I remember returning to Melbourne from Finland to conduct my debut concert with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in 2003.

Travelers will be familiar with the ‘occupation’ question on the immigration card. For the first time I was faced with the dilemma of writing ‘student’ as I was at the time or ‘conductor’ which although true, seemed premature given my early stage of professional work. I paused, and then decided that I was actually entering the country as a conductor to work with one of our finest orchestras and filled the form out accordingly. As I passed through customs officials asked me for my immigration card. “Conductor!” the official said chuckling. “I thought there weren’t any on the trams any more.” I had to laugh. I hardly fitted the image of the elderly maestro and the claim seemed a little audacious even to me. I told him that I was here to work with the MSO. “You don’t look like a conductor”, he said, “What do you guys really do anyway?” It was then that I realised that I had entered a profession that is shrouded with a fairly high level of mystery and suspicion and at the least is little understood.

The thought crossed my mind that maybe it is better left this way. The fantastic image of the magician conductor conjuring music with his or her hands is so powerful, so intoxicating. It is a stereotype etched into the public psyche by great maestros captured on screen and in live performance. Some perceive conducting as an artistic expression of ultimate power and control, a fantasy of the imagination. It is possibly all of these things, however, if these are reasons for deciding to follow the dream of becoming a top-level conductor the beginner will most likely have limited success.

“Power” and “control” are certainly qualities a conductor needs in communicating to an orchestra and audience, however conducting for me is about neither. When I conduct an orchestra I feel only a responsibility to the music, the musicians creating it and also to the audience.

This may sound idealistic but as I stood nervously waiting to conduct the Sydney Symphony Orchestra at the Sydney Opera House in the 2001 Young Conductor of the Year Competition my teacher Jorma Panula, regarded as the greatest of all conductor trainers, said words I will never forget. “Forget yourself, only music.”

This only later made sense of course, like the time he ran up to me and shook my stomach saying “More… More!” The “self” is not necessary to consider when making music. It is expressed through the act of creation anyway. As soon as a conductor starts to fix his or her hair on the podium, alarm bells ring for me. “Hair ok, music problem.” was another of Jorma’s great quotes.

Personality is of course crucial in relating to the PEOPLE in the orchestra and orchestral management. Nobody likes to work with an arrogant tyrant these days. But authority comes from only one place, the score. Professional musicians can be ruthless in a rehearsal if things are not going well. They need to hear and feel the music improving through a carefully judged and relevant rehearsal strategy. The knowledge of the music you are conducting is the only refuge for a conductor in a rehearsal or performance with professional musicians.

Inspiration can only get you so far. Talent or musicianship should be a given at this level, the world is full of brilliant musicians who cannot physically conduct an orchestra. Technical proficiency, although surprisingly rare, is also of limited benefit. Even those with the most affable and gregarious personalities will generally not be spared if the music is not right. How a conductor wants the music to sound and how they can effectively communicate this to the musicians and audience is perhaps a simplistic but relatively accurate basic job description.

Conducting is like any leadership position in that the power with which you are entrusted comes with a huge, sometimes almost overbearing responsibility. The musicians are relying on you to create an artistic environment that shows them at their best. The audience is expecting to be moved and enlightened by your interpretations.

And then there is the enormous weight of the often long dead composer’s artistic and emotional wishes. If I conduct Tchaikovsky, should I also try to reflect the personality of Tchaikovsky the man? Should his romantic and complex soul need any magnification beyond the notes? How can I translate the music of a genius like Mozart or Beethoven for heaven’s sake? Indeed, how can one switch between these individual giants of art in one concert? These burdens are potentially crushing for all performers sometimes.

Clearly one perceptual problem for audiences is that a conductor’s work is largely done in the privacy of the rehearsals leading up to a performance. It is in rehearsal that a conductor has the chance to really work in detail at getting the musical results they are after. Some conductors talk a lot to get results whereas others show great detail in their physical gestures, which eliminates the need use too many words. This for me is really the art of conducting – effectively converting the communication of mental will into the physical domain. The Germans have a great word ‘ausstrahlung’ which is perhaps best translated as ‘radiance’. A conductor has to radiate music on the podium without using words.

Maestro Panula always said that his responsibility was to teach students to conduct, not how to make music. Music, he said, was up to the individual and was different for everyone. I think he also knew full well that these two things are eventually indivisible. This is the basic duality of any art, the combination of the technical and the creative. Some people say that conducting cannot be learned but rather it is a gift or a calling. The incredible number of world-class conductors produced by the Sibelius Academy conducting class in Helsinki where I studied would seem to disprove this to a certain extent.

There is a language to the physical side of conducting which can be studied and learned. The music making is something altogether different. Studies give a conductor the tools with which to best express their desired musical result. The best teachers encourage students to find their own ‘style’ that works best for them within the basic framework of the universal and well-established conventions governing beating patterns and basic dynamic gestures. The best professional orchestras are so well practiced in playing together that often they don’t need the basic time keeping gestures all the time. They need more advanced direction such as the broader shape of the music and the deeper emotional meaning contained within it.

I remember at the conclusion of my formal studies with Jorma Panula I was so absorbed with my hands and physical movements that I was becoming a little closed to the music I was conducting. He said, “Congratulations Benjamin, you can now forget everything that you have learned!” This was the best advice I could have been given. He felt that my ‘technique’ was absorbed to the point that I could forget about it and trust that it would be there anyway. “Just make music”, he told me. He reminded me of Yoda all of a sudden.

I can’t describe the feeling of freedom I felt on the podium after he said that. It was as if I had completed the first major step in this seemingly endless journey. That first step took seven years and carried me from Melbourne through the Sydney Opera House, around Australia to Austria, Germany, Finland, Sweden, Great Britain, France, Spain, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Latvia, Mexico, Israel and the United States. And, for now, very happily back home again.