Why conductors are important

These usually fall to the left hand. Concertgoers may have their ears trained on the orchestra, but our eyes are invariably drawn to the podium.

We too want to be steered, to be able to align the way the music sounds with the conductor is doing. He or she is a vital visual connection: the bridge between our eyes and the sense of what is happening in the music. Conductors may look like they have an easier ride, not having to master any fiendish passages of finger-work like the violinists, say, or risk the exposure and split notes of the wind and brass players.

A great conductor might have peerless musical instincts and intuition, but innate musicality will get them only so far.

Cerebral creatures by and large, they will typically have spent many hours of preparation on the score before they get anywhere near the podium — often this will be of a most rigorous, even academic nature, encompassing historical documents such as letters, technical performance manuals from the period in question and biographies. The cult of the maestro is still alive and well. Water that actually consists of hydrogen and oxygen with no impurities is rare, and achievable only by distillation in a lab setting.

Everyday water often contains a sufficient number ions charged molecules to allow "normal" water to become a de facto conductor.

Insulators, as you would predict, contain materials whose elements have valence electrons bound far more tightly to the nucleus than is the case with metals. Note that resistivity is different from resistance, which is or can be determined by physically manipulating the placement of resistors in a circuit with known resistance values.

At room temperature, all materials have some measurable degree of resistance, but the amount of resistance in conductors is small. Certain materials achieve a state of 0 resistance at sufficiently low temperatures. Unfortunately, achieving the temperatures required for superconductivity — which would result in almost incalculable global energy savings if it could be propagated worldwide into existing technology — are prohibitively low-attainable as of the early 21st century in laboratory settings.

Kevin Beck holds a bachelor's degree in physics with minors in math and chemistry from the University of Vermont. Formerly with ScienceBlogs. More about Kevin and links to his professional work can be found at www.

Concrete, though far less conductive a substance than metals, is nevertheless considered a conductor on balance. Notify me of follow-up comments by email.

Notify me of new posts by email. Claude Reply. Send this to a friend. Send Cancel. And why do they sweat so much? And almost exclusively male. As long as there are myths around what a conductor actually does, an important part of classical music will seem mysterious to many people.

At a basic level conducting is very simple. It keeps an orchestra or a choir in time and together. Most importantly a conductor serves as a messenger for the composer.