Probably (I hope) many of you will have wondered how the players perceive your gesture, considering also and above all the fact that they read the part, they do not look at you.

In the following video you will find the solution to the question (as long as you have never asked it)

How to conduct music with Ennio Nicotra: how musicians perceive the impulses

The conductor is the reference point of all orchestral musicians.

All of them receive a series of information from him, that is then consciously or unconsciously transformed into sound, in a performance that reflects the interpretation of the piece that the conductor has reconstructed in his mind after a careful and meticulous study of the score.

What is the difference between beating time and conducting?

Even Toscanini, with his usual hasty way, refers to the issue. During a conversation with a nephew one day he said in his typical language that mixed English and Italian:

"Any asino (jackass) can conduct ... but to make music ... eh? Is difficile!"

In a meeting with the students of the Milan Academy of music, M ° Riccardo Muti tells of the first lesson in the class of Antonino Votto - the video can be found on the internet, and it is the same story reported me many years ago by the famous pianist Antonio Ballista, student of mine and, in his youth,  student in the class of  Votto too and classmate with Muti- : ...

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In the second movement of the first symphony of Beethoven the phrasing can be understood in different ways.

Obviously each type of phrasing is realised technically in a different way.

"Technique without genius isn't worth much, but genius without technique isn't worth anything"

Nadia Boulanger

You know, in 1993 Musin called me as an assistant at the Accademia Chigiana. It had just been three years since the beginning of my studies at the Conservatory Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov in former Leningrad. The shock was indescribable: there were fine students from around the world, with years of study in famous schools with high-sounding name teachers that induce fear.

What definitely disturbs the sleep of many conductors, young and old, is undoubtedly the notorious start of the fifth symphony of Beethoven.

Here we have seen, we see and we will see, all sorts of things.

It would be interesting to do a medley of videos with the most convoluted solutions.

Ilya Musin recounted of having seen it being done in the most outlandish ways.

As we have seen in one of the previous articles we can identify two categories of attacks, the initial and the internal ones.

The internal attacks, correspond to the musical movements in the bar and of course the gestures of the pattern used at that time.

There is no way to overstate the importance of the role of the baton..

The baton amplifies and makes more visible even the slightest arm movement, and at the same time  increases the expressiveness and the precision of our gestures making them clear for musicians sitting far away, especially in the concert hall or in the semi-darkness of the orchestra pit. In our imagination it symbolizes  power, command.

We are now facing an important subject on which there are conflicting opinions and which is always the subject of lively debates amongst the representatives of the various trains of thought.

It is known that the orchestra plays with a certain delay in relation to the beat given by the conductor - in acoustics, this phenomenon goes by the name of transitory attack. The conductor, in giving the beat, is forced to wait a few seconds for the reaction of the orchestra and this is particularly visible in the following video

An exact basic position is essential if we want to develop  correct gestures.

The freedom, naturalness and character of our arm  movements, grow from this basic position.

The  sforzando is based upon the principle of the held-back attack (see previous article).

This means that if we want to produce a sforzando we have to give a preparatory gesture  just in front of the passage for  which we want it