I think this is the take-away point: "Beyond stopping and starting a given piece, it is the job of a conductor to decide how it will be interpreted. How loud should the middle section of the first movement be—and ought the violins to be playing a bit softer so as not to drown out the flutes? Someone must answer questions such as these if a performance is not to sound indecisive or chaotic, and it is far easier for one person to do so than for 100 people to vote on each decision."
If you've ever worked with a conductor, even in high school band, the whole mystery disappears right away. In classical music, "conductor" usually refers to what would be called "musical director" in other situations: they oversee all of the big and little artistic decisions you need to make good music. Standing up there waving the baton around is a pretty small part of the job. When you explain to people this way, it's almost obvious: just like any big project, you want to have a manager with some kind of vision to give things direction. It's pretty hard to run the whole thing as a commune.
This mostly makes sense to me. A conductor for music is the equivalent of a director for a play.
Except with a play the director doesn't stand on stage pointing at each actor to cue their lines. The actors rehearse and learn their own cues. The director coaches them on timing, volume, expression, etc, but then mostly relies on each individual actor to take that direction on board and follow it themselves on the night.
One thing worth mentioning is that an orchestra performance may resemble a rehearsal more than the audience is aware of. Even for a regularly scheduled performance of a major orchestra, there may be relatively little time to prepare for each performance. There will be a few players in the sections who have been hired as substitutes, with or without having been present at the rehearsals. A typical contract gives each player one or more performances or "services" that they can take as vacation.
For lower profile performances, such as pit orchestras or something thrown together for an event, the entire ensemble may consist of hired hands. A few hours before the show, someone may be looking at parts that they've just received as PDF's and hoping to hell that the conductor will get them through it. ;-)
Rather than having the conductor be optional, always having them on the stand creates a continuity between rehearsal and performance that may be unnecessary in some cases, but is a welcome insurance policy for the kinds of vicissitudes that Murphy's Law can unleash.
Disclosure: I've been one of those hired hands, not in classical orchestras, but in large jazz ensembles. I actually enjoy the challenge of coming into a situation with no preparation and having to figure things out on the spot. For jazz bands, somebody in the saxophones or trombones will often "conduct" through their body language, or even stand up and lead the band through a tricky passage.
I suspect that music like an orchestra requires vastly greater precision than is required from plays.
For example, if the orchestra is going to become rapidly silent, or loud, in a dramatic way, then it's important that all of the instruments do this on the same timing. You can't have an instrument that "false starts", or it will sound obviously out of place.
By comparison, in a play there's a lot more leniency and flexibility. Typically only one person is speaking at a time. If one person pauses for a few moments between lines, or enters/exits stage more slowly than normal, that won't disrupt the rest of the play --
whereas if any musical instrument hits at the wrong time, it will.
Actually though, with a stage play, there typically is a conductor: for the stage crew. Everybody on the crew is wearing a headset, and the person "calling show" is following a marked-up script to call spotlight cues (which spot to follow which actor, when to open the aperture, how BIG to open up), music cues, light board cues (even with a digital board, the timing of cues is manual), etc.
The difference to me is to do with synchronicity. Multiple lighting cues need to sync up with the action on stage, so you need someone to call show. A musical ensemble obviously needs to sync up rhythmically. Actors, however, don't typically need that kind of third-party direction during performance. If they do, generally the director will come up with some kind of offstage cue (a gunshot sound effect, for example) or designate one actor to subtly cue the other actors (touch her nose, for example).
The other thing is obviously just the nature of the performance. Enjoying a play, unlike music, requires a suspension of disbelief--an immersion in the setting of the show, a loss of awareness of your actual surroundings--and having the director standing in front, pointing to people and mouthing orders at them makes that impossible. Not to mention, having somebody up on stage waving their arms around is just plain distracting for a visual experience, but not at all for an auditory one.
fwiw, a play director will be off stage signaling, giving cues, and advise. She may not physically be on stage, but she's definitely involved during the performance.
The most basic function of a director in a concert is to dictate the tempo. You can make do without a director in a small group of people by just looking at each other in tricky moments, but when the people involved become dozens or hundreds it is impossible to stay in tempo without a director.
You could take the director out and people would still be able to play, but it would most likely result in a much worse performance.
Also many bands have a drummer and/or bass player who will set the rhythm, just by nature of their instruments cutting through the others, which generally obviates the need for a conductor.
Yup; musical notation might look like programming, but it's not MIDI, and there's often still a lot up for interpretation and that needs tuning for the specific assembly of players, the location, and some creative interpretation.
It's a bit like the sound guy behind the mixer panel at recordings and non-classic concerts.
I appreciate this article's focus on rehearsal. A lot of people not familiar with classical music see someone waving their hands around on stage and wonder why they're needed.
The answer is that they're not really needed _for the performance_. A conductor who leads effective rehearsals and gives clear interpretation instructions could probably not show up to the performance and the orchestra would still know what to do.
But leading effective rehearsals and knowing the music well enough to communicate interpretations details is _really hard_.
I disagree somewhat--the conductor may not strictly be needed for the performance (with enough rehearsal, of course), but it's likely to be much better with them than without. For one, keeping a steady tempo by consensus is pretty hard when you're trying to listen for it from your fellow musicians while simultaneously attending to your own pitch & timbre. (Not to mention accelerando and ritardando--changing tempo in sync is nigh impossible without a benevolent dictator in front of you!)
Also it's very easy for an individual musician to forget that oh, this is the THIRD repetition of this really loud phrase, and this time we're supposed to move on to the really quiet part, and seeing the wildly gesticulating figure in your periphery suddenly shrink down smaller is a good reminder that things are changing to the quiet part.
And as a former percussion player who had to wait for sometimes hundreds of measures of rest before coming in precisely on time with, say, an extremely important bass drum hit, it's extremely reassuring to get eye contact and a finger-point from the conductor to verify that you're not about to ruin the entire performance by coming in four measures early just because you lost count and were therefore trying to base your entrance on the repetitive phrasing of the piece. Not that this ever happened to me...
Thanks for the insightful comment. I’ve often wondered how the triangle player can sit for a hundred measures and still hit that one note right on time. And the other stuff as well, but that one stood out.
I don't want to downplay the need for rehearsal. It's nearly impossible to simply count for that long, so percussion players REALLY need to know the shape of the piece (perhaps more than the rest of the ensemble, in my biased opinion) to get their cues right. A nod from the conductor is reassuring, but she also has literally a dozen things happening simultaneously that she must attend to, so you can't depend on it.
One hard thing about rehearsals is to catch and keep the musicians attention for hours.
Some of the best conductors I've met were really funny (like presenting jokes/stand up comedy at pauses), charismatic, ,energetic and engaging (for hours)... Conductors are making their main performances at rehearsals, and they are having much less (and shorter/simpler) work during the actual performances.
I dabble in music. Long time ago for a couple of years I studied arrangement and composition as something interesting to do outside my day job. Included some study on conducting. I did a few arrangements for big band orchestras and it is quite a buzz to listen to musicians play sheet music you just handed them live without any rehearsal. Yet the idea of conducting is completely intimidating. I practised a bit but was never good enough and was relieved I never had to do it for real when my teacher would step in conduct instead. I found it to be a strange beast; quite the opposite of arranging which is very mathematical and precise. If I ever decide to get back into that side of music I'll have to make a point on working on that skill.
> Someone must answer questions such as these if a performance is not to sound indecisive or chaotic, and it is far easier for one person to do so than for 100 people to vote on each decision.
It strikes me that this is a bit akin to the role of a good CEO, or an active monarch in a democratic monarchy: not to direct, but to roll with the flow, and influence things just a bit — like a harmonic knocker, giving just the right impulse at just the right moment.
Except in rehearsal the conductor has imposed his vision of how things will flow in later performances. Different versions of the same piece from different conductors can sound extremely different, although the sheet music is the same - different tempos, different changes in tempo, different dynamics, phrasing, relative volume of instruments, timbre (quality of sound), different lengths of notes and accents and attack on notes, etc etc, and each composer has their own idiosyncratic ideas and preferences, both about what the composer wanted and what they want the piece to sound like. Sometimes different numbers of players are used. Also the particular way the conductor speaks to the orchestra about the music and the players, and other things, what they say and how they say it, can have a huge effect.
"To influence things a bit" is nothing like it. A performance may give that impression, but the nature of the performance in all those details and more has been thought out by the conductor and rehearsed beforehand. The orchestra has been taught and trained in exactly how the conductor likes it, and that's what you hear.
For any that want an entertaining and somewhat informative "behind the scenes" take on conducting, Amazon's "Mozart in the Jungle" series[1] is pretty good. Not sure how accurate it is, but still a fun look at something most people don't get to see behind the scenes of.
Agree 100% with the functional points. One additional responsibility that arises from time to time is to handle disturbances during performances. Having someone able to speak eloquently to the audience in such circumstances (a/v issues, noisy individuals, etc) can be the difference between an otherwise great performance and a very awkward musical experience.
A few years ago, the bbc ran a celebrity reality show where the contestants learned to become conductors. It made for very good television whilst explaining the role well: http://www.bbc.co.uk/musictv/maestro/
In college I had a wind symphony conductor who was phenomenal. Playing for him was so much fun. Someone once told me that the better we played the more he danced, and the more he danced the better we played. I think this concisely captures one of the big functions of the conductor.
If you've ever worked with a conductor, even in high school band, the whole mystery disappears right away. In classical music, "conductor" usually refers to what would be called "musical director" in other situations: they oversee all of the big and little artistic decisions you need to make good music. Standing up there waving the baton around is a pretty small part of the job. When you explain to people this way, it's almost obvious: just like any big project, you want to have a manager with some kind of vision to give things direction. It's pretty hard to run the whole thing as a commune.