Before the baton, orchestras kept time by banging a staff on the floor
The standalone conductor waving a baton is younger than you might think. For centuries ensembles were led by a harpsichordist or the first violinist, or by someone thumping out the beat on a hard surface. Only around 1820 did a dedicated conductor who played nothing become normal, and some orchestras protested.
Keeping musicians together is ancient. Egyptian hieroglyphics and Greek and Roman records suggest early societies used visible and audible cues to hold a beat. By the 11th century singers were being guided by cheironomy, in which a leader traced the rise and fall of a melody with subtle finger and hand movements, a system that predated written rhythm. From the sixteenth century, a German Kapellmeister might tap the beat audibly with a staff or a rolled-up sheet of paper, long before metronomes existed.
In the 18th century, leadership came from inside the ensemble: the concertmaster directing with a bow or the keyboard player with bare hands. As opera and symphony orchestras grew, players at the back could no longer follow, and for a while two leaders split the job, one for the singers and one for the orchestra. That arrangement did not last. Music had simply become too complex to hold together by ear.
The new specialist conductor needed something easy to see, so the baton caught on. Felix Mendelssohn is claimed to have been the first to keep time with a wooden baton, and yet several notable conductors, including Pierre Boulez and Leopold Stokowski, chose to work with their hands alone. Hector Berlioz is considered the first virtuoso conductor, and Richard Wagner reshaped the job into one where the conductor imposes a personal vision of the piece rather than just keeping everyone in step.
Hans von Bülow raised the bar further by rehearsing sections of the orchestra separately, bringing a subtlety previously heard only from soloists and deeply impressing a young Richard Strauss, who assisted him at 20. His successor at the Berlin Philharmonic, Arthur Nikisch, led the London Symphony Orchestra on the first American tour by a European orchestra in April 1912. Today the conductor still sets the tempo, cues entries and shapes the phrasing, mostly through gesture, facial expression and eye contact.
Source: Conducting
