Ban conductors
Not bus conductors - we need more of them to tell chavs to get their feet off the seats and turn off their shitty R&B - orchestra conductors are the ones I'm talking about.

What in the name of Mozart's arse do they actually do? In the orchestra you have a collection of highly talented, thoroughly practised, professional musicians who could probably play the entire piece with their eyes closed. All they need is someone to give them the nod so that they all start at the same time. But nooooooooooooooo, instead you have some self-important, dressed-up twat who insists on flailing and gurning his way through the entire piece and then, the final insult, turning and bowing to the audience at the end as if to say "Oh yes, that was all me! Ignore the large crowd of people with instruments behind me, they didn't do anything. It's my name that's going to be on the CD cover, not theirs!"

Put them all in a huge trebuchet and fling them into the middle of the Atlantic I say.
(flimflam_machine, Fri 23 Sep 2011, 11:18, 5 replies)

I think this is incorrect
To answer your initial question: what they actually do is coordinate the whole orchestra - it's not enough to start at the same time, they need to remain together throughout the piece; also they are responsible for the texture and dynamics of the performance - compare different recordings of the same work by different conducters and they can be quite contrasting.
Yes they are often self-important, dressed-up twats, but they are also highly talented, thoroughly practised, professional musicians themselves. It has been said (I forget who said it) that the orchestra is the ultimate instrument to play.
( tangledupinblue hairy badge with moving eyes, Fri 23 Sep 2011, 12:10, closed)

To be fair...
...I was exaggerating. I know they are talented people, and having a non-playing coordinator for practising must be very beneficial. But at the actual performance stage I'm still completely at a loss as to what they actually do. Take the beginning of a piece for example the conductor waves his arms around for a seemingly random time/number of beats and then the orchestra all comes in together, see about 3:15 here:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnKJpYGCLsg

How do they know which of the conductor's varied flailings they should start on? How?! Similarly, througout the piece, none of his gesticulations relate to a beat within the music so how is he contributing to keeping them in time?
(flimflam_machine, Fri 23 Sep 2011, 12:26, closed)

I did suspect there was some tongue-in-cheek in your post
But in the example you give there, it looks to me as though at 3:15 he simply counts them in. How do they know what his varied flailings mean? Well, that performance isn't the first time they have worked with him - there will have been many months of rehearsals involving discussion about the performance as well as playing (and more than likely a lot of shouting from the conductor when members of the orchestra fail to understand his flailings).
He is not just keeping them in time but controlling their expression too. If you ever watch an orchestra without a conductor you will see they are shit. Individual sections may stay together, but the piece will quickly lose its coherence.
( tangledupinblue hairy badge with moving eyes, Fri 23 Sep 2011, 12:40, closed)

well
speaking as a "self-important, dressed-up twat" It isn't really that much to do with keeping people in time although making people start and stop in the right place is part of it. It is more about interpretation, someone has to decide how the piece is going to be performed, in a small group you can decide amongst yourselves but when you have lots of musicians you need to have one person to pick tempos mood etc and the gurning is just trying to epress that to people without speaking, yes you could do that in rehearsal but it would take a very long time to go through every single bit of a piece and usually rehearsal time is very short.

Sorry for the serious answer.

Patiently joins cue of over dressed floppy haired prima donnas next to a trebuchet in Cornwall.
(alc http://www.cameronmusic.co.uk, Fri 23 Sep 2011, 13:20, closed)

No need
After a spirited defence by tangledupinblue I've decided that conductors are remarkable, talented and deeply valuable people and the trebuchet has been re-aimed towards a large container filled with naked women, kittens and marshmallows that I've specially commissioned.

*heads off to learn to be a conductor*
(flimflam_machine, Mon 26 Sep 2011, 13:40, closed)