On conducting from memory / Ezber yönetmek üzerine (EN / TR)
EN (quotations as *1, *2, etc)
“Humans are incredibly visual creatures. We possess something called foveal vision, which is a high acuity vision in the center of our visual field. This is distinct from our peripheral (panoramic) vision, which is better at detecting motion, but is fairly low resolution. More than 40% of our brain is involved in vision in some way or another. Perhaps not surprisingly then, our cognitive focus largely follows where we are focusing our visual attention.”
Andrew Huberman, Stanford Neurobiologist
On conducting from memory
Such a shenanigan was probably destined to happen the moment Franz Liszt sat down on a piano before one of his recitals, causing his audience to gasp: “Where is the score ?”. This was, as far as I know, a first in Music history*. Gradually after (and because of) this, it became commonplace for soloists to play pieces by heart for more than two centuries.
Let’s take a moment and think about why Liszt would have wanted to pull off such a stunt. One could hypothesize that this was a cocky display of superiority; true, he was quite the showman and vain in his younger years (as far I’ve read). What I actually suspect is that he was looking for ways to have an even better command over the pieces he was interpreting; not relying on a score was a way to give him just that.
Every solo instrumental player will know the feeling: when you have a piece memorized, a threshold has been crossed; it almost becomes like a part of your body. Most pianists (including good ole’ me), are used to play programs of around 90 minutes or more without a score through years of practice. When you think about it, that’s pretty insane for any beginner, no matter how talented. Piano Music, however, has only two staves; orchestral music has about 30 staves, for at least 10 different instruments, making the question of conducting by heart quite a different proposition. But ! In the end, it is not so different: as a pianist, you are playing an instrument which can at times simulate an entire orchestra’s polyphonic capabilities… In this post, I will try to show that the rewards of conducting from memory could be even greater than doing so on a solo instrument.
So far, I have conducted about 30 or so concerts in the first two years of my career; I calculated a few days ago that about 75 percent of my appearances have been from memory, including operas, ballets, concerti… Why ?
Maybe it was because of my first meeting with a symphonic orchestra at 6 years old. How could I have used a score back, then without knowing how to read notes ! Here is a peek (my father had even showed me how to give syncopations to the trumpets around the end, I still give them the same way :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRXoeMz015A
First experiences matter in a child’s psyche. I remember being excited, happy, comfortable, relaxed; I remember feeling ‘one’ with other humans, and communicating, and sharing. These feelings have accompanied me to this day and have not changed. No matter how big the occasion, I have never have had stage fright before conducting (as opposed to playing the piano as a soloist); to be fair, it’s not like I’ve had the pressure of standing in front of the Berlin Philharmonic yet, but believe me when I tell you that your first opera seems like a mount Everest at first, and that in any case, with any orchestra, one stands in front of the genius of the composer and feels the enormous responsibility of the mission of Music making.
A little paranthesis. One thing that does however give me great anxiety are rehearsals. I dislike them. For pathological perfectionists like me, one does tend to get lost in too much detail and become very frustrated when the ‘ideal’ one hears inside does not match the sounds made by the orchestra (even if the orchestra is great, the two are always different at first). It’s really a grind like no other. In a performance, there are no more details, just the big picture; it’s liberating. I am not particularly good at rehearsals either (working on that, nevertheless); they unnerve me to the point where I can never sleep before the first one (just recently though, I’ve been starting to be able to get some sleep in, after two years). In my particular belief system (after a book I read and fell in love with) where words are signposts to the truth and that Music is the truth itself, I always find it unnatural to mix them and that one should have influence over the other. I obviously understand why rehearsals are required; but I see them as just a necessary evil versus the ‘real truth’ which happens live, the moment where Music becomes an entity, a shape from a higher dimension, something alive that we can not fathom but can somehow see its shadow (like a teserract in high dimensional space geometry).
So, let’s get back to the point, where were we ?
Why do I try to conduct from memory as much as I can ?
Is it too far fetched, too easy an answer to say that the idea of the aforementioned ‘first impression’ of a child in front on an orchestra also contained conducting without a score, and prevailed, in some corner of my mind, as something ‘natural’ ?
Let’s look for more reasons.
Maybe it is because I am used to it as a pianist ?
Probably not. It’s true that to have a university degree in piano performance you must to play a program of about 90 minutes, by heart, as I have also done (one recital + one full concerto). The piano is an in a way an ‘orchestral instrument’ and can at times simulate it, but it really doesn’t compare to memorizing 30 different instrumental parts in a piece for large orchestra.
Is it because I am vain and want to show off that I have a good musical memory or that I know the score quite well ?
Probably not either. If I wanted to show off, I would have stopped this madness when I joined the Ankara State Opera and Ballet: the conductor’s stand is quite enormous there and can not be moved or removed; no one (including the musicians or the public) can see if there is a score in it unless they literally stick their head inside the stand. Not to mention that Operas and Ballets are much longer (2 hours, 3 and a half hours…) than symphonic repertoire and that they have at least 20 times more tempo changes, as well as stage related things to memorize (such as a dancer’s steps to be sychronised with the Music or waiting for a singer to walk into the stage before starting a passage, etc.)
Then why do I do it ? The memorizing used to happen by itself when I had big preparation times before a concert (two, three months or more). But since I‘ve had more concerts and have had to learn pieces very quickly lately, it’s taken me a bit of extra work.
So, Why ?
I’ve obviously given this a fair amount of thought.
Here are some reasons:
The first and most obvious one is that a conductor must have the capacity to hear the entire piece in the ‘inner ear’ of his mind. This includes all tempi, all sonorities and textures, articulations, nuances (not as easy as it sounds. Try to hear a note in your head; then in a piano dynamic, mp… it’s hard isn’t it ?), all the different orchestration layers of the score heard separately and together… and many more things. In case of a lack of this inner hearing (I’ve been there actually: when I was a pianist and even during the start of my conducting studies), the orchestra will basically be playing by itself, while a conductor only accompanies their ideas; his whole existence becomes irrelevant and he will have little to no influence on the final result. In my humble opinion, a conductor must carry the piece he is to interpret like an organ of his body; it has to be a part of him, almost like an appendage. The stronger this inner ear/voice is, the stronger his or her influence will be on an orchestra. Not even gestures are as important, as they will be shaped by this mysterious, impalpable ‘voice’.
Without looking at a score, I find that this ‘mind voice’ grows much stronger because of the lack of a visual stimulus. In the end, the score is a representation of the sound. Only sound is sound, and the closest thing to physical sound is the imaginary sound in one’s mind; this connection is much more direct than a visual one. There are also many studies that say that the brain always processes one sensory stimulus better than multiple ones. This is why the blind have better hearing than most; or even the great Beethoven, whose inner hearing was already phenomenal, but after his deafness, became godlike.
Can you still have a score on your stand and have a good aural representation of a piece ? Of course you can. But for me, I feel that the lack of a score really becomes a catalyst for my inner musical representation to become stronger. A conductor, during a performance, is always facing something other than what he internally hears and idealizes (sometimes it can be better, too). So his mind must split into two ‘ears’: if he is not outwardly hearing, for example, the tempo that he hears in his inner ear, he must switch off from the external sound source (the ‘external ear’) and listen to his inner representation which dictates another tempo to him simultaneously; this will result in his hand beating a faster pulse (contrary to the what the orchestra is playing), which the orchestra will then follow (if his technique is clear and he succeeds in influencing them into looking at him). When a score is present, you are also engaging the music ‘visually’, which makes it much harder to ‘divide’ your brain into two (‘outer’ and ‘inner’) ears in the first place, having two stimuli instead of just one. This division in a very complex cerebral process that is anything but innate. I really suspect this is also the reason why Karajan conducted with his eyes closed, to make his inner voice even stronger during a performance.
I realize that none of this is demonstrated by the scientific method; but I am quite sure that in my case, no score means a more powerful inner representation. This could also be because my visual memory is not very good compared to my aural memory. I can only take ‘half photographs’ with my mind but I do see the score in my head, somewhat. Since a psychologist visit as a kid (for ADHD, apparently) I discovered that I could memorize relatively long numbers easily (20-30 digits) and recite them backwards, only to realize later in life that the reason I could do that was because as I would read them I would hear them in the inner voice in my head; then I’d repeat the voice to recite the numbers. Check the article https://liu.se/en/article/how-much-information-can-the-brain-handle.
So, to conclude: the conductor’s mind is divided into three ‘ears’ during a performance. One ‘ear’ listens to his own ideal of the work playing inside his mind, while a second ‘outward’ ear listens to the actual result and gives messages to his body to make instant changes if the latter differs from the former; finally, there is a third, ‘predicting’ ear, which hears the ideal sound of what is about to come next. I have consistently experienced that this ‘third ear’ (quite important too because conducting is about giving information ahead of time: one never gets the sound one wants without hearing the sound before giving an upbeat for it !) will never show up when one adds the visual stimulus of looking at the score, at least in my current capacities.
The second reason is less complex: it is the matter of having visual contact with the musicians. This obviously creates a counter argument against the aforementioned ‘von Karajan Method’; but I think we may all agree that the eyes are the most expressive human organ by excellence (maybe it’s our tongue and vocal chords but since ‘everybody lies’ , I’m not so sure. The eyes never lie), the ‘windows of the soul’ as some might call it. So then, without the burden of looking at a score, the eyes are liberated; sometimes watching the orchestra from above like a hawk, sometimes helping to relax a player’s psyche before a treacherous solo, communicating feelings, inspiring … they become a window for the composer to take a peek back into earth.
Can you still have a lot of eye contact with musicians with a score on your stand ? Of course you can ! But it will be considerably less, may get interrupted, and may not be ‘quality eye contact’ because your vision may not have time to focus properly as it dances between the score and the musicians. Here’s an example about this from one of the masterclasses I attended as a student in 2017 (in Kuopio, Finland, with the great teacher Jorma Panula): one of the orchestra musicians had come to me, advising me to engage in more eye contact; I told him I had been looking at them, but he retorted: ‘No ! You are looking towards a section, or around our heads, or at our instruments ! But not in our eyes!’ . Wise words indeed !
A third reason concerns the conductor’s bodily posture, arguably the second greatest communication device with the orchestra (and in all ‘societies’ formed by mammals, actually). A loud Brucknerian maestoso played by the brass, for example, will not sound as it is meant to sound if the conductor is not standing quite straight, with open arms and broadened shoulders. But if a page turn happens right before, or during such a passage, the posture can not be totally maintained, which has a great chance of affecting the sound. Not to mention how the physical act of turning the page with the left hand may also create short but critical hiccups in the continuousness of the beat pattern of the right hand (unless the conductor has trained himself into having a sublime dexterity in ‘separating’ his two arms, but why make it harder, even if so ?).
So these were my three general arguments.
Having said all this, I must say that I do not take conducting by heart lightly at all: I have a very strict process to ‘clear’ a piece to be conducted without a score. It’s almost like a pilot’s list of redundancies to check on before a plane takes off ! Erste mal, I have to be able to sing the entirety of the instrumental parts separately. This already makes for at least 20 repetitions; if I make one mistake, it does not count and I go back to the beginning. Secondly, I will play the entire piece in my head, from start to finish at least three times, ideally nine times (I have an obsession with the number 3 and its multiples since time immemorial). Even before that I will do this separately to each layer of the orchestration. Each time, I will strive to hear everything even clearer, with more precise relative dynamics and more polyphony (it’s one thing to hear a piece’s main foreground layer, it’s quite another to hear the background and the foreground, and quite quite another to also hear the middle ground layer). If I have time, I will foolproof my inner hearing even further with some mad techniques I’ve devised: I remember, before my first concert with the Istanbul State Symphony Orchestra, I would play Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf in my head while swimming (the rhythm of swimming being different from the tempi, this was quite the challenge and I almost drowned from mental exhaustion after the piece was over). Another even more extreme exercise which I devised and can’t wait to try: playing a piece in your inner ear while externally listening to the same piece, but from a different and very close point in time (one bar behind or forward, something close, to create great difficulty). Honestly, I’m not capable of doing this without a slight bit of singing, -yet-. If one can do this, It’s safe to assume that the piece in question has become like an organ of his body, immovable, as alive as alive can be without being actually alive as a sound frequency in three dimensional reality.
A final step if I have nothing better to do: ‘rewriting’ an entire piece in my own handwriting. I’ve only done it once for my final exam while at the conducting class of the Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris where we had to prepare a treacherous 21st century piece by the composer Roger Boutry (and Bizet’s First Symphony, and Dvorak’s Serenade)
This is simultaneously a good orchestration exercise. Also, when you write the notes one by one, you can also usually hear them in your head and half of the work is done.
Now, I must confess that I don’t have the time or the iron will to do all these ‘redundancies’ all the time; but I will do at least three faultless ‘inner ear’ run throughs or else I will put a score on the stand. So far, I have never done more than minor half mistakes in about 15-20 appearances without a score. A minor mistake would be, for example, a soloist jumping an entire bar in forgetfulness, making me give a false entry, also trying to jump a bar (that would have happened with a score as well as I was dumbfounded); and once or twice, I remember I wasn’t able to hear the sound of a tutti chord properly before giving its upbeat. I think these are quite minor mistakes which are more about concentration and not enough for me to be cross with myself for not taking a score on stage. Who knows ?
One final point: I’ve also pleasantly realized that my concentration capabilities are much stronger, almost laser-like when I step on stage without a score. Even if I have conducted the piece 6 times in the last two months (which can happen a lot in an opera house), there will still be that one voice out of all the voices in my head that will say ‘well old chap, this is a bit risky innit’ (apparently this voice is a Brit). That voice will make me enter the stage in a total trance, where I won’t even remember how a performance went. It succeeds in giving me an ‘edge’, I think, by creating a ‘life or death’ situation in my body. Also as a pianist, my worst performances were always the ones when I was too comfortable; you need a kind of spiritual fire to recreate Music, a certain sort of ‘will’. When this will, this fire, is not there, one just plays the notes or makes an orchestra just play the notes. Or not ? Who knows ? I make it a point in my life not to believe in anything more than 99.9%. Maybe I’m wrong. But that 0.1 percent belief that maybe the world is indeed flat and that maybe there is no God or no reincarnation keeps my mind flexible and sharp. All this is of course because I am very inclined to fanaticism, it’s a way to be less affected by the cons of it.
I must say that I dream of an orchestra who also plays a piece by heart. That would mean that all players would know the piece almost as well as the conductor. I suspect the performance would be quite spontaneous and beautiful. Has that ever been tried for big Symphonic repertoire ? I know it has been for Classical Symphonies, etc. but what about a bigger instrumentation like Strauss tone poems, etc ? Let’s see if I can inspire people to do that one day.
So ! What do you think ? Do you find my reasons to be valid or not ? Be sure to comment or contact me personally and let me know.
DOE
*Well, not quite. But Liszt probably was the one who did this in front of the biggest audiences at the time. I didn't want to stain my little opening story meant to lure you in with pedantic details =) Besides, this is no academic paper ! If you want to know who really did it first, the pianist Gyorgy Sandor's book seems a good guide.
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TR
(alintilari ve fontu kodlama bilmeden değiştiremediğim için buraya bir link bırakıyorum)
