Modica. At the edge of a fascinating Sicily, a land living among the vestiges of a glorious culture, its stones worn away by the sea wind, its grayness as sorrowful as it is distant, forced to endure with stoic patience the rumore of a modern life that seems to look only forward, erasing the ancient traces that history has left behind—like Ariadne’s thread, inviting us back to the origin, to the starting point that reminds us who we are. I even see it as a metaphor for Europe itself, struggling not to empty its own meaning, not to be left with nothing more than the outer shell of an enlightened past that appears to be fading relentlessly.
The streets of Modica, with their exaggerated noise and theatricality, seem to reach back with a nostalgic hand, trying to seize that thread and keep from losing their way.
And it is precisely in this improbable place that a conducting competition is held, bearing an even more improbable and distant name: Frederick Fennell—luminary of modern American conducting and a seminal figure in the aesthetic transformation that the wind band underwent through what we now call the Wind Ensemble.
We are already in the fourth edition of the competition. A group of band enthusiasts, eager to continue the legacy of others who came before them, have decided to do the unthinkable: to create an international event in this corner of Italy. When people say one must “think big,” they underestimate what has been done here. There are no prejudices. No obstacles. Fear of failure is not a factor. Their boldness and candor are touching—and at the same time, remarkably powerful.
Japanese, Chinese, American, European conductors embark on what is nothing less than an odyssey—a modern return to Ithaca. They cross the world to conduct for five minutes. Such is the demand of the preliminary round. Dreams, ambitions, doubts, discoveries, personal challenges—everything, absolutely everything is placed on the line within that fateful span of time.
In the blink of an eye, a score of conductors wager their chances of advancing to the next round. Do or die.
I find myself on the jury side of the table. And I wonder how absurd competitions can be when dealing with art. I wonder whether I myself would be capable of facing such trials successfully. I remind myself it is just a game. I remind myself that they are all winners simply for accepting these draconian rules and risking elimination over a single misguided gesture. I think about how harsh the world can be, demanding that we be perfect, infallible, implacable—and at the same time sensitive, connected artists. I think of all of this. I think of how fallible conducting pedagogy can be at times.
My colleagues on the jury have surely lived the same anxieties. They are seasoned and kind. We undoubtedly have different sensibilities, and it is right that we do. After all, we are speaking of art. Aligning criteria is difficult. Explaining the intangible even more so. Still, our exchanges are collegial, respectful, grounded in camaraderie.
The set piece for the preliminary round was written by one of them—a composer of recognized career who is also an orchestral conductor. Naturally, such a work must contain obstacles capable of testing the participants.
Each conductor receives two movements of the six-part suite—one slow, one fast. More or less. The work is called the Modica Suite.
Conducting is the art of nonverbal communication through gesture. Nothing new. And yet…
Somewhere along the way, something went wrong. Something in our historical evolution has made us forget the past. We lost the traces. There seems to be no Ariadne’s thread to help us find our way back.
Reading Alessandro Baricco’s brilliant new book Breve Storia Eretica della Musica Classica, I realize that since that fateful date in 1198—when the Notre Dame polyphony of Léonin and Pérotin, my two youthful idols, opened up a world of possibilities for the superposition of voices, laying the foundation for Western music—we have gradually, over centuries, stopped illustrating the melismas of plainchant, essentially horizontal and discursive, in favor of the functional need to organize that flood of voices into regular temporal segments that would allow musicians to perform together efficiently.
Of course, I am skipping centuries of history here. But the fact remains: in our collective imagination, the art of conducting has been reduced to a single dimension—a temporal one. Whereas in its origins it was the opposite: a spatial dimension, where time could be suspended by the linearity of musical discourse, which blossomed regardless of the structures that later organized it. Time and space.
I thought about this a great deal throughout the weekend. We begin teaching the very thing that will later become our greatest curse: the segmentation of time into equal parts. Giving some of those parts more weight so that a meter can settle in and allow the ensemble to come together.
For reasons lost to history, we have dressed up centuries-old knowledge—the shaping of sound in space—and replaced it with temporal segmentation as the basis for understanding musical discourse. When we had no grammar, we spoke freely, if you’ll allow the comparison. Grammar should have granted us greater freedom of expression. And yet…
Clear beat patterns at a given tempo, with a given dynamic and certain diction of the musical line, are the indispensable foundation on which clear musical discourse can be expressed. This is not new. But somehow, this has come to be confused with conducting itself. When in truth, it is merely grammar. Beating time.
The spatial dimension of musical discourse—the one that builds dramaturgy, phrases, punctuation, intention, inflection—seems to have abandoned the pedagogy of conducting.
I speak here of the discipline as practiced especially in the band world, too often built on rhythm and articulation. Creating the false illusion that precision in conducting is merely the precision of indicating when to play. It rarely tells us how.
Where and how. Time and space. And there, the worlds of plainchant and polyphony touch across a millennium—where precision becomes the gesture that encompasses the entirety of musical meaning. Precision of intention. Communication.
If I want to be understood in five minutes, I must be able to say what is essential, clearly and unequivocally. What I seek must be known; what I feel must be seen; what I hear must be communicated.
Who cares if we repeat endlessly that time must be divided into equal parts so we can play together, if what we are truly trying to recreate is a musical discourse that can only live when both dimensions exist?
In Modica, they were all winners, because they all displayed a hunger to learn. They all played with passion a difficult game.
We all lose if we forget that grammar is merely the sine qua non condition that allows us to speak freely and say everything we wish to say—but that grammar alone is not enough.
To hide behind a one-dimensional act—beating a pattern—is to forget centuries of history.
We long to be moved, to let our imagination soar, with sounds that float in a space that cannot be confined by vertical laws of organization that conspire against the essential—the eloquence of the musical discourse.
And yet…
Miguel Etchegoncelay 