Hacker News Reader

Comment by autarch | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate this article's focus on rehearsal. A lot of people not familiar with classical music see someone waving their hands around on stage and wonder why they're needed.

The answer is that they're not really needed _for the performance_. A conductor who leads effective rehearsals and gives clear interpretation instructions could probably not show up to the performance and the orchestra would still know what to do.

But leading effective rehearsals and knowing the music well enough to communicate interpretations details is _really hard_.

View on HN

I disagree somewhat--the conductor may not strictly be needed for the performance (with enough rehearsal, of course), but it's likely to be much better with them than without. For one, keeping a steady tempo by consensus is pretty hard when you're trying to listen for it from your fellow musicians while simultaneously attending to your own pitch & timbre. (Not to mention accelerando and ritardando--changing tempo in sync is nigh impossible without a benevolent dictator in front of you!)

Also it's very easy for an individual musician to forget that oh, this is the THIRD repetition of this really loud phrase, and this time we're supposed to move on to the really quiet part, and seeing the wildly gesticulating figure in your periphery suddenly shrink down smaller is a good reminder that things are changing to the quiet part.

And as a former percussion player who had to wait for sometimes hundreds of measures of rest before coming in precisely on time with, say, an extremely important bass drum hit, it's extremely reassuring to get eye contact and a finger-point from the conductor to verify that you're not about to ruin the entire performance by coming in four measures early just because you lost count and were therefore trying to base your entrance on the repetitive phrasing of the piece. Not that this ever happened to me...

Actally there are some motion sensor based reseach in this domain, e.g.: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

Thanks for the insightful comment. I’ve often wondered how the triangle player can sit for a hundred measures and still hit that one note right on time. And the other stuff as well, but that one stood out.

I don't want to downplay the need for rehearsal. It's nearly impossible to simply count for that long, so percussion players REALLY need to know the shape of the piece (perhaps more than the rest of the ensemble, in my biased opinion) to get their cues right. A nod from the conductor is reassuring, but she also has literally a dozen things happening simultaneously that she must attend to, so you can't depend on it.

Thanks for this. You've largely answered my question elsewhere in this thread.

One hard thing about rehearsals is to catch and keep the musicians attention for hours.

Some of the best conductors I've met were really funny (like presenting jokes/stand up comedy at pauses), charismatic, ,energetic and engaging (for hours)... Conductors are making their main performances at rehearsals, and they are having much less (and shorter/simpler) work during the actual performances.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com