[1] The chance to speak about one’s own work is a valuable opportunity for a musician, above all if he has reached the age at which the scale of hopes is in perfect balance with that of experience. One stops and takes stock of things: and it is a fine piece of luck, considering that as musicians we are essentially bound to the practical dimension of music and almost never have time to explain our work, either to others or to ourselves. It must be said that, paradoxically, speaking about music is one of the few temptations musicians seem able to resist. Indeed, we do not think much of those who forever revel in ‘musical chatter’: “Music isn’t spoken: it’s made!” is the motto of the vast majority of musicians. We hold, rather arbitrarily, that anyone who speaks about music does so only because he was not able to make it. And we close the matter.
We are by nature dogmatic, touchy, self-centred: we do not ask ourselves too many questions, because we might undermine those hard-won certainties that are the only weapon at our disposal when we face the public. This does not mean that we do not constantly question ourselves about the pieces and the composers we have to perform, quite the contrary! Considering that the average life span is around eighty years and that musical study usually begins at the age of six or seven, we can certainly say that the musician, throughout his whole existence, does nothing but study and, consequently, think [2].
The conductor’s case is then of a special kind: on the one hand, he thinks ‘in music’ in the same way as a pianist, a violinist or a singer; on the other, he is aware that he will not be able to give life to his thought directly. He will have, that is, to delegate someone to take on this burden. There is no denying it: the conductor is a mute musician. Gestures and facial expressions speak for him, and nothing else, and he will have to hope that his intentions are accepted, understood and, above all, realised by the artists before him. This, at least, in concert. In rehearsal the conductor will have to make his thoughts ‘public’ (assuming he has any); he is, in short, the musician who will have to go beyond the reluctance typical of the category I mentioned at the outset: he will be forced to speak about his idea of music. In this article I will deal with this particular and wonderful form of coming out. My own, to be precise.

a) The conductor: a god or a traffic policeman?

More than once I have been asked: “What is the conductor’s task?”. At the beginning of my career I attempted earnest, reasoned and solemn answers: “The conductor must be authoritative but not authoritarian, he must have a strong personality in order to make contact with the artists, he must have a deep knowledge of the piece he conducts, and so on”. A few years on, while still holding these answers valid (what conductor, on reflection, would dare say otherwise?), I would reduce them entirely to one that contains them all: “The conductor must know how to speak”. To most people this answer seems naive, while to those of a livelier turn of mind it seems, at the limit, paradoxical. In fact, it is both. ‘Naive’, because it is obvious that most human activities are communicated through language; ‘paradoxical’, because it is hard to see how a word could worthily represent the manifold dynamic, agogic and spiritual varieties that are the very essence of music. And yet, for the conductor, that is exactly how it is: unable to let himself go directly by playing an instrument or singing, he will have to be able to convey verbally and effectively his analysis, his intentions and his ideal way (for such it remains) of setting out a musical piece. And the only means the conductor has to reach this goal is language.
Before bringing a piece to rehearsal, I spend days studying it in different respects: technical (is it right for the forces I have available, or is it too difficult?); analytical (I study the various sections from the harmonic, melodic and contrapuntal point of view); historical (if it is Vivaldi, a forte cannot be performed ‘the Verdi way’). If I were an instrumentalist, my work would in part be finished [3]; as a conductor, instead, it has only just begun, because the fact that I have clearly in mind what I want is only a necessary condition, but certainly not a sufficient one, for obtaining the performance that others will have to realise.
Once the first period of craftsmanlike study is over, which unfolds in separate rehearsals, the female voices on one side, the male voices on the other, in which the choristers must learn the rhythm and the correct pitches [4], comes the magic moment when for the first time I have the whole choir before me: this is the finest phase of my activity, because I finally hear what, until an instant before, resounded only in my head. At that point I will have to make up my mind: do I want to be a god or a traffic policeman? Do I want the choristers, the piece, the composer to be the privileged substance on which my demiurgic art can express itself in all its omnipotence, or do I prefer to limit myself to directing the traffic of sixty and more voices? As always, the truth lies in the middle and, luckily, most of the time that is more than enough to bear good fruit.
One thing has been clear to me since the beginning of my activity: it is not morally right to demand from more or less good voices a soloist’s quality, nor, still less, to have the presumption to teach how such a high standard can be achieved. Choral singing, in Italy alone, is spread far and wide, with more than two thousand amateur or semi-professional groups: this means that ‘making choir’ is the most democratic exemplification of ‘making music’. Everyone, or almost everyone [5], can be part of an amateur choir, and for the most varied reasons: from the obvious passion for music, to the wish to spend pleasant moments together, right up to the more than legitimate desire simply to feel less alone. It takes no psychologist to understand that sharing a commitment and the chance to overcome, together and thanks to others, the obstacles that arise one after another are a good incentive to self-esteem and to a healthy acceptance of one’s own limits.
The conductor cannot do more than what fate places before him. If he has a choir of fifteen people, he will not be able to propose Verdian pieces; if he has a group with voices that are not particularly fine, he will have to avoid programming pieces with ranges that are too high. The conductor must have patience and work with the material he has, hoping that things may improve with time: meanwhile he too will improve [6].

Having established, then, that the conductor is not a god because he works no miracles, not even the great conductors manage it if they do not have the human material that works miracles for them, it is nonetheless ungenerous, as well as incorrect, to believe that the conductor is merely someone who ‘keeps the choir in time’, or that his role is limited to giving the right entrances: a traffic policeman, in short. Certainly, he is all this too: a conductor who cannot correct rhythmic mistakes or who gets the entrances wrong should perhaps reflect on his real abilities. And, having done so, change trade: and quickly. In music the first objective is order, the scrupulous pursuit of carrying out a task without mistakes. This cannot and must not be a mere ideal, not even in a semi-professional group: the voices may not be those of Callas or Pavarotti, but the conductor must be absolutely uncompromising in everything that concerns rhythm [7].
Obviously it is not an easy thing to achieve. I can assure you, in fact, that merely realising that a section, or even a single chorister, is not keeping time is something that calls for abilities going well beyond simple attention to detail: it takes preparation, sensitivity and musical intelligence. A conductor who keeps a choir in time always does something more than slavishly submit to the set tempo: he understands when the tension can be loosened or pressed forward, he feels, if he is a true musician, that living energy that moves within the iron stability of the tempo imposed by the composer. The great conductor moves freely within the narrow circle of the rules. No: keeping time is not like directing traffic.
These considerations have led us to a conclusion that, alas, is however only partial. I think the reason is clear why I believe the conductor’s role corresponds neither to that of the ‘Great Architect’ nor to the reductive one of the mere manager. But this is only the pars destruens of the question. Answers are called for.
Mine is this [8]: the conductor must see to it that his own artists know what they are doing. And this is such a banal statement that it deserves more than one explanation.

b) Singing according to reason

So far I have given two indications of my way of working with the choir: (a) the conductor must know how to speak; (b) the choir must know what to do. I realise that in the eyes of the ordinary reader both statements may seem so obvious as to make him doubt my real musical abilities. “How is it” he might ask himself “that a musician, instead of speaking of inspiration, feeling and passion, speaks of language and reason? But this gentleman has chosen the wrong trade: let him go and be a philosopher!”. Yes, that is a possibility. The trouble is that I do not know exactly what it means to be a philosopher, otherwise I would give the advice some thought. For now I content myself with being a musician, using what are the ordinary natural resources of the human being: language and reason.
When we express a thought of ours, even a thought about music, we use concepts that the people before us must be able to recognise as their own. In the case of my choir’s rehearsals, that is exactly how it goes. “To grasp a concept is to master the use of a word” says a great philosopher, Wilfrid Sellars: I subscribe wholeheartedly to his view. I do not ‘master’ words that express concepts such as ‘feeling’ or ‘inspiration’: I cannot explain to others what is clear and evident in me only as a private sensation. What use is my personal experience, stirred by the Rex Tremendae of Mozart’s Requiem, to the choir, if I do not have the means to give it back to them? And besides, would it be right to do so? Must a conductor make his choir sing by founding the performance on his own sensations? I do not think any colleague seriously believes such a thing.
I have nothing against feeling, let us be clear. What concerns me, and what I will try to explain, is that in order to understand a piece and make it understood, the conductor must offer explanations in which everyone can find their own language, and not use something strictly personal that loses its nobility the moment it is set out in the public square. The reason I am referring to requires that one speak about music in such a way that the chorister may have at his disposal the same conceptual tools the conductor used to analyse the piece, and which are the very ones the composer most probably followed in the course of composition.
Do we really believe the stories that Mozart and Beethoven wrote under inspiration as though in a state of trance? In my view, no one believes them any more. The geniuses of the past, like those of the present [9] , were, precisely, geniuses. The sensibility of certain figures is part of an uncommon musical intelligence, of a capacity to take in and transform any input into experiences of sound; but this does not happen without adequate preparation, necessary even to the extraordinary figures I have cited. Mozart, the most enigmatic case the history of the human being knows, was born a genius, but to his being out of the ordinary he added an equally extraordinary preparation.
This digression is useful to make clear that it is within the language of reason that music must be placed, understood and explained: to say ‘reason’ does not mean to make an apology for a glacially perfect performance. The reason I mean, just like sensibility as a form of musical intelligence, has an expressive power. To catch the sense of a phrase or of a musical period, to understand why a harmonic passage comes first, or why it is entrusted to one voice rather than another, is something that a mind rational in the reductive sense of the term could not even remotely imagine. The mind of the musician, or of the artist tout court, should have at its disposal a reason as analytical as it is expressive: not to grasp only what is there, but above all why it is there.
To make contact with the intellectual path travelled by the composer, to ‘serve’ music in the noblest sense of the term, oblige us to a constant use of our linguistic faculties, which we employ for an expressive end. When a musician is inexpressive he is not without feeling, but without ‘musical reason’ [10]. What could a musician of this kind explain? What could he teach? Analytical capacity and expression as a maieutic art, thanks to which we manage to ‘draw out’ what the piece already holds within itself, are indispensable conditions for a musician who wishes to call himself such. A musician is a conductor, an instrumentalist or a singer: the reverse is not a given.

The language of reason that I use with my choristers allows me to put into verbal form music, which in itself is the asemantic art par excellence. Asemantic, however, does not mean illogical. When a piece has been ‘digested’ from the point of view of acquiring the pitches and the rhythm, I involve the choir in the explanation of the composition: here this happens because we come from that; here Mozart lays a trap for us, because we would have expected a conclusion different from the one he actually wrote. And so on. At other times, I play only the fundamental chords to convey the tension created in the various modulations and, above all in the operatic repertoire, I try to make clear how music becomes the ‘handmaid’ of the poetic text (the ‘libretto’ is a poetic text, even if often of little worth).
All this captivates the chorister and gives him the awareness that he is not simply singing by rote. I have nothing against anyone who says: “Do it like this” without giving too many explanations: in the end, what really counts is the performance, and this is always the fruit of the choristers’ vocal abilities. Yet, from an ethical point of view, I would feel I was depriving the people before me of something essential which, in my view, has a decisive bearing on the final result. If, for example, the soprano section is fully aware of what it is doing, if it knows, that is, that what it is about to sing follows ‘logically’ from what the contralto section has just sung, I am certain it will produce a ‘considered’ sound and not one merely ‘thrown to’ the public. It does not always come off, but that does not mean one should not try all the same.
I think of the chorister as a learner who, after each rehearsal, goes home with something learned over and above the previous time, and I am not referring merely and trivially to the notes. To paraphrase one of Kant’s finest sentences: I think of the chorister not as a means, but as the end of my work. This is why I must know how to speak the language of reason through which I make explicit the connections that structure music; this is why a choir is not enough for me if, though singing well, it does not know with the right awareness what it is doing: a choir, in short, that sings by rote [11]. Of course, to succeed in this aim one must have before one people who are very motivated and willing: this happened to me, I have been particularly fortunate.
My ideal is that the chorister should, sooner or later, be able to explain what happens in the musical text, that he should tell me that this forte is the necessary consequence of what came before, that he should not passively undergo the composer’s dictat (nor, still less, my own). Respect for the text is achieved only if one has truly understood it and, to do so, I believe it must be constantly questioned. To ask oneself why in music, as in all human activities, is a sign of intellectual growth: singing according to reason means committing oneself to answering as many ‘whys’ as possible.
A musical piece, when it is a masterpiece, already has everything within itself: the task of a conductor and his artists is ‘simply’ to work to make explicit what is implicit [12]. I see music essentially as a most precious clock with a perfect mechanism which the artist, through direct knowledge of its inner parts, will manage to set walking. Music walks, music breathes: this is what expressiveness means to me. A musician should always have expression as the motive of his action: it is in making music expressively that we do justice to the work and to the composer, without whom, and musicians should always bear this in mind, we performers would be nothing.
In the search for an ever expressive sound the private side of the musician, his feelings, certainly comes into play: but not so decisively. Expression, as such, is the musical object itself, and on that the artist must work, whereas staking everything on a sentimental performance might even produce the opposite effects. To control expression means to control feeling with precision, so as to use it. There is a fine sentence of Novalis that explains what I mean better than I can: “In the work of art chaos must shine through the veil of order”. As I was saying, I am not against chaos, against feeling: but it is only the respect we owe to the veil of order that will determine the expression of the musical work of art.
That veil has a name: reason.

c) Conclusion: the concert

All the reasoning done so far takes place in the private dimension of the rehearsal. Unfortunately it is rarely possible to attend the rehearsals of renowned orchestras and choirs: the idea we form of an ensemble and its conductor is limited to the one we receive from concerts. It is a pity that some rehearsals are not open to the public, above all when I think of the benefit the young people of the music conservatories could draw from them. Think of a young person studying conducting who, besides practising in front of the mirror with a recorder or going to lessons with his trusty baton, could periodically attend the rehearsals of a great conductor. It would be an impressive enrichment for him: first of all, he would learn how art differs from academy. He would realise that gestures forbidden in the conservatory are instead essential to obtaining a certain sound from the instruments; he would learn the kind of language that arises between conductor and orchestral players or choristers, and many other things the academy does not give.
In my own small way I am always happy when someone is there watching at rehearsals [13]. It helps me to be more communicative, clearer and wittier with the choir. I believe this feeling depends in part on the narcissism that all musicians, some more some less, have, but above all on the pleasure I take in making music in public, on the love I have for the pieces and the composers I study and, consequently, on the pride I feel at the moment I offer them to others [14].
Let us imagine, then, that we are a quarter of an hour from the start of a concert. For a concert to go well, it takes a great deal of preparation and just as much luck: in short, everything must turn out right. In the last minutes before going on I will no longer be able to intervene on anything; the choir by now knows what it knows: as before an examination, all that remains is to trust to good fortune. Then, no longer able to speak about music in a technical sense [15], I prepare the choir (and myself, I do not deny it) from the psychological point of view: the two words I use are naturalness and communicativeness.

Let us begin with the first. Music must be offered to the public without their ever perceiving the effort and the sacrifices made in constructing it. ‘Naturalness’ means that the public performance must give the sense of being born in that very moment, that it should be spontaneous, that it should cost no kind of toil: like breathing. A public that notices the performers’ effort is not put in a position to enjoy the beauty of the work of art; everything must be carried out as if it were the simplest and most natural thing in the world. The construction, the reasoning, the technique of the rehearsals must give way to the immediacy, the freedom, the self-assurance that a performer must always convey, even in the event of a possible mistake. To do this I ask my artists never, for any reason, to hold back the pleasure of letting people hear what they have learned, and to do so with the naivety of children. Think of the ritual of the newborn’s bath: everyone stands there watching and the little one does not feel the ‘weight’ of the outsider’s eye at all, and enjoys himself. In the same way, singing with naturalness allows the chorister not to worry about the public, but to enjoy himself ‘within’ the music: the public must catch the beauty of the sounds also through the serene expressions of those who produce them. ‘Naturalness’ means living music and its special intensity while setting aside the ‘superstructures’: offering the finished product through the pleasure one feels in performing it. I guarantee that when a piece has been made the choir’s own, the naturalness of the performance is achieved without particular obstacles.
Communicativeness is the aspect most difficult to define, because it is the one most subject to the changing conditions of human life. It depends, obviously, on the choir and on the conductor, but also on an element that cannot be dispensed with in a concert: the public. More than once it has happened to me to be a spectator at concerts that were technically perfect, but null from the point of view of expressive communication. This, I believe, happens when there rises between musicians and public what I call the ‘invisible barrier’: on one side the music, on the other the public, and between them the wall that separates them. This dualism is fatal to a good outcome of the concert. Why does such a thing happen? Is it the musicians’ fault? Was the choice of programme mistaken? To these questions I cannot give answers, because we enter that minefield I earlier called the imponderable of live performance. Into the case of the ‘invisible barrier’ fall those musicians, even excellent musicians, who give the impression of playing only to themselves, who do not take due account of the fact that there, in that moment, there is a public that has come specially for them and to whom they should be grateful [16].
Another case is what I call the ‘musician’s ataraxia’, the absence of pre-concert agitation and the excessive calm which, unlike what it might seem, comes not when one is entirely sure of oneself, but when one is not in particularly good form. I fall into this case (luckily, I must say that so far I have been its victim at most a couple of times).
It has happened to me to give concerts on days when I would have preferred to keep to myself. It is understandable that if one finds oneself in a state of mind of this kind it is not easy to get in touch with the public through music: if one has no emotions, if one has no wish to be in contact with others and does not feel the knot of fear in the stomach, one does not have that dose of adrenaline indispensable for communicating the expression of music. Put another way: the ‘musician’s ataraxia’ places one in a state in which one has nothing to give. To no one.
It is when one of these two cases occurs that I speak of a badly succeeded concert. I have always preferred a concert with a few mistakes (few, for pity’s sake!) to one in which the public and the musicians have not made contact.
The solutions I propose to the choir for communicating with the public from the very start work most of the time. For example, the first piece on the programme should give the choristers the sense of being comfortable, of having a melody that envelops the public [17]. The opening piece must not be a shock for the listener, but something that conveys confidence, that makes the spectator, unawares, be guided by the music into entering the mechanism of the concert and into having a fundamental role within it. If the musician succeeds in this aim, he will have the public on his side for the whole duration of the performance. And that of the public is a fundamental help for anyone making music: one must never think of the spectator as a passive subject. His warmth, his attention are the energy needed to give strength to the performers. Making music involves an immense expenditure of energy: if the musician draws the public into the spiral of the music from the very beginning, he will manage to achieve two objectives: the first is that the listener will not have the feeling that, to put it bluntly, no one cares about him; the second, that the musician will use the public’s energy to recharge his own. For the way in which I understand communicativeness, the three elements, choir, conductor and public, are absolutely indispensable and must collaborate with one another. Music is made for and not against someone. In the cases where one manages to create this wonderful and mysterious union, I have the sensation that choir and public become almost one, and I feel the breath of both. Then the concert becomes the sharing of a joy that, for us artists, is that of having managed to fulfil our duty: to have served music.

[1] This piece is the fruit of my contribution to the meeting entitled Educare è educarsi, la dimensione reale di un’esperienza held at the Tor Vergata University of Rome on 16 January 2015 as part of the annual seminar Formare l’uomo organised by Prof. Giovanni Salmeri and the MondoDomani Association. I thank Prof. Salmeri for inviting me to take part. I also thank my choir artists Laura Baldazzi, Francesca Ferroni, Elisabeth Huber and Mauro Sallemi, who made the discussion livelier with their questions and observations.

Notes

[2] It is well known that the musician’s is a life of study; that is enough to entitle many people to ask, with a mostly pitying look, whether music is also the musician’s life’s work. “What do you do in life?”. “I’m a musician.”. “Yes, but what work do you do?”. I defy anyone to find a colleague to whom something similar has not happened.

[3] Which does not mean that it could be done once and for all. Instrumentalists seek the ideal interpretation their whole life long, and they do so through interminable study. Or at least they should.

[4] The length of the separate rehearsal sessions depends on the difficulty of the piece the choir has to learn.

[5] It is certain that if the choristers are good it is always better.

[6] When I began my activity with the choir, at the first rehearsal there were perhaps a dozen people. I merely said: “Men on one side, women on the other”. Then we began to work no better, no worse than many others. Six years on, I have about sixty choristers: today I have the good fortune to choose freely the repertoire to propose to the choir, because along with the quantity the quality of the voices has grown. But the slog of going to hunt out the pieces suited to a small, inexperienced group is something that helps above all the conductor to grow and mature. If at the start I felt a touch of envy towards conductors who took over a choir finding it ready-made and numerous, today I think that most of the little I know depends precisely on that initial experience, which was anything but easy, but which I remember with gratitude and tenderness.

[7] To my choristers, as to all my pupils, I always say that a note can be got wrong, a passage can come out dirty because of the imponderable of live performance. Rhythm, no. To bluff on rhythm means to fail in respect for the composer, for music and for the iron rules that structure it. It means, essentially, being dishonest musicians.

[8] Musica mensura: not to play the ‘Protagoras’ of the situation, but truly every conductor could give a different, and true, answer (for him).

[9] These considerations make me a little different from most of my colleagues. I am not a nostalgic: I love the composers and musicians of the past, but I also recognise the greatness of present-day ones. If there are no longer any Mozarts, Haydns or Beethovens (which, moreover, is not true, there are very great composers today) it is not because the human race has grown dull. It has only changed its objectives: computing inventions or aerospace ones are brilliant, to limit myself to the best known. I once heard, in a television programme, a musicologist maintain that if Mozart had lived today he would probably have become a film director, on account of his immense intellectual gifts and the ease with which he moved from one musical genre to another. A genius is such also and above all because he understands, before others and with sensitivity and intelligence, the time in which he lives.

[10] I am keen to point out that what I call ‘musical reason’ corresponds to so-called ‘musicality’ only in part. By the term ‘musicality’ one usually means the ‘being musical’ of the artist: a definition I have always found a little vague and hard to explain, because it concerns the artist’s private nature and his immediately intuitive and interpretive faculties. By ‘musical reason’ I mean also this innate faculty, but above all I am referring to the analytical sphere that helps to grasp the structural and expressive aspects of a musical text. Moreover, while musicality cannot be taught, musical reason represents the operative method that every musician should follow and is therefore something one works on constantly and that can be learned.

[11] With these statements I would not wish to give the idea that my choir’s rehearsals are a kind of academic lecture: most of the time everything I have described takes place in a relaxed and cheerful atmosphere. Only thus, I believe, is it possible to make less heavy rehearsal sessions that last more than two hours.

[12] It is an operation I have always felt as my own, but in a vague way. Reading certain philosophers has helped me to clarify for myself these points which, in my view, are essential in my work as a conductor.

[13] Never at the one on the day of the concert. In that case I insist on being alone with my artists, and when that does not happen, for one unforeseen reason or another, I tend to get on edge.

[14] I love the composers I study, but I do not have an absolute favourite. When someone asks me: “Maestro, which composer do you love most?”, I answer: “The last one I studied”. With this answer I am not trying to be original at all costs: that is exactly how it is. When I take on a piece I will have to perform in public, that becomes for me the only one truly important to know, and its composer the greatest of all. This attitude increases my desire to study it. At that point, my concentration and my passion are total and turned in that direction alone, because I am certain that if I give it all the importance it deserves, it will be the piece itself that offers me its beauty. This is why I have a certain distrust of performers who study one composer their whole life long: in my view they lose many chances to grow and enrich themselves. And besides, music is one of the few things in which betrayal has nothing immoral about it: why not take advantage of that?

[15] The only technical thing I remind choristers and soloists of is to look at me during the concert: this gives as much reassurance to them as to myself.

[16] As in the case of a conference in which a speaker, perhaps highly skilled and particularly expert in the subject he is discussing, revels in all the things he knows, talking only to himself without taking into account that he is there to offer his knowledge to others and not to himself. It has happened to me more than once to witness performances of this kind. Perhaps because I am a musician, but I immediately realise the little game and, consequently, the speaker’s limits.

[17] Obviously this is not possible when a single piece has to be performed. In that case it is in rehearsal that I must work to see that the choir sings the incipit with the right serenity and ease. There are numerous pieces that begin with very difficult passages: then an effective warming-up of the voice before the concert is obligatory. And, as always, to hope for good fortune.

Pier Giorgio Dionisi (1975) holds a PhD in philosophy. He has taken part, as organiser and speaker, in several international conferences. His areas of interest are epistemology and the philosophy of language in the analytic tradition, and the philosophy of D. Hume. Alongside his philosophical activity, Pier Giorgio Dionisi pursues a musical one: he is a pianist and a conductor.