Music: How to Conduct

For ten years, walrus-mustached Pierre Monteux, conductor of the San Francisco Symphony, has spent part of each summer teaching younger musicians to conduct. Last week, after a visit to “Papa” Monteux’s 1951 class (50 students) in Hancock, Me., the New York Herald, Tribune’s Critic Virgil Thomson wrote a report on how he does it.

“Mr. Monteux sat in the orchestra . . . [and] nobody, literally nobody got away with anything. Amiably, charmingly, insistently, Monteux corrected every fault.” Sample corrections:

“The clarinet owes you two notes. Collect them.”

“You are not letting the horns breathe.”

“You are conducting the instruments that do not play in this passage and not conducting the ones that do.”

“You may give a divided or an undivided beat but not both. Make up your mind.”

“The percussion cannot read your beat.”

One of the best things about Papa Monteux’s pedagogy: “He paid no attention at all to what his younger conductors looked like from behind.”