Story developed by University Communications.

B ryan Hall, assistant professor of music and director of orchestras at Georgia College & State University (GCSU) attended a well-known and highly-regarded conductor training program in January—and walked away with an award for best conductorship.

“I wasn’t focused on the competition at all, just focused on making myself better,” said Hall, who was hired in 2022 to teach upper strings at Georgia College.

“I approached it through the lens of being a better conductor,” he said. “I don’t care what a person does. If you stop learning, you become irrelevant and should probably do something else. Things are always developing, and it’s nice to be able to develop with it.”

A violinist, Hall was one of 11 musicians who took part in the 31st International Conductors Workshop and Competition (ICWC) in Atlanta. The other two winners were Tal Benatar, co-artistic director of the SONUS Choir in Nashville, Tennessee, and James Chang, a freelance conductor from Jacksonville, Georgia.

Participants came from all over the globe and U.S.—France, the United Kingdom, Illinois, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Texas, as well as Georgia. They received intense instruction on techniques, rehearsal procedures and music preparation for standard orchestral repertoire, according to a statement by the ICWC.

The four-day workshop required reading five books on conducting, studying 8 hours a day, taking master classes and being individually coached by three regional directors and co-directors of symphonies in Gwinnett and Macon, Georgia, and Kiev, Ukraine.

Training included how to prepare scores and move hands, as well as when to help orchestra members and when to hold back. A conductor is responsible for every section of the orchestra—including woodwinds, brass, strings, percussion and sometimes more.

At the same time, a conductor has to keep up with the music—the spaces between beats and “super technical music stuff, like creating more rhythmic space for syncopation and hemiola,” Hall said.

After only six rehearsals, conductors led an orchestra in a culminating concert, performing compositions by Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, Antonín Leopold Dvorak, Felix Mendelssohn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

Hall conducted the Tchaikovsky piece. Orchestra members said they felt the strongest connection with him, according to workshop leaders.

Hall’s own style can be quite “gregarious” when conducting. So, he appreciated instruction on “toning down,” extending his hands further out and making smaller movements to communicate nonverbally with musicians.

Developing his conducting skills ultimately helps his students and improves the GCSU Orchestra, which rehearses twice a week. Its next concert, “Classical Masterpieces,” will be at 7:30 p.m. March 28 in Russell Auditorium.

“The better I am at what I do, how I communicate and what I do with my hands—my students will be the first recipients of that improvement,” Hall said. “In the professional world, sometimes you just have one rehearsal to do a whole symphony, and all the musicians are counting on you.”