Conducting Electricity

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

Continue readingHow can a conductor hear everything the orchestra plays?

Earlier this month a fascinating article appeared in the New York Times entitled “How Do You Teach People to Love Difficult Music”. Making an example of one of my favourite composers, György Ligeti, it outlines a problem familiar to many musicians: how do we share our love of something that is really complicated, but also fascinating, thrilling and beautiful. So often audiences hear only the complicated, developing an aversion to anything written after 1900. The author, Ryan Ebright, argues that we tend to make the mistake of trying to describe how the music works technically instead of focusing on what inspired it. For example, Ligeti’s music may be extraordinarily dense and sticky, but it’s frequently inspired by familiar, relatable things: “We hear his childhood amid the

Continue readingMore thoughts on audiences and new music