As a lover of orchestral music I’m always wanting to conduct. Loving to listen to music especially what I call big music with an orchestra as large as possible along with choral forces and soloists, music as big as it gets (don’t get me wrong I do like intimate  chamber music,  not as much) like in opera all musical forces focussed on one thing, in hearing such a piece, whether an opera or a big symphony, I carry the Platonic ideal when it’s buzzing or replaying around in my head. I’m not sure if I am different from most people, in that even when talking to somebody I’m often hearing music so its just about always in my head.

That can mean disappointment at some conductor or orchestra failing to emphasize the right part, or make little of one ritardando or crescendo or another, not getting the tempi right or one minuscule complaint or another. When I was younger I used to take these criticisms seriously but  with age I definitely think less of them, just as I’m less dogmatic about everything than I used to be. The reason is I’ve noticed that competence of performance is almost always enough with a great piece. The wonderful idea of the thing will almost always break through in reasonably competent hands. If something is performed a little differently than I’m used to hearing it, I as a non-musician, usually will find  its what I’ve missed or taken for granted and by such means I learn. I say to myself, “Now there is something as  I have never heard it,.”noting usually what i’d missed in a previous performance by virtue of its not being emphasized.

In a concert hall you can’t do this, and I’ve never proved it but I suspect everyone who hears great music, pictures him or herself conducting it, and if I am not so different usually does imagine oneself to be conducting the work in their own minds. This is just the same as we see in ads with people karyokeing  in their car. Music is temporal, motive. If it is to fire up the whole brain, it will not just be on the sensory side but also enflame associative neurons and motor areas. In other words you want to devote your whole self to it, to sing and dance with it. In that case you will be in a divine trance.  You are free to act upon it anytime you are alone, like in the shower, but is much to be avoided in public places. It is somewhat ok for decent music to play while you are having dinner or at other activities where you can always opt out periodically and revel in a good part.  Otherwise to me at least if a musical piece is to hover in the background and never take you over, well then why bother with it?   That is how I see music anyway.

I’m always lamenting that I haven’t the talent to have become anything in music. Since I was very small I would have wanted to be a conductor, like Leonard Bernstein who I admired so much. Bernstein was a giant, but there’s such a long roster of great interpreters of great music and again the key it seems to me is less one of interpretation than something competently played and recorded.  When I hear that one of the great conductors has died, I always consider him a kindred spirit who has has been to the mountain and felt what I have felt.  Some few musical works transport  you Olympian heights inaccessible to the masses, moved by dumb drooling repetition.  There is such a thing as elite music in other words. I might as well say it.

On one occasion in my high school band a few of us were let to take turns conducting and I never forgot the experience. I was given the opening of Beethoven’s Prometheus where the clarinets took the 16th notes of the violins and for my few minutes I was so caught up in shyness and not giving away my love of the music, in this case incompetently played, that I did poorly. Yet I never forgot the experience, this being my dream even to this day, but remain unfulfilled.

Now the New York Philharmonic isn’t about to let me conduct a Mahler symphony. Yet it strikes me, that given advances we have in recorded music, in our making of sights and sounds in our imaginations and incorporating movement patterns into games and artificial environments, it is already possible, quite feasible, to make an orchestral conductor simulation. It blows my mind that I might be able to accomplish my dream on one of those devices.

You take a competent recording of the symphony. One of the main functions of the conductor is increasing and decreasing tempos. Formerly when you increased the speed of the music you’d also increase the frequencies as in increasing the speed on your tape recorder. That is an obstacle taken care of recently. I can listen to my recorded books at twice the speed without changing the vocal tone of the narrator. Problem taken care of. Of course the listener can adjust the base or treble in playback, but with the orchestra  arrayed before him, it ought to be not much of a technical problem for him to use an agreed upon signal to bring out the clarinets in a piece the tympani or so forth. He will merely look and make a gesture. and from there, it is not much to emphasize or de-emphasize a musical part.  We shall have to encourage the trumpet to play the piece in a little differently better to bring out the Bohemian or Gypsy flavor of the piece and so forth, more difficult yet surmountable problems or so it seems to me. Suddenly we have the makings of conduction simulation, same as flight simulation.  A dream come true.

Note: Since writing this I have found there are some few people working on this project. They seem to have gotten to the stage where they can register changes of tempo only. One program available for Android phones utilizes the phone held in hand as accelerometer to register tempo changes as in conducting some few previously prepared musical pieces and so this is a start. My suggestion is that they use any available tiny accelerometers such as is to be found in a Fitbit or similar exercise devices and not a cell phone. Other researchers do use a screen with an assembled film of an orchestra playing a piece as I suggest. I would use a cartoon of an orchestra as in a game and a Wii or even better, Microsoft type Kinect device to detect movements just as is done in dance. This technology is available presently and needs only to be focussed on such a worthy task.