It Goes Far Beyond Beauty

What I learned from my first time conducting an orchestra (part 1)

My teacher stood tall near the podium with the full orchestra waiting behind him, and he quickly glanced at the list of names he held on a small sheet of paper in his hands. He scanned the hall and his eyes eventually found mine. He gave a single nod to acknowledge his schedule. I heard my name echo through the hall as he called it out expectantly. My heart gave a singular pulse, then thumped along as I stood up straight and made my way to the stage.

It was a confident kind of walk. I was holding this inner commitment to openness and curiosity for moments yet to come. I had a general feeling of things going well, which came from either the optimism of genuine preparedness, or from a secret plan to survive by relying on a naive beginner's luck, or both.

At the front of the orchestra, I briefly stood next to my teacher. I greeted the concertmaster with a handshake, and stepped up on the podium. I placed my score and baton down on the stand to the tune of softening chatter. Everything felt automatic. Everything was powered by the air. 

As I looked up, my eyes met the bright light of the stage lamps that hung high from the art-adorned ceiling. My eyelids narrowed, my pupils contracted, and as I found focus, I saw about 40 musicians in front of me, wearing their casual Saturday dress, resting in their chairs with their instruments of variously shaped metal and wood. 

The violists and second violinists were directly in front of me, along with the woodwind and brass players, the sole timpanist being furthest up ahead; the cellists and bassists were to my right, the first violinists to my left. Their smiles were gentle and welcoming. 

My voice was steady as I said hello. “For those who don’t know, my name is Jordan. We’re starting with the Mozart today.” 

A few encouraging cheers for this novice conductor. We were rehearsing the first movement of his Symphony 31 in Bb major. 

The air continued to calm and focused still. I could hear silent anticipation. How is this going to go? 

As the rustling from the pages died down, I felt their attention. I centered myself by following each breath. In my mind I heard the music written across all of our pages. Imagining the sound, I held on to it, and searched for the right moment to begin….

It was a sweltering summer 9 years ago from today, and I had just turned 21 years old. I was a music composition major at Carnegie Mellon University. At this time in my life, my nose could always be found in some old text about contemplative practices originating in Asia. Always searching, I thought I could find enough nuggets of wisdom in the Āvataṃsaka Sūtra to help me make more sense of the world. To feel safety, meaning, and purpose here, to not want to escape it. 

The most meaningful moments in my life were from playing cello in orchestra, and from post-concert hangs with colleagues and friends, but as my knowledge of music grew over years of study, I felt less and less aliveness in its experience. I felt music abandoning me, leaving me with this embittering existential dissatisfaction, and I was determined to figure out why. 

A few months prior, I discovered a YouTube video of Celibidache talking about the phenomenology of music. This changed everything for me. Here at last was a conductor going for the transcendent experience as the ideal to aim for, both in the performance of music and its study. Born in Romania in 1912, the conductor and philosopher Sergiu Celibidache was interested in how the transcendent appeared, and why, and discussed his philosophy in concrete terms, grounding the universal laws of harmony in the experience of the listener. I was so interested in this music making, I pursued an apprenticeship with his student, Konrad von Abel, who would eventually become my teacher and show how music could find me again. 

Konrad was to the left of the podium, in front of the first violins, between me and the concertmaster. Up until that point, our lessons had been about cultivating our conception of the musical score as a unified whole, and now was the time to make it happen. No biggie.

The musicians of the Târgu Mureș Philharmonic had all found their places by now. They were ready.

I felt the score’s musical impulse within. 

I raised my arms, holding the baton firmly in my right hand, not entirely sure what to expect, and with an inhale and a gesture, I invited the players to join me in the impulse. 

On the downbeat, I heard them. 

Oh my god. 

Pure, concentrated, beauty. 

Resonant instruments, hundreds of years old, gave birth to the harmonious river that carried me away.

The warmth of the sound was heartfelt; its edges were smooth. It sang with a golden care that felt almost holy. 

My arms moved in unison with the bows of sixteen violins. 

With enthusiasm, my ears caught every wave and crest from the winds. 

Despite it being an innocent little Mozart movement, I called forth thunder from the double basses. 

We were charging toward the (quiet) entrance of the second theme of this movement, and I was both giving and asking for more and more of what I was getting from the start: more beauty, more sound, and more passion. I remember my heart thumping out of my chest as we approached the second theme in F major. My awe went beyond ‘nerves.’ I had been completely thrown into another space spiritually from the aesthetic shock and bliss of leading this group for the first time. 

The orchestra sounded so good on the surface, but the players were not at all unified with each other because of my spiritual displacement. My arms were suggesting they play the notes in front of them, but I wasn’t tapping into the music in the score found concretely in the relationships between the notes. There is a healed space that holds knowledge of our unbreakable connection in the felt moment of immediate experience. I wasn’t really sitting with it. Going for perfection, trying to be something that I’m not, prevented me from feeling the language of the body through music.

And so it was, under my baton, quite the free-for-all. The violins and violas moved this way, and the celli and basses and winds moved that way, and in sheer excitement I went with each and every one of them. The harmony and unity that I had found in the silence of score study went flying out the window, along with the sight for the piece. To my ears, and (horrifyingly for me) to my teacher’s ears, we—the orchestra, the audience, and I—arrived at the end of the first big section in musical chaos. 

Konrad raised his hand, and it all stopped. I lowered my arms. The silence begged for rehearsal. Yikes. Wasn’t good. I grimaced. Only Mozart transcended as he rolled around in his grave. 

I looked at my teacher with an apologetic smile and saw his look of concern.

But, there was a good deal of encouragement in his eyes, and, was that a tiny glimmer of congratulations? Did he see something that reminded him of his first time conducting? 

I looked closer. His eyes glimmered. They said, “Remember who you are. Remember your purpose. Remember what it is that we are here to do on this podium.”

Thinking more clearly, the desire to experience the transcendent in music wasn’t simply from a desire to escape this reality, though that was a part of it. There is a very deep part of my soul that has already experienced the religious reality of music as a young child, and from even beyond this life, when generations ago, in Haiti, we would experience the ecstatic musical spirituality of our ancestors. I was just coming at the transcendent from another tradition.

Konrad and I chatted briefly. I was asked what part of the piece we stopped at. It was the quiet entrance of the second theme. This place in the score is a lot calmer than the beginning. It begins on a moment of harmonic resolution. The music relaxes here; it is a contrast to the music at the beginning of the piece. 

Beyond our words, in that slice of eternity, his eyes continued imparting their wisdom. I couldn’t stop thinking about what they were saying. They transmitted this seedling of knowledge that he was asking me to remember at that moment. A seedling that would help me successfully navigate more than this sole moment of rehearsal.

“Don’t do anything. Let it evolve.”

Something huge clicked in me. You see? My inner life from the beginning until this point in the music didn’t match the life contained within the score. I wasn’t changing with the music. Where the music relaxed, I tensed. When the score calmed down, I gave more. I was focusing on the parts, each little part—the violins here, the winds there, the basses there—but I wasn’t seeing the parts in context of the greatest possible whole. 

That’s when I learned that there couldn’t be any separation between myself and my music. In order to make music fully, deeply, I had to be willing to experience the largest realities of the score and not simply hold on to or hide behind its beautiful surface. And in order to do that, I had to participate with the knowledge I had of the music, and allow it to change me so that I and it, together with the orchestra of musicians and listeners, with all of our changes and multiplicities, could become one.

I picked up my baton again and reconnected with myself, and immediately felt more situational aliveness. I invited the players again into the piece, but this time, I was spiritually and musically aligned.

Konrad was the light in the darkness of my experience, and he helped me on that podium find a way to look past the beauty of the world and discover in each moment something even deeper: a truthful concordance between the world and my experience of it.

With practice, I would learn to observe the changes in the score and in life from a more central, unchanging, place within. I would have a light hold on the whole while deeply embodying the parts unfolding over time, which earned me a perspective from which I could achieve a balanced and purpose-filled quality to our rehearsal. A perspective which has at its goal for each of us to go beyond the beautiful, be willing to participate with our knowledge so that it changes us and makes us whole, and experience our purpose and meaning from opening the heart and mind to the harmony of wholeness.

For a musical experience of what I experienced on the podium, read on.