When people talk about conductors and what they do, it's almost always "what do they do in the concert?" They'll say, disparagingly, "hey, the musicians know how to keep time."
Not quite true, but anyway, what that ignores is that they give the orchestra (and chorus, which was where I was) directions in rehearsal, and the eye and hand gestures during the concert are references to that.
So in rehearsal they stop and point to the horns and say "I want you to crescendo / decrescendo here" and have them do it until good. The horns mark it in their scores.
Then in the concert, the conductor just points, and the horns see the pencil marks on their scores and do it.
The musicians can't easily keep time. Not because they're bad at their jobs, but because sound travels so slowly there's an appreciable delay between the different sections of the orchestra. (50 ms for a smaller hall, up to 100 ms for a giant Mahlerian monster orchestra in a large space.)
Those are not small delays. The speed of light is slightly faster, so having someone at the front indicating time keeps everything together.
The pointing and gesticulating aren't limited to prepared rehearsal notes. Rehearsal notes certainly happen, but apart from keeping time, the conductor's job is to define the mood and emotional valence, moment to moment. This may be somewhat improvised, within limits.
Orchestras typically play somewhat behind the indicated beat because it allows for more expression.
There's also a lot of business-related admin - dealing with absences, holding auditions for new members, contributing to program scheduling, reading and possibly writing feedback notes to/from various interested parties, and so on.
Every once in a while a smaller orchestra will try to manage without a conductor. While the results are usually workable - professional musicians are very good at their jobs - they're not great.
Everyone in the audience is clapping in time with the beat, _as it reaches them_, and you can see the speed of sound as the beat propagates out through the crowd.
I often use this to illustrate yet another reason that CPUs went multi-core: When propagation across the chip takes longer than your clock speed, you have to reduce the distances somehow. A bunch of small stages in the same acreage would have a much easier time each clapping "together enough".
One other thing to add to your great response. REHEARSAL!
Orchestras rehearse as little as they do because conductors do everything you've mentioned. But additionally they facilitate a singular musical goal, and take the "democracy" out of it. Further to this is the time management. The musicians in the orchestra have enough notes to play and sound to think of, without having to consider how much rehearsal time we need/want to spend on a specific movement, how we would like to spend more time on movement 1 but actually movement 3 is notoriously tricky so we need to have time for it etc. Also, someone has to be monitoring the process to know when enough is enough, it's not always the case that more rehearsal time = better.
I know from my music days that everyone was expected to learn the piece on their own, or in small groups (for instance, on vocal pieces people would assemble to learn the group piece and then work on uniformity of tone), and then when we would go to rehearsal the point of it would be to iron out timings and building a feel for the piece as a whole.
The only hotspot moments were when you were doing solo or standout work, which by necessity would mean that you would be rehearsing your sections with the whole group as, for instance, if a random tenor dropped a note that can be covered by everyone else, but if the soloist does it then it can make the whole ensemble look bad.
Yeah looking at the drummer or the bass guitar also helps keep time because of this. Also Zoom music is impossible because of this.
AFAIK most bands that play on stage at fast tempos and are not improvising have a synced click going to everyone's IEMs together with their chosen mix of what's coming into the console. That makes musicians able to perform without looking at each other.
Very good points. In the chorus, we were always told to watch the conductor, or else we'd always be late.
Amusing factoid: once I was in the audience at a musical theater production, and I could see TV monitors up high on the walls in the house, facing the stage. I couldn't see what was on them, but I'm pretty sure it was the conductor.
So those folks have to be able to see the conductor, too.
> While the results are usually workable - professional musicians are very good at their jobs - they're not great.
The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orpheus_Chamber_Orchestra), performing without a conductor since 1972, would like a word. :) They’re definitely not large, but I would strongly dispute the “not great” part. On the other hand, they’re also very unusual in that space—even eight-piece chamber ensembles often have a conductor!
> Not because they're bad at their jobs, but because sound travels so slowly there's an appreciable delay between the different sections of the orchestra. (50 ms for a smaller hall, up to 100 ms for a giant Mahlerian monster orchestra in a large space.)
Why does the hall size matter? I would have expected the size and shape of the space within the hall that is actually occupied by the orchestra to be what matters.
Likewise, the vast majority of orchestral music is not done to a regular tick. The phrasing can be very different between different conductors, as they all speed up / slow down / etc. to the conductor's individual interpretation of the piece.
Indeed, it just makes sense to have roughly the same conditions for performance as for rehearsal.
But, having played conducted music (double bass), there's another reason. What seems like a fine tuned machine on stage conceals a lot of chaos, and the orchestra may be barely hanging on by a thread. For one thing, at any performance, probably 5 to 15 % of the musicians are substitutes, due to a variety of circumstances. For some commercial gigs, 100%.
Those subs rarely attend more than one or two rehearsals, and sometimes none if it's an emergency. Of course there's a cadre of musicians who specialize in that kind of work. I do it but in typically in a jazz setting. Still, I've experienced looking at some hastily e-mailed PDF's of bass parts, a day before a performance, and saying to myself: "I'm screwed unless the conductor gets me through this."
It depends on the rep. You're playing Don Juan? No problem, know it like the back of my hand, just tell me when to show up and I'll watch for the tempo changes in all the usual places.
We're doing Boheme? No way I'm doing that without a dress rehearsal. Every opera singer screws things up in their own special way and I need to know what to expect.
We're doing anything by Stravinsky? I'll take every rehearsal I can get.
Meh, there's no point worrying about getting all the notes when the brass is drowning us out anyway. As long as the violin section looks busy we're fine... ;-)
When I played it as concertmaster I felt that it was my duty to ensure that at least one person was hitting all the notes though. Never practiced so much for a concert as that one... and that's why even many years later I feel ready to show up and play it on a moment's notice.
Definitely true in the (school) orchestras I played in. However, a friend who plays in a orchestra where they bring in high-end soloists told me that they don't really rehearse together more than an hour or two. In those cases I imagine the conductor has to do a bit more to coordinate in real time. Maybe a little glaring when the trumpets play too loud or something.
I played in a pro orchestra once. We had one practice.
The conductor is critical. Sheet music is open to interpretation to an extent - what shade of emotion are you trying to convey; how should the different instruments blend together; how loud is fortissimo for this piece; how fast is fast; at what frequency should we tune, etc, etc. The conductor brings this vision about.
> You have to have the ability to physically manifest your vision of what the music sounds like in your head using just your body, in a way that is so clear and concise that anyone watching immediately knows what you mean. You also have to be able to elicit immediate gut responses from people without them realizing it, like a dog trainer giving a command.
They are your leader, your guide. Without the conductor you are all just a bunch of people playing music independently. That's how it felt for me anyway.
You can play without a conductor. In high school, he had us play Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings without him, because it's such an emotional piece. He wanted us to play off each other, not him. That's the only piece I remember from high school orchestra...
I came on here to say just that, they are cue’s. They are movements to a rehearsal part that has been drilled into them time and time again until they got it right.
I often think it’s funny that we critique what a conductor does with our eyes and miss the entire point of what he’s doing. It’s not our eyes that should be critical, it’s our ears.
I play music as well. Eye contact can be a form of communication when other forms are “busy”. When I look to the other musicians on stage and give them TheLook@ they follow, on cue, in time, to the look.
It’s also completely natural for both the cue person and the recipient. It’s deeper than our conscious brain. I find it fascinating.
Amazing how she continued with a different instrument. That would be like swapping my Matias Ergo Pro for a Logitech Squishboard and keep right on typing with no typos.
In Stanford Symphonic Chorus, Steve Sano began every new piece giving us a set of pencil marks to make in our scores. Nearly always, for a phrase that ends with a quarter note, we'd be told to replace that with an eighth note and an eighth rest. This is his choice, not the composer's.
Yes, crescendo looks like a < stretched horizontally based on the length of time that the rise should happen, decrescendo is >.
There are musical symbols for pretty much every common (and uncommon) instruction, and any gaps are typically filled in with textual notes.
However, conductors are tasked at interpreting the piece, which sometimes they might want a different sound, or perhaps the orchestra has trouble adhering to a tricky bit of notation. Any number of reasons will result in extra added notes jotted down in the scores directly.
Given that sheet music is often pre-printed or otherwise very difficult to edit, this is the next best thing.
I am a professional conductor (at a professional level, you can find videos of me conducting on YouTube if you wish). Feel free to ask anything you might like.
Eye contact is vital, and doesn't have to be reciprocated back to conductor. Peripheral vision is used a lot for front desk string players, back desk strings follow front desk (it's a hierarchy). There is usually more reciprocation from solo wind and brass players, if only because of their location on stage and their periods of rest (it's nice to have the safety net of a conductor cuing your entry after 53 bars).
Will you be looking at this post next week? My daughter will be home for the weekend (15 years old, at boarding school) and I know that she has questions that she would love to ask a professional conductor.
Depends completely on the context. In an ideal world the pianist leads the tempo.
However, sometimes the composition makes this near impossible (i.e. there is a large section of the orchestra that has to start playing in the new tempo, such that a conductor couldn't both react to the tempo of the soloist and show it clearly to the orchestra). If it's impossible for the conductor to get the tempo from the soloist, then usually there is time before the first rehearsal to discussing those spots, and discuss ideal tempos for the soloist. As you can guess, there is usually the possibility of negotiation, either verbal during this meeting, or during performance rehearsal both finding a more ideal tempo for the hall, orchestra, and days sensibilities.
Schumann piano concerto is a decent example. Second movement tempo is totally decided by the pianist, no discussion is necessary prior to rehearsal (unless they want some particularly abnormal). The second theme of the second movement is with solo piano in accompaniment position. So while we want to accommodate their musical needs, ultimately the musical burden is on the orchestra (in this case the cellos), as a result the tempo will be mostly decided (contextually of course, it has to fit with the first theme) by the conductor. Third movement beginning in theory is lead into by the conductor, however after the downbeat the soloist can show their tempo and the conductor responds.
I dated an orchestral musician for a while. She was tenured and one of the best musicians in her instrument in the country. So I trust her opinion on this. I once asked her what conductors do, and that's how I learned that conductors expect "eye contact" from the musicians. The way she explained it to me, it was more about the conductor's ego than anything that she needed to her job.
Also, it turns out that the pay for classical musicians is horrendous and almost anything to do with performing arts is a terrible career choice (even before COVID).
In a tight band the bassist and drummer are really one creature with
four arms and legs. Try putting the drummer in a drum room and the
bassist in the control room so the glass is between them, and hear it
all go to crap.
There is a professional finger drummer going by NularMusic who wrote a Max For Live plugin[1] which lets him pre-sequence note progressions, and he becomes a one-man-band using just a Launchpad Pro. It's quite impressive and he performs improvised sets[2] using it.
Well, triggering sequences is not the same thing as playing live; if you want to see a really impressive finger drummer, here is one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_46SRMVOr8
You clearly didn't bother watching the video before commenting, because he's not just triggering sequences, and you're acting childishly dismissive of a traditional drummer with a mountain of talent who is, in fact, performing live. I can't even imagine what would compel you to publicly declare that another musician isn't a real musician, especially given that both his and your performance methods are extremely similar. Your disrespectful elitism isn't welcome anywhere, and certainly isn't reflective of the greater music community.
If you don't like the video, just go to another one in his channel; I admired the talents of this guy since the first video was published long a go where he played like hell on an old yamaha drum machine. There is a difference between true mastery on an instrument and the ability to assemble nice sequences and start them at the touch of a button. People today are satisfied enough with the latter. This is not a value judgment, but a fact.
I just explained to you that, if you had watched the video, it would be obvious that he's not just pressing a button to start a sequence. Your response was to again falsely claim that he is pushing a button to start a sequence, when in reality, he is manually playing all of the drums and notes in the exact same way that you play your instruments, and in the exact same way your video portrays. So he's actually doing the same thing and more than what you claim is "real" musicianship. I have never heard a musician speak so disparagingly about another musician in the way you are right now. It's disturbing and completely inappropriate.
Just in case you didn't notice: this thread is about visual coordination between musicians in an orchestra or smaller formation; so it is up-front unclear why you post a video of a techno performance where the DJ also operates some drum pads in addition to the sequencer. And now you're turning it into a values debate; seems to me like you just look for confrontation.
Let's recap. You made a comment about one person (yourself) playing multiple instruments at once. Somebody replied asking to see that, because it "sounded cool." I provided another example of one person performing multiple instruments at once. Instead of watching the video (or ignoring the conversation), you instead decided to publicly declare that wasn't "real" musicianship, and provided a link to a video where the drummer is literally doing the exact same thing that you just declared wasn't "real" musicianship. You then decided to not watch the video again and instead doubled down on your false claims.
So, if you're asking why we're discussing one-man-bands in a "thread about visual coordination between musicians," that question falls to you, since you were the one who started the sidetracked conversation, which turned out to be a self-aggrandizing advertisement. Yet, now you're gaslighting and trying to make it sound like I did something wrong when, in fact, you were the one who both sidetracked the thread and then confrontationally declared a musician wasn't a real musician, thereby turning it into a "values debate" -- despite obviously meeting all of your requirements for "real" musicianship, since you're both quite literally using identical methods and technologies.
The video visibly shows him playing all of the instruments and not using a sequencer, which betrays that you still haven't actually watched the video.
Ok, apparently you didn't get that point either; let me explain; the fellow proposed that the bass player and drummer need to be "one creature with four arms and legs"; I made an alternative proposal because obviously no such creature exists, but as you might know there are still other musicians in a typical band, so there is still the issue with visual coordination. And anyway, I don't see any connection between your video and the ones I posted. DJ's are a completely different topic. So be it. Concerning your provocations: maybe try your luck on Reddit
> Ok, apparently you didn't get that point either;
I completely got the point, which is why my original comment was extremely relevant to the conversation of a one-man operation -- a conversation that you acknowledge starting. You then, however, claimed that it doesn't make sense for me to post a video about a one-man drummer-bassist in a conversation about a one-man drummer-bassist, in a bizarre attempt to make it seem like I somehow antagonized you. What you're doing is called gaslighting, in its purest and most disturbing form.
> I don't see any connection between your video and the ones I posted.
The methods used by both drummers in both videos are literally identical in every conceivable way. They are using the same technology. It's a MIDI controller going into a computer which triggers samples, which is also the exact same method you are using and describing in your original comment and blog post. They are identical. And even knowing that, you are still shamefully attempting to publicly disparage another musician and claim they are lesser than you -- even going so far as to claim they are a "DJ" despite performing in the exact same way that you are. It's beyond outrageous.
Is it eye contact or seeing the drummer, though? Or maybe even feeling the bass drum, not sure. I'm going to guess that seeing the drum sticks would be helpful too.
Probably a separate skill set, I'm sure a good studio musician knows how to do great with headphones on their head. I'm a bass player myself but rarely do any recording so I'm crap at it but I'm sure I could learn.
There are a lot of channels of communication, but a lot of it is driven by the drummer. Had fun irritating the band director in high school sometimes by pushing silly tempos getting everyone to follow a few drummers, you get the sense of how much you can push and then everybody just follows you.
The Bernstein clip is fun but for an example of how much a conductor can communicate with their eyes (as well as with supremely expressive physical gestures) there is no better example than Carlos Kleiber. From ecstatic climaxes to sections of extreme relaxation it’s a remarkable example of the art of conducting.
I think eye contact is probably more important in most non-classical genres. Everything in a (modern) classical performance is very rehearsed. Deviating from the score is unheard of. Interpretation is one thing, but never do they decide to throw in a bass solo.
In pop/rock/funk/blues/jazz/country/folk/metal/everything, it's common for a band's instructions to be "sit on this 2-bar vamp until i give a signal". And that signal needs eye contact to acknowledge the receipt.
I play classical and jazz (which extends to every other genre), and while I think eye contact is somewhat overrated, it is so vastly more important to establish communication "out of the page" in classical music due to the many many more ritardandos, accelerandos, tempo changes, subdivision changes, meter changes, cessuras, fermatas, and the list goes on, all not uncommonly happening in the same movement of a larger work. The only genre that could exceeds what classical music requires would have to be the many more rhythmically complex world music traditions. What I see on a daily basis in popular music or even jazz doesn't hold a candle to any of those.
> Interpretation is one thing, but never do they decide to throw in a bass solo.
I'm now imagining the conductor in the middle of a Bach concerto calling out "Take me to the bridge" and pointing to the 1st trumpet player for a solo.
Not quite classical, but I was in a community band once where one of the trombones forgot about a repeat, and was loud and confident enough that everyone else just followed. (playing Sousa)
Great example of it when Mogwai perform 'Mogwai Fear Satan'. There's a point in the song where it gets extremely quiet before bursting into a wall of noise.
If you watch the video https://youtu.be/FEwnhjItTSs?t=477 from 7m57s you can see them all start to signal to each other to get ready and then 20 seconds later it happens.
On a serious note, modern bands using IEMs and talkback mic's can do a lot of the things that body signals (raising/slamming guitar necks), facial expressions, eye contact, and mouthing words do.
We feel more awkwardness in audio calls than video calls and more awk in video calls than physical meetings because at each medium we're losing important contextual cues that act as lubricants to our conversation.
A gentle "slap on knee" while sitting can signal to the other person that you're ready to leave the conversation.
Starring elsewhere while listening can be a sign of "thinking" or "distraction" depending on how your eyes are moving.
In a text-dominant world, where all of these contextual cues are lacking, we tend to interpret people's messages in the most negative way possible. (Snapchat solves this w/ images, teens abuse emojis to solve this, voice msg are becoming more of a thing)
I do think we can incorporate a large chunk of these contextual cues digitally to make digital interactions smoother! Even without VR.
Visual interactions offer increased bandwidth in communication, but in a work exchange I find that bandwidth useless to harmful compared to, say, the intricate process of playing musical instruments in more than perfect sync.
Video calls are additionally worse, the extra input is almost pure noise and cannot even help you read the room to show if a person is distracted when their "listen attentively", "glance on their watch" and "just do something else entirely" are exactly the same. I find it much easier to distinguish with pure audio and no distractions.
Having to use video for work makes me feel as if I was in webcam business, though I admit it is useful in more sensitive meetings where you want to visually confirm participants.
Audio calls mostly just feel like phone calls to me, except without having to hold a phone up to my ear. Even if I'm using Discord or Slack or some company-specific thing, audio calls trigger "muscle memory" that I've built up my whole life. Video calls are much more novel to me; I rarely ever did it before covid, and although it now is a bit more natural, it'll be a long time until it feels as "normal" as audio calls for me.
There's also the latency. POTS audio added very little, but modern codecs add some and modern networks add some more, and modern computer audio adds a bit more and soon enough it's enough to make the conversation harder, even when it's hard to perceive.
I've sung in amatorial vocal ensembles and medium sized choirs and there are several professional musicians in my friends and family.
Eye contact is very important in small ensembles especially when there isn't a director to synchronize breathing and cues with other voices or instruments who share your part, though in a lot of cases you can go by ear just listening to the other parts.
In this setting, when there is a director their basic role in a performance is to keep the tempo regular and direct rallentando and accelerando, and to remind you of cues, dynamics, and other things they might've discussed during rehearsals. During rehearsals their role is also to set the mood of a piece of music and get everybody to match it, because obviously if all the musicians have a different idea of how it should sound and feel it's not gonna be a very good performance, and in a concert they can reinforce that mood through body language.
In larger choir or orchestra's the director's role to keep the tempo becomes extremely important because you just can't rely on what you hear from the section that's sitting on the other side of the church or of the concert hall; by the time the sound gets to your ears there'll be a few ms of delay and you'll already be primed for starting late, so you have to maintain eye contact or have a "leader" in your section who will do it and to whom you'll refer for cues.
As an amateur musician, having played in different sitiuations, eye contact with the conductor or drum major is important. Professionals can probably do all of this without a conductor on stage but when things start to fall apart and go out of sync, it's kind of a weird feeling. You have to force yourself to go deaf and play the music in time with the conductor's gestures until you're back in sync again. If you don't go deaf you will end up playing in time to the people around, you who may or may not be in sync with the conductor.
There's a lot of easy-to-spot conductor-orchestra eye contact (sometimes really funny) going on in Thielemann's Beethoven symphonies in Vienna. #1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiLjTA39aJI
I competed in group and solo vocal performance in my youth and we were expected to sing something together in 6 part harmony after a single run through with our conductor/voice teacher. We definitely made notes on that sheet music from her comments to help with sight reading and dynamics, etc.
Maybe this is just a sign of working in a technical field for too long, but my mind always jumps to counterexamples first. So I was surprised they didn't even acknowledge the existence of blind musicians.
Classical musicians need to sightread, so that pretty much excludes the blind.
Pop is a different field. Bands are more manageable because the individuals all have separate lines and are supposed to be listening to each other. Which is how blind musicians like Stevie Wonder signal changes through their playing rather than through eye contact.
In an orchestra you have entire sections of somewhere-between-6-and-24-more-or-less people all trying to play the same lines while facing in the same direction, while another section plays something else next to them and/or behind them.
Classical musicians need to sightread, so that pretty much excludes the blind.
Yes and no. I agree that it's very difficult for classical musicians who are completely blind, but there are talented musicians who are legally blind and make use of assistive technology. I know an oboist who plays very well in orchestra despite only being able to see two or three bars of sheet music at a time.
Bands are more manageable because the individuals all have separate lines and are supposed to be listening to each other.
I think the issue is the other way around really. Yes, the musicians in a band all have separate lines, but it's all very coherent -- a melody and some harmony. In symphonic music you might have 24 violinists all playing the same notes, but that's the easy part -- the hard part (and where you really need a conductor) is when one melody is bouncing between the 1st and 2nd violins (with supporting harmonies in the lower strings) while a counter melody is being played by the clarinets and French horns and the trumpets are furiously counting 57 bars of rest before they interrupt in 3/4 time.
When I directed the local univeristy basketball team's pep band for a time we had a blind musician. All he needed was a recording of his part done on any instrument (which took me under 5 minutes to prepare per song) to participate fully. He was even able to take auditory cues for things like signaling an early cutoff. I don't remember him carrying over once.
It's definitely too far a stretch to place it at the center - but for those who have experienced it, it is definitely a part of musical performance /for them/, and a not-insignificant part.
There might also be some unexplored areas in this article, with regards to the role of eye contact in /improv/, especially jazz improv and the like. There's a lot more communication that occurs both through instruments and non-verbal cues in that setting.
When I've played keyboard in a group setting, I've noticed I'll use eye contact to let someone know that we're feeling out-of-sync - perhaps in tempo, for less experienced groups, or to mark a chord transition or harmonic opportunity they're missing, or to encourage them to push a bit more in a section where they're withdrawing too much.
Collaborative pianist here. Since the beginning of the pandemic I’ve noted more difficulties inferring musical intent when we’re masked. Obviously the eyes say something but without the whole gestural package there’s something missing.
Odd that they say quartets don't need eye contact. It's always been indispensable in my experience. But I'm very far from pro, so perhaps it's less of a thing for pros?
It’s more looking at the other musician’s fingers in the case of a string quartet (or when I played in rock groups as a bassist, I would have my eyes on the drummers hand and foot on the kick drum pedal). Likewise, when I’ve done orchestral work, I generally had one eye on the music, one eye on the conductor and one eye on the principal's bowing.
Interviewing the Guarneri quartet is about the most extreme example they could've found in this regard. They are one of the most longstanding and in lockstep chamber ensembles on the planet. Most chamber groups engage in enough eye contact to get them through changing elements of a piece, like ritardandos, accelerandos, fermatas, etc.
Eyes don't play string instruments, hands and arms and backs do. In a string quartet, with the exception of a nice shared smile before everything starts, eyes should be taking in hand and limb movement information.
But really, why isn't this article talking about the most important sense of all w/r/t music... HEARING????
All the eye contact in the world isn't going to fix violin I not being able to hear that they are sharp to the cello.
> eyes should be taking in hand and limb movement information
Is this true? Even as an amateur musician I find I'm able to play effectively without looking at my instrument. I know professional musicians who often close their eyes while playing.
Or did you mean looking at other musicians' hands and limbs?
But for timing, visual cues usually takes priority. That's why in chamber music they usually do that deep, exaggerated breath in the beginning, to synchronize the start.
Not quite true, but anyway, what that ignores is that they give the orchestra (and chorus, which was where I was) directions in rehearsal, and the eye and hand gestures during the concert are references to that.
So in rehearsal they stop and point to the horns and say "I want you to crescendo / decrescendo here" and have them do it until good. The horns mark it in their scores.
Then in the concert, the conductor just points, and the horns see the pencil marks on their scores and do it.