A Con­duct­ing Mas­ter­class by Richard Strauss, Max Rudolf, Erich Leinsdorf, Gun­ther Schuller, Pierre Boulez, Wal­ter Beeler and Wil­liam Shakespeare.

The Com­pleat Con­ductor (Gun­ther Schuller, 1994 Oxford)
The Composer’s Advoc­ate (Erich Leinsdorf, 1981, Yale)
Weingart­ner on Music and Con­duct­ing (Felix Weingart­ner, 1969, Dover)

We do have a prob­lem with the wind band, that of decibels … in short we all tend to play too loudly. The reas­ons for this are five-fold, in part due to the bril­liance of the medium with all of those primary col­ours jost­ling and com­pet­ing, in part due to our choice of rep­er­toire, in part due to the nois­i­ness of our mod­ern age, in part due to sheer lazi­ness and in part due to poor conducting.

Gun­ther Schuller sums it all up, with ref­er­ence to sym­phony orches­tras, in his mag­ni­fi­cent book, The Com­pleat Con­ductor (Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press):

The abuse, and mis­use, of dynam­ics is per­haps the most com­mon evil in orches­tral play­ing today, (espe­cially in the United States being either tol­er­ated or gen­er­ated by our con­duct­ors. This is par­tic­u­larly ironic, since the tech­nical abil­it­ies of mod­ern play­ers are so high that no claim could ever be made that subtle con­trol is bey­ond their cap­ab­il­it­ies. And to excuse this dynamic lazi­ness by say­ing “it’s more fun to play loud” or “it makes a big­ger effect” or “it’s more excit­ing” or more philo­soph­ic­ally resigned – “it’s just human nature”, is insuf­fi­cient reason and just plain laziness, carelessness.

He is talk­ing about the great orches­tras ofthe world; how much more import­ant is it for us work­ing with less than excel­lent wind bands to try to har­ness their dynamic exuberance?

At the 2003 WASBE Con­fer­ence, Wayne Rapier, co-principal oboe for many years of the Phil­adelphia and Boston Orches­tras, said that as a young player he used to sit in on rehears­als by Stokowsky to try to ana­lyse why the per­form­ances were so great. He reckoned that Stokowsky had an incred­ible con­trol ofthe archi­tec­ture of dynam­ics, with two or three major cli­matic moments in a con­cert. I per­son­ally remem­ber play­ing for Ferdin­and Leit­ner in Brahms Sym­phon­ies, with our dynamic range exten­ded incred­ibly — so that a for­tis­simo at the end was so much louder than a for­tis­simo at any other time in the work.

Richard Strauss Golden Rules
It would be an excel­lent thing if someone in each band, pos­sibly a flute player or alto cla­ri­net­tist, sewed a sampler for the con­ductor out­lining some of Richard Strauss’s Ten Golden Rules.

4. Never look encour­agingly at the brass, except with a short glance to give an import­ant cue.
6. If you think that the brass is not blow­ing hard enough, tone it down another shade or two.

There are instru­ments which I rarely hear: harp, double bass, light per­cus­sion and lower wood­wind are often inaud­ible. Admit­tedly, much of the music in the rep­er­toire exploited a bright, brash, attack­ing sound-world, but it is essen­tial that we take care of the bal­ance of what is in essence a huge cham­ber ensemble made up of trios and quar­tets of instru­ments of widely dif­fer­ing col­our and timbre.

Max Rudolf puts it very clearly:

In most halls, the sound level of trum­pets and trom­bones is just right if the con­ductor barely hears them. The same is true for horns in piano pas­sages, while they often must be encour­aged to bring out a forte mar­cato. Wood­wind soloists should hit the conductor’s ears quite strongly to make sure that their sound car­ries into the aud­it­or­ium. This, of course, must not be accom­plished by for­cing the tone, which would hurt the instrument’s sound qual­ity and inton­a­tion. The solu­tion lies in hav­ing the accom­pa­ny­ing instru­ments play more softly …

Erich Leinsdorf, in another of my bibles, makes two excel­lent points about dynamic levels:

VERTICAL DYNAMICS — Com­posers often wrote one dynamic mark for the entire ver­tical scor­ing involved. They expec­ted per­formers to adjust their instru­ments’ rel­at­ive strength accord­ing to the primary or sec­ond­ary import­ance oftheir roles.

A SUSTAINED NOTE IS ALWAYS STRONGER THAN A MOVING VOICE – There is one fun­da­mental phys­ical law that bears repe­ti­tion, since so many musi­cians are unaware of it; a sus­tained note is always stronger than a mov­ing voice … There is so much to be decided by the con­ductor who cares for a bal­anced per­form­ance that no amount of detail can pos­sibly cover the per­muta­tions presen­ted by such con­sid­er­a­tions as types of instru­ments (and play­ers), size and acous­tic of hall, seat­ing arrange­ments, types of scoring …

Pierre Boulez explains the pro­cess of decision making:

There are times when respect for the musical text alone does not serve much pur­pose. You may have a sec­ond­ary part writ­ten­for a rel­at­ively weighty instru­ment, and a prin­cipal part writ­ten for a much lighter instru­ment. You have to change the dynam­ics. I have no qualm about doing that. As a fel­low com­poser, I say to myself, “That’s what he wanted to hear, but he didn’t have enough exper­i­ence to write down the exact dynam­ics.” So I change them, that’s all.

The com­poser has writ­ten a cer­tain num­ber of instru­mental lines and on the whole, he hasn’t done so just to make a gen­eral amount of noise. He’s com­posed those lines so that we can hear cer­tain things, so that we can exper­i­ence a cer­tain hier­archy that’s depend­ant on his writ­ing. What I try to do is to bring out that hier­archy in a very pre­cise way, even when it’s difficult.

You may be say­ing that all this is OK for play­ing Brahms or Bruck­ner, but does not really work in the wind band repertoire.

Wal­ter Beeler, one ofthe great band train­ers of the last cen­tury said:

Restraint is espe­cially import­ant in fast music; the spirit begins to suf­fer if played too loud. The audi­ence tires, the play­ers tire and it becomes a very determ­ined piece. It’s hard for a band to play with restraint because speed and excite­ment always tend to increase the volume. But if we rely on artic­u­la­tions, accents and rhythm (rather than volume) to bring about a con­di­tion of bright­ness, it will def­in­itely be more musical.

Von Bulow

Diminu­endo sig­ni­fies forte, cres­cendo sig­ni­fies piano.

Gun­ther Schuller

It is at that very highest level of per­form­ance that a wealth of inter­pret­at­ive choices and decisions become avail­able at least to the really sens­it­ive, intel­li­gent and ima­gin­at­ive recre­ator. It is in this realm that there is not one pp, but many subtly dif­fer­ent pps; not one f but many dif­fer­ent kinds of fs, and not one slur but many dif­fer­ent kinds of lega­tos etc, etc. The more basic point how­ever is that it is pp not a p or a mf.

Pierre Boulez:

For me an orchestra’s lack of dis­cip­line is always reflec­ted in a feeble dynamic range … Some­thing I do very often … is to push the dynamic register to the abso­lute max­imum until it reaches what I think are appro­pri­ate levels for a given work.

Two anec­dotes from past BASBWE Con­fer­ences under­line a con­cern I have about our approach to music­mak­ing. A dis­tin­guished col­league in dis­cus­sion talked about how mono­ton­ous the sound world was with the relent­less loud music of the con­tem­por­ary band. He needed strings, he needed small ensemble work to break up the pro­gramme, he sug­ges­ted includ­ing tran­scrip­tions from earlier peri­ods to change the pace. Our sound world need not be omono­ton­ous if we select a bal­ance of music and insist on contrast.

Some time ago an equally dis­tin­guished col­league began a rehearsal of one of his works by telling us that bands play too loud, and request­ing care­ful con­trol of dynam­ics. The first time he stopped was to ask the sax­o­phones to play louder in a pas­sage — NOT to ask the rest ofthe band to play quieter — soon every­one was play­ing full out.

The import­ance of know­ing the rep­er­toire
I would respect­fully take issue with both. To the former, I would sug­gest that there is an incred­ibly rich vein of music avail­able to us through which we can change the pace and vary the sound-world. I can remem­ber hear­ing Duke Elling­ton on his last tour of the UK, and the vari­ety of pace and dynamic was exem­plary, the pro­gramme was as care­fully built as any by the Vienna Phil­har­monic or Chicago Sym­phony. We in the band world are only lim­ited by our know­ledge of what is avail­able. Pro­gramme build­ing is an Art, and fol­low­ing one loud bril­liant piece with another and another, each ushered along with increas­ingly enorm­ous ges­tures, is no way to build a programme.

Ignor­ance of the pos­sib­il­it­ies is one ofour biggest prob­lems. Select care­fully; as Wil­liam Shakespeare advised: I count it but time lost to hear such afool­ish song.

Ask the accom­pani­ment to be lighter
To the lat­ter, I would sug­gest that we fol­low Max Rudolf’s advice, and should almost invari­ably ask the accom­pani­ment to play quieter. I would go fur­ther, and pro­pose that we con­sciously take down the gen­eral level. The great Rus­sian con­duct­ing teacher Ilya Musin used to say that:

Forte is a characteristic.

I have a couple of T-shirts which pro­claim that Forte is a Light Dynamic. If it is treated as such, then for­tis­simo and molto for­tis­simo can take their place as truly excit­ing points in the score, with one or two really roof-lifting cli­maxes per con­cert, not a dozen in each piece.

FORTE IS A LIGHT DYNAMIC.