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The Evolution of Orchestral Conducting from the Seven Soloway, Abigail 2018 Music Thesis Title: From Biber to Barber and Beyond: The Evolution of Orchestral Conducting from the Seventeenth to the Twenty-First Centuries Advisor: Marjorie Hirsch Advisor is Co-author: None of the above Second Advisor: Ronald Feldman Released: release now Contains Copyrighted Material: No From Biber to Barber and Beyond: The Evolution of Orchestral Conducting from the Seventeenth to the Twenty-First Centuries by Abigail J. Soloway Marjorie Hirsch and Ronald Feldman, Advisors A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Major WILLIAMS COLLEGE Williamstown, Massachusetts 15 April 2018 !1 Acknowledgments I would first like to thank my thesis advisors for their unwavering support. Professor Hirsch rose above and beyond the call of duty time and time again, reading countless drafts of this paper in its nascent stages and helping me to weave a coherent thread through centuries of musical history. For these and many other reasons besides, I am incredibly grateful for her patient encouragement. Professor Feldman mentored me through four years of conducting at Williams, and I am honored to be able to share the stage with him as a conductor on my final performance with the Berkshire Symphony as an encapsulation of all that I have learned. Though I had two official thesis advisors, I gained many additional mentors along the way. I am grateful to Erin Nafziger, co-director of the Williams Opera Workshop; Matthew Gold, director of the I/O New Music Festival; and Muneko Otani and Joana Genova, my violin teachers, for the roles that they all played in my musical and personal development. Finally, I would like to thank the many volunteer musicians who dedicated their time and talent to make the dream of completing a performance thesis in conducting a reality, as well as my friends and family for their moral support and enthusiastic attendance at the many concerts that this thesis entailed. !2 Introduction Compared to other musical disciplines, the field of orchestral conducting is relatively new. Though the origins of conducting are rooted in medieval times, the modern construct of a single leader standing, with a baton in hand, in front of a group of musicians, did not take shape until the nineteenth century. Orchestral conducting has undergone considerable and nearly constant change over the last several centuries. During the Baroque era, dynamics, tempo markings, and consistent score notation had not yet been standardized. In addition, the use of a designated conductor was not yet commonplace; rather, the harpsichordist or concertmaster would provide direction from where they sat. During the Romantic era, the model of the composer-conductor began to emerge as orchestral music came to be performed in the concert hall, rather than solely in the church and court. Today, the field of conducting continues to burgeon as modern conductors reckon with conducting in the age of technology. As an orchestral conductor, I undertook the challenge of conducting great works from the seventeenth through twenty-first centuries in order to experience firsthand the progression of orchestral repertoire and the role of the conductor. As such, I set out to conduct a concert of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century works (Johann Sebastian Bach, Brandenburg Concerto No.3 in G major, BWV 1048; Johann Sebastian Bach, Concerto for 2 Violins in D minor, BWV 1043; and Heinrich Biber, Battalia) with the newly formed Chamber Orchestra of Williams, intending to use historical practice to inform modern performance. To provide a representative sample of the eighteenth century, I conducted the Williams Opera Workshop in presenting works from The Marriage of Figaro and The Magic Flute by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The works I conducted from the nineteenth century were more diverse, drawing from The Tales of Hoffman by Jacques !3 Offenbach and The Pirates of Penzance by Arthur Sullivan and William Gilbert. From the twentieth century, I selected Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber, also performed with the Chamber Orchestra of Williams. The Adagio for Strings contains similarities to the Romantic repertoire of the century before but with an updated harmonic vocabulary. Finally, I conducted the twenty-first century work There Once Was by Angélica Negrón, which is a setting of a series of poems by Edward Lear for SATB choir, accordion, and live electronics, with an ensemble formed expressly for the performance. Though no work can be fully representative of the century during which it was composed, the aforementioned selections provided an intentional sample of works from the Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Contemporary periods, affording me with the opportunity to grow as a conductor through a broad array of experiences. In conducting seventeenth century works, I strove to inform modern performance with historically accurate information, a challenging endeavor due to the lack of clearly expressed intent from the composers. The conducting of Classical works involved fewer interpretative enigmas, though I still relied on inference and research in large part. In the Romantic and Contemporary periods, composers were more in the habit of providing performers and conductors with specific performance markings, allowing the conductor greater insight into the desire of the composers. Conducting Baroque and Contemporary works provides different sets of challenges: when conducting Baroque music, the conductor must also play the role of musicologist in order to best understand the context in which the composer was writing. In Contemporary music, the role of the conductor is less interpretive, for the desires of the composers have been expressed within recent memory. The use of technology now allows for a conductor to instantaneously read interviews and hear recordings !4 put forth by the composer, eliminating any questions of intent or interpretation. Thus, in the progression through the centuries, the role of the conductor has shifted from an interpretive role guided largely by the conductor’s own preferences to more of an empirical study in which the conductor strives primarily to help the orchestra navigate interpretive choices that have been expressed by the composer. Traveling through history by means of orchestral, operatic, and choral repertoire, I undertook the role of historically informed conductor in order to gain a deeper understanding of the ever-changing dynamic between the composer and the conductor. A Brief History of Conducting As this project was intended to trace the stylistic evolution of conducting throughout several centuries of European and American history, I first embarked on a musicological study of the field of conducting in order to understand the context behind the earliest works I was conducting. Perhaps the first early modern conductor was Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687). Lully worked in the court of the French king Louis XIV beginning in 1652 and was a prolific composer as well as performer. In addition to being a pioneer of Baroque opera, Lully indirectly influenced the field of early orchestral conducting. In order to unite dancers and orchestra in his compositions, Lully struck the ground rhythmically with a large staff, as was the practice at the time. On January 8, 1687, however, Lully was conducting a composition he had written in order to celebrate Louis XIV’s recent recovery from illness, and reportedly struck his own toe with the staff he held. He later died due to complications of the wound, which became gangrenous.1 1 "Jean Baptiste Lully." New World Encyclopedia, 21 Aug 2014, Accessed 9 Mar 2018, www.newworldencyclopedia.org. !5 Though the tale may be apocryphal, scholars postulate that this incident instigated a period of experimentation during which early conductors explored other means of rhythmic direction.2 In the time of Bach, when orchestral music was gaining prominence, ensembles would not have been led by a designated conductor, but rather either the harpsichordist or the concertmaster. Unlike in modern performance practice, the harpsichord would often be located at the direct center of the ensemble with the orchestra gathered around it, which would have been a visible position to the other players and thus a natural location from which to lead. In Bach works such as the Brandenburg Concerto No. 5, the harpsichord plays a central role, and thus the harpsichordist would have been the leader of the ensemble. In other works in which the continuo section plays a less central role, the job of conductor and leader would have fallen to the concertmaster of the orchestra. Carl Phillip Emanuel Bach wrote of his father’s practice of conducting from the keyboard: The keyboard, entrusted by our fathers with full command, is in the best position to assist not only with the other bass instruments, but with the entire ensemble in maintaining a uniform pace….The tone of the keyboard, correctly placed, stands in the center of the ensemble and can be clearly heard by all….Finally, it is easy (and often necessary) to make minor changes of tempo by this means because exact perception will not be hindered by the keyboard’s excessive noise, and in addition those performers located in front of or beside the keyboard will find the simultaneous motion of both hands an inescapable, visual portrayal of the beat.3 Thus, the practice of the keyboardist leading the orchestra served both an auditory and a visual function: those around the keyboardist could see his hands, and those who stood farther from the harpsichord could rely on the rhythmic continuo part to maintain tempo. 2 Grove Music Online, “Jean-Baptiste Lully,” (Grove Dictionaries, 2001), Accessed 4 December 2017, http:// www.oxfordmusiconline.com. 3 Elliot Galkin, A History of Orchestral Conducting in Theory and Practice (Pendragon Press, 1988), 443-444. !6 In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the role of conductor-performer shifted to that of composer-conductor.
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