Baton down the hatches

I’ve had the pleasure of playing in the “guinea pig” orchestras for a couple of conducting competitions in recent years. I’ve been very impressed by the level of artistry in the upper strata of these groups of aspiring conductors, but simultaneously a bit surprised and disappointed by the inexperience and/or mediocrity I’ve seen in the same competitions. I’ve wondered for a long time what the musical education system could do better to locate and develop conducting talent.

Most music schools currently offer no undergraduate conducting major at all. Many of the schools that do teach conducting courses at the undergraduate level do it as a part of a music education degree, which has a very different focus from the performance-directed training that most orchestral musicians have. If we don’t start training conductors until graduate school, that’s not a lot of time to learn a pretty complicated set of skills before a budding conductor is pitched into the marketplace. With the exception of the League’s Conducting Fellowship program, there aren’t a lot of opportunities for early professional development in the field (at least, as far as I know). So essentially, if you want to be a conductor, you get about two years of master’s-level training, and then you have to go look for a job, with little real knowledge of how to do the job, aside from basic baton technique and score-reading.

A conductor with no experience as an instrumental performer has a whole other set of challenges, though. The sheer amount of practice time needed to build the level of virtuosity that’s required to win an orchestral audition these days is daunting. If instrumental expertise is as valuable as I think it is, how would an undergraduate have time to effectively pursue conducting skills in addition? I don’t know the solution to the problem, but I do believe that most new conductors in the job market don’t have enough experience and enough podium time under their belts to be very effective, and an earlier start in the academic progression might help.

My own orchestra recently recast its assistant conductor position as a kind of short-term post-graduate training position (with a close mentoring relationship with the music director), as opposed to a long-term staff conducting position where the full range of job skills is (perhaps unrealistically) expected to be already in place. We’re still very much in the experimental phase of this model, but I’m optimistic about the potential of such an employment step to develop already formidable talent with a year or two of practical experience, not just on the podium, but in the bewildering array of off-stage duties that a 21st-century music director faces.