Baton down the hatches

I can recall many times when I’ve thought I could tell a conductor to stop doing one or two things in order to get an improved response from my colleagues (and myself), but I never got up the nerve. I thought it would be too presumptuous, or I just didn’t care enough to stick my neck out. But some problems are quite widespread, and can be summed up in a few principles. (For conciseness I’ll refer to conductors with the male gender, but no bias is intended.)

I’ll start with a generalization: the less a conductor talks, the more I like him. Some conductors seem incapable of showing their ideas with their hands. There is certainly a technique to conducting, just like there is for a musical instrument. A conductor’s hands are his most important tools, and I can only assume that he has resorted to words because those tools have failed him. Imagine if an instrumentalist had to explain with words every idea she had about what she was playing. You’d say, “Don’t tell me what you’re trying to do, just do it!” The same goes for the conductor: show me what you want with your hands, not with words. I’d even extend this to the habit some conductors have of telling the orchestra where they’ll be conducting in two or in four. If you find yourself needing to explain all the time what you want or what you’re doing, perhaps you should put a critical eye to your stick technique.

Other issues emerge from an apparent lack of trust on the part of the conductor. When, in the first rehearsal, a conductor stops the piece in the second bar to make corrections, he has already lost my goodwill. A good musician usually can hear the same errors the conductor hears, and will be happy to be given the chance to fix them without having them pointed out. Given a bit of time and momentum, a lot of problems will go away on their own, and the conductors I prefer to work with will let us read a whole movement or piece before picking it apart. Obsessing over every detail, or spending an hour on thirty bars of music, will only get one labeled as a micro-manager. Better to focus on the big picture and trust the musicians to work out the details.

Time management seems to be another issue for many conductors. I think it should be expected that the conductor will have a clear plan of how his rehearsal time will be used and will hold to that plan as closely as possible, especially when there are personnel changes from one piece on a rehearsal to another. I’ve played too many rehearsals where musicians sat waiting for their piece to get called, only to go home without playing a note, and too many concerts where some pieces were severely over-rehearsed and others barely even touched upon. One incident comes to mind: A German-speaking conductor had only one rehearsal for a program, and arrived at the end of it with the final section of one piece not having been played. Frantically paging through the score, he cried out, “Zese last few bars will be in vier,” to which a wag in the back of the orchestra responded, “Yes, in constant fear!”

In summary, the conductors I like working for are the ones I respect, and who I feel treat me respectfully in return. I am most satisfied as an orchestra musician when I’m given a clear picture of what’s expected of me, along with the freedom and trust to produce it as I see fit. It’s in that environment that I’ve experienced the highest level of music-making, and that, after all, is what we’re all looking for.