The Rilling Diagram

The orchestra is working under the baton of Helmuth Rilling this week, (notice that I did not say "we" - the strings have been reduced for this concert, and since my current position in our seating rotation has me in the last chair, I've been cut for the week,) which is always a good time. Rilling, while not a household name in America, is a legend in the business and an old friend of the Minnesota Orchestra. (He once showed up at a rehearsal we were playing on tour in Stuttgart, Germany, where he lives, just to say hi and welcome us to his hometown.) He's a deeply serious musician with a definite point of view, and probably the foremost Bach conductor working today. (He helms the Oregon Bach Festival each summer, and a number of MN Orch musicians are regulars there as well.) He also, as I discovered the first time I played under him, uses what may be the world's most unique beat pattern.

Anyone who's ever played in an orchestra or a band knows what a beat pattern is, of course, and Sarah demonstrated a few different ones during our Copland concerts a couple of weeks back. But in case I've lost anyone at this point, it's fairly standard for a conductor to move his/her hands in a specific pattern for a specific meter. If the music is in four, the usual beat pattern will look like this.

Conductors can and do deviate from this, of course, and as long as the rhythm isn't too horribly difficult, we don't actually need each beat spelled out for us to stay on target. But generally, we expect beat one to be a downward slash, beat four is the opposite, and beats two and three need to be left and right motions of some sort.

Rilling is having none of this. His personal beat pattern for music in four is perfectly consistent, and surprisingly easy to follow, but it is a bit on the unconventional side...

No kidding. That's exactly what it looks like - the usual downward slash for one, followed by a light bounce and curlicue at the bottom for two, then an upward left sweep for three, and a final bounce up and to the right for four. When I was new in the orchestra, my stand partner at the time, Kerri Ryan, and I spent an entire week determined to diagram the Rilling beat pattern, and that's what we came up with. We were, in fact, so taken with our diagram that we began writing it in our music (without the numbers I've included above) wherever we would normally have written "In 4." (This will doubtless cause much confusion for other violists in future performances, but I think this is balanced out by the distinct possibility that, since Rilling frequently has us use his personal set of orchestral parts, the next person to see the diagram will also be playing the piece under Rilling, and might, after a few minutes, actually figure out what the squiggle is supposed to represent.)

Rilling is hardly the only conductor with his own beat pattern. Our former Sommerfest director, Jeffrey Tate, used to bob his head upwards on beat four and downwards on beat one, as if watching his own rising and falling baton. Our last music director, Eiji Oue, would occasionally forgo the baton completely during comical passages and keep the beat by throwing his hips from side to side, a move I dubbed the "Hip Check." (Eiji actually had a whole litany of entertaining podium moves, some of which were variously referred to as the "Safe at Home," the "Tiger Woods," and my personal favorite, the "Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em.")

Eiji Oue In Action

Definitely not Eiji Oue

People often accuse orchestra musicians of not watching our conductors, not realizing that we're constantly looking at them peripherally, while watching our music and our principal players simultaneously. The reality is that we tend to know a conductor's moves so well that we would likely recognize their beat patterns and podium mannerisms even if we couldn't see their faces. Especially Helmuth Rilling. I'd know his hands anywhere...