I was watching some America’s Got Talent clips on YouTube that featured choirs. Many of them had a conductor up front gesticulating madly while the choir sang.
Is this of any use whatsoever or is it just the conductor trying to get on stage too?
I get the conductor is the person who arranges the music and gets the choir/musicians to do what they do. The conductor is important, even critical in this regard. It is their vision that brings the whole thing together. They should be praised and respected for their work. (really)
But my question is do they need to stand on the stage and flail at the performers to produce the final product?
Somebody has to tell everyone when to start and when to stop the held notes. Hard to do that when that person is in the group itself instead of standing in front. The conductor is also acting as a metronome with all the flailing about. There is actually a pattern to the madness. This is based on my 14 years of school bands and choirs.
Absolutely. And they do more than just indicate time and transitions. The conductor is like a painter and the singers/musicians are their colors. Every song has an infinite number of possible variations in timing, phrasing, etc. The individual singers or musicians may each have his/her own idea of how their specific part should sound, and how to emote through it. But the conductor’s all-encompassing vision of the song and how it should sound when the pieces come together drives the final result.
No member of the choir or orchestra can hear all the other parts correctly. The conductor’s place at the front and center can hear that and guide it from the audience’s perspective.
An interesting experiment along these lines is the Orpheus in Boston, which plays orchestral music with a more chamber music type of set-up. There have been many others through the years. As an audience member, I can say that this is a very different experience, and the musicians can not be placed for optimum blending of the sound from the audience perspective. It also requires a certain personality type from the players/singers. If you have one ego-driven performer, and no conductor to rein them in, the balance of the whole soundscape can be thrown off.
It’s not unpleasant at all, it’s just more like sitting in on somebody else’s jam session, then attending a performance that is for the audience. It’s my understanding that for the musicians it is a more rewarding experience, as they feel more a part of the whole, rather than a one-on-one relationship with a conductor who is pulling it all together.
Speaking as someone who has sung in a semi-professional 100+ person choir, the answer is yes, you will get lost. Maybe not you personally but the person next to you, who will pull you askew and then you lost your place or your pitch or the tempo and you’ve pulled someone else into error. Then the people who absolutely know the piece and have strong voices will start guiding their section but what if those people are off a quarter beat from each other? What a mess. Been there. Keep your eyes glued on your conductor, just like they tell you at rehearsal, thousands and thousands of times.
Yes, someone has to keep time for everyone. In a rock band, it can be the drummer. In a large ensemble, especially one whose genre doesn’t have someone loudly beating the “one” every measure, it has to be someone everyone can see.
People don’t naturally keep time in synchronization. It’s very hard.
And, as stated above, in a complex piece, people will get lost counting hundreds or thousands of beats.
Just the issue of time is huge. This is arguably where the conductor first came from. As described above, once you get past a few musicians it becomes difficult to manage without a central authority on time. In an orchestra musicians have a heap of challenges. They can’t hear the whole of the sound, indeed some players have their entire experience dominated by a couple of nearby instruments, and have very little to guide them with their own contribution to the overall sound. What makes things more difficult for many players is that in an orchestral piece there will be long periods where they don’t play at all.
A little appreciated problem is the speed of sound. A professional level orchestra plays to compensate for the delay introduced by the distance from the back row to the conductor. For a small ensemble this isn’t an issue, but the human ear becomes sensitive to delays over about 10ms. (The Hass effect.) That is a distance of roughly 10 feet. You will find that the back row (wood winds, winds) deliberately play very slightly ahead of the conductor in order to compensate. They play in order to make the sound in the audience cohere, not the sound that they hear cohere (in which case they would be already behind the strings, and doubly behind as heard by the audience.
The tempo and overall balance will never be the same in performance as in rehearsal. There is always a dynamic with the audience. Changes in the acoustics of the venue when filled with people, and an almost psychic feedback of appreciation with the audience causes the conductor to change things dynamically.
Probably the most clear example of the role of the conductor is when the orchestra plays a concerto. The performance becomes a duet, with the soloist and conductor playing together. This is quiet an achievement. Most concerts are performed with remarkably little rehearsal. A working orchestra will begin preparing and rehearsing a performance the week of the performance, with the the soloist arriving for only a few rehearsals. Somehow the orchestra has to jell with the soloists personal performance of a piece. Whether it is standard repetiour, or new music, there will be significant artistic interpretation of a piece that the orchestra needs to be able to work with. The conducor’s job is to provide the best possible partnership with the soloist’s performance. This is very dynamic, and is closer to a jam than outright by the book performance. The conductor is following the soloist and responsible for keeping the orchestra both in time with the soloist - and just as importantly following the nuances of the dynamics and emotional colour of the performance as it unfolds. The conductor is probably the only person on stage who can hear the entirety of the performance The soloist has the first and second violins in their ear, and much of the orchestra won’t be able to hear the soloist over their nearby compatriots.
You will sometimes see orchestras - especially small chamber orchestras - led by their leader - the principal violin. Usefully, time can be visually established by the leader’s bow movements, but the smaller size of the orchestra and removal of some of the dominating loud instruments makes it easier to manage.
The conductor was a late addition to orchestras, but their addition was arguably pivotal in making performance of music from the Romantic era onwards viable, and one of the lesser acknowledged enablers of progress in music.
Fellini’s Orchestra Rehearsal is a political satire where an orchestra asks this same question, eventually overthrowing the conductor and replacing him with a giant metronome. Someone posted the last 9 minutes of the movie on YouTube — watching it will obviously spoil the ending. - YouTube
From my musical experience (youth through college, symphony and chamber), conductors are pretty essential for any group bigger than six or so.
While I know you are indulging in some hyperbole here, if you think what a conductor is doing is “flail[ing] at the performers” while conducting, you obviously aren’t aware of what a conductor does. It only looks like flailing.
I personally know the conductor of the Charlotte Symphony, as well as a few of the musicians. From discussions with him, and them, it’s quite clear to me that his presence on stage flailing at the performers is vital. Not only is he, of course, reminding them of what they have worked out during rehearsal to do, but he is also deftly blending the performances of the players, which differ in subtle ways each and every time that a piece is played. He is also, of course, performing the monotonous, but nevertheless necessary function of keeping the 50 to 100 musicians together in their beat, since trust me, the second violinist sitting six rows back on stage right (left as the audience sees it) isn’t able to tell what the cellist four rows back across the stage is doing time-wise.
As someone who has performed in choirs ranging from small ensemble to very large groups (12 members or so to 100-plus), I consider a good director essential during the performance to producing the best possible result. Lacking such a person flailing away at me, the group might perform well enough for the average person to be ok with the result, but not anyone who really knew good music.
You presume wrong. I would routinely get the music Friday. We’d have evening rehearsals Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday, concert Friday, concert Saturday. A good chunk of those rehearsals you aren’t even playing because the conductor is going over parts with different sections.
For a pop concert, e.g. touring rock band, Tony Bennett, etc., wants a pit orchestra, we would have just one rehearsal.
