Ilya Musin in his book “Technika dirizhirovanja” (St. Petersburg 1967) gives us a clear and simple explanation of the pauses and their casuistry. We could enumerate an infinite number of cases but, in fact, there are six main types, which in their turn may be divided into two big groups:

1) Pauses followed by a downbeat

2) Pauses followed by an upbeat Inside each group we can differentiate as follows:

a) A pause followed by a rest (with a close, with a new attack)

b) A pause with caesura (with a close, with no stop)

c) A pause and the music starts again (with no close, with no caesura, with no stop)

Closing a pause is not a problem, just as it is not for keeping on a chord or a rest. In pauses the problem might be in showing what comes next, how to go on.

The first time I met Antonio Ballista he was very frank with me: “I studied orchestral conducting with Antonino Votto at The Academy of music in Milan, a wonderful musician as few.

During my first lesson he told me: “This is the pattern of 2, this of three and this of four, that’s all!”

It’s already been 30 years I have been conducting contemporary music, I never met difficulties, for me it’s important have a clear control of the metric structure, but If I have to conduct Brahms I don’t know what do… In 1994 Carlo Maria Giulini came to St.Petersburg (Russia) on the occasion of his 80^th birthday.

The anacrusis attack does not present great problems when the note or the chord that comes before the beat is of the same length as one of the notes that follow.

But when the note in front of the first beat is not as long as a one beat we might have difficulty in giving the attack.

Often an inexperienced conductor gives a very sharp stroke to indicate he beginning of the performance.

Very frequently an orchestra is asked to perform a clear and sharp attack, especially in the Forte.

The gesture that offers most chances to suggest and obtain this effect is the held back attack.

This is one of the most important basic gestures, and to master this attack is very useful as its use can be very frequent.

The absence of control on the rebounce of hand - and arm -  after the beat is one of the most frequent defects and difficult to eradicate.

In the technique of the orchestra conducting there are dozens of basic gestures which can be applied in corresponding contexts.

The codification of these gestures by Ilya Musin is of great help to resolve certain moments. Solutions that aren't banalities or arid technicalities, but always stand out for being able to combine in a single gesture expressiveness, clarity, musicality, simplicity, technique. With time and practice obviously the student learns to recognize casuistry and gesture to apply.

Ilya Musin firmly argued that any technical issue had its gestural solution.

In front of steps which for us students constituted real brain teasers the solutions that he found left us always speechless.

A pattern is correct if the beats inside it are all of the same and neutral character.

We often encounter patterns that connect vertical gestures to lateral diagonal gestures, to the left and to the right,  and even others, that provide in the final part  a "Christmas tree" which narrows upwards:  These patterns must be avoided. In fact if a student shows an sf and it is basically set up with an oblique lateral gesture, those aren’t the  conditions under which to realise it and to show it clearly to the musicians.

What do we usually mean with the term attacks?

The attack is a signal that indicates the start of any action.

We could, for example, consider the gunshot that characterises the start of a race as an attack: all competitors acknowledge an impulse that they must start at the same time; even the green at the bottom of a traffic light is the starting signal for an action. In our case, in the same way, the attack is a gesture that has to show to the whole orchestra the precise moment at which they must begin to execute the piece, and to ensure that it achieves a perfect synchronisation of the whole orchestra, to be implemented unequivocally by all players, in the same way.

"The conductor is first and foremost a musician performer. As an instrumentalist he has to revive the process of reincarnation in the piece with his whole being, from the musical conception to the motor and emotional sphere". (Ilya Musin).

This phrase is by my teacher- but that could also be a remark from the pen of Konstantin Stanislavskij – the figure of the conductor pruned by mystical and supernatural connotations by tracing it back to a more human, more earthly dimension.

A correct pattern has to guarantee to EVERY single beat of the bar a character of independence and neutrality;

the conductor  will  then  group them together again to produce the sound he wants and   to create the musical continuity.

Orchestral conducting technique has been the subject of numerous discussions for several years.

There are many different schools on this subject: some are very dedicated to anecdotes, others to the spirituality of music and to listening and watching the conductors of the past, because they're convinced that they must shape the new class of interpreters, and other trends are channelled towards the founder of the school’s vision and woe betide moving away from those interpretations.