In an age when political leadership has all the dignity of a sophomoric food fight, we need to step aside to return to the earlier part of the 20th century and learn from a symphony conductor. We seem in our time to have lost the distinction between an authentic strong leader and a soft dictator. That is because the space between those two personalities is very nuanced and yet in that thin gap is the difference that makes all the difference. Our nation has been both blessed and sliced in two over that critical difference a good symphony conductor knows both technically and intuitively. If our current political leader was a symphony conductor, the symphony would be a cacophony heading for silence for that is what would happen to orchestra conductor who fires every musician that misses his cue. 

David Allen wrote a tribute in the NYT to the character of Pierre Monteux calling him the “conductor who set the course of music in the 20th century”. I wanted to quote on paragraph to you summarizing this man’s leadership character.  “in the telling of one English writer, he (Pierre Monteaux)signed on as the principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra in 1961, at age 86. Throughout, Monteux had a reputation for making music with balance, with energy, with decency and with taste — for “pure glow and luminosity, loveliness, brightness, and sheer auditory incandescence,” the critic Virgil Thomson once wrote.”

A modest proposal for Good

Imagine if we could have a political leader such as this man at the helm of the nation. This writer can assure you, it is not too much to ask. A symphony conductor may look like a dictator in a performance, but that space of communication between conductor and musician is a shared discipline of mutual skills that when it works something gorgeous occurs out of the integrity of shared preparation. What happens between a conductor and the musicians is close to spiritual. What is happening in our divided nation right now is edging over into dictatorship. We need as a nation to demand the return of our nation’s character, skills, and capacity for good. We won’t deserve better until we vote better. But this writer can’t imagine a majority out there, upon reflection, doesn’t think we deserve better. Time for a national conductors at the level of Pierre Monteaux’s character and skill. That could be so good.