Why does orchestra need a conductor

Any answers? Nooks and crannies. Semantic enigmas. The body beautiful. Red tape, white lies. Speculative science. This sceptred isle. Root of all evil. Ethical conundrums. This sporting life. Stage and screen. Birds and the bees. David Lindsay, Munich Germany An orchestra can in theory keep in time without a conductor although I'm not convinced that this would always be the case with some amateur orchestras. But there is a lot of room for interpretation in the score, e. Without a conductor, each musician would resort to his or her own individual opinion.

Much of the conductor's input is during rehearsal when he or she conveys this information to the orchestra. Sometimes, especially in the case of piano pieces, the conductor can give enough guidance by playing the solo part and can "conduct from the piano", but this isn't common. Allan, Wimbledon Listen to the music of Harrison Birtwistle or any comparable contemporary composer, and you might wonder whether it is worth the bother to pay a conductor.

On second thoughts, paying competent musicians to play the stuff seems a little excessive too. He was born in the Finnish town of Rauma in He went to the local music school, and says he was fortunate to fall in with a small group of passionate students, all of whom have gone on to make music their career.

Panula is the man who turned the Sibelius Academy into a powerhouse for training conductors. No matter what kind of strange things he saw, he could see the will. And that was enough. If you just pick up the right kind of students, they will become conductors. Lintu acknowledges that most orchestras nowadays could play quite well together without the involvement of a conductor. Conducting is a more general thing.

You have people contributing to that sound, and it is your duty to create it. Because most of the orchestras in the world can play together without any conductor. Relationships between orchestras and conductors have an element of cat and dog tension about them.

Players like to boast about assessing conductors in the few seconds it takes to walk onstage to the podium at the first rehearsal. Of course it happens in the orchestra, as well. On the other hand, the conductor can see, too. I conduct an orchestra for five minutes and know exactly what kind of orchestra they are. I even usually know what kind of chief conductor they have. Then there is the reaction to the printed music.

How they react to the variation of dynamics, different kinds of accents, crescendi, diminuendi. Do they really know, balance-wise, what is important, what is not? What kind of sound do they produce?

All these kind of things a conductor notices in five minutes. The challenge of the job is to find ways to make the orchestra move away from the way it normally does things. The orthodoxy is that the conductor uses his or her right hand to hold a baton if used — some prefer just to use their hands and set the tempo, control it thereafter, signify the beginning of a new bar and deal with other matters of timing that help keep an ensemble of sometimes over a hundred individuals together.

But while these elements are all vital components for a smooth performance, a great conductor is self-evidently much more than just a metronome wearing tails. This video is no longer available.

Convey an interpretation The conductor is there to bring a musical score to life, communicating their own highly refined sense of the work through an individual language of gestures, which might sculpt the musical line, tease out nuances, emphasise certain musical elements while controlling others, and essentially re-imagine an old piece anew.

These usually fall to the left hand. Concertgoers may have their ears trained on the orchestra, but our eyes are invariably drawn to the podium.

We too want to be steered, to be able to align the way the music sounds with the conductor is doing. He or she is a vital visual connection: the bridge between our eyes and the sense of what is happening in the music.

Conductors may look like they have an easier ride, not having to master any fiendish passages of finger-work like the violinists, say, or risk the exposure and split notes of the wind and brass players. A great conductor might have peerless musical instincts and intuition, but innate musicality will get them only so far. Cerebral creatures by and large, they will typically have spent many hours of preparation on the score before they get anywhere near the podium — often this will be of a most rigorous, even academic nature, encompassing historical documents such as letters, technical performance manuals from the period in question and biographies.