Many think that the role of a conductor is primarily to beat time. In the form that phrase most often implies, this is actually one of our easier tasks. Nevertheless the word 'beat' has connotations of aggression that are hardly musical and had Jean-Baptiste Lully, one of the first ever conductors, been a little less forceful with his floor stamping cane (the baton had not yet evolved), his foot might not have sustained the gangrenous injury that ultimately led to his death. Perhaps 'marking time' would be a more lyrical expression and avoid the sense of music and musicians being thrashed into submission by the violence of the time beater!

However if 'beating' is defined in the more athletic context of winning or triumphing over, I think 'time beating' is one of the most fascinating and important aspects of the job.

Time is rarely man's friend. It slowly destroys most things it touches, and only the sea is able to withstand its all conquering power. Living near an eroding cliff edge, I see that every day. But on a short term basis, Time can be, if not defeated, then at least denied, and music is perhaps where that temporary victory can best be experienced.

According to Stravinsky, 'music is humanity's way of realising the present.' I would actually dare to disagree and say that music is humanity's way of releasing the present from the weight of its past and the expectations of its future. Rather than being the place where humanity and time meet, I would argue that music is where they can finally separate.

It's one of music's paradoxes that it takes place within a specific period of time, and yet in a great performance gives us a sense of complete timelessness. Music allows us the opportunity to play with time in a way that isn't normally possible in life. It's hard to believe that a desperately fast and furious movement like the Scherzo in Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony lasts about as long as the agonisingly slow and reflective Prelude to Act Three of Wagner's Parsifal. Listening to either transports us away from the ultimate truth of minutes and seconds and into a world without such day-to-day cares and obligations. A good musician allows music to free itself from the bar lines that define its structure and to release it like a gas into our heavily organised world. Parsifal is a long opera and its music is essentially slow. But in a good performance no one will notice either. Time itself will have been beaten.

So perhaps the job of a conductor is to 'beat time' after all - to create an ebb and flow to music that defies the tick of a clock or the pulse of a beating heart. When music is lifted out of the metronomic organisation that the other sort of time beating implies, we can find ourselves in a world in which, to quote from Wagner's description of a scene in Parsifal, 'here time becomes space'.

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