UCLA SCORES WITH CONDUCTING CLASS AT BOWL

A conductor called his discipline “an exalted form of show business.” A principal cellist considered it “a responsibility to be a teacher of styles and traditions.” And a member of the Los Angeles Philharmonic administrative staff labeled it “decisive creative control.”

Conducting--what it seems to be and what it really is--was the subject under examination at “The Conductor’s Art,” a seminar organized by UCLA Extension and jointly hosted at Hollywood Bowl on Sunday by the year-old Hollywood Bowl Museum and the L.A. Philharmonic Institute.

Once the questions led past the discipline’s basics--beating time, giving cues for entrances, dynamics and phrasing and serving as a crack pair of critical ears--the opinions were as numerous (and as varied) as the eighth notes in a Rossini overture.

“An outstanding conductor values clarity,” Michael Tilson Thomas, the institute’s artistic director, said to the two dozen curious students-for-a-day (actors, musical hobbyists and interested listeners) just after he had rehearsed the Institute Orchestra in Hector Berlioz’s “Harold in Italy.”

“He or she should know when not to get in the way of a good thing,” he continued. “The good conductor knows when to do something with the baton or hands and when not to.”

Daniel Rothmuller, a member of the afternoon panel discussion on conducting, said the conductor also needs to function as the receptacle of performance practice for young orchestras only dimly aware of the traditions they are inheriting.

“The conductor has a great responsibility now to be a teacher of styles, of traditions and approaches,” said Rothmuller, who as associate principal cellist of the Philharmonic has worked under a wide array of different conductors. “He’s got to fill in the gaps.”

But he added, shaking a cautioning finger, “You people aren’t out there in the audience to see the conductor--you’re there to hear the music. If you’re hypnotized by the person on the podium and start missing the music, something’s very wrong.”

The Philharmonic’s director of publications and program annotator, Orrin Howard, noted that the popular perception of conductors among audiences is that “the function they perform is analogous to the director’s role in a film--decisive creative control.”

So if a conductor should be at once unassuming, pedagogic and all-powerful, how does the aspirant go about learning to juggle these roles successfully?

“The knowing what to do and when to do it doesn’t necessarily relate to creativity, or intelligence, or anything, really,” Tilson Thomas stated. “But the conductors who have that awareness . . . they have a feeling, an instinct for the right gesture. All that other stuff helps, certainly. But sometimes ‘You go this-a way’ works so well, it’s exciting.”

Edward Cumming, an associate conducting fellow at the institute, agreed: “Strong musical convictions are at the heart of this business. If you’re unsure about why you’re doing a particular thing as a conductor--or if you overanalyze it into uncertainty--you can forget it.”

David Alan Miller, another institute conducting fellow who joined Cumming and fellow Fellow Leif Bjaland in conducting works in an orchestral program Sunday evening in the Bowl, agreed that organization and coordination were twin essentials in the conductor’s art.

“A lot of conducting, for me, is helping people give the musical best of themselves--helping them channel all that performance energy and getting that out to the audience.”

But all three conducting students, who have studied their craft at places like Yale University, the Juilliard School and the University of Michigan, were very certain of one thing: getting up there and actually conducting was a lot harder than they thought it would be.

Bjaland, who began his musical career as a clarinetist, said: “It was easy to sit there among all my fellow players and say, ‘Why didn’t he do this, or that, and why did he do this?’ Once you’re up there, you start appreciating just what kind of load was on the guy’s shoulders.” And Miller added: “It’s a terrible, vicious circle. The more you learn about this business, the more you need to learn. So, on you go, finding the best way for you.”