Duluth Superior Magazine / September 2011 / Training Conductors

 Email  Print

Training Conductors

Imagine an occupation that pays well, and is exceedingly easy to do but exceedingly difficult to do well. Imagine that other people are almost entirely responsible for the results, and there is no objective measure of the quality of your work.

Poker player? Easy to do, difficult to do well, but they count the cash at the end of the day. Hollywood actor? Potentially lucrative for someone of modest ability (I’m talking to you, Ben Affleck), but great acting isn’t brain surgery. Brain surgeon? Well-paid? Yes. Easy? No, not really; not if you expect the patient to live.

Folks, welcome to my world: symphony conductor. Pays well, and is quite easy; after all, the musicians do the work. All we do is move our arms up and down. Sometimes to the side. And then bow as if we made it all happen. (“Yes, thank you, thank you, I was wonderful!”) Moreover, the quality of our work is impossible to measure. We can’t be better than the musicians; in other words, we can’t empower them to play beyond their capacity. We can however be worse – we can not enable the musicians to play up to their capacity. But, who really would know?

In addition to my responsibilities in Duluth, I am co-director of graduate conducting at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, one of the elite conductor training programs in the world. We have students coming from six continents (and I seem to recall an application or two from Antarctica) and graduates in positions across North America.

So how does one teach conducting? The old school was tough. My own teacher was the legendary Sergiu Celibidache, for eight years music director of the Berlin Philharmonic, and easily the greatest conductor of the 20th century. “Sure, I studied with Celibidache,” said a friend. “Wanna see the scars?”

My own students, all — to the best of my knowledge — still relatively unscarred, know five essential responsibilities. Number one, understand how the tones can come to life to result in the best experience. In other words, understand the complex of tempo, structure of volume, instrumental timbres, and so on, that results in the most beautiful, most moving, most magical performance. This is the overwhelming bulk of the job, and it is profoundly difficult.

Number two, stand up straight, regally, throughout. Harder than you’d imagine. Number three, free the body. Think it’s easy to move your arms with complete freedom? Try holding your hands out using only the muscles you need. I’ll bet you a hundred bucks you can’t do it, and I’d love you to take that bet because I have a son who’s going to need braces. Number four, hear everything. It’s ever so easy to focus elsewhere – the next bar, the percussion entrance, those ugly shoes on the sousaphone player (yes, we see them, and boy are they distracting!). Number five, be the music. Let go of any and all inhibitions. Enough said.

This March 11-14, ten conductors came to Duluth from hundreds and perhaps thousands of miles to work with me and the DSSO for four intensive days of instruction. It was a good chance to see the process at work—and get a sense of what a conductor does, what it means to do it well, and how difficult that excellence really is to achieve.

Markand Thakar is the Charles A. & Carolyn M. Russell Music Director, Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra; music director, Baltimore Chamber Orchestra; principal conductor, Duluth Festival Opera; co-director of graduate conducting, Peabody Conservatory.