The conductor and the score

A full score stacks every part on one page, so a conductor reading a big symphony may follow twenty or more lines at once.

Who kept time before conductors

For most of the Baroque era (about 1600 to 1750) an orchestra had no conductor standing in front. It was led by one of the players, usually the principal first violinist, who set the tempo by lifting the bow in rhythm. Sometimes the leader was the keyboard player who played the basso continuo on a harpsichord or organ. In works with both choir and orchestra there might be two leaders. Lully’s heavy staff, which beat time on the floor, was another method, with the fatal result you read about in the first unit.

As orchestras grew in the nineteenth century, the music grew harder to hold together from inside the group, and conductors became standard. Today the conductor chooses tempos, balances the sections, shapes the phrasing and leads rehearsals. During the concert the right hand usually holds a light baton and shows the beat; the left hand cues entries and asks for louder or softer playing. The concertmaster remains second in command, leading the tuning and setting the bowings for the strings.

Beat patterns

A conductor’s beat follows simple patterns. The first beat of every bar, the downbeat, always goes straight down. In 2/4 the stick goes down, then up. In 3/4 it goes down, out to the right, then up. In 4/4 it goes down, left (toward the heart), right, then up. The players read the bottom of each movement as the beat. Slow music may be beaten in smaller subdivisions, and very fast music in one large beat per bar.

Reading the full score

Each player reads a part, which shows only that instrument’s line. The conductor reads the full score, where every part is stacked on top of the others and lined up bar by bar. The order is almost always the same, from top to bottom: woodwinds (flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon), then brass (horn, trumpet, trombone, tuba), then percussion with the timpani first, then harp and keyboard if any, and the strings at the bottom (first violins, second violins, violas, cellos, double basses). Within each family the higher instruments sit above the lower ones, with one exception: the horns sit above the trumpets.

Transposing instruments make the score harder to read. The clarinets in B♭ and trumpets in B♭ are written a whole step higher than they sound, and horns in F a fifth higher. A conductor has to hear the real pitches in the mind while reading. The tuning note works the other way: before the concert the oboe plays an A, and every section tunes to it. That A is often set at 440 Hz, the pitch recommended in 1939 and adopted by the ISO in 1955 and again in 1975 as ISO 16, though many orchestras tune a little higher, between 440 and 444 Hz.

The notes above are the first two bars of the melody you hear in the model, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” in D major. In the full score it appears first in the cellos and double basses in the last movement of the Ninth, and then climbs up through the orchestra, part by part.