The Conductor Justified

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 430, 19 September 1947, Page 9

The Conductor Justified

OYD NEEL answered the question ’ posed in the second of his Friday night talks from 2YA, Is the Conductor Really Necessary? with an emphatic affirmative, nor could any grinding of axes be heard. By the end of the talk I was convinced that an orchestra without a conductor is as an army without a general, a football team without a captain, a Gala Ball (Gents 2/6, Ladies a basket) without a Master of Ceremoniégs. Now (although it had not occurred to me before) it is obvious that the conductor’s position does need some justification, since Boyd Neel in his historical survey of the office revealed the fact that its origin is recent enough to be positively post-classical. (One of the first men to use a baton or its equivalent at an orchestral performance was Spohr in 1820; as late as 1847 Mendelssohn had to share his conductorship with the first violin, who, ~harking back to a former era, "was constantly beating time with his fiddlestick in such a manner as to obstruct the view of the conductor and to confuse the attention of the instrumentalists.") It was significant that Boyd Neel concentrated on the conductor’s function of purveying aural rather than visual enjoyment, modestly refraining from suggesting to his hearers that one of the reasons radio audiences leave home is to experience visually the satisfying rhythm of the well-trained conductor’s arm and shoulder muscles.