It always feels strange once the orchestra stops playing annd its the composer that bows for the applause.
This gives a good overview I believe
Keeps the beat and tells you to ramp up, ramp down (volume ) and when to stop or start. He points the stick at your instrument group, makes eye contact, to let you know.
I was only in band (we had band not orchestra) in 5-8th grade.
But I’ll tell you, it’s very intuitive. I never was like “what’s he mean?”.
It’s just like very obvious what the composer is indicating to you.
Essentially, musicians in an orchestra play the instruments, while the conductor plays the musicians. In both contexts they guide the instrument to make a specific note at a specific time, intensity and timbre, for a specific duration.
As for how the musicians interpret the movements, not sure. Perhaps it’s unique to every orchestra and relies on the familiarity between musician and conductor.
As someone who used to be in a (casual) orchestra, I can tell you that the musicians can interpret the conductor because they’ve rehearsed it extensively beforehand. The conductor is really just there is remind the musicians to do the things that they’ve practiced beforehand.
As for the baton’s movements, that’s meant to indicate the speed that the music is played at. Nobody can keep perfect rhythm, and in a large orchestra, the echoes and travel speed of sound becomes especially disorienting. It will start to sound like you are playing off-time from the rest of the orchestra. In those cases, everyone has to ignore the sound of their music and only use the conductor to figure out where in the song they are, and they just have to trust that it’ll sound correct to the audience
In addition to all the good answers previously given, a conductor interprets what the composer has written. And different conductors may create very different interpretations of the same piece. They can set the basic tempo faster or slower, they can get the orchestra to really lean in to a particular musical phrase or de-emphasise it, they can bring out the horns at one point or hush them a bit and let us focus on the oboe or piccolo… A good conductor has studied and notated the entire score for some time before they and the orchestra even begin to rehearse.
So, part of that bow at the end can be to say, “what do you think of this interpretation compared to all the other times you’ve heard this famous symphony?” Then they usually turn around and wave the orchestra members to stand, which means, “and didn’t these guys do a great job executing it!?”
- It’s like a semaphore type thing, the position of the baton shows where the beat is, and the conductor can signal other things as well like “emphasis here” or “quieter” with body language. An orchestra where everyone does their own thing wouldn’t sound very good.
- It’s hard to get up and bow with certain instruments, there might not be space, and you couldn’t see past the first row very well anyway. I always assumed the bow by the conductor was on behalf of everyone.
how does it work? do specific baton flicks mean specific things? is he just shaking it around to the beat?
They do actually! For a 4/4 beat (4 beats per measure and the quarter note gets the beat, meaning 4 quarter notes per measure), they will move the baton straight down for 1 (the “down beat”), left (usually) for 2, right for 3, and up for 4. Different time signatures will have more or less movements, such as 3/4 time (3 beats per measure) will be down (1), left (2), and up (3).
Further, there are other movements like a wide slash left to right is a stop motion for everyone to instantly stop playing.
Yup, there’s a specific pattern for each time signature, and if you get really lost you can tell where in the measure you should be by them.
The patterns for cursed time signatures are equally cursed.
They’re kind of a live mixing engineer, it’s really hard to coordinate a piece between more than about 6 others without a conductor to give feedback, cues, and tend to the overall sound (tone, dynamics, rhythm).
Yeah when you’re playing an instrument in a symphony you have a very, very narrow ability to hear and understand everything that’s going on. Your own instrument is (usually) in your face, you might be in a section with a bunch of the same or similar instruments that is drowning stuff out, everyone is facing away from you and the acoustic echo is weird, etc.
Conductor stands right in the middle of it all and can actually hear everything. A conductor can guide entire sections, or even easily pick out a specific player and get them to be louder, quieter, slow down, etc.
Each player in the symphony is paying attention to that person and they all take cues from them. It’s pretty wild.
Composers write the music, musicians play the music, and conductors wave around a stick to keep the musicians playing the composition at the right volume and tempo, and to make sure the different sections of the orchestra (the different groups of instruments) come in and out at the right times.
Try coordinating all that without a conductor and it’d be a crazy cacophonous mess…
Fun fact, if you’ve ever watched a string quartet performance, the first violinist basically conducts the other three with their body and bow while playing. Most people have some natural tempo, but keeping multiple people on track usually requires visual queues and well-timed breathing.
At the highest levels of proficiency, knowing “when to play” doesn’t rreeaallyy require a conductor.
An orchestra of professionals mutates into this crazy combined organism. A hive mind, with thousands of signals being generated and consumed among the members. Negotiations all over the place.
The conductor stands in the front not just because it’s convenient, but because they’re in the best relative position to understand what the audience will ultimately hear. If I’m in percussion, positionally I’m getting a skewed take on the relative dynamics of the piccolos. As a professional, they’d have a good “gut feel”, but thier ears are simply not in the right spot to know for sure. The conductors are.
The acoustics of a performance space are drastically different when the seats are full of meat, too.
The conductor is acting as the source of truth and feedback for that hive mind, from a physical position which gives them the best understanding of the complete sound being produced. While professionals CAN do a very passable job of distributing that work, it’s an additional burden and with an imperfect set of inputs. Having one person set the tone and act as that authority frees up capacity on the individuals to do thier best work.
It is the conductor.
I didn’t know orchestras had trains.
You’ve never heard of the Trans Siberian
RailroadOrchestra?Now I just want to listen to an orchestra play on a train.
I dunno, that sounds like a fast track to being the subject of a murder mystery. I think I’m good.
Oh there’s lots of trans people in orchestra
Is that where you switch from playing trombone to trumpet?
TBF sometimes the conductor is the original composer. Just obviously not usually if it’s a very successful piece, or if they’re dead.
The secret is in the practice before the concert. Over many weeks, months the conducter truly “sets the tone”, listening to each individual instrument, their interplay, the tempo, the balance. The conductor knows the weaknesses and strengths of the orchestra, and during the concert uses the stick to create accents, to control the speed, to make sure any hurdle is removed. It doesn’t have to be either a stick, some use just their hands.
This is rage bait
Players are playing instruments. Conductor is playing the players.
What composers are doing when they wave around that tiny stick is probably the same thing the rest of us are doing when we wave our tiny sticks around.
But for what conductors are doing, see the other answers here.
Setting the tempo and keeping the instruments all synchronised
I just recently attended to the Opera “The magic flute/Die Zauberflöte” so reading the replies here gave me a lot of answeres to questions I was to lazy to ask for myself.
Anyway, have soneone else here seen that play?
This explains is pretty well:
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20141029-what-do-conductors-actually-do
