Beyond the baton

When I am asked what I do, I say I am a musician. The response is invariably, ‘Which instrument do you play?’ When I say I conduct, I am aware that I have passed beyond the easy into the more difficult, but I know at the same moment that I have not lost my audience. They know that instrumentalists need conductors and everyone has seen them, it is just that such figures of authority are rather austere and hard to talk to. But should I be asked what I conduct, and should I say, ‘Singers,’ then I have surely blown it. ‘Musicians’ are not associated with singers and above all not with music which consists only of singing.

I tell this tale because I have been struck recently, as I was when I read music at Oxford, by how unquantifiable the profession of ‘musician’ actually is. To the superficial glance music is one simple thing, involving instruments and orchestras; to the insider it is so many things that universities hardly know how to create a syllabus for it, and would-be employers do not know what to expect from someone presenting themselves under that title.