In the crosshairs

I'm finishing up Michael Pollan's wonderful The Omnivore's Dilemma, which, I have to confess, I started back when the Orchestra was on tour in late February (I have a bad habit of reading up to a dozen books simultaneously, which often results in taking many, many months to finish a single one.) It's a thought-provoking read (who knew how corn permeates so much of what we consume?) describing four meals from four different sources - factory farming, industrialized organic agriculture, self-sustaining polycultural organic farming and hunting/gathering.

A phrase in the hunting/gathering chapter caught my eye; "the hunter's ecstatic purple". Describing his participation in a pig hunt in northern California, Pollan goes on to explain:

It was as if I'd dialed up the gain on all my senses or quieted myself to such an extent that the world itself grew louder and brighter...So much sensory information was coming into my head that it seemed to push out the normal buzz of consciousness. The state felt very much like meditation, though it took no mental effort or exercise to achieve that kind of head-emptying presence. The simple act of looking and listening, tuning my senses to the forest frequencies of Pig, occupied every quadrant of mental space and anchored me to the present.

Reading this was an "aha" moment for me, as I realized that's exactly how I feel while conducting opera.



No, I'm not comparing pig-shooting to Cavaradossi in the crosshairs of the firing squad (I just love that poster). It's more about the feeling of absolute focus on the necessities of the present, which is so all-encompassing that, as Pollan says, one forgets both the passage of time and any physical discomfort.

Opera conducting is an entirely different beast from the orchestral variety. Ostensibly, the biggest difference is the addition of singers, costuming and scenery, but practically this translates into an approach to performance that is completely divergent.

First of all, much more so than in a purely symphonic realm, one has to be acutely aware of the necessity to create a coherent narrative from a musical standpoint; it's a matter of constant attention to dramatic pacing. Which would be hard enough on its own, but the major complication of opera is that you have a bunch of singers running around on stage, and while you may have rehearsed something to perfection in the rehearsal hall, all bets are off when you hit the stage.

Conducting singers is often like herding cats (said with all love and respect for my singing friends and colleagues - but it remains fact that singers rarely have to work under the constraints of communal agreement and consistency that orchestral players do). Combine the artistic license being taken vocally on stage with a prop door that doesn't seem to want to open with a smoke machine that threatens to asphyxiate your first violin section, and you have all the makings of a disaster.

But, oddly (and that very same scenario happened to me several weeks back during the Orchestra's run of Hansel and Gretel), just as those little calamities are piling up, I feel calmer and more focused. After a particularly harrowing act in which a soprano threatened to skip over several lines of music, our principal horn Mike Gast found me backstage and asked, "Geez, doesn't that make you crazy? How do you not panic?"

Call me crazy, but I love that feeling of chaos. When it happens, I utterly understand Pollan's "ecstatic purple"; time slows down, and all those constant bubbles of subconscious thought ("'Did I feed the dogs? Will my house in Richmond ever sell? Should I call my dentist tomorrow?") completely dissipate. My attention is given fully to the task at hand (lassoing the errant soprano, holding a cue until the door can be opened, fanning the violins with a spare hand) and on nothing else. Which for me is incredibly mind-clearing, and thus intensely pleasurable. It's ironic that at those moments when a conductor should feel as if they're caught in the crosshairs, I feel the most relaxed and free - anyone have any comparable experiences in other fields?