Conducting the Wind Orchestra: Meaning, Gesture, and Expressive Potential
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Conducting the Wind Orchestra: Meaning, Gesture, and Expressive P ...

Chapter 1:  Conducting in Theory and Practice
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It was assumed by the public that, as Stern suggests, the conductor was more intelligent and knowledgeable than the orchestra.

Bruno Walter’s notion of the orchestra as an instrument of the conductor provides some insight into the view:

His ear tells him, and his musical feeling corroborates it, that—contrary to appearances—it is in actual fact that single person who is making music, playing on the orchestra as on a living instrument, and transforming its multiformity into unity, and that he is concerned with the technical as well as the spiritual aspect of the music. The musical feelings of the listener perceives [sic] that the conductor’s conception and personality sound forth from the playing of the orchestra, that his re-creative inspiration reveals, by means of the executants, the inner meaning of the work of music.36

Whilst Walter is said to have been gentle in his interaction with the orchestra, he cajoled the orchestra in a light but insistent manner in order to get out of them what he wanted. For Leonard Bernstein, the conductor is more motivator than tyrant:

But the conductor must not only make his orchestra play; he must make them want to play. He must exalt them, lift them, start their adrenaline pouring, either through cajoling or demanding or raging. But however he does it, he must make the orchestra love the music as he loves it. It is not so much imposing his will on them like a dictator; it is more like projecting his feelings around him so that they reach the last man in the second violin section.37

While the conductor is placed in a position of authority, his/her role is not authoritarian. Harry Price and James Byo state that the conductor establishes a balance between authority and collaboration as well as inspires the performers through a show of his/her own enthusiasm for the music.