Quiet time as a conductor

One of the odd things as a conductor is that you can go for a long time without actually waving your arms in front of anyone and yet you still have lots of work to do, planning projects and preparing scores. In 2010 I'm only going to have conducted one concert, way back in January, yet I've spent a lot of time making plans for future projects and between February and May 2011 I currently have seven concerts planned. However, this year doesn't feel like it's been wasted time, as I've had a chance to do workshops and take rehearsals with groups of a higher standard than those I was working with before and perhaps most importantly doing some serious score preparation.

One of the things which this quiet time makes you do is really try to get further into the music before starting to work on it with a group. I used to be guilty of being so busy that I would do almost as little preparation as I needed to before the first rehearsal and then starting to learn it properly after that. However, it's nice to actually have time where you have no pressure of a performance to prepare for but can just learn music for your own pleasure. And it means that when you do have lots of concerts coming up you can really organise your time better for learning scores.

Learning scores from scratch is perhaps one of the hardest things a conductor has to do as you have to try and imagine a large and often complex instrumental or choral texture in your head. Getting to grips with a new piece is perhaps best compared to trying to find your way round a new town. You start by wandering about, playing the piece through and getting a feel for it, trying to use the map/score to help you. Then gradually you start to notice things that connect up, you work out where the important places are and the logic of how to get from place to place. Of course the most satisfying part of this process is when you finally get to work with musicians and put all that studying into practice and I'm looking forward to the New Year when that happens regularly again.