So invariably, this happens. I’m at a party or gathering of some sort, and just as I’ve stuffed my mouth full of the ubiquitous cocktail peanuts, someone who’s found out that I’m a conductor will approach me and ask, “So, no offense, but what does a conductor do? I mean, it doesn’t even look like the musicians are watching the conductor!” At which point, I point to my mouth to indicate that I am somewhat indisposed.
So I thought I’d just get that question out of the way here, for those of you who’ve never had the occasion to meet an actual conductor. The answer is a long, complicated one, which people who’ve had one too many drinks may find somewhat “involved” (for lack of a better word). So, perhaps I should preface this blog by asking my readers to put their drinks down – at least until you’ve finished reading this entry!
So, for starters, a conductor’s work starts with the score, which tells him (or her, of course) what each instrument should be playing. Sort of. A lot of people have this idea that, once a composer has written down a piece of music, everything is taken care of. You know, that we just have to play what the composer wrote. However, the process is far subtler than that.
The score tells us which instrument plays what note (or pitch), when it plays that pitch, how long, and how loudly. In some scores, especially from the mid-19th Century onwards, the composer might even write in some words describing the feeling he wants to evoke. Sounds like a lot of information, right?
Well, yes – but hardly complete. You see, all of the information given us by the composer is approximate. Take pitch, for example. The “A” above “middle C” should be the same pitch in all cases, right? Wrong. In certain places at certain times, people have tuned their instruments lower than they do today, by varying degrees, up to about a half step. You can hear period instrument bands play at this lower tuning even today. If you have perfect pitch, listening to one of these performances (hearing Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony in B Major instead of in C Major, for instance) can drive you batty. If you don’t, no sweat. It’ll just sound like the Jupiter Symphony. Even if all the instruments in the orchestra are tuned to the same A, there’s a lot of pitch adjusting that routinely happens. Not a lot of laypeople know this, but if you play one note over and over, accompanied by different harmonies, you actually have to change how high or low the note is to remain in tune with the surrounding harmonies. The upshot? A written pitch is a very approximate suggestion. (Which is why most high school orchestras sound the way they do!)
Now, how about length? If a composer writes a simple rhythm (e.g., 4 quarter notes), can’t we all agree on how to play it? Apparently not – there is much ambiguity here as well. Is each quarter note held for its full value (as in a Brahmsian Adagio), or do we tastefully shorten each one and insert some space between the notes (as is generally accepted to be the custom in a fast Mozartian bass line)? If we can’t take length for granted even in the simplest of situations, how can we ever expect agreement in the majority of cases, where there are seemingly endless possibilities for just this one variable: how long should each note be?
Dynamics (how loud or soft the music should be played) are another case in point. In the majority of musical scores, the dynamics are given in relative terms. The musical termforte (or f) = “strong” in Italian, and we generally think of it in America as “loud”. (All the Europeans reading this are thinking, typical Americans…) But how loud/strong, exactly? The same goes for piano (p), mezzo-piano (mp), mezzo forte (mf), fortissimo (ff) and the rest of them. These are inexact terms, and the performer has a great deal of leeway in deciding how loud or soft to play at any given moment.
It’s hard enough with one player, but imagine a roomful of players, all with music markedforte – only some of them will have the melody, right? That means that those players will have to play louder, and those who are playing accompaniment and secondary parts will need to play softer. Of course, it’s never that simple, because there’s a hierarchy even within the accompaniment and secondary parts. So each player ends up playing a different dynamic, even though all of their parts (in this case meaning the sheet music off of which they are playing) say forte.
Oh, and there’s one other set of decisions that needs to be taken care of for every single note in the score: together, they can be thought of as the “shape” of the note. How does the note begin? Is it a sharp, biting attack? Or is it strong and solid at the start? Does it slowly gain steam? There are infinite possibilities, of course. Same goes for the end of the note. Is it held out strong until the end? Does it diminuendo, or die away? Does it crescendo, or get louder to a climax at the end?
I’m not even going to get into things like color, emotion, or other qualities. The main point I want to get across is that there is no way any two performances of any piece are ever going to be even remotely the same – especially if different people are playing it each time. There are so many ways to be different, even if you are “following the score exactly” as it is written. The great artists are those who can turn this incredible mountain of decision-making into a convincing, inevitable-sounding, organic whole.
So, the FIRST STEP of what a conductor does is to study the score, making unbelievable numbers of decisions about how to transform what the composer has written down into music an audience can hear. I can’t speak for other conductors, but as a part of this step I then create a multi-dimensional audio “image” in my mind – something that allows me to recreate and hear the piece on demand (if silently), exactly the way I feel it should sound.
My wife is cooking something delicious, which makes it very hard to concentrate. Plus, I think this is enough to digest for one posting. Next time I’ll go on to the SECOND STEP, which is the rehearsal process.
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