Baton down the hatches

The conductor’s primary purpose is to help the musicians in the orchestra play together. The size of the orchestra and its distribution across a large stage make it difficult for a musician to rely on sound alone to know when to play, especially in a hall that provides poor contact between different parts of the stage. Obviously, then, a musician needs to be able to make some connection between what she sees from the stick and what she hears happening around her. The closer this connection is, the more confident the musician can be that she is playing with the group.

Many conductors have developed a habit of beating ahead of the orchestra, some to the extent that the connection between stick and sound is quite tenuous. Simple math will tell you that a conductor can’t beat a tempo that’s different from what the orchestra is playing and not have that connection break entirely before long. In my experience, the ensemble at those times deteriorates immediately, and I have to conclude that the conductor simply isn’t paying attention. Both instrumentalists and conductors have to keep the connection between their hands and their ears going at all times. Enough said.

In other cases, the conductor or the orchestra develops a habit of keeping a noticeable gap between the apparent impulse from the stick and the corresponding reaction of the players. The size of the gap will vary with the tempo of the music in a predictable way. This can work fine if it’s something the players are accustomed to. Orchestras that see a lot of different conductors, though (and conductors that visit many different orchestras), are sure to find that it’s hard to adjust to a delay that falls well outside an industry average — in the tails of the bell curve, as it were. In the era of jet travel and peripatetic maestros, I would predict that the remarkably large delay becomes less common.

As prevalent a problem is the failure of a conductor to maintain a beat pattern that is clear. The first thing any of us learns about conducting is the various patterns for 4/4, 3/4, 6/8, etc. It doesn’t make sense to me that such a fundamental element of the technique can be entirely discarded. Especially in difficult, unfamiliar or mulitple-meter music, the musicians need every clue they can get about where they are in the measure. If you’re looking intently at your music and make a momentary counting error, you want to be able to look up and find your place immediately. If all you see is a pattern of 1-1-1-1-1-…, you’re out of luck. More attention to the beat pattern would prevent a lot of erroneous entrances.