Discussion Panel: Page 12

I’m sitting now on a tour bus with a colleague, so I asked him what he thinks conductors can do to make our musical experience better. For him, it’s a matter of keeping things fresh, of not overplanning, of not making it obvious that you’re going to stop the rehearsal at a certain spot because […]

One word stood out in this entire discussion: Trust. All the musicians in an orchestra, even the one who doesn’t make a sound (well, ideally not, at any rate) must have a pretty high level of mutual trust, or they’ll get in each other’s way when it comes time to actually create art, live, in […]

I’ll branch off on my own today and throw out two brief thoughts regarding one of the many elephants in the room – contemporary music. My guess is that a number of our orchestra’s mission statements address Music of our Time (a nice term for contemporary music that sounds less scary). The attempts to complete […]

My experience is that most conductors do not create pieces of large musical architecture. Even competent ones work a lot on details but forget about developing an overall shape to a movement or work. A lot of conductors have trouble letting go; trust the musician(s)to be able to interpret their parts/solos without being spoon fed. […]

I think I’d like to address the question of what can we musicians do to improve the relations between conductors and orchestras. What I have to say, though, deals with talented conductors. There are those who really are jerks on the podium. Fortunately, in my orchestra, we have had pretty much only conductors with at […]

More than anything else, I am most upset by conductors who inject too much of themselves into their interpretations. The best conductors I have worked for allow the music to speak for itself, rather than loading it with distortions and exaggerations for the sake of individualism. Certainly I’m not asking for generic performances, but I’d […]

Ann Drinan and I would like to thank all the panelists for their thoughtful and direct observations. We can only hope that some conductors will wander through this corner of cyberspace, read this discussion, take some of it to heart, and make the world a marginally better place – at least for orchestra musicians. For […]

Who comes up with these wonderful questions anyway? (That’s known as “sock-puppeting” when it’s done by bloggers, by the way – at least when it’s done anonymously.) My pet peeves: Moving too much. When conducting an orchestra, less is more. Then, when the conductor actually does more, it means something. The orchestra might even notice. […]

I admit that this is a subject that has always irked me somewhat — not that orchestras play “behind the beat” but that some conductors (usually not regular orchestral ones, but people who are used to working with rock bands) ask us to play “on the beat.” My question is, “Where is the Beat?” For […]

In my thirty-odd years of orchestral experience, I’ve encountered all flavors on the podium. I’ve seen micromanagers, and the ones who just want to go home early. I’ve seen great technicians who have nothing to say, and artists with a lot to say who don’t know how to say it. The “ahead-of-the-beat” phenomenon isn’t necessarily […]