Deconstructing Conducting….

My teacher Jorge Mester taught me something vital from the start: focus on Conducting before focusing on a career in Conducting.  It may seem obvious to do this, but when I served as a faculty member for a conductors workshop with Jorge a few years back, many of the students were more concerned with their resumes than with their downbeats!  An article I read today took me back to the beginning when it first clicked…..

David_web The article by Michael Tumelty entitled Now doing what comes naturally is a wonderfully written summary of David Danzmayr’s journey to enlightenment on the podium and should be required reading for anyone attempting to start a career in conducting.  He’s the new assistant conductor of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra.  His path to this point has included pitfalls, self doubt, humiliation but ultimately self determination and a teacher who with unrelenting truth and criticism, ultimately broke through to enable David to find his true voice and purpose.  I could just change the names of the orchestras and the teacher and it could almost be my story.  Here’s a choice quote:

After three months with Leif, I had heard nothing other than how bad I was.” The tirade of insults was unstoppable. “I made some conducting movement in a piece and he mocked, Oh, this was just for the gallery, wasn’t it? You are not being yourself. You look stupid. You are so bad’

One might construe from these  comments that Leif Segerstam uses humiliation as a teaching tool!  Jorge wouldn’t use those very words, but what he would say amounted to the same thing, and once he even let an orchestra in a workshop tell me what they thought of me (It wasn’t pretty!).

When I started out and was told I showed promise, it completely got to my head. I was enamored with the “idea” of a conducting career and all the potential trappings, my feet were not planted on the ground, and I was frequently conducting the recording in my head, not the musicians in front of me.  Jorge’s difficult lessons and especially the comments were initially offensive to me, but I soon realized that they were sincere attempts to rid me of my false confidence and ego and to try to turn me into an effective communicator.  A feeling of self importance was replaced with a sense of purpose which has never left me, and for that I am so grateful to him.  I wish David much success.

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