Lol, check out the look on the guys face!!! Goodday everyone, ever wonder why these guys wave a magic wand?. For years I have been curious to understand the logic behind a conductor, sometimes i ask "why is it that a single person, making
no noise at all apart from the odd breathy grunt and armed with just a
sliver of wood, or sometimes just their hands, can be held responsible
for the sonic output of hundreds of instrument-wielding people and how
is it that the sounds that pour forth from this “mysterious podium
dance”, as one critic has called it, occasionally reach the sublime,
conjuring an artistic experience that nobody who hears it can ever
forget?
Here are some things I got to figure out they do.
BEAT TIME
“The whole duty of a conductor is
comprised in his ability always to indicate the right tempo,” said
Richard Wagner, himself a supreme conductor as well as composer. The
orthodoxy is that the conductor uses his or her right hand to hold a
baton (if used – some prefer just to use their hands) and set the tempo,
control it thereafter, signify the beginning of a new bar and deal with
other matters of timing that help keep an ensemble of sometimes over a
hundred individuals together.
CONVEY AN INTERPRETATIONThe
conductor is there to bring a musical score to life, communicating
their own highly refined sense of the work through an individual
language of gestures, which might sculpt the musical line, tease out
nuances, emphasis certain musical elements while controlling others,
and essentially re-imagine an old piece anew. These usually fall to the
left hand.
“The best conductors are the best listeners”, says Tom Service, the broadcaster, journalist and author of the fascinating study Music As Alchemy: Journeys with Great Conductors and their Orchestras. “They become a lightening rod of listening; a focus so that the players and the conductor can become something bigger than all of them – than all of us – at the same time as feeling fully realised as individuals.” For him, the late Claudio Abbado is the ultimate example of this, a conductor able to conjure “a hyper-awareness of awareness”.
BE A CONDUIT
Concertgoers may have their ears trained on the orchestra, but our eyes are invariably drawn to the podium. We too want to be steered, to be able to align the way the music sounds with the conductor is doing. He or she is a vital visual connection: the bridge between our eyes and the sense of what is happening in the music.
Interesting huh? now you enlightened on what conductors do, dont go looking at them like they are fooling themselves they are also the center piece of art. Although if you are intrested you can further check out some names of great conductors the world has ever known.
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