If there is a clear turning point in the history of British conducting – a point at which the modern era may be said to begin – it is marked by the arrival in England of the Italian conductor Michele Costa (1808–84). In 1829, Costa was sent by the composer Niccolò Zingarelli to direct a Birmingham performance of the latter's Cantata on the Book of Isaiah, Chapter XII, though in the event he only sang in it. The following year Costa settled in London, where he became maestro al piano at the King's Theatre and adopted the anglicized Christian name Michael. He made his mark quickly and indelibly. In less than two years he had abolished the prevailing system of dual leadership (see chapter 8) at the King's Theatre, and established himself as sole director, with the baton as his tool and symbol of authority.

London audiences had seen visiting conductors use the baton before, notably Spohr, Weber, and Mendelssohn; but as a resident Costa was able to carry on a sustained campaign. Nearly four decades after Costa's appointment at the King's Theatre, George Bernard Shaw wrote that

The period of sf history from 1926 to 1960 can justly be called the magazine era. Even though many well-known works appeared in other venues during this period - books, comics, movies, and even radio plays - sf magazines such as Astounding Science Fiction were chiefly responsible for creating a sense of sf as a distinctive genre.

Science fiction is not only a mode of story-telling but also a niche for writers, a marketing category for publishers, a collection of visual images and styles and a community of like-minded individuals. All of these aspects of the genre took on their most familiar guises within the magazines that dominated the field for half a century. The magazines exerted considerable influence on sf's form and subject matter; the nature of magazine publishing and distribution, and, in particular, boom-and-bust cycles within the industry, have likewise played a part in shaping what is written and read. In addition, the location of most of the magazines' publishers in the USA has strengthened the association between sf and American culture, both in the United States and abroad.

Origins of the science fiction magazine

The first English-language magazine entirely devoted to sf was Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories , founded in 1926. Nineteenth-century literary magazines, such as Blackwood’s and The Strand in the UK and Putnam’s and Atlantic Monthly in the USA, had occasionally published works of fantasy and what might be called proto-science fiction alongside more realistic fare. Early in the twentieth century, a number of inexpensive periodicals, called pulp magazines because of the poor-quality woodpulp paper on which they were printed, included sf stories by writers such as Jack London and Edgar Rice Burroughs as one of several categories of exotic adventure. Burroughs’s first novel, A Princess of Mars , was first published in one of these pulps, All-Story Magazine , in 1912.

In a famous 1941 wartime photograph (Fig. 15.1) Sir Henry Wood stands amid the ruins of London's Queen's Hall, atop the rubble and chaos of what had once been his artistic domain. The image is of desolation, but also defiance in the face of a Luftwaffe raid. Wood's biographer, Arthur Jacobs, has pointed out that two similarly earnest BBC officials were airbrushed out of the original. Propaganda required the symbolism of the artist's civilizing vision amidst its destruction by the nefarious Nazis. Wood's hegemony over the Proms was drawing to a close. Although he was never officially artistic director, his association dated back to their inception in 1895. He died three years later, having seen his famous music festival transferred to the Royal Albert Hall where it prospers beyond his wildest dreams.

By way of contrast, in 1983 Simon Rattle was captured on film inspecting the building site of Symphony Hall, in Birmingham, with tousled hair barely suppressed beneath the regulation hard hat. Rattle was in the middle of an astonishingly successful period as Principal Conductor and Music Director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (his title changed during his tenure). Not entirely coincidentally, the last two decades of the twentieth century saw the rebirth of Birmingham as an international city. 1960s urban planners had wreaked almost as much havoc as the Luftwaffe did in wartime. Concrete was universally employed as the material of the moment as the city was rebuilt. Paradoxically, musique concrète was successfully featured amongst Rattle’s programming as he took the CBSO around the world for over two decades, winning renown for Birmingham and personally embodying the renaissance of its reputation.

When Hans Keller set about debunking musical professions he considered “phoney,” his “hit list” was predictable: opera producers, music critics, musicologists, and of course, violists and conductors. These professions were new to his generation as independent full-time activities; they were consequences of a historical process in Western Europe sociologists once termed “rationalization.” During the second half of the nineteenth century, professions became more bureaucratized along lines of ever more narrowly defined specialties. These in turn demanded the creation of targeted processes of training and certification. Expertise, particularly in medicine and science, but in the arts as well became more competitive on a massive international scale justifying discrete divisions and narrow fields.

Music critics once did something else as professionals. They were composers (Schumann, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, and Virgil Thomson), teachers (Richard Wallaschek, Robert Hirsch feld, Eduard Hanslick, and Paul Henry Lang) or writers (consider Max Kalbeck, Ludwig Speidel, and, in the extreme George Bernard Shaw and Ezra Pound). Musicology became an autonomous academic field relatively late, and only in the generation of Guido Adler and Hermann Kretszchmar did music history emerge as a distinct branch of scholarship. In Keller's world (he trained in Vienna as a violinist and was forced to flee to England in 1938) great violists were actually violinists; no one set out to become a violist. Opera producers, in the contemporary sense, were entirely unknown.

Valperga: or, The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca was a novel surprisingly long in its gestation. Although not published until 1823, its inception actually dates from six years earlier. “I first thought of it in our library in Marlow,” Mary Shelley wrote as she was completing it in 1821 (L I 203), thus placing its beginnings at some point in 1817. She does not stipulate what book in the library which she and Percy Bysshe Shelley had assembled in Marlow prompted her to conceive the idea of this new novel, nor is there anything in either's correspondence that would further elucidate her claim. But among the components of an ideal library P. B. Shelley later enumerated to his cousin Thomas Medwin were the writings of Nicolo Machiavelli, the Italian Renaissance political theorist. Beginning with the first English translations of The Prince in the early seventeenth century, it became a common practice to append to that work Machiavelli's admiring biographical account of Castruccio Castracani dei Antelminelli, the warlord of fourteenth-century Lucca, whom Machiavelli, in 1520, looked back on as an exemplary Italian “prince.” This is the work that Mary Shelley denigrates in the first sentence of her Preface to the novel as a mere “romance” (V i 5). One might therefore infer that Mary Shelley's original idea for the novel centered on simply setting the record straight about Castruccio; her original title - The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca - focusing on him alone, would seem to substantiate that inference. The change in title by which Valperga became centered was owing to Mary Shelley's father, William Godwin, who reconfigured the novel's balance by emphasizing its female protagonist, the Countess of Valperga, a fictional Tuscan duchy.

Any discussion of conducting technique can be problematic. The potential for disagreement over what constitutes a conductor's technique is huge, so this chapter will be limited to the ways in which conductors express their thoughts and ideas through physical movements, the tools they use, and the skills that they employ. The film footage of conductors like Willem Mengelberg, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Klaus Tennstedt, and Pierre Boulez demonstrates that there are as many styles of conducting as there are conductors, and to attempt to codify, to dissect, and to analyze fully the variety of gestures used by conductors is beyond the scope of this, or perhaps any, chapter. Although the gesticulations that they use seem to vary widely, all conductors' techniques have a basic task in common: to act as a kind of conduit through which their ideas are transmitted to the musicians. Of course, body movements are not all they use: a conductor also communicates verbally in rehearsal and makes eye contact with fellow performers throughout the performance process. A member of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra once remarked laconically to the present author that “it matters not whether a conductor stands on his head and wiggles his toes or beats time like a metronome as long as his intentions are clear.” While the first position described has more in common with yoga than music, the player's basic thesis has merit; clarity of intention is paramount for any conductor.

When Mary Shelley's The Last Man was published in 1826, her Lionel Verney entered a literary scene already peopled by a significant number of last men, such that reviewers could not resist jokes at the expense of this crowd of solitary survivors. Cousin de Grainville's prose epic Le Dernier Homme, posthumously published in 1805, had initiated this post-revolutionary mode. An anonymous English translation entitled The Last Man, or, Omegarus and Syderia, a Romance of Futurity appeared in 1806. Byron's poem “Darkness,” one of his best-known works among his contemporaries, was written in 1816 at Lake Geneva, where Shelley also began Frankenstein. And the most popular variation on this theme, Thomas Campbell's lyric “The Last Man,” appeared in 1823 and was followed, in the next decades, by a wealth of imitations and parodies as well as by John Martin's remarkable, apocalyptic paintings of the subject from 1826, 1833, and 1850.

Shelley thus joins her contemporaries in her apocalyptic response to the horrors of the French Revolution, the subsequent carnage of the Napoleonic wars, and the metaphysical and cultural uncertainties attendant upon Romantic-era attacks on religious and political authority. Yet the extremity of her particular form of apocalypse bears comparison with twentieth-century existentialist, absurdist, and nihilist reactions to two World Wars, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb, such as Camus’s La Peste or Ionesco’s Les Chaises, thus revealing The Last Man, like Frankenstein, as an uncannily prescient novel. In its refusal to place humanity at the center of the universe, its questioning of our privileged position in relation to nature, then, The Last Man constitutes a profound and prophetic challenge to Western humanism.

The trouble with “men as they are”

“I am now writing 'Falkner,'” writes Mary Shelley in her journal for June 7, 1836. “My best it will be - I believe” (J I 548). What could she have been thinking, a modern reader might well ask. The identifying moral qualities of her characters appear immediately, and the “roundness” that Forster praised as being “capable of surprising in a convincing way” and which the novel as a genre has cultivated, is nowhere to be found. Yet Shelley was optimistic during the conception and execution of this, her last long work of fiction. Writing to her publisher, Charles Ollier, in January 1836, she told him she had had

Not only did she write the book “with a rapidity [she] had never done before” (L ii 267), but in a letter to her fellow novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, she remarked that “it is not always the most studied & (consequently) the favourite works of an author that are his best titles {to} fame . . . but the flower that springs to bloom most swiftly is the loveliest” (L II 296).

The origins of science fiction

The word 'science' acquired its modern meaning when it took aboard the realization that reliable knowledge is rooted in the evidence of the senses, carefully sifted by deductive reasoning and the experimental testing of generalizations. In the seventeenth century writers began producing speculative fictions about new discoveries and technologies that the application of scientific method might bring about, the earliest examples being accommodated - rather uncomfortably - within existing genres and narrative frameworks.

One genre hospitable to sf speculation was that of utopian fantasy, whose usual narrative form was the imaginary voyage. The rich tradition of sf travellers' tales was launched by one of the first and foremost champions of the scientific method, Francis Bacon, in New Atlantis (written c.1617; published 1627), although the importance of technological progress to social reform had earlier been recognised by Johann Valentin Andreae's account of Christianopolis (1619) and Tommaso Campanella's description of La Città del Sole (The City of the Sun, written 1602; published 1623). Most subsequent utopian fantasies took scientific and technological advancement into account, but relegated it to a minor role while matters of social, religious and political reform remained centre stage. Nor were those writers who took account of scientific progress always enthusiastic about it; Baconian optimism prompted a backlash of hostility from those who perceived a threat to religious values in the secularizing tendencies of religion and the materialistic encouragements of technology.

Great conductors tend to follow the imperatives of their teachers and apprenticeship, their national musical cultures, and above all the special requirements of their repertoire. Close study of their work reveals no code, conformity, nor Ten Commandments to be found across their individual approaches to rehearsal.

The Conductors on Film Collection at Stanford University has over two thousand hours of some two hundred and fifty conductors in concert, conversation, and rehearsal. From Abbado to Zender, they reveal an extraordinary canvas of action and aesthetic. This chapter will examine the elements of their work that seem to be most successful, vital, and enduring, although much of the (no doubt biased) advice also comes from the author's experience in concert, opera, and recordings. These comments are meant both for young conductors just setting out and for those trying to understand where the real work gets done with an orchestra.

Preparing for the first rehearsal

No serious work is possible without consideration of the performing edition to be employed. Especially since the rise in the mid-twentieth century of the scholar-conductor, it is no longer acceptable simply to hire a full score and go at it. It is essential first to acquire a copy of the manuscript and its variants, and to look into its published history. Many first-class university or conservatory music libraries will have microfilm or microfiche of mainstream repertoire in autograph and first edition. Study these sources closely.

The 1960s - like the turn of the twentieth century, and the apocalyptic, futuristic millennial years 2000 and 2001 - carried a special freight of nervous expectation. While atomic weapons still had limited capabilities, public perception was of a world facing imminent destruction, and people daily suppressed their anticipation of radioactive doom from the skies. That terror had been manifest, in disguised form, in earlier sf tales and movies of monsters, horrific transformation and alien invasion. By late 1962, the world actually faced just such a science-fictional threat - the Cuban missile crisis, when nuclear war seemed about to erupt - and saw it narrowly averted. Two images epitomize this turbulent, paradoxical era: the brief, grainy film frames of President Kennedy's assassination in November 1963, and the equally indistinct television coverage, live from the moon, of Neil Armstrong's first step into the lunar dust in July 1969. These were beamed about the planet via a medium, television, that just forty years earlier had been, in the contemptuous phrase journalists love, 'mere science fiction'.

A studio is not a concert hall and a recording is not a concert. A recording is music made objective. The experience of setting an interpretation into stone in a recording is a humbling one for even the most ego-crazed, over-coiffed, mega-multi-media-jet-setting superstar. It creates a multitude of unique problems which often require immediate decisions that have lasting and sometimes costly consequences. Much debate is focused on the battle between “live” and studio (by implication, “dead”!) performances, where intellectual laziness has exaggerated the claims for “live” recording. As with “live” theatre and film, the differences (in both means and ends) between recordings and concerts are so vast, that they are hardly the same art form, but we can enjoy both without needing to set one above the other. How do conductors adjust to these challenges and what does the producer do? The conductor in the studio, particularly for an opera recording, can be compared with a train driver on a journey from A to Z, but travelling from R to Z first, and A to B last, with all of the bits in between jumbled together, sometimes twice or three times over, to allow for passengers who missed the train the first time. At the end, one literally does not know if one is coming or going, or if all the passengers have been safely delivered. Not so far removed from the opera conductor is the conductor with a soloist. The studio magnifies the pressure on the conductor and presents an interesting opportunity to examine this exotic creative ego.

Science fiction and the idea of sexuality

Knowing sf’s potential for using the future to explore contemporary reality and its alternatives, one might think the genre ideal for the examination of alternative sexualities. Critics of sf have generally agreed that science fiction is a ‘literature of ideas’. Indeed, for many people, it is the ideational content of sf that is its primary characteristic. Sexuality is also an idea. In this sense, one might well expect to find an intrinsic compatibility between sf as a genre and the exploration of human sexuality. For many people, however, sexuality – and particularly heterosexuality – can be envisioned only within the category of the ‘natural’. To these people, sexuality is quite specifically not an idea; it is the very reverse of the ideational – instinctive, sensate, animalistic. It is at once both ‘common sense’, as in the apparent logic of procreative sex, and unthinkable, since even apparently procreative sex calls into play emotions, positions, actions and desires whose potential for perversity, even if it is merely the perversity of pleasure, are too frightening to contemplate. And yet, even for these people, sex is an idea because it is, after all, an ideology and one which contemporary Western societies have tried very hard indeed both to propagate and to control.

I started in the business in 1971, at the age of twenty-five, when a well-known US manager told me he was opening a European office. The conductors were not particularly well known, but with youthful enthusiasm I worked night and day for them. I had gathered experience for this largely at the Royal Festival Hall, where, as a student, I always bought the cheapest seats behind the orchestra in order to watch the conductor. Through observation, I came to learn how physical gestures and eye contact conveyed musical structure, excitement, and internal balance to an orchestra. I also collected records of all the major conductors of the past and present, so although I was completely green about managing conductors, I had acquired a system of aural and visual evaluation about the conductor's art. I have experienced the artist/manager relationship, the elements needed to build an artist's career, and the changes to both over the last thirty years. These reflections are offered in the hope that future conductors will be better prepared for what may lie ahead of them.

From impresarios to managers

In the nineteenth century, conductors managed their own careers. Conductors tended to stay in permanent positions for ten to fifteen years or even more. Faster travel opened up more opportunities and created the notion of a conducting “career,” which then led to the need for more administration and planning.

There are no politics in Utopia; as in its neighbour Dystopia, the government of people has been replaced by the administration of things. To many observers, this state of affairs implies anything but freedom. It is the absence of political debate, as much as the absence of privacy and the relentless presence of morality, that makes the communism of Anarres, in Ursula Le Guin's anarchist classic The Dispossessed (1974), so oppressive. When her hero Shevek finds himself in conflict with aspects of his society he has no forum in which to express it, no way to find like-minded individuals with whom he might find common ground; instead, his conflicts become conflicts with other individuals. He is as isolated as any dissident in a totalitarian state.

For a Western tradition of political thought which begins with Aristotle and continues through such diverse philosophers as the conservative Edmund Burke, the radical Thomas Paine, the liberal Lord Macaulay, the communist Antonio Gramsci, the socialist Tony Polan and the social democrat Bernard Crick, politics provides the forum to which free people – not always, of course, a majority of the adult populace – bring their conflicts of collective interest for peaceful resolution. For most of these thinkers the forum is as central an institution of a free society as the market and the court of law, and the interaction of politics, economics and justice is the substance of public life.

It is sometimes said that the ability of the writer to imagine a better place in which to live died in the course of the twentieth century, extinguished by the horrors of total war, of genocide and of totalitarianism. The genre of utopia, created unwittingly by Sir Thomas More when he published Utopia in 1516, died when idealism perished, a victim to twentieth-century pessimism and cynicism. It is the contention of this chapter that utopia has not disappeared; it has merely mutated, within the field of sf, into something very different from the classic utopia.

Hoda M. Zaki, whose Phoenix Renewed (1988) is the only published monograph on sf utopias, was on the point of recognizing this, although she failed; as a political scientist, she was still looking in vain for the classic utopia. She concluded that 'the disappearance of utopian literature in the twentieth century is surprising' and 'an issue with serious implications for the entire body politics'. Her study was based on the nineteen novels which had won the Nebula Award between 1965 and 1982. Almost all these novels had utopian elements, she concluded, but none of them were actual utopias: although many of those novels offered critiques of the contemporary world, none of them offered the necessary coherent account of a superior and desirable alternative in the future. Modern sf thus had no utopias to offer, but only ‘tantalizing fragments in the utopian tradition’.