Essentials in Conducting

by Karl Wilson Gehrkens

At another point in the same work, this writer again discusses this same matter (page 120):

Music is presentative in character, not representative. Measure, to be sure, may correspond to the beating of the pulse, and the final cadence may picture the satisfaction of desires; the coda may simulate a mental summary; but the composition in its totality, with its particular melodies, harmonies, and rhythms, and with the specific union of all these elements characteristic of this composition, does not represent any definite psychical or material fact.

The majority of us would doubtless take a middle-ground position, admitting the beauty and power of music, per se, but acknowledging also the fact that abstract beauty together with a certain amount of suggested imagery, in combination, will usually make a stronger appeal to the majority of people than either element by itself. Many of us are entirely willing to grant, therefore, that a more complex and more vividly colored emotional state will probably result if the auditor is furnished with the title or program of the work being performed; but we contend nevertheless that this music, regardless of its connection with imagery, must at the same time be sound music, and that no matter how vividly descriptive our tonal art may become, if it cannot stand the test of many hearings as music, entirely apart from the imagery aroused, it is not worthy to endure. It is not the meaning of the music which makes us want to hear it repeated, but its inherent beauty; it is not usually our intellectual impression, but our emotional thrill which we recall in thinking back over a past musical experience.

Those of us who take the middle ground that we have just been presenting contend also that descriptive music can only legitimately arouse its appropriate imagery when the essential idea has been supplied beforehand in the form of a title or program, and that even then the effect upon various individuals is, and may well be, quite different, since each one has the music thrown, as it were, upon the screen of his own personal experience.

EXPRESSION CONCERNS BOTH COMPOSER AND PERFORMER

It will be noted that in this discussion we are constantly using the word expression from the twofold standpoint of composer and performer, each having an indispensable part in it, and neither being able to get along without the other. But in our treatment of conducting, we shall need to come back again and again to the idea of expression from the standpoint of interpretation, and in directing a piece of music we shall now take it for granted that the composer has said something which is worthy of being heard, and that as the intermediary between composer and audience, we are attempting to interpret to the latter what the former has expressed in his composition. It should be noted in this connection that wrong interpretation is possible in music, even as in literature. One may so read a poem that the hearer, without being in any way to blame, will entirely miss the point. So also may one conduct a musical work, whether it be a child's song or a symphonic poem, in such a fashion that neither performers nor audience gain a proper conception of what it means.

INTERPRETATION IN VOCAL MUSIC

In the case of vocal music, the key to the emotional content of the work may almost always be found by carefully studying the words. In preparing to conduct choral singing, master the text, therefore; read it aloud as though declaiming to an audience; and when you come to the performance, see that your vocalists sing the music in such a way that the audience will be able to catch without too great effort both the meaning of the individual words and the spirit of the text as a whole.

The great Italian tenor Caruso expressed himself forcibly upon this point during an interview for the Christian Science Monitor, in 1913. In reply to the question "Where do you locate the source of expression in singing?" he said:

I find it in the words always. For unless I give my hearers what is in the text, what can I give them? If I just produce tone, my singing has no meaning.