On Conducting and Leadership

YaYa said to me the other day, “Wouldn’t it be interesting if the conductor of the symphony or your choir heard the audience coughing and shifting around and got frustrated, turned around, and stomped his foot on the podium like this?”  She stood up, hunched up her back, clenched her fists and screwed up her face into an expression of comical rage.

I giggled immediately, because visions of various tyrannical conductors I’ve played and sung under came popping into my head.  Although I’ve never actually seen them turn on an audience like YaYa was suggesting, I certainly have a large collection of vivid memories of crazy things conductors have done in rehearsals and at concerts to whip the ensemble in shape, and a lot of those memories involved some very testy and tempermental conductors loosing their temper silently, expressing extreme rage at how things were going with their faces, and in some instances, leaping over rows of chairs to get in a musician’s face to get their attention and get them doing what they needed to be doing.  (The leaping conductor was actually pretty old and frail, so it was pretty amazing how he zoomed across all those chairs and people).

I explained to YaYa how she was really pretty close to the truth, how conductors have a tough job, and how sometimes they have to be a little mean and scary and sometimes tow the line and stick to their own idea to get all those singers and instrumentalists working together and on the same page.  And I affirmed the fact that conductors definitely don’t like a noisy, shifty, coughing audience.

YaYa’s eyes lit up, and she said, “I think I know exactly how that works! I can just imagine all those people having their own ideas and wanting to tell everyone else their ideas all at once, and it would be a loud and crazy mess!  Like when we are playing with all the neighbors and making a play, and everyone is excited about it and wants to tell everyone else their ideas.  It’s a lot of work to tell them to hold their ideas in and get everyone organized.”

She’s a wise girl, that YaYa.  For the record, she’s the oldest of the neighbor kids who get together and make “shows” for all the grown ups, so the “organizing” (some might less delicately refer to it as bossing around)  often falls to her and her good friend from the top of the hill.