Rich Mintz  

If your musical training (like mine) has left you with the ability to pick out “The Entertainer” and “Love Is Here to Stay” on the piano, and not much else, you’ve probably wondered, as I have, exactly what the point is of having a conductor up in front of an orchestra. The players all know the music, and know their instruments; everyone can keep a beat; why do you need that guy, anyway?

This long LA Times story about the purpose of orchestra conductors explains that the conductor is what overlays the music with an interpretation. Apparently orchestras can play without a conductor, but they usually aren’t very good; even if they’re technically proficient, which important orchestras always are, the music often sounds mechanical and soulless without the interpretive overlay of the conductor’s vision.

The article also confirms something that I sort of suspected, which is that most of the baton flourishes that mean anything to the orchestra are referring to points of musical interpretation that have already been discussed and rehearsed in regard to this particular performance. So a particular wave of the baton doesn’t mean, say, “tremolo” to every orchestra across all time, like a sign in ASL; rather, it means something like “ok, now! — do that thing we did in rehearsal at this point,” or “ok, the thing that’s called for in the score around this point starts… now.”

I’ll try to think of something pithy to say about this, but in the meantime I just thought it was interesting.