The Art Of Conducting Part 1

A good conductor is one who understands the music he/she is conducting and exudes an overwhelming confidence that inspires the confidence of the choristers being conducted. However a lot of choral groups especially in churches are faced with conductors who do not understand the art of conducting and thereby causing issues for the choir being conducted. A bad conductor is equal to terrible singing by a choir. At a point in our musical journey we must have all met one or two conductors who flapped their hands like local chickens and thought they were conducting lol. Well below is a part of a question and answer session with Leon Botstein on The Art of Conducting.

Question: What is the role of the conductor? 

Leon Botstein: In the most basic sense, conducting is the art of organizing music through a kind of pantomime. Using your hands, your face and your eyes in order to shape and control and deliver a musical performance that requires a lot of people. When there are a lot of people on stage, each of whom knows his or her part, are terrific musicians, they have to have some sense of coordination because the piece that they’re doing involves so many different moving parts, you need one person to try to keep it all together. So there’s a basic traffic cop part of being a conductor. The most obvious place where conductors are needed is in an opera pit. So you have the conductor in the opera pit, you’ve got musicians in a pit, that’s the orchestra. 

Then you would maybe have an off-stage band. You’ve got a chorus on stage. You’ve got a bunch of people in costumes shouting at each other, running around, going crazy and you have to keep all of this machine, it’s a very complex machine, keep it going where everybody comes in at the right place, gets out at the right place. Everything happens in an organized way. That’s the traffic cop part of conducting. That’s why so many great conductors come out of the opera pit. Because that’s the place where coordination of things is very important. The other area where conducting is very important is in music that doesn’t in a way seem very easily understood. So let’s say a complicated piece. In the 20th century would think of “The Rite of Spring” by Stravinsky, where it’s complex rhythmically, there are a lot of things happening at the same time but not in the same place. Let’s say the “Fourth Symphony of Charles Ives,” which has many different rhythms like a geological layer, one on top of the other. So, you know, how do you keep track of your part?

Well, you need someone there who, again, is organizing the traffic cop part of it. But the traffic cop part of it is the most basic aspect of conducting. And it’s needed just for efficiency’s sake. In other words, you could, there have been histories, in the Soviet Union, for example, there was a very famous orchestra that had no conductor that did some of the Prokofiev premieres. It was a communist idea, you know, it was a collective. There would be no boss, no owner, no, no guy in front who was going to tell them what to do. So it was a collective experience. First of all, everything took 16 times as long to prepare because they couldn’t agree. They argued and debated and disputed and so one point of view never won. 

You know, it was kind of a mish mosh. And Prokofiev describes these endless rehearsals of trying to figure out who is right, who is keeping the right rhythm, who is with the other person. And so he wished suddenly for a conductor to help it out. Orpheus today is a very fine ensemble that works without a conductor, but it needs much more rehearsal time, so there’s an efficiency issue. And then finally the most sophisticated part of it probably is an interpretive issue. So, you need someone who comes in with a point of view who shapes an argument. It’s like a director in a play. You could ask the same thing. You’ve got a bunch of these actors, they come out on stage. There’s “Hamlet,” there’s “Romeo and Juliet,” and they know their lines, they’re literate. What do you need a director for? But we think they need a director, even though the director is invisible. 

In this case, because it’s a different kind of art form, the director is visible. Now, the most important part is that conducting is about communication with a bunch of people about a work of music. Now there’s a lot of nonsense theater in conducting. A lot of dancing around, a lot of show and tell, a lot of Hollywood biz, which has nothing to do with conducting. There’s a lot of marketing personality stuff. There’s a lot of fakery in conducting. The reason conductors are always help in suspicion is because if you are going to the Vienna Philharmonic, the Berlin Philharmonic and you’re doing a Mozart Symphony, they probably don’t need a conductor to get through the piece, so the conducting becoming decorative, supplemental. It becomes a cult of personality. So in a certain limited arena, there is a lot of bogus conducting. You know, someone plays the piano, plays the violin, it sounds out of tune, they don’t play very well, it’s hard to fake.

A pianist, you know, he can put the petal down, but you really can’t get away with not being able to play. So conducting is a little more elusive because it doesn’t appear to make any sound.