Leading by Listening: Lessons From a Maestro

Sponsored by Furniture for the Electronic Classroo

September 2009, Volume 22, Number 9

 

MAESTRO: A Surprising Story About Leading by Listening, by Roger Nierenberg

In MAESTRO: A Surprising Story About Leading by Listening, Roger Nierenberg tells the story of a struggling manager who finds an unlikely source of wisdom and inspiration — the interplay between a symphony orchestra and its conductor. Through a series of rehearsals and conversations, the manager is inspired to think about leadership and communication in an entirely new way.

Nierenberg is creator of The Music Paradigm, an experiential learning event in which executives, seated inside an orchestra rehearsal, gain insights into effective leadership through the interactions between conductor and orchestra. Nierenberg draws on his real-life experiences in his new book, to be published by Portfolio in October. Take a glimpse into the world of a successful conductor and leader in this excerpt from the book. 

                                              ____________

The Rehearsal

From a seat in the concert hall all professional musicians look pretty much alike dressed in tails or long black dresses. But when I walked through the backstage entrance and got a close look at some of the players as they arrived, I saw them for the first time as individuals.

This was, in fact, a far more diverse group than the employees at my company. None of them was formally dressed, but while many looked stylish and trendy, some others even wore sweatpants and T-shirts. The women were shod in anything from high heels to hiking boots. And I noticed some men with close-cropped hair, while others looked so shaggy that heads would have turned at the office.

I heard quite a few foreign languages as I made my way toward the stage. The average age seemed to be about forty, though some looked fresh out of college and others seemed to be in their sixties. Wow, I thought, these people are so different, one from the other. I wondered how the conductor got these people to work together.

At last I saw a familiar face. Pierson was waiting for me and he led me onto the stage, where the musicians were unpacking their instruments. "I've arranged everything. It's fine for you to be up here." He pointed to a chair. "There's an extra place set up for you at the back of the viola section. Have fun." And with a friendly wave of his hand he headed toward the violin section to find his own seat.

By now the stage was full, and when a man in the violin section stood up, the orchestra grew quiet. Then, right behind me, the oboe played a long note and everybody started tuning their instruments. Finally the conductor, who had been standing off to the side while the musicians readied themselves, stepped up onto the podium.

"Good morning, ladies and gentlemen," he began. "Let's play the last movement: Allegro vivacissimo."

People started turning the pages on their music stands. When they found the right spot they sat up and raised their instruments. I was watching the conductor, who seemed to be reading the orchestra, waiting for them to be ready. Finally he raised his baton and held it steady. The room was silent. Then he made a quick, sudden, compact movement of the baton and the room burst into sound.

I was stunned by the orchestra's response. It was like a pack of racers reacting to the starting gun. Pow! All the musicians left the starting blocks at exactly the same instant, with not a single one ahead of or behind the others.

And I'd never heard music in this way. In my chair at the back of the viola section I was inside the sound, surrounded by instruments of every kind. There were cellos to my left and bassoons and horns behind me. The music was so close to me that there didn't seem to be any difference between hearing with my ears and feeling the vibrations coursing through my body.

I stared at the violas, who were playing a repeated note with such vehemence and punch that it was hard to believe they hadn't all suddenly become quite angry. As I looked around the room I realized that the musicians' expressions and body language were different from one another, some intense and serious, others extroverted and playful. All of this activity and energy seemed to have started with that little motion of the baton. What power!

Eventually the conductor stopped moving the baton and held both hands up. The orchestra gradually ground to a halt, like a train whose brakes have been applied but that takes a while to come to a full stop.

"Thank you," he said as the orchestra had just about quieted down. When there was enough silence for him to be clearly heard he turned to the violins. "Violins, concentrate your bows. Get the same forte, but with less bow. Articulate, articulate!" he said, nodding his head at them to reinforce his message. "And be careful to find the pulse in the horns and bassoons. Your double-dotted quarter notes weren't quite long enough."

I had no idea what he was talking about. But before my mind had time to process this new language, he raised the baton again, and they played. I listened now for the second time. The music sounded so complex, but to my ear it was completely synchronized. So many different instruments coming from every part of the stage, so disciplined and so coordinated.

As the rehearsal proceeded I gradually recognized a pattern: they would play, he would comment, they would play again and fix whatever flaws he'd found. If they didn't, he would make them do it again until it was right. They continued in this way for maybe an hour and a quarter. By then I thought that I'd figured it all out.

The orchestra worked like a mechanical clock. It was composed of a series of interlocking parts that needed to be perfectly synchronized. Just as a clockmaker painstakingly takes great care to eliminate the slightest irregularity that could affect accuracy, so the conductor found any points of friction or misalignment, and reshaped the orchestra's playing to fix it. Like a clockmaker, he had a detailed understanding of how the parts fit together, and was a specialist in regulating the mechanism. That's what all of this talk about note lengths, articulation, balance, and strokes was about.

Just as the clock has a mainspring whose energy is transferred through the mechanism until it ultimately moves the hands at exactly the right speeds, so the baton generates the power that the players convert into sound. It not only provides the energy, but also gives precise directions about the tempo.

Rehearsals seemed to be for the conductor to tell the musicians what to do and not to do, and for them to carry out his instructions. His success came from being demanding, not settling for anything less than his high standards. By making the musicians repeat a passage until it was right he let them know that they couldn't get away with anything less. I could see why Pierson was impressed by him. Here was a leader who could isolate the faulty part and refine it until it connected flawlessly with the next piece in the puzzle.

I was pretty proud of myself for having so quickly come to an understanding of how everything worked in the orchestra. Then something unexpected happened. The conductor announced that he wanted to step down and listen to the piece as the audience would hear it. He left the stage and said nothing more. After a few moments, when they could see that he had reached a seat in the hall, the musicians started by themselves, and continued to play with the same synchronicity as before.

To tell the truth, it sounded every bit as good to me. Eventually they came to a passage that I'd begun to recognize, where they had to slow down just a bit and then resume in the original tempo. I was sure that they'd bungle this tricky part. But no, they negotiated the transition just as smoothly as when the conductor had been on the podium. When the music came to the end he called out from the hall, "Break." The musicians immediately began putting their instruments into their cases and the stage was suddenly alive with conversation.

I sat in my chair, now perplexed by what I'd just seen. If the baton was the mainspring, how could they play without it? How did they start without the conductor's signal? How did they stay synchronized, even through the transition, without direction from the podium? I was so puzzled that I had to ask the oboist behind me, who was still at work cleaning his instrument.

"Excuse me, but could I ask you a question?"

"Sure," he said, and laid the oboe on his lap.

"You all played without the conductor just then, right?" He nodded with an expression that suggested this was nothing special.

"Well" -I tried not to sound foolish-"how does that work?"

"We're perfectly capable of doing that."

"But you stayed together. You even started together." He sat waiting for my question. "How can you do that without him?" I said, pointing toward the podium.

He laughed. "We don't need him for that. We do all of that stuff ourselves." At that moment one of his fellow musicians came over to discuss an upcoming orchestra committee meeting. The oboist excused himself and fell into conversation with his friend.

I was really confused now. My assessment of how the orchestra works didn't fit at all with what I'd just seen and heard. How did they so skillfully act as one entity, without anyone person to follow? The more I thought about it, the more questions sprang up.

For the rest of the day I kept on trying to figure it out, replaying in my mind various memories from the rehearsal. I wasn't quite sure how it worked, but I definitely knew that my original model was quite wrong. The conductor wasn't much like a clockmaker after all and his baton certainly wasn't the mainspring.

 

Used with permission. For more information, visit www.MaestroBook.com.

Roger Nierenberg, creator of The Music Paradigm, has served as conductor of the Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra in Florida and the Stamford Symphony in Connecticut, and has performed with orchestras throughout the U.S. and Europe.

 

Posted by The League for Innovation in the Community College on 09/11/2009 at 5:32 PM | Categories: Leadership Abstracts -