The Art of Conducting: The Basics

I suspect most people don’t really understand what conductors are doing when they wave their arms around in front of a chorus or orchestra.  As evidence of this I’ve had people ask me, “What’s your real job?”  I suppose they think that there is nothing to it besides showing up at rehearsals and performances, so I must do something to use up my free time!  And make a living (some truth to that, unfortunately!).  I graciously tell them (sometimes with a sigh), “This is my real job,” but I’m not sure they understand what goes into the art of conducting.  So this is the first of an occasional series of blogs on the art—and joy—and work!—of conducting.

To quote my conducting teacher and mentor, Abraham Kaplan, a conductor “plays” an instrument called a chorus, orchestra, or band, or combinations thereof.  One of a conductor’s main jobs is to rhythmically keep that instrument together.  As Kaplan says, a composition written by one composer speaking to individuals in the audience needs one human pulse (not a mechanical metronome) to unify its rhythm.  That’s actually an intriguing thought: a single composition needs one director to speak through multiple individuals to multiple individuals.  Without a conductor the likely outcome is chaos. 

To make the composition speak a conductor needs an innate sense of rhythmic pulse, and an absolute, drilled-into-your-brain-and-muscles-until-it-is-second-nature knowledge of conducting patterns.  This is particularly important for orchestras and bands because they don’t have all the parts in front of them, like a chorus does.  It makes way too many page turns and makes a single part hard to follow, so they have only their own part to play from.  But the conductor does have the full score, and the players trust their conductor to show them where each beat is at any given moment so they can keep together.  There are certain time-honored, universally known patterns that allow this to happen, such as the pattern used to conduct a four-beat measure.

Singers and players all over the world, whether they share the same spoken language or not, read the pattern(s) created over and over by a conductor’s hands, and through it sing or play together in perfect rhythm.  It’s a universal musical language!  As a student I spent countless hours tucking those precious patterns into my brain so I could communicate through that musical language.

So the next time you watch a conducted performance, watch the conductor’s hands!  A whole world of meaning is conveyed therein; rhythm is an important component, but only one component.  But more on that in another blog.

Dr. Linda Gingrich

Artistic Director and Conductor

Master Chorus Eastside