If you’re a music director of a performing ensemble, I’m sure you’ve said it to your musicians many times. Follow me. Stay with the beat. After all, that’s one of the reasons they have you, the conductor, standing up there in the first place, right? You’re up there to keep everybody together, and the way that is accomplished is to conduct a beat so everyone is playing together, and to give cues, so that people come in and out when they’re supposed to.

But what if I told you that locking musicians into one beat, your beat, can be a detriment rather than a help? Have you ever noticed how conductors of advanced ensembles, and by advanced, I mean college or professional level, conduct the beat a lot less and conduct phrasing or some other beat? This sort of conducting leaves the time keeping to the musicians, and lets them see the phrasing, the expressive interpretation, while they simultaneously handle the business of “keeping the beat.”

It also releases the players from being locked in on the conductor’s ictus. The truth is, music has several beats going on at once. There is that ictus, the one the time-keeping conductor chooses to beat, but there is also the “subdivided” beat; the one that is twice as fast as that ictus. Sometimes, it’s more helpful for players to attend to that beat than what the conductor is doing. Or, there is the beat that is half as fast as that ictus. Often, if a legato melody is laid over a rhythmic background, the musicians playing the melody do better to attend to this slower beat. The conductor may be conducting quarter notes, but the melody flows well to a larger note duration. For example, in the band literature, this is true for “Greensleeves” in Holst’s Second Suite for Military Band. Players benefit from having the freedom to attend to a different beat from what they see from the conductor, or even from what another section in the ensemble might be attending to.

There’s also the impossibility of playing or singing with a conductor if you are following the conductor. Clearly, if you are following something, you are doing it after they do, not at the same time. In reality, either a conductor anticipates what they want the ensemble to do, so that when the ensemble does it they are truly following, or the ensemble members are indeed keeping time, and using the visual of what the conductor is doing as conformation that they are in the right place. The whole idea of a preparatory beat addresses this. The conductor gives advance notice that the ensemble is to do something after the preparatory gesture, but this concept tends to get lost once the piece is under way. Every gesture must be preparatory if a musician is going to truly follow the conductor and be on time. Musicians are in reality anticipating where the conductor’s beat is going to occur in space, and timing their playing to conform with that. Once a conductor starts trying to keep the ensemble together by tapping the music stand, clapping, or counting out line, the battle is lost because there is no anticipatory cue in any of these actions from which a musician can gauge when to play or sing. This is also why it is so difficult to play with a metronome. If you are not able to keep a steady beat internally, there is no way you are going to be able to anticipate where the next metronome beat will be. You end up trying to react to hearing the beat and only fall further and further behind.

So the questions are, which beat to use, and from where does a musician get that beat. The truth is, the beats and the tempo, which is determined by the time between the beats, does not come from a metronome or a conductor. It comes from the music itself. We perceive beats, meter, and tempo as we listen to music. Trying to put unfamiliar individual notes or rhythms to an externally imposed beat is unmusical will be unsuccessful. Musicians, whether playing alone or with others, must already know how the music so that they can extract the beat from it. When the ensemble already knows how the music goes, then all the musicians will agree, or be very close to agreeing, on what the tempo, meter, and beat is. Then the conductor becomes part of what the ensemble is doing. It is shared knowledge, and easy to perform. Student musicians who cannot sight sing or sight play music should rely on recorded versions to become familiar with music they are going to rehearse. This is not to say they should not read music, or learn all of the notes from rote. But they should learn how the piece goes, learn what to expect, anticipate tempos, key changes, and the general character or expressive intent of the music they are going to learn before they try to learn their part. With this knowledge, each individual musician can then rely on the beat they find most useful at any given passage within the piece, and the conductor can deal with what tempo and beat discrepancies are left from a musical rather than tyrannical perspective.