What does a Conductor actually do?

Conductors measurably improve the performance
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If you’ve ever seen an orchestra, choir, or band perform, you’ve probably seen a conductor in action. To the untrained eye, the conductor’s job may seem like glorified stick waving, but he or she is in fact a vital member of the ensemble, whose talent measurably improves the performance.

The most basic role of a conductor is to keep the performers playing together. A musical piece is divided into measures, each with a specified number of beats. Beats are evenly spaced pulses in the music, and the conductor will demonstrate when these beats should occur with hand gestures. These hand gestures may be emphasized with a baton, but many conductors choose to use only their hands, in an effort to provide more expressiveness. While conductors can technically signal beats with whatever gestures they would like, there are some basic patterns that have become standard. For example, if a piece of music has four beats in each measure, *this* pattern is often used. Within this pattern, each beat has an ictus, or a precise moment that signals when the beat should occur. The first beat in the measure, also called the downbeat, is the strongest and most important, so it is signaled with a large downward gesture, with the ictus finally occurring at the bottom of the pattern. In order to make the location of the ictus perfectly clear, the conductor rebounds slightly after each beat. A good conductor ensures that his or her gestures are clear to the ensemble, and conductors who are less visible, like a drum major conducting a marching band, use more rigid conducting patterns to compensate.

All of this technique may seem a bit like overkill. Surely a group of well-trained musicians can play together simply by listening to each other. To a certain extent this is true, and small groups like brass ensembles or barbershop quartets may perform perfectly well without a conductor. However, the larger an ensemble becomes, the more necessary it is for the musicians to have a visual reference for the beat. This is because sound takes time to travel across the ensemble, so if a tuba player is listening to a violinist to determine where the beats in a measure are, the tuba player will be consistently playing too late. With a visual reference for the beat, however, both the tuba player and the violinist play their music in sync, even if it doesn’t sound like it to them. In an orchestra or choir, these sound delays are slight, but can quickly build up over the course of the piece and throw the musicians out of sync. In a marching band, however, players on opposite sides of the field will play nearly a third of a second out of sync if they rely on their ears instead of their eyes. Small ensembles are close enough together that this sound delay is negligible, but they still choose one player as an authority to signal the beginning of the piece and set the tempo or speed of the piece.

Aside from preventing the ensemble from derailing, the conductor is also the authority on the interpretation of the piece. Most stylistic directions in music are left vague, so the conductor will determine whether a phrase should be played more loudly, more delicately, or more sorrowfully. In addition, the piece may contain fermatas, indicating that a note should be held, or caesuras, indicating that the music should briefly pause, and it is the conductor’s job to determine exactly when to resume the piece. These stylistic decisions are communicated either with the conductor’s free hand, or with the style of the conducting pattern itself.

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