Do Orchestras Really Need Conductors? (2012)
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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.
with my limited music training, i never thought that was even an option.
Not to make jazz sound easy; jazz theory is way harder than any of the classical theory you'll learn in college music classes (speaking as someone who aced all the college music theory courses and just can't seem to get a handle on bebop).
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.
This is the part that most people like to glaze over. Yes, it's totally possible to go conducter-less (even for, say, high school musicians), but something is lost without one.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
[2]: http://www.trivia-library.com/b/history-of-the-greatest-cond...
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" :-)
At minimum, the conductor is a clock and a feedback mechanism.
So yes, they can add quite a lot.
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.
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.
Recent HN discussion on another article about orchestral conductors: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7687641
I think soloists in concertos sometimes conduct.
And the answer is definitively "yes".
Could an orchestra synchronize their performance to the dancer's movements instead of those of a conductor?
Would that work? Has anyone tried?