The Art of Orchestral Conducting

The current state of conducting as an academic and professional pursuit shows a plethora of conventional traditions and techniques that are accepted without question, but a dearth of ideas and approaches that will develop the skills essential to producing an effective conductor. This profile is especially apparent in the field’s literature. This book compiles a list of these titles and annotate each one, in order to determine the common threads that run between them. This information is distilled into categories, identifying levels of approach and target audience. Evaluation of these data may lead to a discovery that many of them are derivative of the others rather than being products of original thinking. This book is not a definite and complete evaluation of the orchestral conducting bibliography, but its approach can support or reject the notion that the methods used for teaching orchestral conducting are complete and sufficient.