Why are Conductors Paid?

Schickele Mix Episode #81

Part of The Schickele Mix Online Fan Archive

Premiere
1995-02-11
“Peter, are you ready?”
Do conductors own mirrors?

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[This is a machine-generated transcript, cleaned up and formatted as HTML. You can download the original as an .srt file.]

Thanks for your very generous outpouring of support during our classical countdown today.
We heard from Bitzburgers near and far about their favorite pieces of classical music and heard the top 80 or so throughout the day.
Now stay tuned for Schickele Mix.
Peter, are you ready?
Do conductors own mirrors? Here's the theme.
Hello there, I'm Peter Schickele, and this is Schickele Mix, a program dedicated to the proposition that all musics are created equal. Or as Duke Ellington put it, if it sounds good, it is good.
And it's a good idea to remember that our bills are paid by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,
by the National Endowment for the Arts, and by this fine radio station, where I'm provided with this fine studio filled with the finest audio equipment that they could find. Our program is distributed to the world beyond these walls and to WRI, Public Radio International.
The conductor Eugene Goossens once said, With a perfect orchestra, you can do what you like. You can draw a sort of immense emotional throb out of the air merely by curving your hand.
You can get brilliant waves of sound merely by a twist of the wrist. You can make sudden and absolute silence by a gesture. It is the most wonderful of all sensations that any man can conceive.
It really oughtn't to be allowed.
And in fact, everybody and his brother, and these days his sister, too, wants to be a conductor.
Given the opportunity, people have contributed hundreds or even thousands of dollars to symphony orchestras for the privilege of getting up on the podium and leading Stars and Stripes forever.
It's obviously a glorious experience, and it looks so easy. Today's show is called Why Are Conductors Paid?
And the subtitle of the show is And So Much, Too. Back in the 1970s, I wrote a kids' piece for the St. Louis Symphony.
The name of the work was A Zoo Called Earth. And the orchestra played it for the first time at the zoo. They actually did a whole concert at the St. Louis Zoo. And for one of the pieces on the program, not mine, I hasten to add, they put a chimpanzee up on the podium to conduct the orchestra.
Very smart move. Made the newspapers all over the country. But the question is, if an orchestra can play decently under the highly dubious leadership of a chimp
I mean, come on, conductors are supposed to have tails.
Then why have a conductor at all? Or at least a human conductor?
You could get the services of a star-quality chimp for a lot less. And you could probably save a bunch of money on other things, too, like limos. I'm sure that most chimps would be perfectly happy in a Honda Civic. And actually, if you go back a couple of centuries, most orchestras didn't have conductors, or at least separate conductors. They were led by some musician within the ensemble, very often the composer, or the main soloist, as in the big bands and jazz. The tradition of an orchestra in which everybody has an honest job, that is, everyone is actually playing an instrument, has been revived in the 20th century.
And the New York-based Orpheus Chamber Orchestra
is one of the most felicitous examples of that revival.
[No speech for 35s.]
A little contra dance by Mozart entitled The Lady's Triumph, performed by the conductorless Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.
That's a tongue twister.
So, okay, how do they do that?
Well, in the first place, it may be an orchestra, but it is a chamber orchestra.
For that piece, it's probably about 28 to 30 players, which is a lot compared to a string quartet, or even to a jazz big band, which might have 15, 18 players. But it's still a far cry from 100 Men and a Girl, or whatever that movie was called with Stokowski and Diana Durbin.
A full modern symphony orchestra is no longer all male, but it still often contains more than 100 players.
And 100 players take up a lot of acreage.
And the farther players are from each other, the harder it is to keep them together. Also, that kind of piece, the Mozart contra dance, and even each movement of a Mozart symphony, tends to stay pretty much in the same tempo.
So once you get it going, it bops along on its own, at least until the ending when there may be a bit of a slowing down.
Even Mendelssohn, conducting in the second quarter of the 19th century when separate conductors were well established, would often start faster movements off and then let the orchestra play on its own for long stretches. Which is what big band or swing band leaders usually did. In fact, with society bands, once the leader gets a number going, his duty often switches to hobnobbing with the prominent patrons who drift by the bandstand.
I talked to a musician once who used to play in society bands, and he said, if it was a smaller group anyway, that when the leader started chatting with people at the front of the bandstand, the band would sometimes play the same phrase over and over and over again until the leader noticed,
and then they'd seamlessly proceed.
Well, hello there! Good to see you again.
Well, of course I've noticed you dancing.
Certainly the loveliest couple on the floor, and I...
Hey! Hey, hey, hey, hey!
All right.
Ah, yes. Just trying to stay awake on the bandstand.
To tell that story, I had a little help from
Stefan Grappelli and a razor blade.
But even when the beat isn't as pronounced as it is in the Mozart piece,
and even when the piece is slower and the tempo isn't constant, a small orchestra with a good collective soul can do a fine job.
Here's the Orpheus gang again.
[No speech for 12s.]
Orpheus
[No speech for 105s.]
Sorry to cut that off there. That's the kind of place that would have made Beethoven get up out of bed and go downstairs and resolve the chord.
Charles Nyditch was the soloist accompanied by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, note conductor, in the first movement of Weber's concertino for clarinet and orchestra in E-flat. Beautiful playing. Now, in terms of ensemble and togetherness, it is a recording, so we don't know what kind of editing might have been done, but they are good.
And not just in ensemble, either.
They play with terrific, terrific spirit.
And that brings us to the...
Man.
You know, I'm not even going to answer that.
I don't know how this number gets out, but every time I answer the phone when I'm on the air,
I end up wishing that I hadn't.
Okay.
Actually, maybe whoever it was just wanted to know who I am. I'm Peter Schickele.
The program is Schickele Mix from PRI, Public Radio International.
Now, I have heard the whole big New York Philharmonic play the Overture to Candide, which is a tricky little piece,
without a conductor.
They did that on an anniversary concert as a tribute to the late Leonard Bernstein.
But it is in the nature of a stunt. It's a piece they've all played many times, and in the long run, playing without a conductor would require much more rehearsal time. But actually, you know, we're talking about
why conductors are paid, and keeping the orchestra together is only the beginning. The conductor helps give a performance a real personality, which he or she does by controlling, or at least coordinating, many different aspects of performance.
Let's start with tempo.
Most pieces, in the standard repertoire at least, don't have precise indications about how many beats to the minute there are.
The metronome wasn't invented until Beethoven's day, and even after that, many composers felt that using metronome markings encouraged a mechanical adherence to the beat,
rather than freer, breathing performances.
Wagner gave up using metronome markings in his later pieces, and many people feel that Beethoven's metronome markings might have been a little different had he not lost his hearing. And besides, is the composer always right, or even consistent?
I know sometimes that composers, including myself, play pieces at different tempos at different times in our life.
So anyway, the conductor decides the tempo, and it can vary tremendously from one conductor to the next. Listen to these two performances of the opening of the Funeral March
from Beethoven's Eroica Symphony.
Beethoven's Eroica Symphony
[No speech for 40s.]
Roger Norrington, and then Otto Klemperer, an excerpt from Beethoven's Eroica.
You may have noticed, by the way, a pitch difference between the two as well.
One of them is pitched lower than the other using authentic instruments.
The A that they tuned to in the 18th century was about a half-step lower than it is now.
Anyway, Klemperer's performance of this one movement alone is almost four and a half minutes longer than Norrington's, and the feel of the piece is quite different. It's even possible, and allowed, to like both.
But there's a lot more than tempo to decide.
There's balance, articulation, and dynamics, loud and soft, to deal with.
Okay, now we're really going to get down here. We're going to hear the beginning of Mozart's Paris Symphony, number 31, as played by seven, count them seven, different conductors. And you will see, or anyway hear, that no two of them are alike.
We'll start out with Günther Kerr with the Mainz Chamber Orchestra.
[No speech for 25s.]
Okay, now there are five things I'd like to ask you to focus on as we listen to these different recordings.
The first is tempo, how fast it is.
The second is the spaces, if any, between the long notes at the beginning.
The third is the articulation of the... is that last note short or long.
The fourth is the repeat of the long notes at the beginning.
Now in that second part, when the strings in most of the orchestra are going... there are some horns, some of the winds are going...
Now some of these recordings, you can't hear that at all. Some of them you can hear it very slightly, one of them anyway, it's quite clear.
And then five, the dynamics at the end of that second eighth note phrase.
Let's listen to the care again.
He does not separate the long notes at the beginning.
The ends of the figures are long.
You can't really hear the one in the repeat of the opening at all. And there is no dynamic fluctuation in the eighth note phrase there at the end.
[No speech for 24s.]
That was Günter Kehr.
Strings weren't quite together there in a couple of places.
Here's Jane Glover conducting the London Mozart Players. It's slower, big sound, lots of timpani, no real spaces between the long notes, long ends of the soft phrases.
You can barely hear the one, bum, bum, bum, bum, and she does a crescendo and a diminuendo,
getting louder and softer on the ending eighth note phrase. Okay, next comes Leinsdorf.
The tempo is faster, there's less timpani, there are almost no spaces between those opening
notes.
All the notes at the end of the phrases are long.
And there's almost no one bum, bum, bum, bum, although I think it's a little bit more than
Jane Glover's.
And then there's no particular dynamic change in the last eighth note phrase.
Okay, now here comes Ormandy.
I'm doing this fast, folks, so you can keep the previous one in your mind. Ormandy is the fastest of them all. And in the repeated notes at the beginning, he does put some separation between them. All the ending notes are long in the little soft phrase.
Still almost no one bum, bum, bum, bum, you can't hear, but you have to hunt for it.
And then at the end, no dynamic change on the eighth notes. Now, along comes Sir Thomas Beecham.
We've got some separation between the opening notes, but he, on the second little group
of figures there, makes the end of the second phrase and the fourth phrase shortish.
I'm exaggerating a little bit, not much, one bum, bum, bum, bum, hardly at all on that.
But he does make a bit of a crescendo and a diminuendo on that last eighth note thing.
Now, John Elliott Gardner uses authentic instruments, which means that the pitch is going to be noticeably lower.
There are spaces between those opening notes.
The trumpets are very loud.
They almost obscure the 16th note run.
Not obscure, but it's much louder than in the other recordings.
And on the, the first one is long and the second one short.
We do hear the one bum, bum, bum, bum, a little bit more.
And then in the eighth notes in the end, he makes quite a crescendo.
And, finally, here's Nicholas Harnancourt, very different from the others.
In the first place, it's the slowest of all the versions.
And then in the repeated notes at the beginning, there's not only a separation between them,
but each one has a decrescendo, a bum, bum, bum.
It's very dramatic.
The last notes are very long.
It's very romantic.
It's sort of milked for all the emotion possible. There's lots of timpani.
And the repeat there, one bum, bum, bum, bum, is very clear, I think the clearest of all of them.
I don't care about that, I'm not making opinions here. And then, finally, there is no crescendo at the end. It's a subito forte, a sudden loudness, when it gets into the section that we fade out
on.
Lots of stuff for a conductor to think about. Now, what's that?
You know, I can hear you thinking.
I know what you're thinking.
You want to know what my favorite is, right? Well, I don't know. I will say, when it comes to tempo, that the Ormandy seems too fast to me.
And the Harnancourt seems too slow. I think I probably like the Leinsdorf in terms of tempo.
There's a recording the Harnancourt made of one of the Vivaldi, the Tempest concerto, that I just love the way he did this sort of over-the-top kind of dynamics and stuff.
But you know, I don't think I'm going to get into this.
You know, I know some of these people, I think I'm going to move on here.
I will tell you one thing I don't like.
It's sort of like a pet peeve, and I just want to get it off my chest. You know, it's often, if not usually, a natural thing to slow down a bit, retard at the end
of a movement.
But I hate it when the conductor pauses and withholds the very last note beyond when you
expect it.
You know how annoying it is when somebody hands you something? He says, here, take this, and then just as you're about to take it, he pulls his hand back so you can't grab it.
Annoying, right?
Well, as far as I'm concerned, this is the musical equivalent of that mean-spirited behavior.
Bach's fourth Brandenburg Concerto, and no, I don't think I'll mention the conductor.
I've met him. He seems like a perfectly nice guy, and not mean-spirited at all. But I still don't like that form of musicus interruptus.
Now, if you like process, which I do. I love artists and writers and composers' sketchbooks, then you'd love to sit in on a real working rehearsal with a good conductor.
Their styles vary enormously, but if they are good, they succeed one way or the other in inspiring the musicians to a performance with spirit and personality.
Beecham was extremely laid back.
Here's about five and a half minutes of him rehearsing Haydn's Symphony No. 104 with the
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.
Now, this tape was not made with the idea of commercial release in mind.
This is what rehearsals are really like.
The opening of the Allegro.
Well, the first violins only matter.
If they'll make the dotted notes, not quite so dotted, we're never quite together on those
four notes.
That's it.
That's right.
That's right now.
Mr. Thomas, excuse me.
I think it would help in that second bar if we cut our D short so that that E-natural
came so that we didn't cover the E-natural. Well, then, I have to do it in all.
I have to do it in the second bar, I have to do it in the violas and the cellos, basses.
Make it a minimus.
Set of a tire, set of what?
It's a dotted minimus. Make it a minimus.
Have you got that?
We've got squeaks on the record in front of your seat.
Second bar. We'll try a minimus instead of a dotted minimus and we'll change into the basses.
See how that works. Thank you, Mr. Danger.
We'll try that.
Just try this out.
All right.
A few other points, letter A, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. The ninth bar, nine, ten, eleven, twelve.
Just a little more swagger from horns and trumpets.
Just those four bars.
It helps. It brightens the thing up a bit.
B we have the same thing.
I haven't marked anything though, have I?
I'd better mark it for you. That fane of yours isn't really convincing, is it?
It's all right, Tina, it ought to be so that's all right, Tina, it ought to be so that's all right.
As you come again, come somewhere, we'd better take the old treatment, haven't we? Yes.
We ought to be at that time.
Now if you please, letter B. Well, that's what I've just marked, so that ought to be all right.
Nine bars before C. This C sharp marked fortissimo and the following D sharp as I heavily extend you again, wrong, dead, that will help that passage too.
Before D, one, two, three, four, five, six.
I want to hear this passage. Six bars before D. I may have to mark up the flukenobo a little.
Don't play it, don't play it.
Now six bars before D, if you please.
It ought to come down again, each time, yes, that's why I'm not hearing it so well.
Six once again before D. Sir Thomas Beecham, who was noted for saying
he hated rehearsals, but actually he obviously rehearsed, and you can see there what we heard in the different openings to the Paris symphony too, that usually a composer, he just wrote forte loud for the whole orchestra, and sometimes that doesn't make things come out the way even he obviously intended it, so you have to make adjustments. This can vary even in the hall, it can have to change because you're in a different auditorium than you were playing last week.
Now there are conductors who are also good pianists or good violinists, but they don't tend to shine in the vocal department, or to put it another way, it's the gesture that
counts.
Here's Beecham rehearsing Mozart's opera, The Abduction from the Seraglio.
It's very romantic and sentimental and wistful, sounds like a post-mortem in the cup final.
Now, diminuendos.
Sir Thomas Beecham, blowing his chance to be on the next Three Tenors album.
As a contrast, I'd like to play a few minutes of a rehearsal with Herbert von Karajan. It's in German, but you can get a good feel of how different the atmosphere is, not antagonistic,
but very concentrated.
And Herbie the K was one of the fastest talkers I've ever heard. The piece is the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and I'll just give you a smattering of what he's going to say here.
Stop, stop, one more thing, there must be a great difference between the notes with staccato dots and the others. The staccato notes are too long and the others are far too short.
Later he says, suddenly the song breaks out and the rest is correctly marked. Be careful of the upbeat.
The main thing is beauty.
The battle is half-lost if people hear rough entries, intoxicating sound.
It shouldn't be tremendously loud, but it must be full, et cetera, a lot of technical
stuff.
Long, long, long, one bar before please, off at once when you have made your entry. And he ends up saying, wonderful, very fine, that's it, impressive but beautiful, whatever
that means.
He ends up saying, wonderful, very fine, et cetera, a lot of technical stuff, but it
must be full, et cetera, a lot of technical stuff, but it must be full, et cetera, a lot of technical stuff, but it must be full, et cetera, a lot of technical stuff, but it must
be full, et cetera, a lot of technical stuff, but it must be full, et cetera, a lot of technical stuff, but it must be full, et cetera, a lot of technical stuff, but it must be full, et
cetera, a lot of technical stuff, but it must be full, et cetera, a lot of technical stuff, but it must be full, et cetera, a lot of technical stuff, but it must be full, et cetera, a lot
of technical stuff, but it must be full, et cetera, a lot of technical stuff, but it must harmonic, charismatic, sometimes autocratic, extremely intelligent guy.
As a matter of fact, somebody I know who works with the Cleveland Orchestra told me that when somebody who works in the administration there was told that von Karajan had died, this person said, well I suppose that means he's only going to be doing recordings from now on. Now the thing about rehearsing, I can't stand it. I am not going to answer that. I'm going to go right on. This is Peter
Schickele. The show is Schickele Mix from PRI Public Radio International. Why are
conductors paid? They're paid and paid a lot because good ones are worth their weight in gold. Especially these days they have to be good musicians, good diplomats, good administrators, good public relations people, and if at all possible good sports. And like the CEO of a corporation they have to take the blame when the results aren't good. Sometimes no matter how accomplished the leader and the musicians are they simply don't have enough rehearsal time. Years ago before the Iron Curtain came down I talked to a conductor who worked in an
Eastern European country. He said, circuitously, that the bad side of working with a completely state-run orchestra was that it was extremely difficult to get rid of dead wood. But the good side was that if he needed more time to rehearse or record something he simply took it. No problem. Very few, if any, non-pop outfits in this country can do that.
Gil Evans was obviously a fine musician but he also obviously didn't always get the amount of rehearsal time he needed. This cut from the Miles Davis Porgy and Bess album is a terrific chart. I love it. But with some of the tricky rhythms the musicians are hanging on for dear life. And there are some places where they're obviously supposed to be together and they're not. Listen especially to the ends of the phrases in the first section.
[No speech for 25s.]
Listen to the end of this one.
[No speech for 173s.]
Great piece by Gil Evans based on Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. Great trumpet
work from Miles Davis. And one of the things that's great about that cut is that as I say the musicians are hanging on for dear life and reading some of those rhythms but the piece still cooks like mad. Now there is in my mind no doubt that Gil Evans would have preferred the band to be together on
those phrases. But that doesn't mean that everybody wants machine-like precision all the time. Here's Villa Lobos conducting an excerpt from his own Bacchianus Brazilianus number five. The solo cellist is quite free with the rhythm. It's not always being played exactly as written. But my guess and it's only a guess is that the composer liked it like that. It makes it feel more like
improvised music.
[No speech for 56s.]
Villa Lobos conducting his Bacchianus Brazilianus number five or part of it with cellists from the orchestra de la radio diffusion francaise. You know excuse me you know there was a time when attacks and endrances in which all the instruments are exactly together were not only rare they weren't even necessarily thought of as desirable. Just as Duke Ellington and Charlie Mingus often got their groups to revel in a sort of loose slightly chaotic highly sensuous sound. Well I guess I can't put it off any longer. It's it's confession time here at the Sound Sanctuary. One of the nicest compliments I ever got was from a musician whose playing I had corrected during a rehearsal and afterwards she said boy you've got x-ray ears. Well maybe sometimes but certainly not always. In fact I'm amazed at how much I'm capable of concentrating on one part of a musical texture to the complete exclusion of another part. There is one PDQ Bach piece in which I didn't notice that the keyboard which was practically the only instrument playing at that point played a minor chord instead of a major chord. Huge difference. I didn't notice it until the record company sent me the edited tape to approve. As soon as I heard that tape it jumped out at me wrong wrong wrong. Why hadn't I noticed it at the session? To this day I can't understand that but we had to do some very fancy footwork to correct it. At least in that case we did manage to splice in a correct version in the case of the cantata knock knock there are a couple of wrong notes that I never noticed until it was too late and we couldn't do anything to save that situation. So they're they're simply immortalized. That is until Deutsche
Grammophon gets around to recording the complete works of PDQ Bach. But I was the conductor and I have to accept the blame. So you see being a conductor is not oh oh all right all right all right I give up. Hello oh hello sir yes well I I usually do keep it locked while I'm on the air yeah. You what? But sir the show's almost over there's not really well no you're right about that.
Yes as the station manager you do have more of a say in this than I do but I didn't even know you wanted to be a conductor. Well it's just that it's it's
late you know. What? Right next door in the big studio? An orchestra now? Well yeah I can I can turn the mics on from in here. And well when you see the red light go on you can start the piece. Oh yes it will be broadcast live to the world in living stereo. I'll just hang up here and you wait for the light okay?
Man you know sometimes I lose touch and think that this is my show. Well here it
goes.
[No speech for 30s.]
Well, that was some of the least together playing I've ever heard. But anyway, it was...
Hello?
You're welcome, sir.
It sounded... Well, I've never heard anything like it. What was that piece called? All the Way Around and Back?
Well, what do you know?
Yes, goodbye, sir.
Well, it turns out that that piece was by Charles Ives, so maybe the conducting wasn't so bad after all.
As a matter of fact, when Ives wrote that piece, they probably would have had to use
four conductors to perform it.
Imagine four conductors conducting one piece.
And
that was it.
That's Schickele Mix for this week.
Our program is made possible with funds provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, by the National Endowment for the Arts, and by this radio station and its members. And not only that, our program, when it conducts itself appropriately, is distributed by PRI,
Public Radio International.
We'll tell you in a moment how you can get an official playlist of all the music on today's
program with album numbers and everything.
Just refer to the program number.
This is program number 81.
And this is Peter Schickele saying goodbye and reminding you that it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that certain je ne sais quoi.
You're looking good.
See you next week.