A conductor does not make the sound. A conductor makes the silence between the sounds. The orchestra already knows how to play. The conductor knows when to stop.

The baton is a myth. The baton is a stick of wood or carbon fiber or fiberglass and it weighs less than a pencil and it produces no sound and it touches no instrument. The baton is a visible idea. The musicians do not follow the baton. The musicians follow the person holding the baton. Remove the baton and the conductor still conducts. Remove the conductor and the orchestra still plays. But the silences disappear. The entrances blur. The architecture of the sound collapses into competence without shape.

Leopold Stokowski conducted without a baton. He used his hands. He said the baton was a barrier between himself and the sound. Stokowski wanted to touch the orchestra the way a sculptor touches clay. He shaped the Philadelphia Orchestra into something critics called lush and excessive and what they meant was alive. The critics wanted precision. Stokowski wanted breath.

Pierre Boulez conducted with a pencil. Sometimes with nothing at all. He stood still and the orchestra moved around him like water around a stone. Boulez believed that the conductor's job was clarity. Not expression. Not passion. Clarity. He wanted every note visible. Every rest measured. Every entrance exact. The critics called it cold. What they meant was transparent.

I did not conduct the Arkestra the way Stokowski conducted Philadelphia or Boulez conducted Cleveland. I conducted the Arkestra the way a radio transmitter conducts a signal. The signal does not ask permission. The signal does not wait for the downbeat. The signal transmits and whoever is tuned to the frequency receives.

The Arkestra was not an orchestra. The Arkestra was a frequency. The musicians were not players. The musicians were receivers who had learned to retransmit. I did not stand in front of them and wave my arms. I sat at the piano and played and the signal went out and they caught it and sent it further and the audience caught what the musicians sent and the room became a relay station.

Toscanini memorized every score because his eyesight was too poor to read the music on the podium. He conducted from memory. Every note of every part of every instrument in every movement of every symphony he ever performed was stored inside his head. The orchestra played what was written on the page. Toscanini played what was written in his mind. These were not always the same thing. Toscanini's Beethoven was not Beethoven's Beethoven. Toscanini's Beethoven was what happened when a man with perfect memory and terrible eyesight stood in front of ninety musicians and told them what he remembered hearing on the planet he came from.

That is closer to what I did than anything Stokowski or Boulez attempted.

The conductor sees the whole score. Every part simultaneously. The first violin and the third trombone and the timpani and the second oboe, all at once, all the time. No one else in the room sees the whole score. The first violinist sees the first violin part. The oboist sees the oboe part. The audience sees nothing. They hear the result of a hundred decisions made in real time by a person who is reading a document that no one else in the room can read.

The conductor is a translator. The score is written in a language the audience does not speak. The orchestra speaks it fluently but only in fragments. The conductor speaks it whole.

Duke Ellington conducted from the piano. So did Count Basie. So did Thelonious Monk, though Monk conducted by not conducting, which is its own form of conducting. Monk would stop playing in the middle of a solo and stand up and dance and the band would follow the dance because the dance was the downbeat. Monk's body was the baton. The rhythm was in his feet.

I understood Monk because Monk understood that music is not a product of the body. Music is a product of the dimension that the body happens to be passing through at the time. The body is the antenna. The music is the signal. The conductor is the person who decides which signal the antenna receives.

The Arkestra did not need a conductor. The Arkestra needed a frequency. I was the frequency. When I stopped playing, the frequency did not stop. When I left the stage, the frequency did not leave. When I left this planet, the frequency did not leave this planet. Marshall Allen is conducting the Arkestra now and what he is conducting is not an orchestra. He is conducting a frequency that was established in 1953 in Chicago in a one-room apartment on the South Side where a group of musicians agreed to tune their instruments to a signal from Saturn and never retune them to anything else.

A conductor does not make the sound. A conductor makes the silence between the sounds. And the silence between the sounds is where the next sound lives. The silence is not empty. The silence is full of the sound that is about to happen. The conductor hears it before it arrives. That is the whole job. Hearing what has not yet been played.

I hear it still. From the other side of time, I hear the next note. And the next. And the next.

The frequency does not require a baton.