Albert Stoessel

“ DEVELOPMENT OF CONDUCTING
“Conducting is the art of directing the simultaneous performance of several players or singers by the use of gesture.” It is thus that Ralph Vaughan-Williams heads his illuminating article on conducting, written for Grove’s Dictionary, and while this rather terse definition is an admirable summing up of the meaning of conducting, it needs to be qualified.
In music the conductor is one, who after assimilating in his own consciousness every phase of a musical composition, becomes the supreme arbiter in the process of bringing that composition into actual being. ”

“ More and more I have come to think that what decides the worth of conducting is the degree of suggestive power that the conductor can exercise over the performers. At the rehearsals he is mostly nothing more than a workman, who schools the men under him so conscientiously and precisely that each of them knows his place and what he has to do there; he first becomes an artist when the moment comes for the production of the work. ”

“ For the average conductor then, the piano does not become the supreme channel for expressing the score, but is used merely as an aid to his mental and spiritual master of its intricacies.
There still remains for discussion one phase in the work of score preparation, and that is—memory. Just as among concert players the old custom of playing from the printed page has given way to the one of playing and singing everything from memory, so have modern conductors taken to dispensing with their scores in performance. ”

“ Through the process of much careful rehearsing and teaching, he succeeds in imparting his ideas of interpretation to his chorus, which in turn comes to understand the meaning of his gestures. Up until the first orchestral rehearsal, which is usually the only one, everything goes smoothly; but as soon as the highly trained and sensitive orchestra tries to follow the conductor’s beat, a state of utter chaos ensues. Much time is wasted, the conductor becomes irritable, the chorus demoralized, the orchestra scornful, and in general the outlook for a successful concert begins to look very black. ”

“ Occasionally one must take hold and drive one’s forces to the top of a climax, just as a boat’s crew on the day before the race does one minute of its hardest racing, but takes it pretty easy otherwise. The main thing at a rehearsal is to watch results and to act on them. At a performance it is the other way about—the conductor must take the lead. ”

“ If he is nervous and apologetic, if, when he makes a slip, he feels crushed and would like to sink through the floor, he had better leave conducting alone. It is the confident, not-to-be-daunted man who is fit to be a leader of men.”
“The conductor must take every precaution to make the rehearsals interesting. The test of a society’s success is the popularity of the rehearsals, and the test of the rehearsals is the feeling that if one be not attended something in the way of enlightenment or pleasure has been missed.”
“The man who lacks tact is not fit to be a conductor. ”

“ Conducting is an art, and a difficult one to master.
It requires a special talent, enthusiasm, great nervous vitality; a serious study of the works written by the masters of music; the magnetic power of forcing the executants to carry out the conductor’s demands; infinite patience, great tenacity, great self-control, and absolute knowledge of the technique of the baton. ”

“ The orchestral conductor should see and hear; he should be active and vigorous, should know the composition and the nature and compass of the instruments, should be able to read the score, and possess—besides the especial talent of which we shall presently endeavor to explain the constituent qualities—other indefinable gifts, without which an invisible link cannot establish itself between him and those he directs ”

“ Granted that the conductor has a clear and matured mental conception of a musical work, there is still a vast distance between this conception and its final perception by the listener. An enumeration of these obstacles and a description of their overcoming will constitute a complete outline of what the art of conducting is.
A conductor with a definite conception of the musical score in his head is not unlike the commander of an army who has worked out a complete plan of action. Each has to carefully consider the limitation of his forces and equipment, and how best to achieve the objective. ”

“ The life-nerve of a symphonic production rests in the conductor’s spiritual and intellectual conception of the composition, it being assumed, of course, that the orchestra possesses the necessary powers to realize this conception. Should the latter condition be absent, I recommend that my works be left unperformed.”
“Although I have tried through exact markings of the dynamics, the accelerations and slowing up of the tempo, to clearly indicate my wishes, I must confess that much, even that which is of the greatest importance cannot be expressed on paper. ”

“ One of the distinguishing features of modern choral technique is what I term ‘characterization,’ or realism, of the sentiment expressed in the music.... Contrasts of tone-color, contrasts of differently placed choirs, contrasts of sentiment—love, hate, hope, despair, joy, sorrow, brightness, gloom, pity, scorn, prayer, praise, exaltation, depression, laughter, tears—in fact all the emotions and passions are now expected to be delineated by the voice alone. ”

“ To play a full score accurately and fluently on the piano, is an art in itself and in the course of musical history we hear of only a few musicians who really could do this. Saint-Saëns, Liszt, and Von Buelow were said to be proficient in this difficult art, and undoubtedly their marvelous piano technique was a most important factor in their prima-vista score transcriptions. To fluently play a printed pianoforte arrangement of a Beethoven Symphony takes as much technique as to play one of his sonatas. ”

“ It must not be imagined that if one is fortunate enough to acquire the style of handling the baton which we have been advocating, one will at once achieve success as a conductor. The factors of musical scholarship, personal magnetism, et cetera, mentioned in preceding pages, must still constitute the real foundation of conducting. But granting the presence of these other factors of endowment and preparation, one may often achieve a higher degree of success if one has developed also a well-defined and easily-followed beat. ”

“ Wagner never forgot his indebtedness to Spohr, who was the first German musician to recognize him. It was Spohr who introduced the system of marking the score with letters and numbers to facilitate rehearsing.
It is interesting to read Carl Maria von Weber’s directions for time beating. To quote him: “The beat must not be like a tyrannical mill-hammer but must be to the musical composition what the pulse beat is to the life of a human being. There are no slow tempi in which places do not occur which demand a faster movement in order to eliminate the tendency to drag. ”

“ There seems to be in the minds of some musicians an idea that a vast difference exists between chorus conducting and orchestra conducting. In fact, it is a very common fact that there are many fine musicians who obtain excellent results from their choruses but who are completely at a loss when it comes to conducting even the orchestral accompaniment of the choral works they are presenting. The tales told by sophisticated orchestral players on their return from music festivals in the provinces about the antics of many choral conductors would be funny if they were not tragic. ”

“ He has to criticise the errors and defects of each during the rehearsals, and to organize the resources at his disposal in such a way as to make the best use he can of them with the utmost promptitude; for, in the majority of European cities nowadays, musical artisanship is so ill distributed, performers so ill paid and the necessity of study so little understood, that economy of time should be reckoned among the most imperative requisites of the orchestral conductor’s art. ”

“ Instead of the cry being raised that the choral societies are doomed, we shall find that by absorbing the elixir of characterization they have renewed their youth; and when the shallow pleasures of the picture theatre and the empty elements of the variety show have been discovered to be unsatisfying to the normal aspirations of intellectual, moral beings, the social, healthful, stimulating, intellectual, moral and spiritual uplift of the choral society will be appreciated more than ever. ”

“ Definition—The word ‘conducting’ as used in a musical sense now ordinarily refers to the activities of an orchestra or chorus leader who stands before a group of performers and gives his entire time and effort to directing their playing or singing, to the end that a musically effective ensemble performance may result. ”

“ At the conclusion of this chapter, a word or two on practice in the art of conducting may not be out of place. One might read all about the art of swimming and yet be entirely lost the first time one is actually thrown into the water. The tricky resistance and action of the water is not unlike what the tyro conductor feels when he first takes his stand, baton in hand, in front of the orchestra or chorus. ”

“ It lives only in the performance, and the interpreter, sensing his importance, is often tempted to place his own personality between the audience and the music itself. It would seem, however, that in ensemble music, (music requiring several or more performers) this opportunity for the glorification of the personality of the virtuoso would be present in a far less degree. And yet, the interpretation by the conductor of the score of such a piece demands a degree of virtuosity transcending by far that which is required in the performance of an ordinary solo composition. ”

“ It is related of Koussevitzky, the great Russian conductor, that in his apprenticeship period he gained his practice of baton technic on an imaginary orchestra which consisted of empty chairs with signs on them representing the various instrumental choirs. It required imagination to do this, and let it be said right here that imagination is one of the first requisites of the conductor.
The beginner in conducting can at least familiarize himself with the feel of the baton, and practice the ordinary gestures until they become as automatic as walking and breathing. ”

“ Naturally, the conductor cannot change the habits acquired during many weeks of rehearsal and when he finally finds himself in front of the critical professional orchestra, he is confronted with the task of leading this complicated organization with gestures engendered by the peculiar weaknesses of his choral body and which are totally confusing to the strange orchestra. ”

“ The ability to read and hear music without the aid of an instrument is absolutely essential for the conductor. It can be acquired to a degree by proper study. Such works as Wedge’s “Sight Singing and Ear Training” (G. Schirmer) and Robinson’s “Aural Harmony” (G. Schirmer) are invaluable helps. “Musical Form” by H. Anger (Augener) is a most practical treatise on the subject and contains clear instructions for analyzing the piano Sonatas of Beethoven and the Fugues in Bach’s “Well-tempered Clavichord.” ”

“ Although Spohr is remembered today chiefly as a composer of violin concerti and duos that all pupils play, in his own time his prestige was equal to, if not greater than that of Beethoven. A man of inflexible character and peculiar critical methods, he was not in full sympathy with Beethoven and von Weber but on the other hand he vigorously espoused the cause of the new German school, even giving a performance of Wagner’s “Flying Dutchman” at a time when Wagner was not at all popular. ”

“ In this day and generation the ever increasing tendency of specialization has brought about an almost complete separation of creative activity from executive activity. Even in the 18th and early 19th century the virtuoso who travelled around was principally a composer who played his own works. The conductor, player, or singer who performs only the works of others is a modern product and was completely unknown until recently.
But, before reviewing the names and accomplishments of the line of purely virtuoso conductors, we must take time to consider Richard Wagner’s position as conductor. ”

“ A Conductor who desires to organize a choral society must bear in mind: First—that he needs to make many friends; then to do all in his power to keep them; Second—that he must expect active opposition from other professionals, passive resistance from lazy singers, and discouragement from a considerable class of people who never can see how anything worth while in choral music can be done in their community. They are sometimes ‘dog-in-the-manger’ people ”

“ In a slow movement, accuracy can be obtained by ending each beat with an added sharp wrist movement in the same direction as the beat.
9. The function of the left arm is difficult to describe. Although it plays a more modest part than the right arm, it is nevertheless of much importance. It must ever be ready with preventive motions, indications of instrumental entrances (cues) , and to add force to certain gestures of the right arm. But let it here be said that the habit of conducting constantly with both arms describing the motions is only to be condemned. ”

“ Everything depends upon the question as to who stands at the head and how the rehearsals are conducted. Wherever one piece after the other is disposed of with the aid of piano thumping, singing must soon come to an end. The training, or at least the supervision of the individual member must form the foundation of choral activity, and the performance and study of accompanied compositions must constitute only half of the work. Constant practice in a capella singing is indispensable. ”