Page 160 - Weiss, Jernej, ur./ed. 2025. Glasbena interpretacija: med umetniškim in znanstvenim┊Music Interpretation: Between the Artistic and the Scientific. Koper/Ljubljana: Založba Univerze na Primorskem in Festival Ljubljana. Studia musicologica Labacensia, 8

glasbena interpretacija ... | music interpretation ...
Musical reviews inevitably contain a general understanding of the
time as well as the individual opinion of the critic (author of the article), di-
rected at a particular group of readers. Reviews are subjective, and we read
them differently today than they have been read by contemporaries. I will
regard the statements from the reviews not as objective truth, but as opin-
ions which link the world of music with other social worlds, which will be
explained later.
In 2018, the British conductor Mark Wigglesworth wrote a book called
The Silent Musician. Why Conducting Matters with the aim to explain what
conductors do.
A good conductor unifies and inspires a large group of people for exactly
the same set of reasons that any other leader does. Retaining one’s own
responsibility for decision-making while creating a rewarding collective
sense of collaboration might not be an exact science, but few would dis-
agree that such a combination is the goal of contemporary leadership in
pretty much any field. A conductor is one of the few people whose au-
thority is exercised in public. […] Conductors are more hands on than
most leaders. The complication is that the language we use is figurative,
and our mode of communication can appear questionable to an audi-
ence that is probably not meant to see it at work at all. It’s hard for the
public in the concert hall to avoid observing the physicality of a conduc-
tor, but our gestures are no more a means to an end than is an instru-
mentalist’s fingering. I’m not sure it should matter to the listener what
a conductor looks like – yet everything about the visual mechanics of a
live orchestral concert seems to suggest that it does. 1
Wigglesworth points out the centrality of the visual for a conductor.
Not only does a conductor interpret music by visually transmitted signs,
he or she is also a visual object for the audience. That is why a conductor’s
looks are inevitably going to be noticed. If they are not concurrent with the
implicit expectations, they might be mentioned in a review, and that is of-
ten the case with women.
Today, noticing the visual is often regarded as less worthy and writ-
ing about the music is supposed to be the aim of a review. But hiding cer-
tain aspects does not remove them from reality, neither does it change
the fact that noticing the gender of the conductor cannot be avoided.
The visual aspect cannot be separated from the evaluation of the musical
1 Mark Wigglesworth, The Silent Musician. Why Conducting Matters (London: Faber,
2018), 2–3.

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