Conducting Video Lesson: What is conducting?

Hello everyone. My name is Adrian Casas. I am a violinist and conductor from Regina, Canada, and we are here to talk about conducting.

Many of us take advantage of the large music library, not only as performers, but also as music educators. If you're a teacher within your teaching practice, you might end up conducting a small music ensemble. Or sometimes adventure to conduct a large ensemble, such as a wind band, or a full on symphony orchestra.

If you're a beginner conductor, I hope these videos give you some ideas about exploring the world of conducting. If you are an experienced conductor, I hope it refreshes your memory, and adds some new ideas to your tool kit. Of course, there is not one single way or one correct way to explore the world of conducting. These are just some ideas that I have picked over the years.

There are many schools of thought out there. There are many techniques of conducting out there, and they are all worth learning and exploring. If you're looking for resources about conducting, feel free to shoot me a message, and I'll be very happy to share my resources with you. Let's begin conducting.

We understand conducting as a series of gestures, usually hand gestures, to maintain unity in a musical ensemble during the execution of a piece. To understand conducting as we know it today, it is important to understand the history that led to the modern conductor.

When you play a chamber piece of music, such as a duet, or a trio, or a quartet, you probably rely on each member of your group to know when to start, how fast to play, and when to stop. During the performance of the piece, you also rely on your own counting skills, your own sight reading skills, as well as your own personal practice. However, as you start adding more musicians into the group, it becomes more and more difficult to maintain the ensemble together.

During the Baroque period, orchestras were not the large musical ensemble that we know today. Very often, orchestras were a small group of musicians led by the strongest player of the group, which was often a violin player or the harpsichord player. The leader of the group was not only the strongest player of the group, but also the composer.

Later on in the 19th century, composers began to expand the instrumental proportions, or the number of musicians required to play their compositions. These demanded a new musician whose only job was to lead or direct the group. This is also when we start to see new treatises of conducting that is specialized only in the art of conducting, such as the art of conducting by Hector Berlioz in 1856. From then on, the conductor as we know it today had started to emerge.

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