Of the conducting until a few years ago, but someone still tries today, if he wanted to make it the only art without a codified technique, very few things that could be stated in the time of a coffee at the bar.
In about ten minutes everything was resolved, the same Riccardo Muti and Antonio Ballista, both pupils of Antonino Votto, report that the elucidations of their master on this topic took a few minutes in total. It has always been agreed that the technique is personal ..., it cannot be taught ...., that everyone must find his or her gesture ... (here there could also be a fund of truth), which is acquired through practice ... etc etc ... It is even possible to find a documentary on Furtwängler on youtube, therefore dating back to about sixty / seventy years ago, where it is explicitly stated in the credits that this is the only art without set rules.
In short, the fact that at the end of the day the transmission of information during an execution takes place through the use of the arms is completely ignored. Even in Hermann Scherchen's manual to find something about the technique you have to get to about half of the book, this is liquidated in a dozen lines at the bottom of the page that can be summarized in "the director's gesture must be clear". This illusory lack of established rules has pushed illustrious soloists to take the longest step of the leg, throwing an unseemly stain on their honored careers and diminishing their greatness. Maurizio Pollini had the intelligence -which others didn't - to stop in time.
It is also incontrovertible that the conductor very often does not have a clear awareness of the reactions he causes, since generally a good orchestra, in order to bring home the face, is instinctively led to "parry the blows", thus leaving it in the belief of have achieved great results.
Here is the catch! (See the interview with Antonio Ballista in the column alongside).
This is something that occurs every day under the eyes of all but probably the only ones who consciously realize it are the orchestra teachers.
I'm sure that without this "invisible" lifesaver, which activates automatically as soon as there is air of danger, dozens of illustrious careers would never have been possible.
In reality Ilya Musin has dedicated over 7 decades to teaching, and a good part of them to coding the technique; Musin, in fact, very soon realized that he was facing a language. He has long observed students, himself, directors from all over the world - the so-called "directors of the past" who were then agile and healthy, often having long discussions with them: Mitropoulos, Walter, Scherchen, Busch, Klemperer, Knappertsbusch…
He observed and related the phenomena and drew his conclusions by drafting the laws that govern them.
Musin extended and reformulated the concept of conducting technique: no longer those four notions from a coffee cup.
A magisterium continued from 1927 until 1999 a few days before his death. Hardworking studded with an impressive pleiad of directors baked by his class, Rudolf Barshai, Yuri Temirkanov, Semyon Bychkov, Valery Gergiev, Tugan Sokhiev, Teodor Kurentsis just to name a few, sometimes personalities musically in stark contrast to each other if not even at the antipodes , but what interested Ilya Musin was not to create directors with the stencil but, respecting their personalities, give them the technical means to clearly express their vision of the score and therefore be facilitated during rehearsals and in the orchestration work.
And this is the substantial aspect! in fact the conductors who came from his class were distinguished by gestural clarity, did not therefore hinder the musicians during the work, consequently they were hired with their eyes closed in the most important musical institutions of the former Soviet Union, and in a short time at the top of all theaters could be found students from Musin's class: this helped to create the myth of the Leningrad conducting school.
This is a factor that plays an essential role today. In our times where budgets are reduced to the bone, where test times reduced to the bare minimum, having technical clarity is a trump card.
di Ennio Nicotra
