Becoming a conductor

There is no entry examination, no licence and no single route, but the sequence is remarkably consistent: an instrument, then keyboard and score reading, then a conservatoire conducting course, then years of assistant and cover work with an amateur or youth orchestra of one's own running alongside. Very few people complete it, because the number of posts at the end is tiny.

Stage one: an instrument, played well enough to be employed

An instrument played to a high standard is the entry requirement, and it usually takes 10 to 12 years to reach it. Almost every professional conductor started as a good instrumentalist or a good singer, and the reason is practical rather than sentimental. A conductor spends the working day asking 90 specialists to change something about how they play. Somebody who has never sat in an orchestral section, counted 40 bars of rest, played a passage that was badly written for the instrument or been rehearsed by a conductor who did not understand the problem will be found out in the first hour.

The instrument itself matters less than the standard. Pianists, violinists, organists, singers, oboists and percussionists all become conductors. What each brings is different: a string player already understands bowing and section discipline, a singer understands breath and text, a pianist can play the score. Nobody arrives with all of it, which is what stage two is for.

Stage two: score reading, keyboard and the mechanics of the page

Score reading is the skill that separates a conductor from a good player, and it takes years of daily work. A full orchestral score stacks every instrumental line vertically on one system, with the transposing instruments written in their own keys: clarinets in A or B flat, horns in F, cor anglais in F. Reading it means hearing all of that at once, at the correct pitch, from the page and in silence.

Keyboard ability is the standard test of that skill, because a conductor who can reduce an orchestral score at the piano has demonstrated the hearing directly. Conservatoire conducting auditions ask for it. Alongside it sit harmony and counterpoint, aural training, and the historical knowledge that decides what a marking meant when it was written: an Andante in Handel's Messiah of 1741 and an Andante in Mahler are not the same instruction.

Stage three: a conservatoire conducting course

A conservatoire conducting course is almost always postgraduate, lasts one to two years, and takes very small numbers. In Wales the conservatoire is the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff, founded in 1949; in London the Royal College of Music and the Royal Academy of Music both run conducting programmes. The value of the course is not the teaching of technique, which can be learned anywhere, but access to an orchestra. Podium time in front of real players, several times a week, under a teacher who stops the student and says why, is the scarcest commodity in the whole training and is essentially unobtainable outside an institution.

Owain Arwel Hughes followed exactly this route a generation ago. He was educated at Howardian High School in Cardiff and at University College Cardiff, then went to the Royal College of Music in London, where his teachers included Sir Adrian Boult, Bernard Haitink and Rudolf Kempe, and his conducting career dates from 1968.

Stage four: an orchestra of one's own, and the assistant years

An orchestra to practise on is the requirement nobody advertises. Youth orchestras, university orchestras, amateur symphony societies, chamber groups and choral societies such as the Huddersfield Choral Society, founded in 1836, are where conductors learn to build a programme, run a rehearsal to time and take responsibility for a performance that will happen whether or not they are ready. It is unpaid or barely paid, and it runs for years in parallel with everything else.

Assistant and cover posts are the professional version of the same thing. An assistant conductor prepares the orchestra for visiting conductors, takes education and family concerts, and sits in the hall during rehearsals listening for balance. Competitions are the other recognised way through, and they matter because a jury of professionals watching a candidate rehearse an unfamiliar orchestra for 20 minutes is a genuine test. They are not a guarantee of anything: winners disappear and non-entrants build careers.

The stages, and what each one costs in time

How few posts there actually are

The honest discouragement is arithmetic. Each orchestra has exactly one chief conductor, tenures run for several seasons and are frequently renewed, and Britain's professional symphony orchestras can be counted in a couple of dozen. In any given year the number of chief conductor vacancies across the whole country is a single-figure number, and each is filled from an international field. There is no advertised career ladder with predictable openings, no salary scale, and no employer in the ordinary sense, since conductors are engaged on fees rather than employed.

What that means in practice is that almost everybody who conducts does it alongside something else, and that the useful measure of progress is not a title but a diary of invitations that are repeated. Orchestras re-engage conductors who saved them rehearsal time and left the playing better than they found it. That judgement is made by 90 people who have watched hundreds of conductors, it is made within the first 20 minutes, and no amount of training substitutes for it.

Also in this programme

• ConductingWhat conducting is, and what it is for
• Famous orchestral conductorsThe conductors most people can name, and why
• The baton and the beatWhat it is for and how the beat is shaped
• Boult, Haitink and Kempe: how a conductor was trainedThe teachers: Boult, Haitink and Kempe