Spectacles

by Sue Perkins

  I walked over, past the violins, to the podium. It felt distinctly odd. Instead of following my instinct to face the audience, I had to stand with my arse towards them, staring instead at the semicircle of strangers below. It was then I got a sense of how truly out of my depth I was. I made a joke. It was lame. There was silence. After all, words aren’t what turn musicians on.

  The orchestra had been charged with following our beat exactly. Whatever moves we busted, whatever time we set, they would follow. I took a deep breath. My shoulders instantly rose to my cheeks with fear. Come on! This is easy. It’s just waving. I know the piece is in three, and I know how to beat three, so I’m laughing.

  The traditional way to beat three is to make a triangle shape, first going down from your head to your chest, then horizontally away from your body, then up to the original starting point around about your head. I put my hand down for the first beat. Some of the band started. Some followed a beat later. The musicians fell, one by one, like dominos, into a puddle of sound. If Les Dawson did strings, this was exactly the noise he would have made.

  I was confused. I’m making triangles, I thought. Why aren’t they playing along to my triangles? The orchestra appeared to be looking in my general direction, but just in case some of them had missed me, I started making larger, more emphatic, triangles. The sound dragged still further. What’s going on? WHY CAN’T YOU FOLLOW MY TRIANGLES? I carried on. By now I looked like Bruce Willis in Die Hard 2 when he’s on the runway frantically waving at the doomed and rapidly descending plane.

  After nearly three minutes of manic, incomprehensible semaphore, I was shattered. My face was red. My arm hurt. The piece didn’t so much end as gradually disappear – with more of a whimper than a bang.

  One by one we lined up to receive this punishment. Our embarrassments were nothing short of genius, a televisual coup de grâce – the death blow to those who believe that the conductor doesn’t do anything. They patently do, because you can see me on screen not doing it.

  Conductors are deeply enigmatic figures, their profession shrouded in mystery. ‘What does a conductor do?’ is the second most iterated question on the planet after ‘What do lesbians do in bed?’ (God forbid, I’d now be tasked with answering both.)

  Although a few international conductors are venerated, most stick wavers are, at best, merely tolerated by the band. There’s probably a maestro joke for every orchestra in the world, but the one I heard most often was:

  Q:

  What’s the difference between a bull and an orchestra?

  A:

  With a bull, the horns are at the front and the shit up the back.

  My personal favourite (when enquiring who is in charge of the baton for the night) was the fabulous line, ‘Who’s doing the carving?’

  After the humiliation of Baton Camp, it was time to learn what ‘doing the carving’ actually entailed. We spent the next few months studying and rehearsing at the Trinity Music College at Greenwich, a cluster of impeccable Regency buildings in south-east London. My mentor was the charming Jason Lai, who had the face of an angel and the terrifying intensity of Mussolini. That time, out of the sight of the camera, studying scores, developing my instinct, physicality and confidence, turned out to be one of the most profound periods of my life.

  Everything I am about to say about my experiences as a conductor I say as a rank amateur. It may seem – especially if you, Dear Reader, are a professional musician – childish, naive or misguided. To you, the professional, I will most likely seem as much of an advert for musicianship as Maria Schneider is for butter. But this is what the experience felt like to inhabit, so forgive what are inevitable simplifications and gaps in my knowledge.

  To make something as discernible as sound, you begin with silence. Silence is the essential canvas onto which everything else is laid. A piece starts and ends with silence, and into that calm, still space, before a single note is struck, the conductor must give what is known as the upbeat. This is the upward motion that announces that the first beat of the piece is coming. It is a signpost. It prepares. With it you are flagging your intent, you are gathering the energy of the group in order to unleash it upon the auditorium. The upbeat will carry messages about the tone, the feeling of the music and sometimes, although not always, its speed. I have seen some conductors give an upbeat as if they are gathering the air towards them like unruly children. Some simply waggle their fingers. Others expand their chests, raise their heads and violently push to the heavens. Each upbeat for each piece is different, and each conductor will give it in their own inimitable fashion.

  (At this point, now I’m getting into this, I can’t tell you how much easier it is to answer the question ‘What do lesbians do in bed?’)

  In basic terms, your lead hand sets the speed, or tempo. It’s responsible for ‘distributing music on the axis of time’ as the New York Philharmonic’s Esa-Pekka Salonen rather beautifully describes it. More often than not, a conductor holds a baton in their lead hand (in my case the left, as I am left-handed) – a white pointy stick which amplifies your hand movements, making them easier to see from the back of the orchestra.

  Your other hand is tasked with providing notes on expression and timbre. What is important? Which line do you want to shine in that moment? With what kind of sound? What colours and textures do you want to show? It’s a kind of ‘emotional ventriloquism’, as Justin Davidson of New York magazine puts it. It’s feeling by proxy. You calibrate the mood, then ask the musicians to physically create it for you.

  You can tell a lot from the way someone holds their baton. (Oh, stop it.) It’s a pretty good indication, I think, of how someone approaches power in general. Do you grab at it? Do you bully or do you cajole? Or does it bounce, all loose and fanciful? I’ve never felt very comfortable with a baton in my hand (I said stop it) perhaps because I feel, inherently, I don’t deserve to brandish one. I’m much more comfortable with a pencil or a biro. Once I even used a toothbrush for a concert. However you hold it, I’m afraid I don’t agree with the loaded notion of the maestro, i.e. the conductor as boss. For me, the conductor is the moderator of a million exciting artistic conversations happening simultaneously – a graphic equalizer, a sculptor of sound.

  OK, now to the beat. The beat is always a downstroke. Place your hand in front of you, palm up. Then bring your lead hand down to clap it. Clap it rhythmically for a while. Then remove your bottom hand. When you create a beat for the orchestra, you are essentially replicating hitting a surface somewhere in front of you.

  Of course, it’s not just about the beat but about everything between it too, which would explain why, during my ‘Blue Danube’, the orchestra got progressively slower the larger my triangles became. The space between the beat got larger, and so the beat itself slowed down. Also, I was marking time with stiff, rigid lines, so the music sounded stiff and rigid too. If you flow, they flow. And if you manically score a giant Dairylea in the sky, then your ‘Danube’ will sound truly, truly shite.

  The hardest thing about conducting is that you cannot wholeheartedly listen to the orchestra. You have to be a fraction ahead, leading the beat. If you get lost in the music they are making, you are already slowing down. You must be simultaneously in the now and the next, creating a feedback loop, a charmed circle, a beating heart with you at the centre of it.

  That’s the idea. The reality, as I discovered, proved to be somewhat harder.

  The first live show on Maestro featured music from film and TV and I struck gold with The Simpsons. I loved it. It had a chaotic, wonky intensity with everyone, especially brass and percussion, at full tilt.
I started to learn how to echo the textures of the piece with my physicality. This was hard, as I have very poor posture and don’t love the way I look. I may have sloughed off a slight stammer, but hints of chronic shyness remain in my lolloping walk, dropped head and sloping shoulders. It took a team of mentors to get me to stand straight, and to look the orchestra in the eye. So much of the work of the conductor is in the eyes. You gaze at strangers with the intimacy of a lover, glare at them with the visceral hatred of a rival. It is not for the shy, it is not for the weak, it is certainly, as I was to discover, not for the emotionally closed.

  Opera week arrived, and I was given the famous aria ‘O mio babbino caro’ from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi to carve to. It’s a song that speaks of yearning and desire, as a daughter tells her father of her love for her boyfriend. It’s searing, soaring, open-hearted stuff.

  And I couldn’t do it.

  This was the first time I’d had to conduct slow music, and I immediately felt myself resisting. It made me uncomfortable – the delicacy, the poignancy, the messy emotional intrusion of it all. Quite simply it was asking something of me I didn’t want to give.

  Like many families, the Perkinses aren’t given to grand displays of affection. We don’t say, ‘I love you.’ We think it, but we don’t say it. That sort of thing would be far too continental and embarrassing. Love, in my family, is generally assumed rather than iterated. I wouldn’t want to force it down your throat, I can imagine my mum and dad saying, like it would be an unbearable burden they’d be saddling me with. My parents never heard it from their parents, so they weren’t accustomed to saying it in return. You pass on what you get, don’t you? The family baton of hopes and dreams and happiness and screw-ups. You pass it down the line like a relay across time and space.

  I say ‘I love you’ all the time. I say it to partners* and friends. I write it on Post-it notes and scribble it on chalkboards. I sign off emails with it and whisper it down the phone. I like saying it as often as I can. But in my family it remains resolutely unsaid. Which isn’t to say that my folks didn’t love me. I always felt loved. Always. I just didn’t have it confirmed to me in the way you see in movies and on TV.

  This is what you need to know. I am an appalling, appalling softie. But somehow, somewhere along the line, I’ve learned how to hide it. Hide that sentimentality and vulnerability. Control the emotions beneath. My dad does it using data. My mum does it by catastrophizing, so that reality always turns out better than her imaginings. I do it with words. Bluster. It fortifies me against the outside world.

  Take away the words, and I am lost.

  Music asks questions that your head will attempt to answer, but only your heart can truly understand. If you try to hide your heart, then you are not a musician. The one thing I had never given music, in all the years at Mrs Green’s, hacking at the ivories, was my vulnerability. My passion. My soul – whatever that is. It’s a big ask for a weirdo like me who has spent her life concealing her vulnerability with fake, polysyllabic bravado.

  The final was between me and Goldie. I love Goldie. He’s an explosive keg of raw energy and ideas. He’s fun. He looked the part too, all handsome in his spanking tux.

  It meant more than I thought it might to win – because, while it’s utterly true to say that the experience itself was reward enough, the previous years had been so very dispiriting. I hadn’t worked for as long as I could remember. I’d left the familiarity of London and the job I loved, but, more importantly, I’d lost every trace of self-belief. And that night, the night when the result came in, was the start of my rebuilding myself from scratch.

  When I allowed myself to think about conducting in Hyde Park at the Last Night of the Proms, many images sprang to mind. None of them included a horde of menopausal women throwing knickers onto the stage, shouting ‘We love you, Terry Wogan’ while I drove my hands to the beat of ‘Pomp and Circumstance’. There wasn’t a lot of pomp, and as for the circumstance, well someone’s large frilly camisole was now draped across my left foot.

  While the Proms was a strange come-down from the show, the most extraordinary night of my life was gifted to me by conducting. Comic Relief took command of the Albert Hall one night in May 2011, in an effort to break the Guinness world record for the most kazoo players playing simultaneously. The place was packed. It was a fabulous bill – Julian Lloyd Webber, Nicola Benedetti, Tim Vine and the gorgeous BBC Concert Orchestra.

  I had the honour of conducting two pieces with the band. Firstly, ‘Mambo’ from Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story. It’s hard for a stolid northern European like me to conjure the spirit of Cuba. ‘Mambo’ is fast and vertical, with jagged offbeats, dizzying virtuoso brass and whirlwind percussion. There’s a riot of bongos, timbales and cowbells. It is jumping. It screams life from the top of its lungs. If you want to see the Albert Hall being ripped apart by the sheer joyous force of it, then check out Gustavo Dudamel leading the Simon Bolivar Orchestra at the Proms on YouTube and prepare to SOAR, baby.

  I wasn’t particularly worried about ‘Mambo’. It’s frenetic and has its own momentum, as with The Simpsons. Most importantly, it asks nothing complicated from you emotionally; it merely requires the maximum amount of joy you can throw at it. If an amateur like me can just start it off right, then if things go off the rails, the tuned percussion will glue themselves to the beat so everyone can hang off them if needs be.

  At the end of the night came my personal nemesis, Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’. It is one of those pieces often deemed hackneyed, and yet, when you hear it, I challenge you not to be flooded with sentiment. It’s in our DNA that piece, whether we like it or not. It has an ancestral vibration that reaches out from the past and pulls you to it. It is for us what Barber’s ‘Adagio for Strings’ is for the Americans, a wordless evocation of the soul of a nation.

  Go on, get it down from your shelf if you have it. If not, download it now. I like Sir Colin Davis’s version, but there are millions to choose from. Get it and put it on – loud. Let it wash over you, as each bar gradually increases in intensity. Like a clenched fist gently unfurling and then reaching for the heavens …

  ‘Nimrod’ is however an utter nightmare to conduct. On the page it looks relatively simple. It’s in three – yes, that old chestnut – but such a slow three. With ‘Nimrod’ and other slow burners it isn’t so much about what you do with the beat, it’s what you do between it – how you sculpt the space within the notes so that it flows and builds to its ultimate crescendo. And Jesus, it’s tiring. Try drawing your hand across your body in long, smooth lines for four minutes or so. It becomes agony after a while.

  What I wasn’t expecting, though, was how I’d feel. Nothing prepared me for that.

  I put down a beat for the violins and watched as their bows skimmed across the strings. So far, so good. At bar three I turned to the violas, and they expanded the line with an incredible sweetness. And then it happened. A mere five or six bars in I started to lose myself in the music. Just a little at first. But then, slowly and inexorably, it began to eat me up. My hand started to droop. So much so I couldn’t hold the baton. I dropped it on the stand and carried on with just my hands, fingers dragging as if hanging off a boat and dangling in the water beneath. The sound began to lag.

  I wasn’t leading. I wasn’t following either. I was inside it, inside the guts of it, and I couldn’t get out. My chest vibrated with the sound. My head flooded with a million sudden thoughts and feelings – snapshots, sounds, smells. My past. My family. Love and the loss that walks so closely behind it. My hand was now so heavy I could barely drag it across my body.

  The music was either too big for me, or I was too small for it. E
ither way, I will never forget being so utterly overwhelmed. In that moment I understood something profound – that words would only distort should I choose them to describe it. I learned about performance, connection, intimacy, sadness. I learned about me. Every part of myself I tried to hide, it came looking for – ripping me open like a tin can.

  All of which made for a bloody terrible ‘Nimrod’, so I’m sorry if you were listening.

  The next day I obsessed about the fact that I’d had the opportunity of conducting one of the greatest pieces of music ever written in one of the greatest concert halls in the world, and I’d blown it. It was too slow. It was too leaden. All day long it hung over me – the shame, the shame of getting it wrong.

  I arrived home the next night to have dinner with my parents. As usual, I hadn’t told them I was doing a gig. After we’d eaten, I went into the kitchen to help Mum with the washing-up. Minutes passed with nothing but the squeak of dishcloth on glass as our soundtrack.

  Then Mum piped up, ‘I heard your concert on Radio 3 last night.’

  ‘Really?’ I had completely forgotten it had been a live broadcast. There was a pause. ‘It was terrible. Sorry, Mum. It was too bloody slow.’

  I reached for the tea towel in embarrassment. Mum turned to face me. ‘No, Susan, it was yours. And it was perfect.’

  There was that silence again.

  I love you, I thought.

  I thought but didn’t say.

  I love you.

  Oh No, I Can’t

  By now I was travelling up and down the country so frequently I could recite the whole of the First Great Western London-to-Penzance timetable from memory. It was an utterly pointless skill to have, of course, since First Great Western rarely stuck to it. For them the timetable appeared to be more of a suggestion than a schedule. Still, the trains themselves were always a pleasant surprise when they arrived.