What the titles on a concert programme mean

Every other title printed on a concert programme describes a smaller share of that one job, and the differences between them are contractual rather than musical. A guest conductor engaged for a single week and the music director whose photograph is on the season brochure do exactly the same thing on the platform.

Music director and chief conductor: one post, two words

The music director of an orchestra is its artistic head, and British and American usage simply differ. Continental European and British orchestras tend to say chief conductor or principal conductor; American orchestras and most opera companies say music director. Where an organisation uses both, principal conductor is usually the musical post and music director the wider one, taking in programming and appointments as well as the concerts.

The substance of the post is administrative as much as musical. The holder shapes the repertoire across a season, decides which guests are invited and which soloists return, chairs or sits on audition panels, and carries public responsibility when the orchestra's playing standard is criticised. That is why the appointment is made by the orchestra's board, on the advice of the players, and why it is announced a year or two before it begins.

Principal guest, associate and assistant: the rest of the staff

A principal guest conductor takes a committed block of weeks each season with no administrative duty at all. The title exists because orchestras want a second musical personality to return regularly without giving that person a vote on appointments, and because conductors want the relationship without the meetings. Associate and assistant conductor are different in kind: these are staff posts, usually held early in a career, and the work is covering rehearsals, preparing the orchestra for a visiting conductor, taking education and family concerts and standing by in case the chief conductor cannot appear.

Conductor laureate and conductor emeritus are honorary. They are given to a former chief conductor whose association with the orchestra continues, and they commit the holder to nothing beyond whatever concerts are agreed. Carlo Rizzi, twice music director of Welsh National Opera, holds the title of conductor laureate there, which is exactly the shape the honour usually takes.

The titles set side by side

The table below sets out who appoints each title, how much of a season it typically absorbs and what it actually obliges the holder to do. The number of weeks is the one column that resists precision: orchestras negotiate it individually and almost never publish it.

One career, most of the titles

The whole ladder can be seen in a single working life. Owain Arwel Hughes has been associate conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra and principal associate conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, both staff-side titles in London; associate conductor of the BBC Welsh Orchestra from 1980 to 1986; music director of the Huddersfield Choral Society over the same years, which is a choral rather than an orchestral directorship; principal conductor of the Aalborg Symphony Orchestra in Denmark from 1994 to 1999; principal guest conductor of the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra; and music director of the National Youth Orchestra of Wales from 2003 to 2010. He founded the Welsh Proms in 1986 and has been its artistic director since, and he founded Camerata Wales in 2005 as its music director.

Read in order, that list shows the ordinary shape of a conducting career rather than a series of promotions. Associate posts come first and are learned in. Chief and principal posts are held for a period of years and then handed on. Founding an ensemble or a festival is a third thing altogether: artistic director of the Welsh Proms is a title nobody awarded, because the person who starts the series defines the post.

Opera companies use a different set of words

An opera company splits the job further, because the music is only part of what is being staged. Welsh National Opera, founded in 1943 and resident at the Wales Millennium Centre, carries its own orchestra and its own chorus, which means it employs musicians full time in a way that a concert orchestra employing a chief conductor on a weeks contract does not. A music director there is responsible for the orchestra and chorus and conducts several productions a season, from Wagner's The Flying Dutchman to Bernstein's Candide. An artistic director chooses the repertoire and the producers. A general director or chief executive runs the company as a business. The three are frequently three different people, and only one of them is a conductor.

Philharmonic, symphony, and what the orchestra's own name means

Philharmonic and symphony mean nothing different. Philharmonic is a modern coinage built from Greek elements, and the word means a love of harmony; symphony is Greek for sounding together. Both were simply attractive words available to a group of players founding an orchestra in a city that already had one. The London Symphony Orchestra, founded in 1904 by players who walked out of the Queen's Hall Orchestra, and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, founded in 1946 by Sir Thomas Beecham, differ in history, ownership and hall, not in constitution. The LSO is self-governing, owned by its players. The Philharmonia Orchestra was created in 1945 by the record producer Walter Legge, initially as a recording ensemble. Two orchestras in the same city with the same instrumentation and the same repertoire will carry different words on the letterhead for reasons that are entirely accidental, and a reader who tries to deduce size or status from the name will deduce it wrongly.

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
• Welsh National OperaA company, an orchestra and a chorus