The Silent Musician: Why Conducting Matters

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In addition to all of the musical aspects of conducting, there is so much psychology, physicality and crucial attention to detail – among many other things – wrapped up into every second on the podium. However, philosopher of music Julian Dodd claims that it could have been either an ironic comment on effort and failure or intended for comedic effect. It is with great joy and admirationthat I confess that this is the first book on conducting that I have read since the introduction to the Handbook of Conducting by Hermann Scherchen published in 1933 that not only finally bears resemblance to who and what a conductor actually is but puts into very readable and eloquent English prose exactly who and/or what a conductor is and/or isn’t. This led him to realise that “silence was not the absence of sound but was the unintended operation of my nervous system and the circulation of my blood”.

This truly underlines the complicated business of performing what a composer wrote honestly and is the constant challenge we as performers face.A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Earth, Culture, Capital, Travel and Autos, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

Humour can be a most valuable tool in creating and maintaining a positive atmosphere, and it is a very effective way of defusing tension. Between the few notes of the composition, and indeed during those notes, we hear the stereo sounds of a babbling water source.

You’ll often see H bars used to indicate that the musician shouldn’t play for multiple bars which is known as multirests. However, I see the limits of the system in which he practiced and under which his legacy has been appraised. He has a PhD in Music from the University of Surrey, and he has composed music that has been played in three different countries. Giovanni DiLiberto used electroencephalography (EEG), an electrophysiological technique that measures electrical signals from the brain via electrodes placed on the surface of the scalp, to measure brain signals taken from 21 trained musicians.

This introspection is familiar, of course, whenever we participate in a moment’s silence to remember the dead. Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page.Put a hundred cosmopolitan players into an orchestra and as a group their national characteristics still reveal themselves with all the stereotypical differences of that particular country’s identity. Photograph: Sim Canetty-Clarke ‘When music is heard live, there’s an intensity that no recordings can replicate’ … Mark Wigglesworth. That which, within our present-day music, most nearly approaches the essential of the art, is the Rest and the Hold (Pause). If relied upon repeatedly, and never in haste, any chapter or the entire text will provide a lifetime of rejuvenated learning and self-revelation.

A healthy mix of authenticity, tradition, and spontaneity is better than being a slave to any one of them. The EEG recordings from the study showed that, when imagining music, volunteers’ brain activity was slightly delayed and had reversed polarity – peaking and troughing in reverse – when compared to the same activity in response to heard music.In the Book of Rites, Confucius speaks of the “Three Withouts” - “music without sound, rites without embodiment, and mourning without garb” - as representing true mastery of each discipline. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. The motivation behind Scott’s 1941 concert is unclear; the audience, apparently, found it amusing and giggled throughout the performance. Despite being, quite literally, ‘ambient music’, it was the polar opposite of muzak: an attempt to heighten the listener’s awareness rather than an aural anaesthesia. Through musical projects, Tangram seeks to ‘cross the China-West divide, and explore the richness of diasporic experience’.