A Maestro Prepares
Before the baton goes up, conductors have to know the score – every note of it
By Robert Faires, Fri., April 1, 2011
According to a couple of artists who have made conducting their life's work, both of whom will be on the podium in Dell Hall in early April, a lot. Peter Bay, music director of the Austin Symphony Orchestra, and Richard Buckley, principal conductor of Austin Lyric Opera, agree that the amount of prep time varies with the type of work (opera, ballet, symphony) and the maestro's familiarity with a particular piece – having conducted something before can cut the advance work down to as little as a few hours of review. Still, the process routinely takes months. Conductors must know the score in the most literal sense of that phrase: every note played on every instrument in every section and how they all fit together. And beyond packing all that in their heads, maestros must make a decision about what it all means – that is, interpret the material, using tempo and dynamics and color to form a point of view. That part of the process can commonly involve research into related subjects – say, the background of the work's creation, history of its musical style, time in which it was written, or life of the composer – that might shed light on the work's meaning. Being a maestro is comparable to being both an actor who has to know the lines of every character in the play before the first rehearsal and the director who has to guide all the players and determines the overall shape of the play as performed. It's a massive job and one made all the more challenging when the work is complicated.
This month sees both Bay and Buckley tackling works of recent vintage that are notable for their rhythmic complexities. This Friday and Saturday, ASO will perform Toru Takemitsu's 1990 work From me flows what you call Time with the five members of the Nexus Percussion Ensemble, for whom the work was written. Over the two weeks following, Buckley will conduct Flight, Jonathan Dove's 1998 opera set in the departure lounge of an airport terminal. If the oft-performed Tchaikovsky symphony or Puccini opera represents one extreme of preparation for these maestros (the one requiring the least amount of time from them), these two works are the opposite extreme, demanding lengthy stretches of deep study before rehearsals begin. The two conductors offered their individual perspectives on how they prepare.
Peter Bay
The Orchestra: Austin Symphony Orchestra
The Work: From me flows what you call Time by Toru Takemitsu
The Performances: Friday & Saturday, April 1 & 2, 8pm, Dell Hall at the Long Center, 701 W. Riverside, 476-6064
Austin Chronicle: How far in advance of the first rehearsal do you begin familiarizing yourself with the score?
Peter Bay: For me, the pieces fall into two categories: works I've never heard or rarely heard before and pieces that I've heard or conducted over the years. Let's say a major symphony by Tchaikovsky that I know or I've done before, I will spend probably two or three hours of review total before going into rehearsal. If it's a work by a well-known composer but one I've never done before, I'll start probably a month in advance. Operas and ballets fall into a separate category, because of the thickness of the scores. An opera might take me up to half a year to learn, a ballet maybe several months.
The Takemitsu falls into the category of a work I've never performed before and I've never heard live. I heard a recording of it years and years ago. It is a highly complicated score in that the orchestra is a rather large one. On one of the more complicated pages, there are 40 different staves of music, as opposed to, say, a Mozart symphony, which might have a maximum of 12 staves. So there's more than three times the activity going on in the orchestra. I started taking this thing apart around Thanksgiving, and since then, almost on a daily basis I've had to put in at least an hour or two on the piece. The piece only lasts 35 minutes, and it's only 41 pages long, which for conducting scores is pretty thin. But [with] the amount of complexity in the music, it's taken me this long to study.
AC: What do you do typically to begin to familiarize yourself with a score? Do you listen to a recording, if one is available?
PB: I actively avoid listening to any recordings of any piece I do until after I've completely marked up my score and settled on my interpretation of the piece. The reason is I'm acutely sensitive to copying or parroting somebody else's interpretation. I want to avoid that until I've figured out how I think the piece ought to go. There are two recordings of the Takemitsu. I've listened to neither of them yet, because I'm still putting the finishing touches on the score. I sing through the piece and conduct it as if the orchestra were in front of me. Then, after I'm done, I'll compare it to what I hear on the recording.
AC: Where do you start your preparation?
PB: When I learn a score, basically I sit at my desk and open the score and look line by line, horizontally and vertically. I look at every page of score and try to analyze what's going on: who has the melody or melodies, who plays the accompaniment, what is the dynamic shape of the melodies, what are the harmonies, and are there any complicated conducting moves that I have to make. If we're talking about Mozart, basically you have a bare skeleton in the score. You have just notes, once in a while a dynamic marking, and that's it, and it's up to the conductor to decide how the notes should be phrased. [With] this Takemitsu piece, practically every note has its own prescribed dynamic or attack. Everything is completely laid out by the composer. There's very little to have to interpret; however, there are so many things going on, that's what takes the time to learn.
For this particular piece, I've actually had to practice how I move my arms. For a piece by Mozart or Tchaikovsky or Haydn, I don't have to practice how to move my arms, because it's in a very basic pulse; it's either two beats to a bar, three beats to a bar, four beats to a bar. But the Takemitsu changes tempo a lot, changes meter a lot, and the rhythmic complexities cause me to take time to figure out how it's played. In one instance, I have to figure out how five notes fit into a space where four notes fit – five against four, seven against three. It's mathematically complex.
AC: Do you mark the score?
PB: Thoroughly. I have a whole cadre of colored pencils, and after a while my scores, depending on how complex they are, they end up looking like coloring books. I use different colors to signify different things or attract my eye to a particular place in the score so I understand what I'm supposed to be hearing. The notes are self-explanatory, but when I'm looking at 40 lines of score simultaneously, I need some kind of mnemonic device to help me sort it all out. Some pieces need hardly any markings. A Beethoven overture is pretty straightforward; it's clear what the orchestration is. This Takemitsu thing, I think I've worn out at least half a dozen colored pencils.
I can go through a Beethoven overture in about a week or less. A Mahler symphony might take me several months. The Takemitsu took me between four and five months to mark. For a 35-minute piece of music.
Once the nitty-gritty – the notes, dynamics, the phrasing, the colors – has been learned, the next thing to figure out is: What is this composer trying to say? How do you interpret the piece? It all depends on the composer in question. It is very hard to screw up conducting a Mahler symphony, because Mahler is so precise with his directions in the score: where to slow down, where to speed up, what the emotional content of a particular phrase is. So if you just follow what he says to do, the emotional content comes out without much effort. If you have a blank piece of music – "blank" would be Mozart, Bach, Haydn, where you have few if any directions – that's when you have to sing the music to yourself over and over again and experiment with how the melody should be shaped and find what's the meaning of this particular melody. Is it supposed to be a happy-go-lucky melody? Is there a tinge of melancholy in it? Is it truly tragic? Of course, there are ways to answer those questions, but you have to do some research. You have to find out what happened in Mozart's life at the time he was writing this music. Was it a good time or a bad time? Was he ill? That might give you some clues as to what the music might mean. So every conductor has to do a lot of research.
Richard Buckley
The Orchestra: Austin Lyric Opera
The Work: Flight by Jonathan Dove
The Performances: Saturday, April 9; Wednesday, April 13; Friday, April 15, 7:30pm; Sunday, April 17, 3pm; 472-5992
Austin Chronicle: How far in advance of the first rehearsal do you begin familiarizing yourself with the score?
Richard Buckley: I have a different process which has different stages depending upon how much time I have. For an opera, I do a cursory information-finding go-through to get an idea of the libretto, to get an idea of the vocal requirements, to get an idea of the orchestral and choral [requirements], if there are that type of thing, and I map out in my mind the dramaturgical aspects of it.
With Flight, when I finally did not have my energies diverted by anything else, which happened to be this past summer in July, I spent about two and a half to three weeks, maybe five to six hours every day, on the piece, and that's just sitting down with the score or going to the piano with the piano-vocal score and doing a process from macro to micro. When I say "micro," I mean every bar, every instrument, every sound, every harmony, every color. Then I put the score away, and I was on the road in September and part of October, and then we were doing La Traviata [at ALO], and then I worked on the piece again a little bit along with working on [The Italian Girl of Algiers at ALO], then I brought it back into real study after that was done in February, and our first rehearsal was Monday [March 21].
AC: What do you do typically to begin to familiarize yourself with a score? Do you listen to a recording, if one is available?
RB: If there is one available, I will listen to a score in the very beginning, to get a sense of the overall idea of it. But during the process of studying, I don't listen to a recording.
AC: Where do you start your preparation?
RB: Learning [the score] both linearly and harmonically. The harmonic structure is up and down; the linear aspects would be either melodic or rhythmic. With this piece specifically, it's a rhythmic tour de force for everybody. I mean, almost every other bar is changing. So in certain places, you have to analyze almost from an arithmetic point of view how the relationships of one tempo in one bar is to the previous one. It's getting a sense of the vocal lines and the orchestral lines and the rhythms and the pitches, and also the balance and the colors in the orchestration and the ensemble – what you want to bring out and how. For example, there are places where [the composer] uses cascading consonant effect, so one person has a linear lyric melody, then there's a rhythmic chugging along underneath it by the other singers, but they're using syllables of words like a ripple. If you think of taking a stone and you throw it into water, and you see it go "ba ba ba ba ba ba." You'll hear that type of pattern behind it. It's a really interesting vocal technique.
AC: How do you mark the score?
RB: I studied with [William] Steinberg for a short period of time before he passed, and he looked down on having any marks in the score, because he thought the score should be in your head. But for me, and I think for many conductors, the process of marking a score is part of learning, part of the memorization process. I have a really stupid and simplistic way of marking things, and I think every conductor has their own stupid, simplistic marking way. I use color coding. I circle dynamics in blue. I use tempo markings in red. I use pencils for cues to the orchestra.
I think all conductors and musicians are kind of fanatics about the pencils that they use. They use a specific type of lead that's soft – I mean, we get really weird. When I first started working, I inherited the pencils that my father used, which was Eberhard Faber Blackwing 602s. But they went out of existence. Now there's a wonderful pencil that's made by Pacific Music Papers that seems to be being used by everybody. It's called the Magic Writer. It's a very nice black, so that you don't have to dig into the paper. It will make a really strong mark. When I was working in Cincinnati two summers ago, the entire library there uses those. Now, we all use them.
AC: Are you making connections between the score and the musicians you'll be working with?
RB: When I'm in the situation where I've developed a relationship with the organization and an orchestra as I have here, yes. But all the guest shots that I do, you walk in, you don't know what it is, and you have to make those decisions about the positives and the challenges that certain people may have and how can you best support that musician to achieve their finest work on the fly. In Flight, there are sections where there are ongoing rhythmic patterns that may be more difficult for the string section. In other circumstances – when they play Strauss, for example – they may play more notes per page, per beat than anything else, but this is a different style. This requires a certain type of very specific articulation. I use the term "sewing machine music." It has to be that detailed and specific and unwavering in terms of its rhythmic integrity. And that's hard. That's hard for any orchestra, and we don't do this type of repertoire all the time, so that's added. When you're doing Puccini, you have a certain type of flexibility. If you do Verdi and other bel canto, you're listening to the singer and being able to breathe with the singer. With this type of music, you have to really just stay put musically and rhythmically and listen to the rest of the orchestra. It's a great piece in that way.
