
Do Orchestras Really Need Conductors? (2012) - testrun
http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2012/11/27/165677915/do-orchestras-really-need-conductors
======
tunesmith
So, I'm a software consultant but my degree was in music and I've taken
conducting classes, written some (small) pieces for orchestra, etc.

If you take a highly trained orchestral ensemble that knows a certain symphony
cold, and you have them perform the symphony twice, once apiece with two
highly trained conductors, then the two performances _will_ be different
interpretations, and will deliberately sound very different.

The conductor doesn't only do rehearsal prep, entrances, and cutoffs. Nor
about synchronization, timing, any of that technical stuff - that's all a very
small part of it. The conductor emotes the entire interpretation and inspires
the musicality of the ensemble in a particular direction. Some of this might
be rehearsed ahead of time, but it's also alive during the live performance.

It is also completely possible for an ensemble to do their own rehearsal
preparation, and to perform without a conductor. It'll be fine and musical,
but they're not including the interpretation that a conductor themselves can
bring to the performance. Even the conductor-less orchestras will discover new
interpretations during live performance if an excellent conductor hopped up on
the podium to lead them. And for pieces that require a lot of certain elements
(rubato, many changing tempos or meters), a lack of conductor will leave the
music sounding a bit rote.

Anyway, it's always an old joke to consider that conductors aren't really
needed... in high school, we pissed off our orchestra teacher before the final
concert by putting a sign on his podium: "1\. Raise arms. 2. Wave arms around
until the music stops. 3. Lower arms." There are also the pops in the park
concerts where the local bank president will be invited up on stage to lead a
Sousa march... all of that stuff is well and good, but it's all a joke. Of
_course_ conductors are needed - music suffers without them.

[edit] I should note that conducting to _video_ is an entirely different art
form than traditional conducting/performance. Different conversation.

~~~
gcb0
one shocking thing i learned once i got some professional music friends, was
that they show up to a live gig without never hearing the music before. they
just sit in front of the papers and play.

with my limited music training, i never thought that was even an option.

~~~
analog31
I'm just a part time jazz musician with a day job. ;-)

Not all musicians can do that kind of work, but I was fortunate to have taken
classical musical lessons throughout my childhood, so I've developed and
maintained good "sight reading" skills. In any typical mid sized town, there
is a small cadre of musicians who handle most of this kind of work. It is a
business necessity for any larger ensemble because the chance of keeping (for
instance) 19 players together long enough to rehearse everything together is a
losing proposition. Likewise, bandleaders who want to be able to ride out
personnel changes will make sure that they keep their "charts" in order, so
they can call in a sub to read a gig if they need one on short notice in
whatever town they're in.

But it's definitely a skill like any other, that requires practice to
maintain, and where there is always room for development. I can handle most
written jazz material, but would have a hard time sight-reading a modern
symphonic work. If music is over my head, either from a theory or technique
standpoint, being able to read will be rather cold consolation.

------
kbar13
having played violin for the majority of my life with years of experience
playing in orchestras, I can tell you that the majority of a conductor's work
is done in preparation with the ensemble. Musicians are more than capable of
reading sheet music and keeping time and listening to others in the orchestra
to keep things in sync.

Conductors are there to make the decision of how music should be interpreted.
They will tell musicians to make edits to adjust the how music is performed.
This ranges from minor stylistic changes to actual changes to the melody and
such.

In addition, the passion of a conductor really rubs off of musicians in an
orchestra and will inspire them to really put feeling into how they play. This
applies to a conductor who doesn't know what he/she is doing as well, but with
the opposite effect.

Therefore, yes, an orchestra will function just fine without a conductor, but
you'll essentially be replacing a live organism with an mp3 player (but with
sprinkles of human error added).

~~~
analog31
I think this is an important point. The conductor plays such a central role
off-stage during rehearsal, that it would be an odd disruption to play the gig
without the conductor.

Some conductorless bands will have a de facto conductor. I play in a large
jazz ensemble. The bassist (that's me) is supposed to maintain the tempo. For
important rhythmic transitions in a piece (changing from one tempo to
another), you might see somebody in the front row (a saxaphonist) waving his
arms, or even his entire horn like a baton.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
I know someone who works in opera, and the conductor is _always_ there in
rehearsals, even when the only member of the 'orchestra' is a pianist playing
a piano reduction.

And some singers. Who are drilled meticulously until they sing with the tempo,
phrasing, and dynamics the conductor wants.

In opera, conductors also try to cue the singers, so they know where they are
and they don't start phrases early or late.

In classical performances the tempo/time signature changes can be fearsome,
and by the time you get to late 19th/early 20th C rep (Strauss, Wagner, etc)
they're terrifyingly complex.

So yes, conductors are essential.

------
b1daly
Aside from the fact that someone has to lead the arrangement (it can be done
by consensus or pre set as well) that a conductor was needed simply because of
this distance between the players. 40ft gives a delay of about 40ms, which is
a lot in music. Add in the echoes and reverberations and the link between the
musicians gets very loose. Musicians can get used to playing with the various
delays inherent in sound propagation through various mediums, but need to
practice. Most of the players in orchestra are not hearing anything like what
the audience hears, so having someone front and center is essential to pulling
it all together.

------
devonkim
There are orchestras that have performed conductorless fine. I watched my old
bass professor, Barry Lieberman also from Orpheus chamber orchestra, play in a
group of 12 and they did perfectly fine with American String Project and they
all listened to each other to get it done.

The fundamental reason that conductorless orchestras over 20 don't occur in
practice is that music written for that many tends to be complex enough to
warrant a conductor. Similar to how start-up companies probably don't need
much regulation and a board of directors while multi-billion dollar
enterprises invariably do, elaborate pieces are precisely the domain of
symphonies. You're not about to need a conductor to have the London
Philharmonic play Pachabel Canon or something, right? And boy would it seem
awkward for a quartet to attempt Mozart's Requiem Mass. It's why Metallica
with a symphony sounds really, really forced - Master of Puppets is more
arranged like you would an étude or chamber concerto, not some symphonic score
with tons of movements and five layers of polyrhythms.

Conductors are very much like popular music DJs and MCs in that they're
supposed to be expert listeners in charge of coordination of many parts that
could easily fall apart potentially if the musicians started to have trouble
listening to each other in an especially complex piece of music. Stravinsky
works come to mind, and even world class symphonies can (and certainly have!)
fall apart on pieces like Rite of Spring or any movement from the Firebird
Suite.

As an example of such leadership, I saw the National Symphony Orchestra play
in sync with the music from Fantasia 2000 and the only way the orchestra would
have known to STOP was because the conductor could see that the video did not
match the piece because the orchestra faced the audience. The discipline it
takes to full stop an orchestra also reflects the professionalism too. Those
that grew up playing music in groups are quite familiar with stopping
constantly and taking a while to slow to a stop every time, but you don't put
up with that as pros. But in my defense, I just kept going out of boredom of
playing maybe 6 minutes in an hour while we kept screwing with the violins or
trumpets for the whole time. If people don't practice, we all suffer.

------
dalke
I'll say the same thing I said last time this came up on HN: that research
doesn't answer the question "Do Orchestras Really Need Conductors?" It does
answer the question "Does an orchestra which is used to a conductor do better
with an expert conductor?" ... The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra is one of the few
well-known conductorless orchestras..." \-
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8124560](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8124560)

~~~
Intermernet
According to Wikipedia "Most conductorless orchestras are smaller in size"[1]
but I'd love to hear of some larger conductorless groups if you know of them
(it seems more than twenty members is rare).

I also found this bit of trivia interesting:

"Conductor Otto Klemperer was once invited to lead the Pervyi Simfonicheskii
Ansambl in a concert in Moscow. Midway through the program, however, Klemperer
laid down his baton and took a seat in the audience, and the ensemble finished
without him." [2]

[1]:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conductorless_orchestra](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conductorless_orchestra)

[2]: [http://www.trivia-library.com/b/history-of-the-greatest-
cond...](http://www.trivia-library.com/b/history-of-the-greatest-
conductorless-orchestra.htm)

------
Intermernet
I've seen a few articles asserting an opinion on this in one form or another,
and it seems they tend not to really ask the orchestra members.

I have a few friends who play in orchestras and they all tend to think that
they're much more synchronous with a conductor. If they practice without the
conductor, then they all say they sound fine to themselves, but everyone else
tends to drift slightly out of time.

An orchestra is a complex, dynamic web of bi-directional signals. Certain
sections will use other sections as their cues for certain phrases, and these
relationships will change as a piece progresses. Having one master clock to
sync against allows these relationships to not drift too far from each other.

Also, visual cues are faster and more reliable in loud, reverb-filled spaces
than audial cues.

Personally, I'd love to see how an orchestra played to a completely virtual
avatar of a conductor, which based it's "emotional" timing and dynamic
instruction on a corpus of famous conductor's work. Imagine being able to turn
up the "Stokowski" :-)

------
spiritplumber
I think it's a matter of speed of light vs. speed of sound. Everyone takes
their mental clock signal from being able to see the conductor. The conductor,
at the same time, is positioned so that what s/he hear is close to what the
audience will hear, which is very different than what each musician will hear.

At minimum, the conductor is a clock and a feedback mechanism.

~~~
cheepin
Additionally, certain notations are open to interpretation (fermata,
accelerando, retardando, etc) and thus need someone to lead, unless they were
standardized completely beforehand.

------
magic5227
For professional orchestras, a conductor is not a metronome, but an artistic
director.

So yes, they can add quite a lot.

------
jacquesm
These blind ladies certainly don't:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bR6ptUemCwk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bR6ptUemCwk)

------
_cipher_
Probably doesn't matter as a comment (there are so many great comments
expanding way more), but when all classical composers composed music, they
didn't assume something like "Tempo: 70bmp". They were referring to it as
"Adagio" (same for other tempos, see here for reference
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempo#Basic_tempo_markings](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempo#Basic_tempo_markings)
).

That gives the conductor the freedom to play with the tempo (example: one
conductor may decide that a specific part noted as "Allegro" is better sounded
at 120bpm, an other one at 125bpm which may give a little more aggressive
touch), giving the audience a much more pleasing experience.

------
Htsthbjig
Of course. You can also replace Orchestras with a MP3 player.

But there is one thing that machines don't have (yet). The ability to feel
emotions and transmit them to people.

Also a 2 point sound source could not compare to dozens of them that are
actually people who interpret it different each time.

There is a lot of complexity handling dozens of people at the same time, as
they are not machines. They get shuttly out of sync and have to be compensated
on real time.

There is a world of difference between a bad conductor, and good conductor.
Most people won't be able to say why, but they certainly could feel the
difference.

------
dbalatero
It's not just about the performance, it's about leading rehearsals, listening
to what needs to be worked on, and having a vision for the stylistic
direction.

------
iamdave
One word: fermatas.

------
stevetjoa
Brief HN discussion on the same article:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8124560](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8124560)

Recent HN discussion on another article about orchestral conductors:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7687641](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7687641)

------
mynameishere
Someone is inevitably required to lead any large organization. The
concertmaster could probably do it, but it would look funny if he sat on a
pedestal (for visibility). Plus, his direction might distract from his
playing. So, they have someone else, typically more experienced and without an
instrument perform that duty.

I think soloists in concertos sometimes conduct.

------
tsotha
This is probably the most studied question in music ever. The topic even has
its own wiki page.

And the answer is definitively "yes".

------
timthorn
A few years ago, the BBC ran a reality TV competition to see how a selection
of celebrities would fare as conductors. There was a clear difference between
them:
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/musictv/maestro/](http://www.bbc.co.uk/musictv/maestro/)

------
pmoriarty
Could a dancer who's listening to and interpreting the music through dance
stand in for a conductor?

Could an orchestra synchronize their performance to the dancer's movements
instead of those of a conductor?

Would that work? Has anyone tried?

------
ubasu
The conductor is the musician, and the orchestra is his instrument, so yes.

------
lazylizard
if the orchestra planned behind the back of the conductor and ignored his
signals, and instead played on their own, would anyone notice?

------
owly
They only needed to listen to answer this.

------
rflrob
For once, a counter example to Betteridge's Law!
[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlin...](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

