Comment by a_lieb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by a_lieb | Hacker News Reader

I think this is the take-away point: "Beyond stopping and starting a given piece, it is the job of a conductor to decide how it will be interpreted. How loud should the middle section of the first movement be—and ought the violins to be playing a bit softer so as not to drown out the flutes? Someone must answer questions such as these if a performance is not to sound indecisive or chaotic, and it is far easier for one person to do so than for 100 people to vote on each decision."

If you've ever worked with a conductor, even in high school band, the whole mystery disappears right away. In classical music, "conductor" usually refers to what would be called "musical director" in other situations: they oversee all of the big and little artistic decisions you need to make good music. Standing up there waving the baton around is a pretty small part of the job. When you explain to people this way, it's almost obvious: just like any big project, you want to have a manager with some kind of vision to give things direction. It's pretty hard to run the whole thing as a commune.

This mostly makes sense to me. A conductor for music is the equivalent of a director for a play.

Except with a play the director doesn't stand on stage pointing at each actor to cue their lines. The actors rehearse and learn their own cues. The director coaches them on timing, volume, expression, etc, but then mostly relies on each individual actor to take that direction on board and follow it themselves on the night.

Why is it different for a conductor?

[ Edit: Reading the rest of this thread has actually largely answered my question now. taco_emoji's post was particularly helpful https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15983052 ]

fwiw, a play director will be off stage signaling, giving cues, and advise. She may not physically be on stage, but she's definitely involved during the performance.

I suspect that music like an orchestra requires vastly greater precision than is required from plays.

For example, if the orchestra is going to become rapidly silent, or loud, in a dramatic way, then it's important that all of the instruments do this on the same timing. You can't have an instrument that "false starts", or it will sound obviously out of place.

By comparison, in a play there's a lot more leniency and flexibility. Typically only one person is speaking at a time. If one person pauses for a few moments between lines, or enters/exits stage more slowly than normal, that won't disrupt the rest of the play -- whereas if any musical instrument hits at the wrong time, it will.

One thing worth mentioning is that an orchestra performance may resemble a rehearsal more than the audience is aware of. Even for a regularly scheduled performance of a major orchestra, there may be relatively little time to prepare for each performance. There will be a few players in the sections who have been hired as substitutes, with or without having been present at the rehearsals. A typical contract gives each player one or more performances or "services" that they can take as vacation.

For lower profile performances, such as pit orchestras or something thrown together for an event, the entire ensemble may consist of hired hands. A few hours before the show, someone may be looking at parts that they've just received as PDF's and hoping to hell that the conductor will get them through it. ;-)

Rather than having the conductor be optional, always having them on the stand creates a continuity between rehearsal and performance that may be unnecessary in some cases, but is a welcome insurance policy for the kinds of vicissitudes that Murphy's Law can unleash.

Disclosure: I've been one of those hired hands, not in classical orchestras, but in large jazz ensembles. I actually enjoy the challenge of coming into a situation with no preparation and having to figure things out on the spot. For jazz bands, somebody in the saxophones or trombones will often "conduct" through their body language, or even stand up and lead the band through a tricky passage.

The most basic function of a director in a concert is to dictate the tempo. You can make do without a director in a small group of people by just looking at each other in tricky moments, but when the people involved become dozens or hundreds it is impossible to stay in tempo without a director.

You could take the director out and people would still be able to play, but it would most likely result in a much worse performance.

Also many bands have a drummer and/or bass player who will set the rhythm, just by nature of their instruments cutting through the others, which generally obviates the need for a conductor.

Actually though, with a stage play, there typically is a conductor: for the stage crew. Everybody on the crew is wearing a headset, and the person "calling show" is following a marked-up script to call spotlight cues (which spot to follow which actor, when to open the aperture, how BIG to open up), music cues, light board cues (even with a digital board, the timing of cues is manual), etc.

The difference to me is to do with synchronicity. Multiple lighting cues need to sync up with the action on stage, so you need someone to call show. A musical ensemble obviously needs to sync up rhythmically. Actors, however, don't typically need that kind of third-party direction during performance. If they do, generally the director will come up with some kind of offstage cue (a gunshot sound effect, for example) or designate one actor to subtly cue the other actors (touch her nose, for example).

The other thing is obviously just the nature of the performance. Enjoying a play, unlike music, requires a suspension of disbelief--an immersion in the setting of the show, a loss of awareness of your actual surroundings--and having the director standing in front, pointing to people and mouthing orders at them makes that impossible. Not to mention, having somebody up on stage waving their arms around is just plain distracting for a visual experience, but not at all for an auditory one.

Yup; musical notation might look like programming, but it's not MIDI, and there's often still a lot up for interpretation and that needs tuning for the specific assembly of players, the location, and some creative interpretation.

It's a bit like the sound guy behind the mixer panel at recordings and non-classic concerts.

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