[Sidenote:  The conductor.]

[Sidenote:  Time-beaters and interpreters.]

[Sidenote:  The conductor a necessity.]

In the full sense of the term the orchestral conductor is a product of the latter half of the present century.  Of course, ever since concerted music began, there has been a musical leader of some kind.  Mural paintings and carvings fashioned in Egypt long before Apollo sang his magic song and

    “Ilion, like a mist, rose into towers,”

show the conductor standing before his band beating time by clapping his hands; and if we are to credit what we have been told about Hebrew music, Asaph, Heman, and Jeduthun, when they stood before their multitudinous choirs in the temple at Jerusalem, promoted synchronism in the performance by stamping upon the floor with lead-shodden feet.  Before the era which developed what I might call “star” conductors, these leaders were but captains of tens and captains of hundreds who accomplished all that was expected of them if they made the performers keep musical step together.  They were time-beaters merely—­human metronomes.  The modern conductor is, in a sense not dreamed of a century ago, a mediator between the composer and the audience.  He is a virtuoso who plays upon men instead of a key-board, upon a hundred instruments instead of one.  Music differs from her sister arts in many respects, but in none more than in her dependence on the intermediary who stands between her and the people for whose sake she exists.  It is this intermediary who wakens her into life.

    “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
    Are sweeter,”

is a pretty bit of hyperbole which involves a contradiction in terms.  An unheard melody is no melody at all, and as soon as we have music in which a number of singers or instrumentalists are employed, the taste, feeling, and judgment of an individual are essential to its intelligent and effective publication.  In the gentle days of the long ago, when suavity and loveliness of utterance and a recognition of formal symmetry were the “be-all and end-all” of the art, a time-beater sufficed to this end; but now the contents of music are greater, the vessel has been wondrously widened, the language is become curiously complex and ingenious, and no composer of to-day can write down universally intelligible signs for all that he wishes to say.  Someone must grasp the whole, expound it to the individual factors which make up the performing sum and provide what is called an interpretation to the public.

[Sidenote:  "Star” conductors.]