What Does a Conductor Do? (Part 2)

Now that the Great East Coast Earthquake of 2011 (which I didn’t even feel, thanks to my San Francisco upbringing) has passed with little damage to my home or psyche, I can turn my attention to more important things, like blogging. So, without much further ado…

When you’re sitting in the audience, watching and listening to an orchestra play in concert, you’re witnessing the third part of a three-part process. We just discussed the first part (studying the score) in my last post. The second part is made up of anywhere from one to as many as four or five practice sessions, more commonly called rehearsals, that have taken place during the preceding days. Each rehearsal is 2 or 2.5 hours long.

It may come as a surprise to some of you, but a professional orchestra does not need very much rehearsal to play together and in tune. In fact, most of the top-tier orchestras out there don’t need ANY rehearsal to play together and in tune, especially if you’re talking about standard repertoire (say, Beethoven’s Symphony no. 5).

Now that you’ve recovered from your fainting spell, you may be asking, “How’s that possible, dear sir?” Part of the answer is sheer numbers. Each person sitting in the orchestra has played Beethoven’s Fifth 95 million times, under 102 famous conductors, and they just simply know how it goes. The other part is sheer excellence. Each person sitting on that stage is an incredible artist in their own right, technically formidable, experienced, and perfectly capable of making that mountain of decisions to which I referred in my last post and listening to everyone on the stage around them to fit in and contribute to the overall orchestral texture.

Is every orchestra out there that good? Of course not. But you’d be surprised how little rehearsal it takes to put together an acceptable performance, where everyone is playing their part more or less accurately and in tune, with more or less the right dynamics.

So, you’re probably thinking…why rehearse at all? And, haven’t you just written yourself out of a job? Valid questions, and I’ll answer hopefully in terms we can all understand.

Here is my frozen dinner response to these questions: it’s just not okay to subject an audience to an “acceptable” performance. The difference between a whipped-up, under-rehearsed performance and a great, spellbinding one is a bit like the difference between a Stouffer’s microwave dinner (no offense to the good folks at Stouffer’s) and a dinner at aMichelin-starred restaurant. At a certain level, both dinners are much the same: they contain food, they might even share many ingredients, they involve the application of heat to those ingredients, and they are eaten off of plates with cutlery. My point is this: the quality of the meal (and the concert) is all about how the ingredients are put together.

In the concert’s case, the bulk of the hard work of “putting it together” takes place during the rehearsals, led by the conductor. The musical score (i.e., what the composer wrote down) is equivalent to the recipe a cook might use. And the conductor, aided by the highly-skilled musicians in the orchestra, is something akin to the chef in our restaurant scenario. (An aside: did you know that the French term for conductor is chef d’orchestre? And their word for cook/chef is chef de cuisine…)

How a conductor runs a rehearsal is a very individual decision, and we can get into different styles later – perhaps in a different post. Right now, I want to clarify what both orchestra and conductor need to accomplish in the approximately 10 hours of rehearsal time allotted to them. These items come in five categories:

First is “ensemble”. Ensemble, in the most basic sense, is the lining up of all the notes correctly, so that everyone is playing their notes at the right time. As mentioned above, ensemble problems are rare, but they do occur. For instance, the acoustics onstage might make it hard for members of the orchestra to hear one another. When a woodwindor brass player is playing, the sound of their own instrument makes it REALLY hard (but most of the time not impossible) for them to hear anyone far away, even in the best of acoustic surroundings. Fixing an ensemble problem usually just requires everyone knowing what everyone else is playing, and how they fit together. Once everyone knows what to listen for, it’s pretty straightforward to put together.

[Blogger’s note: “ensemble” is actually far more complicated than playing the right note at the right time. It involves everyone agreeing on the length, shape, and color of each note they play together, among other things. For our purposes, though, I hope the above will suffice.]

Second is ensuring correct balances. This involves the dynamics, and dynamic hierarchy, I talked about in my last post. Basically, you need the audience to be able to hear everything everyone is playing, and the foreground instrument “voices” need to be featured more prominently in the resulting mix than the background or accompaniment “voices”.

Third is intonation. If you ask a woodwind or brass player what they think about more than anything else, it’ll be intonation, or being in tune with everyone around them. This is a hornet’s nest, and fixing intonation has the tendency to ruffle feathers. Why? Because everyone on that stage has years of experience, and they ALL know how to play in tune. It’s their job. However, sometimes it needs to be fixed, and it’s part of the rehearsal process. Depending on the level of the orchestra, it’s usually possible just to let the players sort out their own intonation difficulties. It’s only in very rare cases that a conductor is called on to be a referee. We’ll have a nerdier discussion of intonation some other time.

Fourth is the negotiation of any tricky spots, where sudden (or gradual) changes in tempoor dynamics require more than just a cursory glance.

Fifth – and actually most important of all – is phrasing. You can think of music just like any other language, and you can think of a piece of music like a book, or – even more aptly – like a play. Phrasing is all about the subtleties of the language: the pacing, the stresses, the detailed or broader level emotions and colors. Music has sentences, just like language: they’re called phrases, and they can be interpreted by musicians in much the same way that actors interpret their lines. Just as plays and novels grow to climaxes and then resolve (or not!), so do pieces of music – both on the “trees” level and on the “forest” level. This phrasing structure is also called the “architecture” of the piece. Some phrasing can be achieved by talking about it, but a lot of it can only be expressed by actually making the music, playing it through in larger chunks. This is where the magic happens, and where the orchestra musicians are counting on the conductor to be inspired and inspiring. Here is where the music comes alive, and our “recipe” is transformed into a living piece of music.

…which brings me to my last point for this post: a rehearsal is a mixture of playing and talking. Ideally, many items can be accomplished simply by the conductor and orchestra members interacting while playing. On the other hand, there are many things that can’t be shown, that need to be said out loud during the rehearsal. The preponderance of words will come from “the podium” (which is a really bizarre yet common way of saying “the conductor”), but – in a healthy rehearsal environment, at least – there will be questions from orchestra players who have an idea, or want clarification on an issue.

For me, and for many other people, it’s at least as interesting to watch and listen to the rehearsal process as it is to be at the concert. It’s fascinating to witness the palpable (and sometimes very exciting!) transformation from microwave dinner to haute cuisine. Try it sometime – highly recommended.

I could write an entire book on the rehearsal process, and I’m sure we’ll touch on various aspects of it later. But, for now, I trust this gives you enough of an idea to start with. Next time, we’ll talk about the performance, which is of course what most of you have experienced already.