Bar 21 - Allegro con brio

As I came to conducting late, playing rehearsals from the piano in the opera house, I confess that I never really learned how to beat, though I did learn how to follow a beat.  Furthermore, never having taken a formal course of instruction in conducting, I was never even taught how to beat.  And working for years with (or against) various conductors, I eventually learned how to ignore a beat.

The notion that the first step in learning how to conduct would be to learn how to beat is to this day foreign to me.  The only way I can reconcile the meaning of "beating" and its role in conducting is to define it as a (not "the") physical manifestation of pulse.  The conductor does need to find a way to express pulse in hand and body.  The orchestral musician does at times need accurate information as to where s/he is in a measure; the measure having served for centuries as a primary building block in the organization of musical composition and sound.  The conventional wisdom for the intersection of these two "needs" seems to have led to establishing a physical framework of beats placed in space, usually traced by the right hand.  I accept the convention of beating as necessary, but ask continually how and why it became the primary focus of instruction and the basis for much of the conducting I see on podiums these days.

While I never learned how to beat, I did learn how to conduct.  Much of what I learned was imparted to me by my teacher and mentor, Gustav Meier.  Over the years, I was blessed to work with and learn from other great conductors, notably Edoardo Müller, Ozawa, Bernstein and Maurizio Arena, but a basic vocabulary of gesture I learned from Mo. Meier, who himself has never been a conventional beater.  What I will share with the reader for the duration of this "first movement" is what I have learned about conducting and physical gesture, from my own experience and from what I was taught, which might be summarized thus:

In the beginning, there was the score, not the beat.
Conducting is the intersection of gesture and pulse, not gesture and beat.
Clarity of intent is more important than clarity of beat.
Active listening trumps active beating,
If you don't know the score, it doesn't matter where you put your hands.
The size of one's beat is frequently in inverse proportion to how well one knows the score, and
S/he who lives by the beat, dies by the beat.

These concepts are familiar to my students, but may well be new to those who haven't either studied or worked with me.  Over the next several weeks, each of them will be discussed and explored.  I hope that the reader will consider them and apply them as I try to explain, demonstrate and define these and other fundamental aspects of my approach to the craft.

Back to work!