The Ethics of Orchestral Conducting

Theory of Conducting – Chapter 1 The Ethics of Orchestral Conducting In a changing culture and a society that adopts and discards values (or anti-values) with a speed similar to that of fashion as related to dressing or speech, each profession must find out the roots and principles that provide an unchanging point of reference, those principles to which we are obliged to go back again and again in order to maintain an adequate direction and, by carrying them out, allow oneself to be fulfilled. Orchestral Conducting is not an exception. For that reason, some ideas arise once and again all along this work. Since their immutability guarantees their continuance. It is known that Music, as an art of performance, causally interlinks three persons: first and closely interlocked: the composer and the performer; then, eventually, the listener. The composer and his piece of work require the performer and make him come into existence. When the performer plays the piece, that is to say when he makes it real, perceptive existence is granted and offers it to the comprehension and even gives the listener the possibility of enjoying it. The composer needs the performer so that, by executing the piece, his work means something for the listener. Therefore, the performer has no self-existence but he is performer due to the previous existence of the piece and the composer, to whom he owes to be a performer. There exist a communication process between the composer and the performer that, as all those processes involves a sender, a message and a receiver. The composer is the sender of the message, the message is the musical piece coded in the score, and the receiver is the performer. The characteristic difficulty of this process is that the score is not the musical piece itself; it is not even its mirrored reflection or a scale model, like a mockup but it is the result of a complex transfer. The musical work, an essentially dynamic being that takes place in a temporal-acoustic space, is translated in the score as an incomplete and imperfect code of bi-dimensional graphic signs, most of which are of an indeterminate significance. Even the most reliable symbols –that is to say, those, which refer to pitch and length-, are purely relative and not absolute. Such code, indeterminate, incomplete and imperfect, allows the performer getting to know very little for certain: just pitch names, their length relationship, the musical instruments that might produce them and some morphological relations. Everything else must be inferred, reconstructed, quantified or qualified on the basis of the presence of ambiguous directions, suggestions, and different kinds of vague proposals. Its perceptible execution implies hard work of study, investigation, reflection, imagination and assessment. The knowledge the performer can acquire from the context is added to the score basic decoding of its graphic content-. It is, in short, the knowledge of the piece in its poetic level, according to Molino-Nattiez's beautiful and appropriate terminology. Let us remember that in this study level of the musical piece, the techniques and rules that guided its construction ought to be taken into consideration as well as the particular composition strategies that show uncover evidence or clues the composer left (letters, interviews, statements, etc.), his intentions regarding communication or expression, the 1 reconstruction of an expressive –conscious or subconscious- meaning that comes from the piece, without leaving out biographic data, historical and cultural events of his period and the knowledge of other pieces, of the same author or of others with the same stylistic tendency. The result of the decoding task is, for the performer, to build a concept of the piece taken from the text and from what he knows about its context. It is an ideal sonorous image that the performer assumes as a belief and a desire: the performer believes and desires his concept or ideal image to be a reproduction in all senses of the composer’s intention. The execution of the said concept, its fulfillment or carrying out, will be the perceptible expression of such belief. So considered the musical execution is the consequence of a sort of act of faith, and not the sole and exclusive result of a knowledge based on specific, reliable and unequivocal sources. Stravinsky asserted in the conferences that came into being as his Poetics of Music, that there exists only two kinds of musicians, the composer and the executant, whom he differentiates from the performer, stating that the idea of performance exceeds the limits imposed to the executant or imposed by himself during his exercise, which ends in the music transmission to the listener. The idea of execution implies the strict making of an explicit will that ends in what itself orders. It is impossible, by nature, for the agent that is between the score and the listener, name it executant or performer, to transmit the music with the neutrality with which a superconductor transmits electricity. In order to strictly perform the composer’s explicit will, the agent must first develop a concept from the –but not exclusively with- score graphic content. The concept of the piece is, at last, what is communicated to the listener, not the piece itself. Said concept basically arises from the reconstruction of the piece by decoding the signs on the score but to be able to do it, the intermediary brings into action all his intellectual, emotional and cultural being. Every good performer searches, loyal and honestly, the composer’s will. But it is explicitly shown only in relation to a few parameters of the many that make up and characterize the musical speech printed on a score. The most substantial part of the content is unknown; the performer must discover it by him. It is not about mathematical problems that require the knowledge of formulae and operations. It is about meanings not clearly stated, truly connotations that the interpreter, conscious of his task, must look for not only in the graphic signs but also between them and, if necessary, behind them as well. The performer finds his way around looking for his ground between antithetical extremes that are riskily attractive and superficial: one is the pharisaical stand, the simplistic performance of the letter of the piece which is known to be incomplete and imperfect; the other one is the usage of the alien text -whose execution according to the composer’s presumed intentions must be an end– like a mean for an unashamed statement of the own subjectivity. The mere mention of said antithetical extremes leads us once again to the aforementioned statement by Stravinsky, bringing up the faithfulness that a performer owes to the composer’s will as it is graphically shown on the score. Faithfulness of a musical performance cannot be objectified: objectively different performances might be 2 equally faithful as faithfulness is more the consequence of the performer’s moral attitude in relation to the composer and his work than the demonstrable presence of certain resources during the execution. The moral attitude is what imposes on the performer the permanent inquiries and reflection over the work`s meaning. The absence or lack of the performer’s effort needed to support the knowledge and the belief that becomes the development of his conception of the work derives in a sort of guilty ignorance, and therefore, an ethically reprehensible act. In the case of the orchestra conductor performer, the execution or perceptible made-up of the concept or ideal image that –as every performer- he made out of what is printed on the score, necessarily demands the cooperative intervention of persons who play musical instruments, as the conductor alone by himself cannot produce the required sound. There emerges another basic consequence: to be an orchestra conductor is also an effect caused by the instrumentalist being who has previous autonomous existence and collaborates with him and, as such causes his existence as conductor. An orchestra is not an object (something) but a group of individuals (many somebodies), of which the conductor is part of as primus inter pares. In a professional orchestra, its members had devoted many years of their lives to acquire musical knowledge and to develop instrumental execution’s hard skills. They share the interpretative reading of the text with the conductor, of which the conductor has the whole while the performers have the sum of its parts. The conductor’s duty consists of informing the performers his concept of the work, guiding the individual performers to play their appropriate roles within said concept and putting at work all the resources leading to its effective execution. The conductor’s authority and the quality of his action as such do not come from pre-established formal circumstances, but from the recognition and acceptance by the individual performers during the shared task of the existence of several abilities in the conductor: • The possession of a text's concept rich in meanings, • The communication of such meanings with great accuracy and intensity to those who are going to perform them, • To have intellectual and emotional call power, for the shared task, • To possess a refined quality control of the product performed by everyone and, if necessary, • To know and implement all the required means to improve such quality. Nothing of what an orchestral conductor could interpretatively perform –not even the mechanical sound output- is possible if it does not potentially exist in the intellectual, emotional and technical ability of the performers that work with him. On this side of reality, another moral duty for the orchestra conductor arises: the recognition of his own limitations and the significance of the individual performers’ contribution for the execution of concept.

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