Conducting and Lecturing

Don’t get me wrong. I knew what my music teacher was doing when I was in elementary school band. In practices, she would spend a lot of time trying to convince us we needed to stay on the beat. That is kinda important. But come concert time, she would start us and we would all screech our way through the piece. Maybe we all accidentally ended at the same time once or twice.

But, surely there is a big difference between conducting a bunch of 11 year olds and conducting professionals. Professionals already know how to keep time, right? They know how to read music, right? So, what is the conductor doing?

Enter Mark Wigglesworth, The Silent Musician: Why Conducting Matters. The key to the answer is in an aside which comes about midway through the book. It is the answer to a trivia question I never even knew was a trivia question, but once you hear it, you realize a lot about music history. What was the “first symphony to need a conductor”? Think about it for a moment. You don’t need a conductor for a soloist piece. You can play a violin quartet no problem without a conductor. When do you start needing a designated person to stand up front waving around a baton?

I don’t think it is a coincidence that the “Eroica” is arguably the first orchestral piece to benefit from constant, albeit extremely subtle, fluctuations of tempo. It is perhaps the first symphony to need a conductor.

The mystery of what conductors do evaporated while reading this book. Truth be told, I am now puzzled why I was ever puzzled. Does a professional Shakespeare troupe need a director? After all, the script is there, all the actors are professionals, what is the point of a director? That is a really silly question. Or, does a professional football team need a coach? After all, one of the players can call the plays and all the players are professionals, so what is the point of a coach? Again a silly question. What is a conductor, then? The musical equivalent of a director or a coach. It’s obvious now that I think about it.

So, is Wigglesworth’s 250 page book worth reading to get such an obvious conclusion? Sort of. The book is definitely overly long—like far too many books, it would be vastly better at two-third’s or maybe even half, its length. But, scattered throughout the book are some rather interesting observations on both music conducting and, much to my surprise, lecturing.

First, the music notes. The best line in the book:

Richard Strauss said that a conductor should only ever conduct the strings, the woodwind should be treated like soloists, and if you so much as look at the brass they will just play too loudly.

The primary job of the conductor is to manage the parts; not only does someone need to set the time for the piece, but the volume of both the orchestra and in particular, the volume of the assorted parts in the orchestra has to be determined by someone. If everyone in the room decided their part was the most important and played loudly, there would just be a cacophony of noise. Someone has to tell the trombones to be softer and the clarinet to play a little louder.

When an orchestra does not sound together, Wigglesworth argues, it is the fault of the conductor being too indecisive. The conductor’s chief role on the night of a concert is to signal to the orchestra that someone is in charge here. That gives the players confidence. It also, interestingly, give the audience confidence. Curiously, the way the audience hears a piece may depend crucially on how the conductor behaves. Imagine a rousing piece of music with a conductor standing still slightly waving one hand to beat time. Imagine a softer quiet piece in which the conductor is gesticulating wildly. Both images would seem so off it would indeed affect how the audience hears the piece of music.

Conductors theoretically could have a massive influence on how a piece sounds. Start Beethoven’s fifth at a very slow pace, and it would seem like a different piece of music.

The interesting question to me is whether or not the universal availability of recordings has led to a more homogeneous approach to performances around the world. The fact that conductors can easily hear “how a piece goes” without having to make any decisions about what the composer might have meant does diminish the potential for a genuinely individual response…

The idea that we are witnessing a homogenization of music is fascinating. Particularly when that fact is coupled with another of Wigglesworth’s observations: there is a distinct variation in the way different nationalities play music.

But put a hundred cosmopolitan players into an orchestra and as a group their national characteristics still reveal themselves with all the stereotypical differences of that particular country’s identity. These are generalizations, but it is hard not to be aware of the work ethic of the Japanese, the suave style of the Italians, the passion of the Hungarians, the efficiency of the Americans, the sophistication of the Swedes, the teamwork of the Dutch, the freedom of the South Americans, the cultural confidence of the Germans, “no-worries” attitude of the Australians, and the more-passionate-than-we-like-to-admit British. Music might be international language but it is one full of many different accents and dialects

Reading that makes me really want to hear a compilation of the same piece of music played by different national orchestras. Someone should put this together as a YouTube video. (You may take on this task, Dear Reader.)

It wasn’t just the observations on music that intrigued me, however. The more shocking discovery was how much being a music conductor is like being a college professor. The parallels were at times uncanny. Here I am merrily reading about music conductors and I run across a passage that makes it sound like I am reading about my job. Simply convert the following from conductors and music to professors and a particular subject, and you have a manual on teaching well.

For example, “The easiest way to give the impression of being at ease with yourself is to be at ease with yourself,” gets at the root of why nervous professors are not good professors.

Or on why I lecture without notes:

Conductors need to share their love for the music with those who are playing it, and it is easy to underestimate how open one has to be to do that. Speaking personally, I find that openness more accessible if I am conducting without a score. For all sorts of reasons, conducting by heart, which is a far healthier way of describing it than “from memory,” forces me to express myself more, and therefore, I hope, better. And if you conduct by heart, it doesn’t really matter whether the score is in front of you or not.
Memory can be a distorting tool. And it is more reliable if your system for learning a score is one of trying to understand it rather than remember it. Once you understand something, it is impossible to forget it. It is also a far more positive, stimulating, and meaningful way to prepare. Because whatever physical control or psychological intuition conductors may have, it is your relationship with the music that lies at the heart of your artistic identity: you are a musician first, a conductor second.

Or this on why I subconsciously wave my hands around constantly when lecturing:

The strength, mobility, and flexibility of our hands are extraordinary. Their vast range of movement offers limitless opportunities for communication, and we subconsciously associate their nerve-rich tactile nature with a great deal of sensory perception….Hands seem to speak a primordial language, with a vocabulary that no one who seeks to be understood ignores.

Or on perfecting the craft of becoming not an average, but a truly great, teacher:

The problem with trying to learn from watching great conductors is that one of the things that makes them great is that they are unique. I cannot think of any two, dead or alive, who are similar either musically, physically, or psychologically, and the moment students start to copy one is the moment they identify themselves as students. It is perhaps more useful to watch those who show you what not to do, and you would probably learn more by attending bad rehearsals.

And, finally, on why teaching is such an amazing job:

It can be incredibly rewarding to help young people unearth more of their ability than they might have realized they had, and it is a privilege to be the one who accompanies them into the kind of emotional discovery that, for example, the first playing of  Mahler symphony can unlock. With nothing to lose, with no consciousness of the possibility of failure, they live on the wild side of the music, they embrace the edge, and countenance no compromise. Although they are unaware of it, their innocent wonder at the extraordinary power of music can be a reminder to their conductor of just what a special life it is. The “teacher” gets just as much out of it as a student.

What do conductors do? The same thing college professors do. Make something written in the past come alive and inspire a whole new generation to realize that there is both Beauty and Truth in this world.