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.