" arm shape which allows a "space" for the music. another easy habit is to let the elbows fall too close to the sides (or sometimes, raise them too much so it doesn't look natural).
2. a very simple tenet of elbow-wrist-finger/baton movement is that whenever one of these components (usually the elbow or wrist) moves, the other should not move. this is generally good, and protects against the danger of moving all two or three joints at once, which gives your gesture multiple (and contradicting) impetuses, and all of them get amplified by the baton. but anyone who has tried to actually be expressive with their hands knows that you can't only use one of these joints at the same time. so a better principle is that everything, from the wrist to the tip of the baton, should move in direct relation to how far it is from your elbow. the wrist itself bends slightly with the first movement of the elbow to give an impetus, but by the time you reach the bottom of the gesture everything from the elbow to the baton should be straight.
3. rebounds are things we give thoughtlessly. but whether we give one or not can make a world of difference in how clear our gesture is. we forget that they can be sources of information, but they will indicate things like: whether the note is long or short, whether it extends to the next beat (whether the next beat will be merely an information beat), what the character of the note is, how quick the cutoff is or how quickly the next note will come. most importantly, rebounds are sources of information for the note after. they are upbeats which happen to have a note on them. we have to constantly be aware that the rebound is not going to change the attack of the previous note. if you give only a rebound (upbeat) and no ictus on a downbeat, people will still play according to the character of that rebound.
4. he made sort of a big deal about using the structure of a piece to memorize it. i think this is a self-explanatory point, but perhaps there is something i'm missing. he gave us an excerpt of beethoven 9 third movement, and it was so long before we got around to talking about it that i don't remember much of what was said, but he wanted us to be able to understand the structure - how many bars of this before it changes to that, how to piece the whole excerpt together with a sense of its apex, development, etc. unfortunately i can't say much more on this point, but another important corollary is that it's important to be able to search a score in your mind, at least for the important parts.
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