The Art of Musical Expression (Page 2)

Karen Fish, an instructional designer who sings in the Yellow Door Choir, discovered that working with Stubley is indeed a mysterious process. "It's going out on a limb. Singing in the choir allows me to take up more space. Under Eleanor, my voice is working at another level. I'm not aware of how that happened," she says.

Members of the audience agree that Stubley pulls invisible strings that somehow transform the performance. "Most conductors just dance with their arms and their feet," says Ingrid Birker, a curator at McGill's Redpath Museum and an avowed Stubley concert-goer. "But her interpretations are very poetic, very evocative and unusual. And the figure she presents is so dramatic...it transcends everything. I go to the concerts to hear that mass of voices but also to hear what comes out of her own voice. To me it's like listening to some sort of Shakespearean sonnet."

Stubley, an Ontario native who describes herself as a shy person, says she discovered music in a church choir. From a family of scientists -- her father was a nuclear engineer and her mother a nursing researcher -- Stubley nonetheless knew from the moment she held a conducting baton in high school that "this was it."

After receiving a PhD from University of Illinois at Urbana, which she recalls as "a cornfield with a great concert hall," she had the choice of three academic positions in Canada. She chose McGill because it gave her the opportunity to teach both conducting and philosophy of music courses at all levels, and because the calibre of faculty and students "stimulated my thinking." She also chose McGill and Montreal because "it's a vibrant musical community where a lot of interesting music is played."

Soon after arriving in the city, Stubley felt a weakness in one ankle -- the first harbinger of multiple sclerosis. Since then the disease has stripped some of the myelin off her motor neurons, making it progressively more difficult to stand and walk, and presenting unique challenges gaining access to buildings on and off campus, especially in winter.

None of these obstacles have eroded her dry wit or her incisive way of teaching. "The compromises of MS have to do with accessiblity and people's perceptions," says Stubley, smoothing her tailored skirt. In terms of conducting, Stubley simply applies her instructional approach to her own situation.

"Every student who comes to me has a different body that needs to communicate clearly and be easily understood," she says. "A really small person standing on a podium has to use their body differently than a big person. Every person is a whole new palette, a way of finding new colours."

According to Stubley, the fact that she now conducts while seated means that she has to adjust her hand movements to a different plane. "I end up having to use my arms much higher, chest height instead of waist height," she said. "I have less space to build on -- three inches to get people to be louder, and a quarter of an inch to go softer."

She demonstrates by fluttering her fingers delicately in a spiral toward her sashed midriff. The gesture is subtle, like a ripple in a pond. But it certainly means soft, and when Stubley says soft, however she does it, she means soft. She'll make musicians repeat a bar 30 times if they don't understand the meaning of the word.