Music can be beautiful. It can move us, it can exalt us, it can make us better. It offers a transcendent experience of the essence of our selves, one that affirms and strengthens us in our everyday lives. Such an experience is literally transcendent: in our consciousness of the sounds we become the sounds; we transcend the duality that exists between us and them. Beauty—which can occur at different levels of the consciousness and to different degrees—exists to the extent that we experience this transcendence.

In my previous book, Looking for the “Harp” Quartet: An Investigation into Musical Beauty (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2011), I explored the contributions to that experience by the listener, who absorbs sounds; the composer, who suggests them; and the performer, who brings them to life. The conductor guides an ensemble of performers in that undertaking. But how?

In one common understanding, the composition is a script inviting diverse realizations by creative interpreters, the ensemble is a collection of individuals with divergent musical sensibilities and instincts, and the job of the conductor is to visit a unifying interpretation on the group. In another, the composition is a definitive text, the ensemble is a collection of willing but imperfect souls, and the conductor's job is to honor the composer by ensuring the requisite reading. Both understandings require a controlling figure, called a “director,” “chief,” and even “military commander” in Latin, Germanic, Slavic, and Asian languages. Both assume the musicians’ responsibility is to respond to the demands of that controlling figure.

On the Principles and Practice of Conducting is grounded in a different understanding of the process and thus of the function of the conductor. In actuality, an ensemble is a collection of essentially like-minded beings with an inherent inclination to come together and a proclivity to respond to the demands of the sounds in the same or similar ways.