Having done a little of both, I found it easier to write for full orchestra than to conduct one. Conducting is extremely hard. Just the simple practice of conducting ahead of the beat (where you're motioning beat 1 while they're still, roughly, on beat 4) is a bit of a brain bender. The first time I tried to conduct a student orchestra, that alone was enough to make the tempo get slower and slower over time, as I kept trying to correct to their beat while they would in turn correct to mine. Add on to that all the emotive requirements - you need to be a special kind of extravert to take to conducting naturally, I think.
At any rate, conductors are essential to the rehearsal process, as they're responsible for the interpretation, which is rehearsed. By the time performance comes around, the conductor is less essential, serving a more of a coach that gives cues, triggers, and reminders about the shape and interpretation that the ensemble has worked up.
I sometimes operate media servers that deliver video for several classical pops concerts including Fantasia and a number of more modern Hollywood type movies. The conductor gets a special synchronized video feed with white dots flashing to indicate tempo, colored lines to show when changes are coming up and bar numbers, all superimposed over the movie. The conductor has to speed up and slow down the orchestra in order to match the music exactly (or as close as possible) to the original video. I never change the speed of the video. Some pieces seem to be harder and also require a click track. These are shows that obviously require very close attention to the conductor.
I always wonder if all the orchestra was given a click and a copy of the modified video, if the conductor could just sit down and eat a sandwich. Of course, that is kind of like contrasting watching a DJ that selects mp3 tracks vs someone who can adeptly spin vinyl.
Curiously, I can tell you from listening to the conductors speak candidly, they often consider this sort of conducting much harder despite these added tools. Even when they are playing very familiar pieces like the music from Fantasia, it is very difficult to match it so exactly to the original. They compare adjusting the speed of an orchestra to speeding or slowing a freight train.
With professional orchestras, most only do 1-2 rehearsals before the shows I control video. It is amazing how fast the musicians take notes and adapt to the direction of the conductor. There is almost always a marked improvement between 1st and 2nd rehearsal and the actual show.
I will say that having stood at the conductor's podium at many of the top theaters in the U.S. (while empty) - it is an incredibly intimidating thought. Every seat points straight at you. It is much more singularly focused than a dramatic stage. It definitely has given me (someone with very little musical understanding) a great deal of respect for their responsibilities.
> Of course, that is kind of like contrasting watching a DJ that selects mp3 tracks vs someone who can adeptly spin vinyl.
The selection process is the same. But there are various 'cheats' mp3 DJs can use which vinyl DJs can't whilst mixing. A lot of MP3 mixing hardware now comes with auto-beatmatch functionality. I see this being used quite a bit. It tends to sound pretty soulless, because there's no 'liveness' to it, it's very mechanical. Another is looping the bars at the end of a track to make it easier to mix, with vinyl if you run out of time you just get silence!
Still, the main thing is playing the right music in the right order, if you can make it from one track to another without f*cking up then you'll have 95% of the room on your side. The other 5% will the trainspotters that take everything far too seriously anyway.
> With professional orchestras, most only do 1-2 rehearsals before the shows I control video. It is amazing how fast the musicians take notes and adapt to the direction of the conductor. There is almost always a marked improvement between 1st and 2nd rehearsal and the actual show.
Orchestral musician train and practice a lot, across a wide variety of music types, and as such their sight reading abilities tend to be very good. When it comes to a performance piece they'll have been practicing it solo for a while before they even set foot on the stage, so they'll already know both the piece, the flow, and their role in it. Adapting to the conductors direction really should be just a couple of rehearsal task for them :)
I always wonder if all the orchestra was given a click and a copy of the modified video, if the conductor could just sit down and eat a sandwich.
Got to try a rehearsal like this with my high school band (Sorcerer's Apprentice, IIRC). There was still enough other information to get from the director (adjusting dynamics, etc.) that we probably would have sounded bad with just the video.
they often consider this sort of conducting much harder despite these added tools
I'm not sure it's an added tool so much as a more exacting spec.
I am sure that is true (I don't have a music background). I just think it is usually much more interesting to watch someone perform with vinyl. More showmanship or something.
That's how I remember it from high school - by the time the performance comes around you can play the piece without looking at the conductor.
I've heard that many pro orchestra/conductor combos only have one or two rehearsals, maybe the night before and day of the performance. In that case I could imagine it takes a lot of skill on both the conductor and musicians part to pull off the performance.
I found it interesting to hear that conductors didn't play a huge role until after Beethoven. The older I get the more I feel that post-Beethoven symphonic music is a little over the top and often hard to enjoy. Maybe the need for a conductor is a sign that things simply got out of hand. I do enjoy a good Strauss or Verdi opera, though, and that's even crazier in terms of complexity.
Isn't that a natural progression in many fields though? Developing ever more complex and challenging material to show off you're "better" than the previous generation or "building upon their work" so to speak? Regardless of whether the added complexity is much of an improvement.
It kind of makes sense that you start needing a conductor - it is basically dividing the growing complexity into lower and higher level tasks because the full task is too much to bear for a single individual.
Often times, in the standard repertoire, the conductor doesn't necessarily do anything in the performance. It is in the preparation, when the conductor disseminates their interpretation to the ensemble, where their artistic vision is forged.
You can think of the orchestra as a meta-instrument. Just like a violinist plays the violin, a conductor plays the orchestra.
Someone has to make the musical decisions. In a string quartet, it might be the first violin. In a baroque ensemble, as the article stated, it might be the harpsichordist. In a symphony, it's the conductor.
Sure, a conductor keeps time, but not so much during the performance itself. With enough practice, any professional orchestra should be able to keep time on its own, but during rehearsal, someone still needs to say exactly what that tempo is in the first place.
Having played with many amateur orchestras, currently rehearsing with one weekly, I've seen good and bad conductors. Just like a CEO or basketball coach or political leader, the conductor shares his/her vision of "success" yet knows the low-level technical details of the craft required to lead them there. The part about waving one's arms on stage has little to do with it.
An organization -- any organization -- acquires the characteristics of its leader. Therefore, one must not underestimate the importance of a good conductor.
What is excellent about chamber music, in particular, is that no individual makes the musical decisions. Each musician is talented enough to be able to react and expound upon the decisions of each of the other players. Honestly, chamber music is often more of a social challenge than a technical or musical one.
I played in orchestras from 6 to about 23, from small professional quartets to huge 100+ piece complete symphonies - mostly enthusiastic amateur ensembles, but I did manage to get hooked onto a small tour ensemble that hit a handful of cities in just post Iron Curtain Russia and took part in some national level Orchestra competitions. plus made a little bit of spare change playing weddings and benefit events for a while. Had to give it up due to medical issues, but nothing beats sitting in the middle of a Symphony Orchestra going at full-steam.
I'm pretty convinced that the act of a symphony doing their thing is one of the most impressive split second coordinated acts of cooperation humans have every achieved. A conductor is really important for this, especially as the number of players gets larger.
A small trio/quartet can get by just by themselves. Even moderately sized chamber orchestras can manage "ok" with maybe a lead instrumentalist kicking off a tune with an exaggerated nod -- you just rehearse a lot and listen to each other. But once you break maybe 30 or 40 people trying to synchronize complex sound production, manually, with 1/100th of a second precision, it starts getting hard.
Conductors are really critical also in setting the "tone" or interpretation of a piece and the program that the orchestra plays. It's why some orchestras play a piece soft and loud in some bits, or another might play quiet and fast. Or one might use a version of the piece where the oboes pick up a flute harmony in the third movement, etc. In many orchestras they also set the position of players, usually through section auditions. It's how one violinist ends up near the conductor and another one ends up in the back row of the 2nd violins trying to hear themselves play over th e bassoons.
Rehearsal is harder at scale. It's hard getting 100 people together over and over, so there's section rehearsals where maybe just the violins break off and work, or just the brass instruments. At that level maybe just the section leader runs the rehearsal with the conductor dropping in to set vision.
Then you build a bigger part of the orchestra and rehears that, maybe with an assistant conductor or the conductor proper. And maybe you do the full thing a couple of times than go out and perform. A pro-level orchestra can get an all new program of music and turn it around into a performance inside of a week or two.
Think how hard it is to coordinate just a half dozen programmers.
After reading your comment, and considering Serf (the docker coordination thing), I wonder what it would sound like for musicians to coordinate over a gossip protocol (rather than through a centralized conductor which as you note struggles to scale). What would that even look like?
EDIT: Or, as sgeisenh points out below, that's chamber music.
If the subtitle (Do orchestras really need someone flapping their arms on a podium?) had fit in the 80-character limit, I would have added it to the title here.
I probably should have titled it something like "What do orchestra conductors do?". So it goes.
HN readers, please raise your hand if the first thing you though about when reading the headline was not electricity. Now put your hands down if it was something to do with thermal energy. Now put them down if you were thinking about trains. If your hand is still up, please remove all metal items, swallow this, step into the fMRI, and hold still.
I thought buses ... it's very late and I've had a drink, I'm not really that old either but I'd heard that London Transport were thinking of having conductors again, so ...
The elements of the joke are as follows. I assumed that HN readers have a higher probability than the general population to associate words with scientific or engineering meanings. I further assumed that as this site has a high association with electronics, the electrical meaning of conductor would be most prevalent. This was reinforced by the parent post, who stated nearly exactly what I had been thinking, right down to the smirking overcleverness with which it described to motion of elecromagnetic charge. Before clicking on the link, I thought of other things that could be meant by "conductor". I came up with heat transfer and train tickets. I didn't even think of orchestras, probably because I had always been in bands, where the leaders were overwhelmingly directors, band leaders, and drum majors.
The second element of the joke is that I presumed that HN readers, having a variety of esoteric hobbies, might also have an interest in cognitive science and linguistics (particularly the AI folks), and might want to analyze the brain of an outlier. I then decided that, while less accessible to a home hobbyist than brain surgery or in-depth psychological profiling, fMRI imaging conveyed the point of the joke in shorter, more recognizable wording, without actually being a very probable outcome.
In reality, you would probably be wired up to a home-made sensor array and presented with a series of time-indexed sensory inputs via headphones and a computer screen, and perhaps asked to press certain button sequences in response.
So, in short, no, those people do not need a fMRI. You, however.... I would like to analyze your physiological response to traditional comedy and contrast that with nerd jokes....
I auditioned for the job this year in a King Tut costume but didn't get it. I can't say that I know exactly what the drum major does either, but I think spiritual leader is a good way to put it.
While it may be hard to describe the exact purpose of the drum major, some definitely stand out. This year was the 50th anniversary of the Band and many old drum majors came back to play with us. At one point each of them got to conduct a song, and some of them were just incredible.
They're also called maestros (to disambiguate for those technically inclined). Great ones are heard instead of being seen. By the time we see them on stages, most of the things great conductors do have already been done, and they're basically metronomes. The even better ones have a showmanship in them to help the audience to appreciate the music even more. Check out (rehearsal) performances by Szell, Solti, von Karajan, and our very own Michael Tilson Thomas.
Having done a little of both, I found it easier to write for full orchestra than to conduct one. Conducting is extremely hard. Just the simple practice of conducting ahead of the beat (where you're motioning beat 1 while they're still, roughly, on beat 4) is a bit of a brain bender. The first time I tried to conduct a student orchestra, that alone was enough to make the tempo get slower and slower over time, as I kept trying to correct to their beat while they would in turn correct to mine. Add on to that all the emotive requirements - you need to be a special kind of extravert to take to conducting naturally, I think.
At any rate, conductors are essential to the rehearsal process, as they're responsible for the interpretation, which is rehearsed. By the time performance comes around, the conductor is less essential, serving a more of a coach that gives cues, triggers, and reminders about the shape and interpretation that the ensemble has worked up.