The Conductor Doesn't Make a Sound
Leadership Through Listening
I’m sitting here in my hotel in Stockholm at 4:00 in the morning—wide awake due to jetlag—and I’m thinking about this experience of conducting the orchestra here for the very first time. It’s something that happens all the time when I am invited as a guest conductor. I’m not familiar with this orchestra, and they aren’t familiar with me, but within just the first few minutes, we’re able to begin making music together.
How is this possible? I’m someone they’ve never met before, and yet I come in and stand in front of 80 musicians and am the perceived authority in the room. But I am not the real authority in the room. They are. These musicians know each other, they know how to play together, and they understand the nuances of their own home concert hall better than I ever will during my few days here. Even with orchestras I know deeply, like the Greenville Symphony Orchestra, the musicians are the ones who carry the performance.
The funny thing about being a conductor is that I am the only one on the stage that doesn’t make a sound. I can’t breathe for the orchestra, I can’t play their instruments in tune, I can’t make the articulations just right. I have to trust that they will do all of these things themselves.
What I do is a little more nuanced: I try to create the best possible container for the music to happen. A space that feels safe enough for risk. Open enough for individuality. Clear enough for everyone to know where we are going, but free enough that something alive can still emerge.
Contrary to what it may look like I’m doing—many people have an image in their head of the conductor being an absolute dictator and sometimes even a tyrant—I’m not actually trying to control the outcome. I’m allowing for the outcome. And this starts with listening.
The greatest thing a conductor or any leader can do is listen. I’m not talking about only listening with my ears, but listening with all of my senses and all of my presence. How does the room feel? How does the orchestra sound? Is anyone in a particularly good or bad mood today? When I talk about listening, I’m talking about attention, and attention is one of the greatest ways to love.
It’s really phenomenal what I can perceive from the podium. With 80 people in front of me, I can tune in to each of them. There is so much energy in the space that I can feel each individual person. I can often sense who feels open, who feels guarded, who is ready to leap, and who may need a little more space before they trust me.
In a first rehearsal, this is always the invisible question in the room: Can we trust each other?
I don’t ask this question in a grand, sentimental way. Trust begins much more practically than that. Do I show them that I know the score? Do I respect their time? Do I notice their contributions, value them, and respect what they are bringing to the table?
Musicians can feel these things immediately. They know when a conductor is listening and when a conductor is merely insisting. They know when someone is shaping the music from inside the sound, and when someone is standing outside of it trying to impose an idea. This is where conducting has taught me something I keep finding true in the rest of life: people open when they feel heard.
In this instance, our concert this week is a concert with Rufus Wainwright, the legendary singer and songwriter. We are performing fully-orchestrated versions of his songs, and many of them are loud and have many moments where the brass parts are written to be played very loud.
In the first half of the rehearsal, before the break, the texture kept becoming muddy. I asked for more clear articulation—for the orchestra to exaggerate the accents, staccatos, and dynamics so that the sound could become more clear. But it just wasn’t quite getting there. And this was no fault of the orchestra—these orchestra arrangements are very dense and loud, and the concert hall is fairly small compared to most. It was simply a matter of too much sound in the space, and it was piling up on itself.
A few minutes before we took the break, the principal trumpet asked me a question about the dynamics. He noted that it is almost always written forte (loud) in their parts. Due to the duration of the show and the fact that the score calls for the brass to play loudly for very long periods of time, he was concerned about their endurance. Playing loudly for long periods of time, especially for the brass instruments, is highly physically taxing. I responded that of course it doesn’t have to all be quite as loud. Everyone could take a little of the volume off, as I also perceived that it was all too much.
We took the mid-rehearsal break not long after that, and I spent the time thinking about the problem at hand. Why was the texture refusing to clear? The musicians clearly knew what the problem was, as the principal trumpet articulated so well in his question, but even after that discussion, the sound continued to be dense and thick.
And here is where I put into practice something that has served me very well since I discovered it. I started with asking myself: “What am I doing that is causing this problem?” It is so easy to look externally for the problem—to think that the musicians are at fault or the composer wrote the part badly—but I have found over the years that the answer to these questions is usually not external at all, but something about what I am doing that is creating the problem. Applying this introspection to this particular problem, I realized that by asking for more accents, more staccato, more crescendo, more details, I was unintentionally signaling to the orchestra that all of these things needed to be louder. The problem was me.
At the end of the break, I spoke to the trumpet player before taking the stage and thanked him for his observation. I reiterated that he absolutely does not need to play everything so loudly, and when I took to the podium to resume the rehearsal, the first thing I did was ask the orchestra to take the volume down, not to play so loudly. I explained that in my attempts to show the shapes of the phrases and the detail of the articulation, I was using physical gestures and words that signaled that it should be louder, when what I was trying to do was express the emphasis of the phrases or the acuteness of the articulation.
With this in mind, I resumed the rehearsal—this time much more intentional about the types of gestures and language I was using. The change was immediate. Suddenly, everything was crystal clear, the rhythms punched through, the accents were bolder, the staccato more crisp and clean.
By trying to control everything, I was actually losing control. My overemphasis on the details—both in my gestures and in my language—was creating more of the very problem I was trying to solve. It was only when I relaxed, listened more carefully, and trusted the musicians more fully that the sound opened.
The principal trumpet had heard something true. The orchestra had already sensed the problem. My job was not to override them, but to listen well enough to help create the conditions in which the solution could appear.
The best things happen when people feel safe enough to contribute themselves fully—and when those entrusted with leadership are humble enough to remember that they are not the source of all the sound.
The conductor doesn’t make a sound. At first, that may seem like the strangest part of the job. But the longer I do this, the more I think it may be the deepest wisdom of it. My work is not to make music in place of the orchestra. My work is to listen, to shape, to invite, to notice, to adjust, and to create enough trust that something beautiful can happen among us.
And maybe that is true far beyond the concert hall.
The most meaningful things we build with other people are rarely forced into being. They emerge when there is enough safety, enough clarity, enough attention, and enough trust for each person to offer what only they can offer.
Even when we are standing in front, we are not the ones making all the sound.
This might be written about you and an orchestra, but this is about life. It's brilliant. More people need to listen to others. BTW, please bring Rufus to Greenville! It would be a spectacular show!