What Does a Conductor Do? (Part 3)

So back to the old blogging board.  With the lady of the house having given birth to our second girl about a month ago, things have been somewhat hectic around here!  But in between soiled diapers, I’d like to try to sneak in the third and final post of the “what does a conductor actually do?” series:  namely, what does a conductor do in concert?  After all, this is where most of you have actually seen a conductor in action and are likely to do so again.  Because most of the hard work has already taken place by this point, it’s tempting to say that this part is the proverbial “icing on the cake”.  On the other hand, have you ever eaten a cake with the icing removed?  Not highly recommended…

[Note: to see what the conductor has been up to until this point, you can browse my earlier posts on studying the score and rehearsing the orchestra.]

In the broadest of strokes, the conductor’s job during a performance is made up of the following four roles:

First, to remind the orchestra of any details worked out in rehearsal that require such a reminder.  Many of these will need nothing more than a knowing smile, or a wink, or a small hand or facial gesture at the appropriate time.  (Note to beginning conductors: neither a wince nor a grimace following a player’s mistake are appreciated/tolerated by the musicians in the orchestra…)  This first part of the conductor’s job includes those very rare times when an orchestra actually needs a conductor to “beat time” very precisely.  (Most of the time – and this is rarely understood by laypeople – the orchestra can play together just fine, thank you, without being reminded where each beat takes place.)

Second, to help the musicians to “improvise”.  And by “improvise”, I’m not talking about jazz.  What I mean is that music is alive, not stagnant.  So just because a particular performance worked for yesterday’s rehearsal or concert, it doesn’t mean that the same exact performance will work today.  The audience is different, the acoustics in the hall are different, everyone’s moods are different, etc.  I know this is a bit hard to grasp, but just imagine if the actors onstage were required to give the exact same performance of Romeo and Juliet, day in and day out.  Highly frustrating, boring, and problematic, to say the least.  The same applies to orchestral performance, and the conductor is there to help guide the way.  Maybe we need to speed up a bit more there, slow down infinitesimally in that section, delay the crescendo by a beat, getting louder at a faster rate, etc.  All of that can be guided by a conductor, reading the mood of the orchestra players and the audience.

Third, to inspire the musicians.  Victor Hugo once wrote, “Music expresses that which is impossible to put into words, and cannot remain silent.”  There are existential issues at play in music, life and death confront one another, and the concert hall is ideally a place where an audience member and musician alike can contemplate the vastness and also the intimacy of the human experience.  A conductor’s ultimate goal in concert is simultaneously to inspire the amazing musicians in front of the podium to give the music their all and to maximize the effect the performance has on the audience.

How do you inspire musicians and an audience?  A valid question, but I’m going to sidestep it for now.  For our admittedly basic purposes, I’ll merely say that – as an observer – you need to pay attention to the conductor’s entire body, including facial expressions, to get an inkling of what’s going on.  I daresay most conductors would be at a loss as to how to explain how they inspire, except they might say they “become” the music and beam that signal as if their lives depended on it.

Fourth, to help any musician or group of musicians who are in need.  In a performance, you never know what might go wrong.  If there are 85 or so musicians onstage, chances are someone is going to have a bad day (more like a bad “second” or “minute” in this case) now and then.  The conductor’s job is to recognize the problem immediately (normally coming in at the wrong time, but it could really be anything) and shepherd that musician (or those musicians) back to safety, using easily recognizable combinations of hand and facial gestures.

Someone once asked me if conductors ever do things on the podium that are strictly for the audience’s benefit.  Another fair question.  The answer is no – not exactly.  If I do something to help the audience, it’s always going to be something helpful to the musicians as well – the two tend to go hand-in-hand.  For example, during a fugue, do the basses really need me to turn to them after five bars and give them a strong entrance cue?  Not really.  They could enter on their own, led by the principal bassist, so I suppose you could say that I’m showing this entrance for the audience’s sake.  However, I give the cue using a combination of facial expression with hand, arm, and body movements, telegraphing the regal, refined quality of sound the basses will be making, so it ends up helping the players too.

Let’s end this blog with a question about conductors I always get at cocktail parties:  “Why aren’t any of the players even looking at him (invariably the questioner is a sexist pig and does not add ‘…or her’)?”

Two words: peripheral vision.