ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the interactions at three levels: within the process of conducting itself, in the choral rehearsal as social environment, and in wider choral cultures. It discusses the ethnographic approach and why it is well suited to study phenomena conceived using this interactive model. The interactive model of conducting presented in the practitioner literature sees conductor gesture and choral sound working in a symbiotic relationship. It sees a choral ensemble as a microcosmic social world, or as an environment for patterns of behaviour to evolve and propagate them. The chapter outlines a model of peer research that is informed both by the philosophical questions and by the practical experience of doing ethnographic research among musical communities. It provides the opportunity for the research subjects to become the interrogators introduced a degree of reciprocity into the encounter, and diminishes the power differential between observers and observes that researchers set up when they assume the power to gaze.
