It always feels strange once the orchestra stops playing annd its the composer that bows for the applause.
- 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?
It is the conductor.
TBF sometimes the conductor is the original composer. Just obviously not usually if it’s a very successful piece, or if they’re dead.
I didn’t know orchestras had trains.
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).
Players are playing instruments. Conductor is playing the players.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Setting the tempo and keeping the instruments all synchronised
This explains is pretty well:
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20141029-what-do-conductors-actually-do
