Up sticks: when to whip out your baton?
Up sticks
by Michael Berkeley
The Guardian, January 19, 2005
It's the age-old problem: when to whip out your baton? Historically, conductors reflect human nature. Many, faced with a sensuous score, will simply use their hands and keep the baton until things hot up in the final movement. Slow, lyrical passages require a caressing touch so that the shapes and curves can be fully savoured; a baton would get in the way.
Most conductors, however, feel that they can control the proceedings only with a forward extension of their body. But what form should that take? There are many shops nowadays that can provide suitable implements, but a new exhibition, Passing the Baton, at the Design Museum in London - from February 16 to April 25; details, 0870 833 9955 - shows just what leading designers such as Barber Osgerby and Fernando Brizio, given their head, can come up with.
The genesis of the baton goes back to the earliest form of music-making, when a stick was used to indicate speed. The military still use a massive ornamental shaft to sustain the uniformity of a march. Outdoors, there is plenty of room to wield the baton, but in the concert hall there have been accidents on the podium (a phrase often used by orchestral players to describe the conductor) - soloists impaled and timpanists bombarded by fragments of an over-enthusiastically beaten stick. So some of the new designs are welcome, although I doubt Herbert von Karajan would have wanted to lead the Berlin Philharmonic into a battle with a baguette, as produced by Augustin Scott de Martinville.
Players who have already been stabbed might feel somewhat intimidated by the ingenious scissor-baton, which presumably allows conductors to cut out pages of a score they don't like. And I cannot see an Edwardian figure such as Adrian Boult appreciating my favourite offering, the feather-duster baton, since he was someone for whom size, not colour, really mattered.
Singing under him, you came to marvel at the control wielded with one hand over a 19-incher, while the other lovingly twirled and twisted the equally generous whiskers of his fine moustache. Still, if he were with us, Sir Adrian might find more use for the giant cotton-bud baton or the thermometer. On the other hand, looking down on this delightfully frivolous and somewhat surreal collection, he might be glad that he is safely where he is.
by Michael Berkeley
The Guardian, January 19, 2005
It's the age-old problem: when to whip out your baton? Historically, conductors reflect human nature. Many, faced with a sensuous score, will simply use their hands and keep the baton until things hot up in the final movement. Slow, lyrical passages require a caressing touch so that the shapes and curves can be fully savoured; a baton would get in the way.
Most conductors, however, feel that they can control the proceedings only with a forward extension of their body. But what form should that take? There are many shops nowadays that can provide suitable implements, but a new exhibition, Passing the Baton, at the Design Museum in London - from February 16 to April 25; details, 0870 833 9955 - shows just what leading designers such as Barber Osgerby and Fernando Brizio, given their head, can come up with.
The genesis of the baton goes back to the earliest form of music-making, when a stick was used to indicate speed. The military still use a massive ornamental shaft to sustain the uniformity of a march. Outdoors, there is plenty of room to wield the baton, but in the concert hall there have been accidents on the podium (a phrase often used by orchestral players to describe the conductor) - soloists impaled and timpanists bombarded by fragments of an over-enthusiastically beaten stick. So some of the new designs are welcome, although I doubt Herbert von Karajan would have wanted to lead the Berlin Philharmonic into a battle with a baguette, as produced by Augustin Scott de Martinville.
Players who have already been stabbed might feel somewhat intimidated by the ingenious scissor-baton, which presumably allows conductors to cut out pages of a score they don't like. And I cannot see an Edwardian figure such as Adrian Boult appreciating my favourite offering, the feather-duster baton, since he was someone for whom size, not colour, really mattered.
Singing under him, you came to marvel at the control wielded with one hand over a 19-incher, while the other lovingly twirled and twisted the equally generous whiskers of his fine moustache. Still, if he were with us, Sir Adrian might find more use for the giant cotton-bud baton or the thermometer. On the other hand, looking down on this delightfully frivolous and somewhat surreal collection, he might be glad that he is safely where he is.
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