I feel like what everybody knows about being a conductor is you wave your hands around.

Talk to us a little bit about what's actually going on with your hands.

Leonard Bernstein was a great educator and conductor.

He would say, you can learn the conducting motions in five minutes, but it will take you a whole lifetime to learn how to conduct.

And I understand perfectly what he means. I can teach you how to conduct in a four-beat pattern or a three-beat pattern, two-beat pattern, one.

And you will do those patterns, yet it will mean nothing to an orchestra

because it's how you do it that shows you.

That's Carlos Miguel Prieto.

He's a music director and conductor at three orchestras,

including the North Carolina Symphony and the Orchestra Sinfonica de Mineria in Mexico,

which you're hearing now.

If you want the tempo of an orchestra to go faster,

99% of people start waving their hands faster and with a bigger motion.

That causes the orchestra to go slower.

Really?

Oh yeah.

When you want more intensity or more speed, you become smaller in the gesture and more self-contained, and that causes that.

Huh.

So some of this is counterintuitive.

I would say most of it is counterintuitive.

Carlos said when it comes to conducting, it's less about the hand movements and more about the emotion. Conductors could be

energy shapers more than conductors. You're conducting the energy. You're controlling the energy. Speed, intensity are gradations of

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