Reconfiguring the Maestro: A study of contemporary conducting in three parts

Abstract

This thesis explores the way the conducting profession is being fashioned in the modern world. As a portfolio thesis, it is made up of three individual papers which address this issue from a variety of perspectives. These are 1) conducting tuition, 2) female conductors and 3) chamber rehearsal. Each paper makes use of a model, external to the field of music, to investigate the situation for conductors in the modern world. The third paper, building on the previous two, provides an insight crucial to understanding the thesis as a whole. Humans (in this case musicians) ascribe values to various aspects of their day-to-day lives and it is this value weighting that determines what becomes their focus and what may, conversely, be overlooked. In the three papers it is shown that today’s conducting world gives significant utility to 1) video production, 2) quotas of women and 3) social concerns in rehearsal, often at the expense of musical considerations. I argue that that these weightings contribute to the formation of conductors who enact, rather than embody, the role: a concept that is termed performativity. Of concern with performativity is that it may compromise musical thinking, an idea that was crystallised for me at the Audite conducting competition. Audite was a novel experiment as it entailed a screen being placed between the participants and the jury so that competitors were judged “blind”. The paradox of the screen is that it served to reveal as well as conceal, for the framework of contemporary conducting was, in a way, uncovered. This thesis aims to reveal the frameworks in the three case studies and, through this, to turn dichotomies into paradoxes. The Maestro, reconfigured, should be able to be simultaneously musical and performative.