What conducting is, and what it is for
Conducting
WHAT THIS IS
What conducting is, and what it is for
IN THIS PROGRAMME
CONDUCTING
SOURCES
Public record only. The biographical facts are sourced; see About.
A conductor is the musician who stands in front of an orchestra and decides how a piece of music will actually sound: how fast it goes, how loud each section plays against the others, where every phrase turns, and how 80 to 100 people arrive at the same instant.
The conductor produces no sound. Everything a conductor does is done through other players, which is why the job looks, from row H, like the least necessary thing on the platform and is in fact the reason the performance holds together at all.
Why an orchestra of 90 players needs one person who is not playing
An orchestra needs a conductor because it is too large to agree with itself in real time. A standard symphony orchestra runs to about 80 to 100 players in four sections, strings, woodwind, brass and percussion, with harp and keyboard added as the score asks. Strings alone are roughly two thirds of that number, and a first-violin section in a full orchestra is normally 14 to 16 players. A string quartet can settle tempo by breathing together and watching each other's bows. Ninety people spread across ten metres or more of platform, some of them facing away from the front desks, cannot.
The problem is not only size, it is distance. Sound takes time to cross a hall, so a double bass at the back and a piccolo at the front, both playing exactly what they hear, will drift apart. A single visible pulse at the centre of the platform reaches every player at the same instant, and the eye is being asked to anticipate rather than to react. That is the mechanical case for conducting, and it explains why the beat is given slightly ahead of the sound rather than on it.
The four things a conductor is responsible for
The responsibilities of a conductor divide into four, and only the first of them happens in front of an audience. The other three are settled long before the concert, in a rehearsal room and at a desk with a score.
| Responsibility | What it means in practice | Where the work is done |
|---|---|---|
| Tempo and ensemble | Setting the speed, holding it, changing it together, and placing every entry after a long silence | Rehearsal and concert |
| Balance | Deciding which line the listener hears and which supports it, then making the other 90 players give way to it | Mostly rehearsal |
| Interpretation | Choosing the reading: phrasing, articulation, dynamics beyond the printed ones, the shape of a whole movement | Score study, then rehearsal |
| Preparation | Choosing the edition, marking bowings with the leader, fixing seating, planning the programme and the rehearsal schedule | Weeks before the first rehearsal |
Tempo and ensemble
Tempo is the only one of the four a listener can watch being done, and the least negotiable: a professional orchestra will follow a clear beat it disagrees with, and will not follow an unclear one it agrees with. The technique of giving that beat, the patterns in two, three and four, the preparatory upbeat and the independent left hand, is a craft in itself.
Balance
Balance is the conductor's largest single contribution and almost nobody in the audience knows it is happening. Players cannot hear the hall they are sitting in: a horn section fortissimo sounds correct on the platform and covers the violas completely in row K. Someone has to listen from where the audience is, then ask a section to play a marking that looks wrong on the page in order to sound right in the room.
Interpretation
Interpretation is what remains after the notes are correct. Elgar's Enigma Variations of 1899 gives fourteen variations on one theme, and the ninth, Nimrod, can run from about three and a half minutes to over five depending on who is conducting. Nothing in the score decides that. Holst's The Planets ends with a wordless offstage female chorus in Neptune that must fade to nothing, and how long that fade lasts is a decision rather than an instruction.
Preparation
Preparation is the invisible bulk of the work. A professional orchestra rehearses a standard programme in about three to four rehearsals of three hours, and less on tour, so the conductor arrives having already made every decision rehearsal time is too expensive to discover.
The rostrum, the stick and the score
The conductor works from a full score, which stacks every instrumental line vertically, and stands on a low rostrum so that the back desks can see. A baton is typically 30 to 45 cm long, wood or carbon fibre, with a cork, wood or balsa grip, and many conductors use none at all. The stick is a visibility aid, not a source of authority. Authority inside the ensemble belongs to the leader, the principal first violin, who tunes the orchestra, settles the string bowings and plays the violin solos.
How the job is entered, and what it pays
Conducting is entered from inside the profession. The route runs through an instrument played to a high standard, keyboard and score reading, a conservatoire course, then assistant and cover work with a youth, university or amateur orchestra of one's own alongside. Titled posts are very few, because each orchestra has exactly one chief conductor at a time. Pay follows the same structural oddity: conductors are almost never salaried by the concert-giving body, and even a music directorship is a contract for a number of weeks rather than an annual wage.
Why some conductors became household names
Conductors became famous through recording and then broadcasting, not through concerts. Arturo Toscanini had an American radio orchestra built for him in 1937, Leonard Bernstein reached a television audience with the New York Philharmonic from 1958, and Herbert von Karajan made several hundred records with the Berlin Philharmonic. The names a general reader can produce are the names that were on the record sleeves, which is a fact about the twentieth-century media industry rather than about conducting.
What the rest of this section covers
The pages that follow take the four responsibilities apart. One sets the rehearsal week against the concert, including what happens when a conductor stops beating mid-performance. One deals with the baton and the geometry of the beat. One explains the titles printed on a concert programme, from music director to guest. One sets out the training route stage by stage, naming the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, founded in 1949, as the Welsh conservatoire. One deals honestly with money. One lists the conductors most people can name, with their orchestras.
Owain Arwel Hughes, born in Ton Pentre in the Rhondda on 21 March 1942, studied at University College Cardiff and then at the Royal College of Music in London, where his teachers included Sir Adrian Boult, Bernard Haitink and Rudolf Kempe. He has held the whole range of titles described in this section, from associate conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra to music director of the National Youth Orchestra of Wales between 2003 and 2010, and he founded the Welsh Proms at St David's Hall in 1986. His career is used on these pages as a worked example of how the titles, the training and the working year fit together.
Also in this programme
- Famous orchestral conductorsThe conductors most people can name, and why
- The baton and the beatWhat it is for and how the beat is shaped
- Orchestral instrumentsThe instruments of the orchestra, family by family