Arts unravelled: what does a conductor do?

When you attend a concert the roles of an orchestra’s musicians are obvious enough, but what about that person down the front with their back to you? What are they doing? And if the musicians are as good as they are, do they really need them there?

If you’ve ever found yourself pondering these things during a performance then you’re certainly not alone. ‘What does a conductor do?’ is one of the most commonly asked classical music related questions online. The short answer is, quite simply, ‘they lead the orchestra’, but what does that involve?

Well, as the home of six Resident Orchestras and host to many other visiting ensembles, if anyone is well placed to answer these questions it’s us. And to do so we enlisted the help of a couple of experts; the conductor and founder of Paraorchestra, Charles Hazlewood, and Nicholas Collon, founder and chief conductor of Aurora Orchestra. 

Getting started

So let’s start at the beginning, how do you actually become a conductor? ‘Good question,’ says Collon (– thanks), ‘as there’s not one obvious route. Some young conductors enter competitions in the hope of being invited to work with professional orchestras; some might work their way up through the opera house system as a repetiteur; others might work as an assistant conductor for a few years and hope to get a lucky break. One of my ways into the conducting world was to form my own ensemble (Aurora Orchestra)’.

For Hazlewood the route to conducting was a little less direct. ‘I had this amazing experience when I was about 15,’ he explains. ‘I was a choir boy and my voice broke, and it was like my world slipped away from under my feet… I left the choir, dumped my classical studies, stopped playing the piano and joined a punk band. Then one day, I decided to go along to a choir rehearsal. The choir master had not shown up, so I decided to take it. I stomped into the middle and started conducting, and in a lightbulb moment realised this was what I was going to do. I’m not an organist, I’m not a pianist, or a percussionist, I’m a conductor and my music involves a lot of people in a room making music together. I’ve never looked back.’

A conductor’s key skills

On a basic level, the job of the conductor is to keep time and to keep the musicians of the orchestra together in their performance – or, as American conductor Michael Tilson Thomas deftly summarised, ‘a major part of what a conductor tries to do is get a large group of people to agree on where ‘now’ actually is’. That may sound pretty simple, but in practice it is much harder, so how do they pull this off, and what skills do they need to do so?

In Hazlewood’s view, the most important skill for a conductor is ‘listening’. ‘People think the conductor is in charge, but it’s about facilitation,’ he explains. ‘The conductor has to come to a rehearsal with a cast iron sense of the outer architecture of a piece of music, to create a very safe, but fertile space, so every musician in that room can bring something of what is theirs to the music. An orchestra is the ultimate team, it has the discipline of an army, but it has so much more freedom than that. If the conductor is doing their job properly, they’re creating that world, where it’s safe, but free. So everyone can be themselves in that context. This is what the conductor does, and it’s a magical job.’

A conductor’s influence

Hazlewood’s view that a conductor is ultimately creating a space for the musicians to be themselves sounds great – who among us doesn’t enjoy being given a sense of freedom in our work? But given the musical score is written by a composer, who in doing so will have offered clear instruction on how it should be played, how much influence can a conductor have on how that piece of music is interpreted?

‘A lot!’ stresses Collon. ‘Most obviously, the conductor can set the tempo the orchestra plays at, but there are many other layers which a good conductor can influence in both rehearsal and performance; shaping the sound, balancing the different instrumental sections, pacing the breadth of the piece, enabling the orchestra to play well together, and many more.’

‘We’re all in it together,’ insists Hazlewood of the relationship between conductor and orchestra. ‘I can lead a performance of a Beethoven symphony in London on Tuesday, then do the same symphony in Stockholm the following Saturday. Same piece of music, two different orchestras. If I’m doing my job properly, I’ll get two completely different experiences of that symphony, because I’m dealing with two different groups of people, all of whom have different qualities and different strengths. It’s not like there is one generic oboe player that we’re all looking for. There’s a multiplicity of different oboe players, and that’s the point’. 

And so as far as Hazlewood is concerned, there is only one way to approach conducting, and that’s to embrace ‘the thrill of it. Some of the most exciting musical adventures I’ve had have been in Russia, a country where not many people speak much English, and I don’t really speak any Russian. So we don’t have any recourse to talking. We can’t discuss the ideas we can’t intellectualise or make a plan. We just have the air around us, we have energy in the room, we have chemistry and we have the music. And it’s led to some great performances.’

Wielding the baton

The way in which a conductor leads an orchestra is, traditionally, with the aid of a baton, a lightweight stick designed to amplify their hand gestures, making them easier for the musicians – or choir – following to see. Through these gestures the conductor counts out the beat of the music – with a downward motion to indicate the first beat of the bar, they cue in different musicians or sections of the orchestra, and they signify the dynamics of the piece, indicating when, for example, aspects need to be louder or quieter. But will these gestures always be the same, no matter who is conducting?

‘There’s a degree of universality,’ explains Collon. ‘If there are four beats in a bar, then it would be slightly confusing to an orchestra if the conductor moved to their right on the second beat (instead of left). However,’ he continues, ‘within the basic structure, there are huge variables – you only need to look at two different conductors to see how individual their movements are.’

‘Yeah, everyone has their own,’ agrees Hazlewood. ‘Of course, there’s a pattern; there’s a clutch and an accelerator pedal, like in a car, but beyond that, it’s very physical, and very dependent on the person themselves. In fact, the conductor that is least successful is the one that’s been modelling their gestures on someone else they admire, which I understand. We’ve all got heroes, but you have to find your own way. It’s not like there is an agreed rule book, with predescribed signs like semaphore, it’s much looser than that.’

How do conductors practice?

‘How do you get to the Royal Festival Hall?’ ‘Practice’. This may be terrible advice for us to give visiting concert goers, but it is a well-trodden old joke that underlines the understood importance of practice for musicians. What about conductors though, do they practice? Are they all at home now warming up their baton arm? ‘No, it’s pointless to practice the actual gestures without an orchestra, because you don’t know how it will come across,’ says Hazlewood, shattering this entertaining image. 

‘When I was a teenager, and I was attending conducting master classes, summer schools and camps, and so on, there’d always be very fastidious and committed students, practising in front of a mirror at three in the morning,’ he adds. ‘That may look great in the middle of the night, but you don’t know how it will work. You need real musicians. That’s the toughest thing about conducting, you can’t really practice without getting the gigs and you have to get the gigs to practice. It can be a bit chicken and egg.’

‘You can’t really practise conducting in the same way that you can practise an instrument,’ agrees Collon. ‘The one thing you can do in advance of rehearsals is to learn the music as well as possible – thinking about its form, harmony, phrasing, structure and orchestration. Perhaps you can also imagine how it might sound, or how you ideally want it to sound, but the first time you conduct a piece will always bring surprises you could never have imagined’.

Can musicians manage without conductors?

There’s no doubting that Collon and Hazlewood, and the many other conductors we welcome to our auditoriums, are skilled at what they do, but so too are the musicians of the orchestras; so what would happen, or indeed wouldn’t happen, if the conductor wasn’t there? For Collon that ‘depends very much on the complexity of the music and also how well the orchestra can play together as a unit. There are many times in rehearsal with Aurora when I go and listen from the audience and they can play the whole piece without me. I like doing that, it gives them a sense of ownership and I can listen with more perspective. But there is some music, complex contemporary scores for example, which absolutely needs a conductor, and could fall apart very quickly without one.’

For Hazlewood, the answer comes down to his belief of the orchestra and conductor ultimately being part of the same team. ‘One very useful role for the conductor,’ he explains, ‘is that they hold a mirror up to the orchestra and each individual musician within it, reflecting back on how they are all coming along, asking them how each phrase sits… everyone needs everyone else, and the most efficient way of making music with a large orchestra is to have someone do that role’.

Though the conductor may strike a lonely figure, out there at the front, facing the opposite way to the other performers, it’s clear that Hazlewood in particular sees conducting as being far from an individual pursuit. ‘Humility,’ he says, when asked what it is that separates great conductors from the rest. ‘Conducting is not a narcissism show, or about conveying ‘I am the great one’, it’s about collective effort, it’s about listening and humility’. It’s therefore no surprise that Hazlewood considers his most important role as a conductor to be ‘about making people feel safe and making them feel free’.