The Composer As Conductor
We've spent all of our valuable time writing the music, including the planning of the compositional material and the working out of form, instrumentation and other intricacies that make a composition work as one.
Then came the fine tuning of the details such as tempo, articulations, dynamics, form and finally, score cleanup and tidying, not to mention the creation of the individual parts.
Now.... we must conduct it. What's next? What exactly happens when a composer steps on the podium to conduct their own music?
Conducting the music you've written is a different mindset than when you were composing it. For one, you have to relearn your score. You have to keep mind that when you mount the podium to lead a group through a new piece of yours, you have to teach it to them. After all, unless you're super famous and they're familiar enough with your musical style to grasp it even before you step off the plane for your engagement, they don't know it and they don't know you either. Therefore, you must of have a deeper knowledge of the music you've written to help your performers understand it to best of their abilities. This goes the same for when you conduct music by other composers or your colleagues (and for me, this a golden rule): The better you know the score, the better prepared you are, the better the performance will be.
So....
Why do composers conduct?
Composers have a variety of reasons for choosing to take the podium. One popular reason is so there's someone to conduct their music in the first place. As a composer, getting an orchestral work played is already hard as it is, unless you have a really enthusiastic conductor champion who takes your work with them everywhere (which we don't all have).
Imagine getting engaged by an orchestra and you get to choose your program (rare, but just imagine). You might think, 'This is an opportunity to play that new orchestral piece that I'm refining.' or 'Aha! Here's a chance to play my colleague's new composition. People really need to hear this'.
As a young composer/conductor at the very beginning of his career, most of the conducting I've done thus far has been of my own music. I sincerely hope I can get to a place someday where I can program and promote music of my colleagues, because as I said above, it's already hard to get orchestral music performed.
Another reason is to deeper understand a piece music by diving into it. When one analyzes a score, they find the meaning inside and can see exactly how a composer has constructed their score. It's almost like becoming the composer. It goes back to my quote above; imagine trying to give a performance of the sixth symphony of Mahler without knowing that the two hammer blows in the last movement (*superstitious of the number 3, Mahler deleted a third blow he originally wrote) meant the death of his oldest daughter and the diagnosis of his life-threatening heart condition. You might also choose to dive into a Mahler biography before you embark on the lengthy score study process. All of this informs the research process and will ultimately make for a deeper interpretation of whatever music you choose to perform.
Path to the Podium
The most common path to the podium could be seen as starting from within the orchestra and moving up, although that's not always the case. I've been often told, mostly by other conductors, that there is no one true path to the podium. It can so happen that some launch their careers by standing in when someone else is indisposed (prime example: the case of Esa-Pekka Salonen, who launched his career in 1983 by conducting Mahler's huge 3rd symphony completely at the last minute with no rehearsal or prior preparation). Of course, most of the time, half of that depends on luck and the other half depends on how well prepared you are.
There are also conducting competitions, which I myself have no experience with (yet). Usually those are in multiple rounds beginning with two pianos and working one's way up to the full orchestra. Competitions are a test of musicianship, skill, preparedness and stamina as you work under intense pressure. As there are loads of good emerging conducting talent out there, these competitions can be extremely competitive.
But what are the reasons a composer chooses to take up the baton? Take this quote by Esa-Pekka Salonen:
My music wouldn't sound the way it does if I hadn't had the experience of conducting.
That's one reason: to really understand how music feels. I've found that's one reason conducting has informed my own composing. Once you've actually felt the music, the phrasing and the barlines in your hands and arms and body, it makes composing much more natural feeling music easier. Just look at the music of Mahler, which effortlessly flows along like a stream of consciousness. Mahler himself conducted the premieres of his first eight symphonies, so in a sense, his music was transferred out of body into existence.
Another reason: if you specialize in writing large ensemble music but know few conductors willing to perform them, why not do it yourself? (this goes back to what I said above). Personally, I specialize in writing for the orchestra and to date, I've completed several large scale symphonic poems, symphonies and suites. Somewhere along the way, I got realistic with myself: Who the hell is going to perform a 50 minute symphony by a relatively unknown 23 year old composer? What about now? What about in the future?
Why would a composer conduct with the score?
One might think it ridiculous to watch a composer conduct a work of their own with the score at hand. You might be sitting there saying to yourself, "But they wrote it! They should know it all by heart! Why would they ever need the score??" The truth is this: If you've written a large scale orchestral work, with over a thousand individual notes any and everywhere, could you remember which note you wrote in beat 3.5 at measure number 140 in flute 2? Probably not. What about beat 6 at measure 356 in the contrabassoon? Nope. We spend so much time with the finer details of our scores that we can't remember every single thing that we set down on paper. There are often so many notes in our scores that if someone were to ask us to go back and recompose something we've just finished, it probably wouldn't be the same piece.
Plus, it gives the musicians playing it a sense of security in seeing the composer with the score. After all, they don't know the piece as well as the person who wrote it.
