A friend recently asked me, “How do you hear everything the orchestra plays?” I’m going to interpret this as asking how a conductor can hear the sound of the orchestra in enough detail to allow him to change it. Change that could be anything from mundane tasks like spotting wrong notes in rehearsal, to long-term goals that only take place over the course of four or five seasons, such as building a distinctive “home sound” for the orchestra by influencing its style of playing.
From a very young age, we musicians are trained to hear music inside our heads with ferocious accuracy. There are many systems of training around the world, but they all work towards musical literacy, which basically means being able to read music and write it down. When I was at Cambridge, the aural tests were infamous, and so difficult that they bordered on the absurd. For the dictation exam, a digital metronome would issue four ugly beats before a professor played a wild splatter of notes on the piano. We were required to write down the splatter after hearing it three times. Another test (much easier) was writing down all four parts of a Bach hymn played in similar fashion. After that, it’s not so hard to hear when there’s a wrong note in the middle of a wind chord. Similarly growing up singing in choirs gives many musicians extraordinary advantages. Listening to those around you builds a good sense of intonation, and there is nothing like regular singing at sight to build the inner workings of a young musical brain.
When it comes to conducting, the story always begins with studying the score. We spend countless hours (many more than you probably imagine) reading every instrumental line of the music, playing parts of it on the piano, listening to many different recordings of it, and imagining what we want it to sound like. Spending that much time inventing a kind of sonic-blueprint for a piece gives you the conviction you need to persuade the orchestra your interpretation is good, but it also means you know every note. Once you know the score that deeply, you can hear how the orchestra plays it with great clarity.
Last week we hosted four composers from out of town, holding rehearsal-workshops and performing their music as part of the EarShot program run by the American Composers Orchestra. It was a fantastic experience. Between rehearsals the four met with more experienced, mentor composers for advice on what worked well in their pieces, and what could be improved upon. The suggestions were nearly always about how to write more idiomatically for the orchestra. Occasionally a composer had written something that was difficult for a certain instrument to play, but most of the adjustments were to do with orchestral balance. Balancing an orchestra means making sure the audience can hear whatever they are supposed to, all the way through piece. So if there is a beautiful oboe solo, we don’t want it to be covered by a brass chord that is too loud, or when there is a cello solo, we don’t want the brass to be too loud, or if there is a melody for all the strings together, we don’t want the brass to be too loud…(get the idea?) In reality, a lot of this responsibility falls to the conductor in rehearsal, but that’s only because so many composers, even some who are beloved and famous, are so bad at writing well-balanced orchestral music. Watching our composers grapple with this issue was fascinating for me because I realised they didn’t have a particularly reliable audio template in their minds of how an orchestra actually soundsin real life, as opposed to how the notes look on paper. I remember how hard that was for me when I was a composer, so it was interesting to come back to the issue now as a conductor who hears these sounds in real life all the time. That mental audio template comes from spending hours around great orchestras, listening to them rehearse, noticing what makes them play better (and worse), and becoming accu what good balance sounds like from both the concert hall seats and the podium. The sound of the Minnesota Orchestra is seared into my brain from my five formative years working with them. Composers also need lots of time around orchestras so they can develop reliable instincts. To answer my friend’s question another way, being able to hear each instrument of the orchestra comes from listening to as many orchestras as possible for as long as possible.
Something very odd happens to our hearing when we are under pressure. I’m sure you can remember times when you haven’t heard something because your mind was elsewhere. There are passages of music that are more stressful to perform than others. For conductors these are often rhythmical transitions in which the music has to change speed or metre; sometimes we worry about them going wrong. The conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen told me that he used to get so stressed-out during certain transitions that afterwards he couldn’t tell whether they had gone well. The physical tension in his body had shut off his ability to listen as usual. I’m always amazed by how little I remember about the sound of an orchestra after the first rehearsal as a guest. It’s a different story in the second rehearsal when everyone relaxes much more. Our associate conductor, Nathan Aspinall, recently told me that he hears the orchestra most clearly in rehearsal when he sits on a stool, since he’s more relaxed than when standing. I found that fascinating, so I tried it at the next rehearsal and it had the opposite effect. We have to figure these things out for ourselves.
One of the reasons children need a musical education is because it teaches them to listen to each other, a skill that enriches every activity in which it is present. So, it might seem a little trite, but the best answer to my friend’s question, “How do you hear everything the orchestra plays”, is: “by listening”.
Reprinted with the permission of The Florida Times-Union. Originally published at http://www.jacksonville.com/entertainmentlife/20180429/conducting-electricity-hearing-entire-symphony-takes-years-of-practice