DO ORCHESTRAL conductors do anything useful? Alessandro D’Ausilio of the Italian Institute of Technology, in Genoa, and his colleagues tried to answer that eternal question in a study published in the Public Library of Science.
And:
Each violinist had an infra-red reflector attached to the tip of his bow, and the conductors had them attached to their batons. Dr D’Ausilio and his team were thus able to follow the movements of both bows and batons by bathing their little orchestra in infra-red light, which their cameras could see, but human beings cannot. They then used the movements of the reflectors to analyse who was affecting whom.
To do this, Dr D’Ausilio employed a mathematical trick called the Granger causality test…
And the (tentative I would say) result:
The findings are in harmony with what conductors knew all along: that baton-toting despots, like the late Herbert von Karajan, do add value—but only if they rein in the uppity musicians in front of them.
This is a bit like asking –rhetorically — how it is possible that Michele Ferrari had any influence on Lance Armstrong’s performance given that (A) he was not present during actual races and (B) Lance claims to have never tested positive for performance enhancing drugs. The conductor does not get paid to simply waive a baton during the performance. He is in charge of the orchestra, and, most importantly, directs the preparation for a performance. What happens during the performance is mostly a product of that preparation. All the baton-waiving and dramatic full body gestures is a small measure of the conductors influence. A conductor, like a good doping doctor, takes a talented group of people and helps them prepare so that during the performance they are much better than the sum of their individual and collective parts.
Exactly. The real work of conducting is done well before the performance. Also, in opera the conductor works a lot with the vocalist and is responsible for making the pit match what’s happening onstage, which would otherwise be impossible.
Exactly what I was going to say. Most of the conductor’s work is in the music director part of the job. That its the same guy who keeps time and provides a sort of focus for the audience at the performance is due to tradition.
Its sort of the same situation with coaches and field managers in professional sports. Most of their work is in getting the team ready for the game, and tactics during the game are delegated to a great extent to assistant coaches and even the players, but fans and sports commentators love to discuss coaches and managers in terms of how well they handle tactics.
Being an amateur orchestra player…this article reminded me of a few things.
First was a very nice talk about counducting on Ted: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/itay_talgam_lead_like_the_great_conductors.html
The second was the example used by austrian economists about the ‘human action’ – about extraterrestrial who come to see the world and see people randomly going somewhere doing strange things. Statistical analysis of what people do would surely be very enlightening. I think Feynman called it ‘cargo cult science’….
A good analogy of what conductor does would be that he plays the orchestra as his instrument in the way that a violinist plays her individual fiddle. KLO and the Original D are quite right that the work of the conductor is done before the performance ever starts. If you compare versions of Beethoven’s 5th, for instance, as performed by Karajan, Gergiev and Tilson Thomas, you would hear just how much difference the conductor makes in the way the work turns out.
I agree wit the comments about the prep, but another aspect of the relationship between the conductor and the orchestra which someone ought to do a study of is whether the orchestra plays behind the conductor’s beat. This probably sounds unlikely if you haven’t experienced it, but I performed in one very good orchestra with a well-known conductor (and I have heard tell of another very well-known orchestra like this) where, in order to play with the ensemble, I had to listen to them and play behind (after) the conductor’s beat, rather than with the conductor’s baton. It was the weirdest damn thing and seemed passive-aggressive on the orchestra’s part, and I have often wondered why the conductor didn’t call them on it. So it isn’t that the conductor is playing a passive instrument, no sirree, and I wouldn’t recommend using that analogy around any orchestral musicians unless you’re looking for trouble.
In general, the better and best European concert orchestras play behind the conductor’s beat while US ensembles tend to play simultaneously with the conductor. The rationale behind these divergent practices is obscure, but a common understanding in Europe among musicians is that the conductor is a guest and that his gestures invite the ensemble to (literally) follow him rather than dictate to them.
I think that this study proves something that was already pretty well understood: you can dictate only so much lack of autonomy to an ensemble before they rebel. In an optimal conductor-orchestra relationship, which I have experienced reliably only with Carlos Kleiber, the mixture of precision and persuasion (via cajoling, charisma, and just playing impressing the band with the conductor’s own musicianship) is carefully distributed between rehearsal and concert, such that the rehearsal achieves a kind of fixed perfection while the concert surpasses that with extemporaneous fine-tuning of phrase and detail, keeping the orchestra so engaged in the process that it never has a chance to rebel.
Agree with your second paragraph. Concerning the first paragraph, interesting comment but the split may not be as clean as you think: the conductor I played under was Seiji Ozawa (who spent most of his career in the U.S.), and the orchestra that an acquaintance had played in was the L.A. Phil.
Artie Shaw once compared himself with his arch-rival Benny Goodman, saying “Benny plays the clarinet, I play the orchestra”.
The infra-red lights are nice and all, but wouldn’t a more effective experiment have been to release an orchestra into the wild with no conductor? For a series of concerts?
I’m reluctant to cite human nature on a site whose commenters prefer empirical data, but I claim that individuals in organisations need single authorities. The presence of a conductor accords with the way we mentally arrange a body of people into a tree or a triangle order to understand it and understand what we’re doing in it.
I agree with Thomas Aquinas: “every natural governance is governance by one. In the multitude of bodily members there is one which is the principal mover, namely, the heart; and among the powers of the soul one power presides as chief, namely, the reason. Among bees there is one king bee’ and in the whole universe there is One God, Maker and Ruler of all things.”
(FWIW, I sing in a choir of around 150).
Isn’t it obvious that conductors do something? Otherwise wouldn’t the market get rid of them?
A band needs a band leader, otherwise it becomes cacophony.
I’ve been there.
I don’t think there’s much doubt that conductors do -something- since interpretations of the same work by different conductors sound so different. But that’s pretty much all happening off-stage as others here noted. The interesting question is whether the standing on stage gesticulating, after the practice, during the concert, matters.
This result seems to say it does, somewhat. Oddly enough, it’s somewhat misleading in saying that – the study simply took an orchestra and had different conductors gesticulating on stage one after the other for different interpretations. But this isn’t like “real” conducting at all. In real conducting the orchestra has already been trained by the conductor to do stuff a certain way. Maybe if after that the conductor goofs on stage in some way they know to ignore him?
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