Do leaders matter? Insights from conductorless orchestras
The Russian Revolution led to post-revolutionary reform in Russian symphony orchestras. In 1922, Persimfans or conductorless orchestras, were initiated by violinist Lev Zeitlin. Zeitlin’s central idea was that excellent musicians know as well as the conductor how the music ought to be performed. Consistent with the Marxism’s stated ideal that all people are equal, the role of the conductor was removed and replaced with a ‘management committee’ structure.
Persimfams, in the original form have been a limited success but the approach has persisted where the most celebrated example is the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra in New York City. From a leadership and management perspective, the conductorless orchestra asks a question that is rarely voiced with in many organisations, namely: what value do leaders add to the organisational performance?
In an orchestral performance who is responsible for the sound: conductor or orchestra? In a large orchestra, the components of the organisation and the relationships between them are well understood by competent players, so it could be expected that any competent conductor could get a good sound from a good orchestra because the organisation and competence of the players already carry a significant performance load. In terms of texture, the background patterns of the organisational structure are strong enough to ensure a level of performance. The organisational equivalent is the bureaucratic or administrative system. A well-organised administrative system with competent managers carries a significant load in the performance of daily operations in every organisation. However, as with organisations under different leaders, orchestras can adopt a different sound under different conductors. Conductor James Levine expressed the idea well:
‘We all claim to be doing the same thing, yet what comes out is not the same thing!’
The leadership and management challenges faced by Persimfans allow us an opportunity to determine what value conductors, commanders and leaders add.
In 1928, music critic Lenoid Sabaneev, reviewed the Persimfans performance. He noted that they ‘presented a strange appearance’:
The players sat in a circle, facing inwards in order the better to see one another and to catch the fleeting, almost imperceptible signals by which chamber music performers usually maintain unity of rhythm in the ensemble. The outlying flanks of the orchestra were cleverly kept together by means of a system of what might be described as subsidiary ‘leaders’ of the different sections.
Sabaneev noted that it took 20 rehearsals to produce a ‘well-blended and harmonious’ performance of a very familiar program. Despite this, he concluded that the Persimfans ‘experiment’ was very successful. However, there were also detractors, who Sabaneev noted, argued that:
… the conductorless orchestra was lacking in artistry; that it could not produce elemental feelings of exaltation, that its playing was impersonal, a sort of ‘mean arithmetical’ affair, the product of the reciprocal action of the psychologies of the individual performers – psychologies not subordinated to a sole reacting centre. It was further indicated that the presentation of a comparatively simple programme with some success demanded a vast expenditure of time and energy – twenty very trying rehearsals – whereas the orchestra would have played it under a conductor almost without any.
The concerns raised around the performance of Persimfans relate to ‘efficiency’ (both in preparation and performance) and ‘style’. The questions of efficiency seem to be largely questions of control. In an organisational sense, one manager, removed from the mechanics of task performance, is better positioned to marshal and coordinate the resources of the many.
This ideal was captured in Frederick Taylor’s three fundamental principles of scientific management:
dissociation—disentangling the labour process from the skills of workers by reducing all process knowledge to systematic formulas and rules;
separation—separating planning from execution by shifting the responsibility for planning to management; and
control—using management’s monopoly on knowledge to assume complete control over each step of the production process.
That a conductor adds value through ‘style’ or ‘flair’ seems to speak more directly to the foreground patterns of texture. In a classical ensemble, innovation (equated here to style or flair) occurs within a more complex pattern of rules. As Lenoid Sabaneev observed, ‘the sphere of free improvisation by the conductor is very restricted’. Consequently, the role of the conductor in producing innovation more closely aligns with the traditional sense of leadership and management within a rules-based organisational system as opposed to that often advocated for fluid and loosely-connected network structures advocated in the business literature.
So, how does a conductor (or leader) add to the ‘style’ of a performance? Essentially, against the background of a rules-based organisation the conductor or leader’s primary function is ‘interpretation’.
The first element of the conductor’s ability for interpretation, and clear advantage over the most gifted individual player, is the ability to ‘see’ the shape and direction of the entire performance. Singer Dame Janet Baker expressed this idea as:
In fact, this is one of the marvellous things about conductors: they see a work as a whole, whereas we performers don’t. We are too involved in our own parts, which is crucial and exactly as it should be, as we must plumb the depths of the role before we play it. But the conductor’s mentality is always to see the whole picture and to fit the parts into the whole.
The conductor’s position is lifted out from the technical performance of the specialist technical functions of the organisation in order to allow him or her to maintain a coherent picture of the whole. The ‘arithmetical’ or mechanical observations of the early Persimfans performance reflect the intent and singular concentration required by specialists. The additional requirement to consider the whole while immersed in the execution distracts from the quality of specialist performance. In terms of texture, this is ‘noise’ that takes away from not only the background pattern of performance but also foreground opportunities for innovation. The same is true of technical specialists in organisations. Organisational capability suffers if these specialists are distracted from the performance of their roles, or they fail to manage the connection between their specialist functions and that of others.
The conductor and leaders role is interpretation within the parameters of the organisational rules, and the ‘touch’ with which they are applied. The conductor’s role is both integrative and innovative. They adhere to the rules and they interpret the rules. The Australian conductor, Sir Charles Mackerras, observed that ‘it is amazing how many different interpretations you get … simply because of the conductor’s emanation… the effect this has on the players’. Carl Bamberger, editor of The Conductor’s Art and a conductor himself, offers a more philosophical perspective:
The memory which we carry of a painting or sculpture – its line, color, proportion, perspective – reflects the reality of the work of art. When we return to it we find it unchanged in harmony and structure. The organic work, once created, retains its molded unity independent of any interpreter. As it was fashioned so it remains.
However, he argues that music is different. The conductor interprets the mechanics of the music to give the listener access to the art. The listener hears the specialist skills of the players expressed through the interpretation of the conductor. Similarly, organisational performance might be seen as the mechanics of management expressed through the interpretation of leaders.
