A few weeks ago, I had the chance to organize and lead a concert series in London where we played Britten’s Simple Symphony, Mozart Divertimento k136 in D Major, and a strings-only arrangement of Mozart’s Concerto k466 in D minor (with the fantastic Adam Heron on the Piano). This was an incredibly intense and enriching experience for me, on both a musical and a human level. However it was also quasi-traumatic as the rehearsals were very difficult, and I felt like I was to blame for it. As the concerts went relatively well, I now feel more at peace with all of the hardship and I managed to reflect on all the things I learned. Things I had never really realized during my conducting training. This essay is an attempt to share these lessons, and hopefully save fellow starting conductors from doing the same mistakes I did.
When I first stood in front of an orchestra rehearsing for a real concert, I had already taken multiple conducting masterclasses. During these masterclasses, we explored the depth of a given score and thought deeply about how to reshape the standard beating patterns in order to shine light on the inner intricacies of the music, and make it live. This is what all conducting classes are about: you learn the technique and study the score in order to create beautiful music, exactly like playing an instrument. The issue with this is that it often makes the student forget something of critical importance: the sound doesn’t come from your waving, it comes from the orchestra.
Conducting classes teach you how to act, but the conductor’s job is mostly about how to react.
Standing in front of an orchestra while preparing for a concert made me realize I completely overlooked this critical part. If you are leading the Berlin Philharmonic on a piece that they already know by heart, the way you wave matters enormously. If that’s not the case, it’s only a small part of what it takes to produce decent (I would not dare say “good”) music. In this short essay, I’ll attempt to outline a few critical lessons I learned about conducting an orchestra, all originating from this key realization.
I did hear this from my conducting professors, but I never realized the extent of the job this was, nor how challenging it was. It’s not about perfect pitch, relative pitch, or any of that. It’s about listening to a given excerpt of music, played for the first (or tenth) time by some musicians, integrating all of what is happening, and pinpointing exactly what is wrong. On the spot. Are the second violins playing too loud? Is that third desk viola player badly out of tune and messing up the whole sound texture? Is the oboe (who’s playing rather unimportant harmony notes) actually one bar late because he has wrong bar numbers, cannot count, or (most probably), because you forgot to give them an appropriate cue? All of these at once? A myriad of different problems can (and do) occur while rehearsing, and your job as a conductor is to immediately identify what the problem is, and find a way to fix it (if it even is fixable in the short rehearsal time you have). Spoiler alert, you won’t master this by attending conducting masterclasses. The only way to get there is by doing, and by doing I mean making a fool of yourself in front of the orchestra a few times. I’ll try to spare you some problems by telling you some of the things I learned about rehearsal preparation during a traumatic two rehearsals.
I imagine this to be a first-timer classic mistake. You’re so focused on what you’re doing, and wondering if you’re doing it right, that you forget the golden rule: it’s as much about reacting as acting. You should arrive to your first rehearsal with the basics completely integrated within you, in such a way that you don’t need to think about them. These basics are:
That’s it. It isn’t much, right? But if you’re an apprentice conductor going in front of an orchestra that has never played a piece before, that’s all you need to worry about for your first rehearsal. If you don’t have this properly integrated into your first rehearsal, you won’t manage to do your job properly, because you’ll be reading the music with them and thinking about your own waving instead of listening. You should also note that the musicians will mostly be reading (likely even discovering) the music, and thus cannot be very reactive to your waving’s “subtleties”. Focus on giving a clear and simple beating, nothing more than what they need to play.
There will be mistakes on your part (and on theirs too). There will be things where you feel like you didn’t show the music properly etc… This does not matter at the beginning — you can work on these things in your own time between the rehearsal(s) and the concert. What you cannot work on in between is what the orchestra is doing, and whether there are significant problems.
Your job during the rehearsal is to step back and actually listen to what is happening, and take decisions accordingly.
I was conducting the introduction of the first movement of Mozart’s K466 piano concerto, and the first violins and cellos/double bass have the important lines while the seconds/violas are “only” doubling. I was putting all my brain power into conducting/listening to the firsts violins and the cellos — this made me very very slow at realizing that the core of the problem was that seconds and violas were playing too loud and barely managing the not-so-obvious syncopation. You’d think that this is an obvious thing to realize (if I had heard it from the outside, it 100% is), but it isn’t when you’re on the spot, partly focusing on your own way of conducting, and when there are many other things going on. Of course, what first and cellos are playing is not perfect and can be improved to fit the exact idea of the music you have, but you have an ongoing disaster happening on other instruments that are, when you studied the score, only playing “repeated doubling notes”. By the time you realize, precious minutes of rehearsal time have passed, and you’re never getting this time again. In the end, these lines are also very important because they build the overall sound texture.
My conclusion is that one should spend a lot of time studying the inner notes, training yourself to hear them in recordings for example, or playing them on the piano, or anything else that would work in order to make you very quick at spotting things that are wrong when they are wrong.
Music is a holistic experience, all individual components have to be good in order for the whole to be good. Conductors should never forget that.
It is very helpful to deconstruct the music when rehearsing and make subgroups of instruments play sections together. Of course, it is the conductor’s job to have everyone really playing together, essentially acting like everyone else’s ear, but it is extremely helpful to have the players’ ears also in use, and when there is a lot happening, it’s difficult to have that happen. Choose groups of players playing correlated lines, and rehearse them together — not only will they get better at playing these lines, but it will also be extremely helpful for the conductor to correct issues (as fewer instruments are playing, and there is a point of focus that is being looked upon). As long as you don’t spend too long doing this, it will also be useful to musicians not playing as they identify and internalize important parts of the whole piece rather than only their own parts. But please don’t ever spend too long doing that with all the orchestra there, they’ll hate you for it.
Some may argue that you’re either born with it, or you’re not. I’ve always thought of myself as someone who could lead people, and motivate them towards a common vision. I was proven wrong this time — big time. Leading an orchestra is nothing like what I’ve experienced before. Very rare are the people with the necessary self-confidence, musicianship, knowledge, and humanity to do this job properly. I realized it was far from given to me, and that I had to grow a lot as a musician and human to ever hope to do this well.
Musicians are there to play, as much as you are there to conduct. You’re the leader, but don’t ever make them feel like you are in the slightest way more important than they are. As a leader, you should also take the necessary initiatives to make them feel valued and listened to. Small things like putting their bios on a concert program, smiling at them when they have an important line to play (even if it’s not played perfectly!), or the way you make them stand after a concert… This all makes a significant difference, and can ultimately make them truly happy to play for you — or should I say, to play with you. This is what I mean by “no one is bigger than the music“— do not act or think that the musicians are playing for you, they’re playing with you. You’re all together trying to create beautiful music — this shift in attitude is so important to make the whole process, from rehearsals to concerts, more enjoyable and less stressful for everyone. And if everyone enjoys themselves, the music will be the best it can be.
Experience is the only way here. You learn the kind of issues that arise and are used to dealing with them. You thus prepare accordingly and have a better ability to deal with them on the spot. It will be difficult and stressful the first few times — there is nothing more terrifying than a musician asking you a question in front of the whole orchestra and you not having a clue of how to answer. I’ve been in this situation multiple times during the rehearsals, and what I often did was to tell them I wasn’t sure and that I’d think about it for the next rehearsal or that I’d let them know before the concert. It’s really really suboptimal, but that’s the only way I found to deal with it without losing rehearsal time and frustrating everyone with my own shortcomings. It takes a lot of experience to be able to look at a score and figure out complex things on the spot — experience that I do not yet have.
There are other schools of thought, which can also work. I once heard: “if you’re asked about something and don’t know how to answer, just pick an answer that sounds acceptable, and act confident. If you then realize it doesn’t work, just say you’ve changed your mind”. For most people, this will sound like horrible advice. “One must know its limits and when they don’t know something”. Absolutely, but not in front of an orchestra. For a conductor, there is really nothing worse than not being able to answer a musician’s concerns. It not only stresses you out but also makes you look unprepared. And musicians are quick to judge…
I experienced a massive issue with this on the second (and last) concert of the series. We all had to travel for more than 2 hours to get to the venue, mainly because of a railway strike in London… The public turnout was also very disappointing. We arrived early and rehearsed things that were not great on concert 1, and it felt like everyone was much better prepared than at the previous concert, and things looked promising. The first half went quite okay, with some good moments. During the interval, I made the terrible mistake of going to the first violinist and first viola players (the most experienced players in the group) seeking reassurance and encouragement about the first half, before starting the second. I was not sensing much satisfaction at all from their ends. Digging a bit deeper and asking more, the first viola player finally said “I don’t know, it’s like musicians know the music and have played it already, we’re all a bit tired, so it feels like no one is very motivated to play. There isn’t much energy”. This threw me off so much, and whilst there was some truth to it regarding the first half, the second half felt 10 times worse. Why? Well because I was now over-sensing the lack of motivation, which unmotivated me as well and of course made it impossible to generate any excitement from the players. Imagine - as devoted to music as I am, as privileged as I felt to be in front of an orchestra playing the incredible Mozart k466, I still had the feeling that nothing good could possibly come out of this performance anymore.
This was a very traumatic experience for me because I did not expect it and handled it so badly. Whatever happens, however bad the music has been in the previous minutes, the conductor should ALWAYS give their all when performing. Not communicating good energy when conducting is simply deadly for the performance, there cannot be a gram of passion from the players if the conductor is visibly unmotivated. The conductor is obliged to at least fake it. Fake motivation, fake excitement, until you make it in the eyes of only one musician. From that one musician, the whole group’s excitement can progressively regrow. Never stop smiling, always act as if you’re the happiest person in the world to be playing this music, no matter what — this will make all the difference in the world.
“Be aware of what you are rehearsing, and what you are not rehearsing”. This is one of the many important pieces of advice I heard from my incredibly erudite professor, John Longstaff. A conductor should be very clearly aware of the musical level of the players in the orchestra, and of the time you have to rehearse. Sometimes, you should (unfortunately) only aim for decency, rather than goodness. In these moments, don’t lose time rehearsing the fine details of that beautiful line, spend time making sure that everyone is playing together and that all the difficult passages are clear, at a playable tempo, and that all notes can be heard. Musicians won’t be happy staying over the agreed time, they have other things to do and they get tired as well.
Understand what they need, for their mental sanity, confidence, and motivation. Make sure you give them that. If you’re reading this far, you’re most likely a starting conductor, and I guess you’ll have to do the librarian work as well to prepare scores, etc… This is SO important — make sure all their parts are readable, well organized, that page turns are acceptable, etc… Give them clear indications to last minute adjustments in the music, what repeats you are playing / not playing, etc… I’d even go as far as saying you should put all of it in writing for the players not to get confused on concert day. Just imagine how terrifying it would be for you not to be 100% sure whether the conductor told you to play the repeat or not. This can happen so easily when making last-minute changes… Stupid issues like this are so easy to avoid if the conductor just tries a bit harder. Handling this well is a great way to earn your player’s respect, and failing to do so will inevitably make players hate you…
These humble thoughts are only a tiny aspect of what could and should be discussed about the colossal job of the conductor. What an irony that the only musician which doesn’t produce any sound bares so much responsibility.