Founding Fathers, Commanding Conductors

Should the present be held hostage by the past? There is a rising tide of frustration in the United States at certain rules and institutions—the Electoral College, the filibuster, the 2nd Amendment, and even the Senate—which may have suited a late 18th-century society dominated by white, male land-owners, but which seem to be holding back our modern, multiethnic society’s striving toward progress and democratization. This frustration has a heretical, sacrilegious element to it: a willingness to question the omniscience of our founding documents, whose status as quasi-scripture, beyond the reach of acceptable criticism, has been drilled into generation after generation of schoolchildren. Our Constitution is the oldest still-active one in the world, and it deserves much of the respect that it receives: but surely the suggestion that, after 232 years, it may be in need of a slight touching-up shouldn’t be limited to cautious whispers at the end of the bar. And indeed, those whispers are ripening into full voice: even the sacred date of 1776 has been called into question by The New York Times’ “1619 project” (a year in which two momentous events occurred: the arrival of the first slave ship from the West African coast and the formation of the first General Assembly in the Jamestown colony: the threads of slavery and democracy have been intertwined since their very beginnings on our continent.)

These ripening voices imply a certain approach to history, which has been neatly expressed by Yuval Noah Harari in his book Homo Deus: “The study of history aims above all to make us aware of possibilities we don’t normally consider. Historians study the past not in order to repeat it, but in order to be liberated from it.” Harari, with his deadpan love of the arcane, arrives at this conclusion after an examination of the history of lawns—he contends that understanding the lawn historically as a functionless and labor-intensive emblem of status can free us from the unexamined convention of having one today—but we can apply his logic far beyond the bounds of croquet venues. 

In the spirit of Harari, and following the lead of those questioning the necessity of holding our present prisoner to the past, I would propose that there is an important conversation to be had about symphony orchestras. Well, important to those of us who love orchestras! (It may not get as much air time on CNN as discussions about the electoral college.) There have been some hugely important waves of change in orchestras over the past 150 years: the rise of the corporate structure in the early 20th-century (whereby a Board of Directors has the ultimate say in the orchestra’s running), the symbiosis of strengthened musicians’ unions and Ford Foundation grants in the 1960’s (which hugely improved financial terms and bargaining power for orchestra musicians), the institution of blind auditions in the late 1980’s (which led to subsequent shrinkage in the gender gap in orchestra musicians), the explorations into the digital frontier (which, epitomized by Berlin’s Digital Concert Hall, have opened a whole new space for reaching far-flung audiences), and the recent George Floyd-sparked social justice reckoning (which seems poised to expand orchestras’ attention to musicians and composers of marginalized communities). But beneath these waves of innovation, there has been one undertow of constancy that has remained largely axiomatic: conductors lead, players follow. In the musical division of labor, the realms of artist and artisan are nearly as separate as the dressing rooms of conductor and musicians, and they have the same respective occupants. Ever since the generation of Nikisch, Berlioz, Wagner, and Richter created the paradigm of the omniscient and omnipotent conductor, we have been living within the logic of the world they made. To be sure, there have been inflections and variations—the gentle hand of Bruno Walter, the tyranny of Toscanini, the charisma of Bernstein, the paternalism of Celibidache, and yes, the more collaborative direction of many of today’s maestros—but these have been explorations within the boundaries of a paradigm: one guy stands on a box and tells the other people what to do. Is that the best way to organize collective music-making? 

I don’t know. Perhaps it is! But I’m surprised that the question hasn’t been posed more often. History tells us that we should take seriously the wisdom of our forebears, and that in implementing new ideas, the how and the how quickly play a crucial role. But it also tells us loudly and clearly that the solutions of the past are rarely the final word, that paradigms persist as long as they provide coherence and a framework for progress, but then yield to new paradigms. George Washington understood that: he understood that the context of war required his wielding of absolute power, while the context of peace required his yielding of it. And the Constitution, to whose sovereignty Washington bowed, also incorporated the possibility of being amended in accordance with the paradigms of the future. 

What would it look like for an orchestra to break free of the “conductor as enlightened despot” paradigm? Again, I don’t know. Conductor-less ensembles like Orpheus and A Far Cry offer us two possible scenarios, but on the spectrum between anarchy and totalitarianism there are surely massive swathes of unexplored space. Perhaps it’s finally time for us to send a few more Lewis’, Clarks, and Sacagaweas to explore that territory. And when the times comes, I hope that conductors will have the grace and prescience of Washington, who ceded power and accepted a changing role in harmony with a changing world.