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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio.
Hey and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh.
There's Chuck.
There's Jerry.
And you put the three of us together.
It's Sika Bassoon, a tuba and an oboe in her mouth will pump out some stuff you should
know.
Bupa.
Two plays what?
I play tuba.
Okay.
I guess I'll play the oboe that leaves Jerry with a bassoon.
Okay.
I think it's fair.
That sounds right.
When I think Jerry, I think Bassoon, in vice versa.
That's right.
So we need to thank Livia for this one because she did a bang up job.
And we need to thank BBC Music Magazine and Andrew Green because Livia and us got a
lot of help from Andrew Green's primer on conductors.
Yeah.
And this one was my idea because I thought you could just saw it wasn't from seeing the
movie Tar, even though I did see that.
I saw that in the theater a while ago when it was out.
But it kind of hit me then even like what is such a weird job that I know nothing about.
And what are they doing up there and can anyone just get up there and wave their arms around?
Sometimes from what I hear, yes, there are some people doing that out there.
But I found this thoroughly enjoyable to research and hopefully talk about.
Yeah, good pick.
I'm not sure I ever would have gotten to this one.
So good job.
All right.
So I think you're probably in the majority of people who don't really understand what
a conductor does aside from standing up there and waving their arms.
I know I was in that camp until fairly recently.
But the stuff you see conductors doing, which is again conducting a symphony waving their
arms, there's a lot of method to that seeming madness.
And what you're seeing when you see that, a conductor conducting a symphony, is the
culmination of a lot of other work that's done behind the scenes before the performance
that the conductor does.
Like they really earn their money from what I can tell.
Yeah, absolutely.
And just to be clear, I'm not such a rube that I was like, what are they just waving
the arms around?
Because I grew up in choir singing, tenor in the choir.
And so I certainly had my share of choral conductors doing that stuff at me.
So I get what's going on there.
But let's just try to make a joke.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, I don't think anybody thought you were a rube.
Well, you never know.
Maybe a new listener who knows, but you'd win them over by the end of the episode, guaranteed.
I'm not a rube, I'm a tenor.
You're a tenor, huh?
I've never really been much of a singer.
Even though I sang in a band, but as a reminder, band broke up and reformed without me.
Oh, man.
Yeah.
One of the saddest Josh stories.
But also one of the most telling, isn't it?
No.
Should we go back in time, though?
Please.
So when you first joined that band?
Yeah.
I'm going to take another shot at it.
No, we're going to go back in time to tell you about the history of conducting.
And this is sort of prehistory stuff because conducting an orchestra to perform a symphonic
orchestral piece wasn't really a thing early on as far as using a conductor.
It started with what I was talking about, which was choral music and vocal music.
And we're talking, you know, in the early century CE, there were people that would keep
a beat and stomp a foot or wave their arms around to get a choir on point.
Yeah.
Because one of the really important things to remember throughout this episode is that when
you're playing music by yourself, you have to keep on tempo.
But as you add other people, whether you're playing music or singing, as you add other people,
they have to keep on tempo too, but you all have to keep on the same tempo.
And it really does help to have one person who's keeping the tempo for everybody else.
And that became apparent very early on.
And that does seem to be kind of like the predecessor to the conductor.
But it wasn't until the, I think, 18th and 19th century, yeah, that kind of transition
between the two where what we think of as a conductor today kind of came along.
Yeah.
I mean, it was, you know, choir's got bigger.
Orchestra's got bigger.
You know, early on you might have, you know, a six piece ensemble or a four piece.
Or maybe, you know, it would even climb as high as like, you know, 15 or 20.
And in those days, you would have somebody that was actually playing in that orchestra,
keeping the time, a lot of times it was a violinist.
And they would use their bow to tap things out or wave the bow around a little.
I think that's probably due to the fact that a bow, you can see even when you're sitting
down, you can hold it up and people can see it.
Also a violinist, a violin is very small.
It would, you know, you wouldn't ask the tuba player, even though the tuba is the bass
and the bass is the beat.
That would be you.
It'd be hard to like keep the beat and play the tuba at the same, like indicate the
beat to the rest of your orchestra while playing the tuba.
I would think it'd be hard to conduct while playing the violin too.
Well, you're not doing it while you're playing because the violin is an always playing.
Okay.
You know what I mean?
I think it's like during the time where the, like, because they're not waving their
bow around and also playing at the same time that's impossible.
Okay.
Let's get away back to you and go see ourselves.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's someone they've got a bow in their hand and they're playing the violin and they're
certainly not able to wave it around at the same time.
All right.
Here's your five bucks.
Okay.
Yeah.
Let's go forward.
Yeah, let's go forward.
It does seem then, yes, to have started with the violinists who apparently did conduct
while they weren't playing.
Also the keyboardist, whoever was playing like the piano, the harpsichord or something
like that, they might be doing it too.
But the reason why even as impressive as it is for somebody to be in the actual orchestra,
playing music and then also conducting whether they're playing at the moment or not, it's
pretty impressive.
But one of the reasons it was possible is because technically speaking or comparatively speaking,
the music that was being made until the early 19th century was fairly predictable.
Like it stayed on a general tempo, it didn't have all sorts of sudden surprising changes
and twists and turns.
So you could actually keep an orchestra together while you were playing the violin or in between
the moments you were playing the violin.
It wasn't until Beethoven came along that the real need for a person whose entire job it
was was to conduct everybody else playing the music that really became a necessary role.
Yeah, absolutely.
In the classical era, not classical music is the broad term, but classical with a capital
C, which is to say the period from 1750 to 1830.
A lot of times you had composers that would step in and conduct their own orchestras.
Mozart certainly did things like that.
These were as orchestras were growing.
I mentioned the size of the orchestra's being maybe small chamber groups and things like
that.
As they got bigger and bigger and you had 30, 40, 50 people in an orchestra, it wouldn't
do to have that violinist.
The composer themselves would lead the orchestra.
Like you said, once Beethoven came along and brought his really groundbreaking compositions
that they needed a conductor.
A lot of times it was still the composer, but then came the idea of someone that didn't
compose it, is not playing in it, and that the only job they have is to direct the orchestra.
Yeah, and there's a great story that seems to be true and accurate that when at the
debut of Beethoven's ninth symphony, which is the ode to joy, which is the part of which
is playing when they open the vault and die hard.
So does that snowed for I think.
He wanted to conduct it himself, but he had fallen deaf by then.
Well he was Beethoven.
This is his ninth.
He'd already made a name for himself even during his lifetime.
So they let him.
But they had another conductor, the real conductor, that the orchestra was instructed to follow,
because Beethoven was not able to keep on time and conduct the symphony correctly.
So apparently when the whole thing ended, he was still conducting, and somebody had to
tap him on the arm and be like, turn around, the audience is applauding for you right now.
Yeah, that is, that scene is captured very well in the Beethoven movie.
In Immortable Loved, the great movie about Beethoven, Gary Oldman.
Oh yeah, is it good?
Yeah, it's good.
I haven't seen it in a long time, but I loved it back then.
And also, I was able, it was lucky enough.
I was so broke back when I was living in New Jersey back in the 90s.
How broke were you?
So broke that the only way to get into Carnegie Hall, not practice, to see Beethoven's
ninth symphony performed by the New Yorkville harmonic, was to hand out the...
Now we're later.
No, no, not the bulletin, just the program for the performance.
Playbill?
Not like the playbill, somehow got on that little volunteer staff.
Oh nice.
They're like, you can hand out these playbills and then you can stay and see the performance.
And so I got to see the Ode to Joy at the Carnegie Hall, with a full German choir and
it was just like unbelievable.
So you go, hey, what's that guy doing waving his hands around?
I did.
But let's get serious though, Chuck.
Okay.
We said that Beethoven was the reason why conducting became a necessity, because
the music he was making was so complex that it required way more people, like you said,
and the more people playing, the more you need a conductor.
And so it was actually more about just keeping tempo as it had been when you had the violinist
like waving their bow or some dude smack in his foot on the ground.
Even before then, it was about like actually interpreting the music because the more dense
and expressive and sophisticated the score, the harder it is to write out exactly what every
single instrument is supposed to be doing at every single moment in exactly what way.
So there was a lot of interpretation left and that role fell on the conductor.
And here we finally reach what a conductor really does.
This is like the foundation, the basis of their job is interpreting the score and then
getting the orchestra to produce the sounds that meet that interpretation.
Yeah, exactly.
You know, even something written by Beethoven or Wagner or something, it can be pretty
detailed.
But like you said, there's no way to indicate every single nuance that comes through
in an orchestral performance by writing it down on paper.
And that's where interpretation can come from.
In fact, I believe it was Hayden and Mozart both at times didn't indicate tempo like super
clearly for things.
And they had the expectation that, hey, the musician should get in there and understand
the spirit of what's happening.
And they will instinctively kind of go to what the right speed is.
So that's where interpretation comes in.
You certainly not to change the actual notes, but there's so much more beyond the actual
notes that goes into a performance.
Right.
Right.
And there was, I guess, I think Mallor had a second symphony where he noted that trombones,
violins and violins should only play if necessary to prevent the chorus from deflating.
And I mean, who's going to decide whether the chorus is deflating or not?
The conductor.
So as that music became more and more sophisticated, the need for a conductor became greater and
greater.
And I say we take a break and we'll rejoin the conducting profession afterward in about
the 19th century.
Right.
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