The baton and the beat

It produces no sound, carries no authority of its own and is not required: a substantial number of conductors use none at all. What it does is extend the line of the arm by a hand's length and put a bright point of movement where a percussionist ten metres or more away can find it.

What a baton is made of, and how it is held

The materials of a baton are chosen for balance rather than for looks. A shaft of maple, birch or carbon fibre tapers from the grip to a tip a couple of millimetres across. The grip, a pear or ball of cork, turned wood or balsa, sits at the fat end and carries most of the weight, so that the stick balances just in front of the hand and can be steered by very small movements rather than swung. A heavy baton makes a conductor's arm tire in the third hour of a rehearsal, which is why the whole object rarely weighs more than a pencil.

The grip itself is unspectacular. The stick rests along the pad of the thumb and the side of the first finger, with the remaining fingers curled loosely round the bulb, and the wrist stays free. A tight fist locks the wrist and the beat immediately becomes wooden. The tip, not the hand, is the thing the orchestra reads, so a conductor's technique is largely a matter of controlling where that tip is at any instant and how fast it is travelling when it arrives. Batons live in a slim case, because a tip snapped off against a music stand no longer draws a clean line.

Why many conductors use no baton at all

Conductors work without a baton when clarity matters less than colour. Two open hands give a far wider vocabulary of shape, weight and texture than a stick does, and in choral music, in Debussy and Ravel, and in slow music of any kind, many conductors put the stick down. Leopold Stokowski gave up the baton around 1930, while he was still at the head of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and conducted with his hands for the rest of his career, through the NBC Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, Houston and the American Symphony Orchestra, until 1975. Pierre Boulez, whose repertoire demanded rhythmic precision above everything, also worked without one, which disposes of the idea that the stick is what makes a beat exact.

The argument on the other side is simple visibility. In a large hall, in a work with a big brass section and a chorus behind the orchestra, a white tip against a dark suit is legible where fingers are not. Sir Adrian Boult, who taught at the Royal College of Music and whose pupils there included Owain Arwel Hughes, used an unusually long baton and built an entire technique around economy: a small, exact stick movement rather than a large physical one. The choice is practical, and most conductors make it work by work.

The standard beat patterns, in two, three and four

Beat patterns are the shapes the baton tip traces in the air, one shape per bar, repeated until the metre changes. Three cover most Western orchestral music. Every one of them begins with the downbeat, the first beat of the bar, which always goes straight down, and every one of them puts the last beat of the bar travelling upward so that the hand is in position to fall again.

The patterns matter less than the two rules underneath them. First, the down direction always marks beat one, so that a player looking up mid-bar can find the pulse without counting. Second, the outward direction marks the last beat, so the bar has a visible edge. A conductor who keeps those two constant can distort everything else and still be followed.

The downbeat, the upbeat and the beat before the sound

The preparatory beat is the single most important gesture in conducting and it happens before any sound exists. To start an orchestra, the conductor gives one silent beat in the tempo of the music, in the character of the music, and with a breath the players can see. That gesture carries three pieces of information at once: how fast, how loud and what kind of attack. An orchestra that comes in ragged has usually been given a preparation that was ambiguous about one of the three.

The same principle runs through the whole performance. Every entry, every change of tempo and every fermata release is set up one beat early, because a beat given at the moment of the sound is a beat that arrives too late. This is what people mean when they say a conductor is ahead of the orchestra. The tip is not describing the music that is being played, it is describing the music that is about to be played.

What the left hand is for

The left hand does everything the beat cannot do, and the basic discipline of conducting technique is keeping it out of the beat. If both hands mirror each other, the left hand is redundant and the information it could have carried is lost. Used independently, it handles cues, dynamics, balance, phrase shape and the release of held chords: a flat palm pressed down at the brass, a lifted open hand drawing a line out of the cellos, a finger pointed at a horn who has 30 bars of rest to count and one note to place.

None of this is standardised. There is no notation for conducting and no examination that all conductors have passed, which is why a technique is recognisable as an individual's within a few bars. What is standard is the grammar underneath: the down for one, the out for the last beat, the preparation before the sound, and a left hand that is saying something the right hand is not.

Also in this programme

• ConductingWhat conducting is, and what it is for
• Famous orchestral conductorsThe conductors most people can name, and why
• What a conductor doesWhat does a conductor actually do?
• Boult, Haitink and Kempe: how a conductor was trainedThe teachers: Boult, Haitink and Kempe