THE COMPLEAT CONDUCTOR.<i> By Gunther Schuller</i> .<i> Oxford University Press: 572 pp., $49.95</i> : THE ART OF CONDUCTING TECHNIQUE: A New Perspective.<i> By Harold Farberman</i> .<i> Belwin-Mills: 290 pp., $49.95</i>

There is a joke circulating about a man who wants to buy a parrot. He enters a store and spies a beautiful bird, only to discover that it costs $50,000. This parrot sings all the Puccini arias. The man sees an even more beautiful specimen, which costs $75,000. It sings all the Mozart arias. Astonished at these prices, he points to a broken-down, disheveled, one-eyed parrot and says, “I guess I’ll have to settle for that one.” The store owner apologizes. This parrot costs $100,000. Amazed at the price, the buyer asks, “Why is such an ugly beast so expensive?” The owner concedes that he himself doesn’t know; all he knows is that the other two parrots call this parrot Maestro.

Concert-goers are routinely baffled by conductors. Even aficionados harbor the suspicion that conductors may not be altogether necessary. They appear to wave their arms for no purpose other than self-indulgence. Orchestras respond as if they were playing the music themselves without paying much attention to the conductor. When a violinist or pianist plays accurately and in tune, we talk about his or her having a fine technique. But what does it mean to say that a conductor possesses technique or is a good conductor? Given the high quality of our orchestral musicians, why not use the model of Orpheus, that highly successful ensemble that plays and records without a conductor?

Such cynicism notwithstanding, there is such a thing as conducting technique. There are differences between a great conductor, a competent conductor and a fake. Conducting involves transmitting musical ideas and conceptions through physical movement. The conductor must realize sound and shape through gesture in a way that elicits from the orchestra the desired result. Orchestras recognize good conducting. They respond when it happens.

There are at least two levels of technique in conducting: a fundamental repertoire of gestures that help to put a piece together and the somewhat more elusive and complex capacity to communicate a worked-out and subtle interpretation and sonic realization through movement and expression.

The profession of conducting is a 19th and 20th century phenomenon. All conductors of distinction have done more in music than conduct. Some have written music (Wagner, Mahler, Richard Strauss and Boulez); many have been instrumentalists of renown (von Bulow, Szell, Munch, Barenboim and Ashkenazy). In many cases, conductors were trained as professional instrumentalists but had no particular achievement to their credit (Eugene Ormandy, Fritz Reiner, Arturo Toscanini). The point is that no conductor can command the respect of musicians or the audience if he or she does not bring to the podium an extraordinarily high level of musicianship, which often comes from another branch of music-making.

The reason there are more mediocre conductors than in other facets of performance is that conducting involves some amalgam of ill-defined skills. Good looks, charm and a whole host of seemingly irrelevant virtues (including money) can put a less than first-rate individual in front of a major orchestra. Some great conductors are unfairly criticized for having these indispensable theatrical and public relations gifts. Koussevitzky was technically limited as a conductor, but he was a great bass player and a gifted musician, and even though his ears were not as sharp as those of Monteux, he got great results. Bernstein, who may have been this century’s greatest American conductor, was, despite his podium antics, a remarkable composer and pianist. He was a musician of extraordinary charisma, insight and talent. Unfortunately, there are many who have the superficial virtues of both these men without their core musical abilities and convictions.

The publication of two books on conducting by two eminent American conductors of approximately the same age, with nearly parallel backgrounds, is itself unusual. Gunther Schuller, who is among America’s most celebrated musicians, is an eminent composer. He was once a great French horn player. He has been an indefatigable performer and organizer and has written one of the best books on jazz ever published. He has also maintained a career as a conductor. Harold Farberman, who is just a few years younger and is less well known, is also a serious composer whose works are highly regarded. He was a long-time member of the Boston Symphony and began his career as a virtuoso percussionist. He has now emerged as America’s leading conducting pedagogue. His annual Conductors’ Institute at the Hartt College of Music has become justly world famous.

If general readers wish to satisfy themselves that conducting is a difficult technical endeavor, they should consult Farberman’s book first. It is a textbook that painstakingly analyzes the space and physical characteristics of conducting technique. The general reader, however, will discover right away that in order to conduct, one has to have a comprehensive musical training, including a solid knowledge of harmony, orchestration, analysis, score reading and history. The lay reader will be lost, except in one regard. Farberman makes it clear that each conductor must adapt technique, fashion an interpretation and realize it in front of the orchestra. The interpretation derives from the score but is not determined by that score. Farberman, whose father was a klezmer musician, has grasped the profound wisdom behind Strauss’ dictum: Conducting demands a delicate balance between faithfulness to a text and inspired improvisation.

Schuller, on the other hand, has written a book directed at the general reader and the educated musician or would-be conductor. If Farberman’s book is a text designed for use in the classroom, Schuller’s book appeals to the music lover and concert-goer. There are musical examples, but the book can be read by people who don’t read music. This book contains extensive analyses of eight works from the standard repertoir: Beethoven’s Fifth and Seventh symphonies, Brahms’ First and Fourth, the Schumann Second, the Tchaikovsky Sixth, Strauss’ Till Eulenspiegel and Ravel’s second Daphne and Chloe Suite. Schuller’s achievement is nearly incredible. He has listened to literally hundreds of recordings in painstaking detail. He meticulously takes apart one interpretation after another. And the first hundred pages of his book are devoted to an exposition of his own philosophy of conducting and a brief history of conducting.

Despite Schuller’s admirable erudition, his unquestioned brilliance as a musician and his extensive research, in the end the book is a painful, unrelenting and misguided diatribe. It is as if, in the twilight of his career, Schuller is taking his revenge. He tears nearly every other conductor to shreds, alternately mocking and insulting them by pointing out the error of their ways. His pen can be viciously condescending with inappropriate categorical epithets, such as “childish,” “misbegotten,” “absurd,” “vulgar,” “gross,” “perverse” and, above all, “incorrect,” applied to the work of distinguished conductors. At the core of the book is Schuller’s belief that there is one right way of performing the works of the past; deviations from that “right way” are simply wrong. If one looks carefully enough at the scores, in the way he has, one can come up with the composer’s true intention and the right answer. He knows that answer, even though most others don’t.

The trouble with this point of view is that it does not hold up under scrutiny. A musical score is not comparable to a written text. Even if it were like a text, a score is not a comprehensive set of all possible meanings and instructions. The character of notation has changed over time, as has the relationship between notation and performance and between sounds and perceived meaning on the part of listeners. Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Ravel are therefore different from one another in terms of what the score says or means. Despite Beethoven’s anger at bad performances of his own music, he never possessed the modern notion that there was one right way to play his works.

Music is a performing art as is drama. Even if one could discern Shakespeare’s “original” intentions in order to find the “true” meaning of “Hamlet,” one would not necessarily reconstruct the way “Hamlet” was originally done. Shakespeare’s vitality over centuries has depended on the fact that different generations and individuals have read his work differently, produced it differently, acted it differently, responded to it differently and have even taken the liberty of cutting and editing it (and in the 18th century, rewriting it).

The same has been true for music. Mozart rewrote Handel, Mahler rewrote Schumann and Bach and Schoenberg rewrote Brahms. Every performance is a rewriting and a re-creation. The idea of a sacred text, a score that contains, in an almost cabalistic way, all meaning independent of historical change, all the necessary secrets, is a peculiar mid-20th century conceit. It was the view of Stravinsky and Schoenberg, who hated performers and their habits. Schuller came of age with this kind of rigid ahistorical idea of what a musical score is and what interpretation is about. After reading his book, no sane person would ever attempt to conduct any of the standard works Schuller writes about. He has constructed a terrifying wall of technical argument to protect these so-called masterpieces from his notion of bowdlerization and abuse. But as in the case of Shakespeare, it is precisely the fact that Beethoven and Tchaikovsky have spoken in varied ways through divergent readings that has made them part of the so-called canon. Farberman’s intent is to place technique in the hands of a new generation so that it can make music anew. Schuller’s intent is to establish a fixed norm of truth and to create a catechism, of which he is the keeper. The authoritarian, arrogant tone of this book is as unjustified as it is unbearable.

The recording industry has created a library of past performances that young conductors consult all too often. Although Schuller trashes most recordings, he inadvertently encourages this use for them. Recordings have helped stultify the standard repertoire. It is no accident that the point of this book is that there is a final truth that Schuller knows. Schuller does not convince the reader of this, and it is impossible that anyone could. Take, for example, the most famous piece that he analyzes, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Schuller’s reading of the work, which at first seems so convincing, turns out to be just one way of understanding the score. Yet at one point he, too, alters Beethoven’s printed phrasing. He even calls for a slower tempo in the second subject of the first movement.

Consider this point: In measure 62 of the opening movement, the final note of the well-known horn call is a B flat, which serves as a pedal. Schuller believes the second subject begins at the next bar. But another valid way of reading the phrase structure is to consider measure 62 the beginning of the new subject. Schuller’s analyses, like all analyses, are no more than well-founded, which is why mere authority won’t suffice.

These legitimate ways of hearing a score only show how important interpretation is. One can make a case for the 19th century habit of making the famous opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth slower, but in order to make the case for this interpretation to new generations of listeners, the rationale has to be reinvented, and that reinvention has to be rooted in the score. A conductor must defend an interpretation, but in the end, there is no one right solution. Composers (Schumann is a case in point) have heard their own music differently at different times in their lives. Despite the depressing influence of recordings, the object of live performance is not sameness but difference, because one is in new places in new times and, because the making of music always assumes a new aspect, even if the intent is to communicate a fixed or stable meaning.

Consider this extreme example: The score on the stand at the performance of Beethoven’s Ninth by Bernstein at the fall of the Berlin Wall was the same score that was on the stand when Furtwangler and Knappertsbusch conducted the same work in Nazi Germany in the 1940s. No composer, from Bach to Boulez, would deny the assertion that there is more to performing music than the illusory, “faithful” realization of the printed score.

Schuller’s book should be read by every conductor, self-styled connoisseur and concert-goer. It is a classic restatement of a modernist position about reading, meaning, interpretation and texts that has long been abandoned by literature, theater and art. Younger performers and scholars must reclaim traditional classical music as a living art meant to be re-imagined. In order to communicate what Beethoven, from a historical point of view, sought to communicate to his own audience, one might have to radically rethink the performance of his symphonies. At the same time, Sculler’s text offers a crucial counter-argument that must be confronted. He has done a great service, brilliantly executed, if only to help listeners and performers discover how not to proceed.

The sobering part of Schuller’s book is the admonition, equally evident in Farberman’s text, that in the end, conducting is an extraordinarily difficult musical task. It requires, at a minimum, consummate musicianship. But that alone will not suffice. When the great pianist Arthur Rubinstein, who at the end of his career wanted to try his hand at conducting, was on tour with the Jerusalem Symphony in Israel, he asked whether at one rehearsal he could spend the allotted time conducting the orchestra. The orchestra was only too delighted. Rubinstein chose Brahms’ Third Symphony. The music was put on the stands. Rubinstein began to conduct, and very quickly things unraveled. He went to the piano on stage and played the opening bars in an attempt to show what he wanted it to sound like. He knew every note of the score. He returned to the podium and was again unsuccessful. He returned to the piano. After 10 frustrating minutes, with a huge grin he said, “After all these years I have wanted to know what this was all about, and now for the first time I really get it.” He put the baton down and walked off. Schuller and Farberman know what it takes to train someone to do what Rubinstein could not. The fact that there is such a divergence between them with respect to conducting and interpretation is itself a welcome sign of vitality at a time when contemporary musical life seems all too often moribund.