Our consideration of conducting technique brings us full circle back to beauty. The highest experience of musical beauty requires a sound object that can be perceived as singular. The controlling element of singularity is the dynamic structure: specifically, the creations and releases of energy that result in a hierarchy of groupings, within which—to the extent possible—the energy and the music end at the same time. The performer creates the dynamic structure using principally inflections of volume and rhythmic density (the temporal distance between tones). The conductor influences the dynamic structure by conforming physical gestures principally to these same two components of the sounds: temporality and volume.

Instrumentalists use their bodies to hold an instrument and to produce the sounds, by bowing, blowing, fingering, stroking, and so on; singers maneuver their bodies for optimal operation of lungs and vocal cords. Beyond the immediate physical demands of producing sounds, musicians in the act of making music move in association with those sounds: all do it internally, and most do it to some degree externally. For chamber musicians it is this physical manifestation of the sounds that provides a visual confirmation of their audial connection. Imagine, though, a musician without an instrument to play, who could give over his or her body fully to the sounds; that musician is the conductor. Freed from the physical demands of creating the sounds, the conductor's motions constitute a full upper-body actualization of the players’ necessarily limited physical manifestations of the sounds.

Of course, the conductor's physical actualization of the sounds is also limited. For example, we cannot produce gestures that connect to inflections of pitch or to balance. But we can effectively influence the sounds if—to the extent possible—we can be the music, conforming our physical motions to the temporality and volume of the sounds, as well as to some extent the sound quality. This, in a nutshell, is conducting technique.

Temporality

The three most basic elements of temporal organization of music are pulse, beat, and meter. A pulse—singular—is the smallest recurring incidence of energy; the pulse—collective—is the periodicity of pulses. A beat is the sound that takes place from the beginning of one pulse to the beginning of the next. Meter is the organization of beats into small, usually regular groupings.