Empathy between conductor and orchestra: Phenomenology and empirical research

Serâ TOKAY
Conductor, philosopher
Musical director of Tokay Chamber Philharmony orchestra, Istanbul

We are trying to come to terms with certain phenomenological intuitions, born of the practice of orchestral conducting. The articulation of these intuitions has been integrated within a programme of research developed by Prof. Luciano Fadiga (Neurophysiology,

University of Ferrare). Our central intuition: contrary to the dogma of a quite naive though well represented dogma in musicological literature, conducting an orchestra does not consist, first and foremost, in the conductor enjoying some kind of privileged access to the musical, i.e. mental, representations of the instrumentalists – and vice versa. Conducting an orchestra is much more a matter of the conductor possessing a (non representational) kinaesthetic capacity to reproduce, in depth, the style of his or her own lived experiences, so that they become a sort of analog of the expert gestures of the instrumentalist. A transfiguration whose paradoxical radicality goes as far as reinventing the breathing process, the latter being subject to the ordinary physiological necessities that follow from having to raise and lower the arms with each phrase in the execution of the musical work. Without the conductor having to say a word, his or her baton – according to the classical phenomenological description of the instrument, a prolongation of the entire body (and not simply of the anatomical hand) – affectively takes account of all the distortions imposed upon this body by the incarnation of the muscial ideality of the work. This analysis, apparently concentrated upon the kinaesthetic sensations of the particular individual who happens to be the conductor also tells us a great deal about empathy. In the immanental auto-affection of a re-configured corporeal experience, the task of incarnating through gestures the musical meaning of the work interpreted by the conductor is uniquely orientated around the possible resonances of his or her gestures with the gestures productive of the sound of each instrumentalist, singly and invididually. A great conductor is intersubjectively engaged, right down to his or her corporeal gestures.