Baton (conducting)

Professional conductors often have personal specifications for a baton based on their own physical demands and the nature of the performance: Sir Henry Wood and Herbert von Karajan are some examples.

[1] Historic examples of their construction include one given to the French composer Louis-Antoine Jullien in the mid 1850s prior to his first visit to the United States: it is described as "a gorgeous baton made of maplewood, richly mounted in gold and set with costly diamonds.

[3] When Gaspare Spontini arrived in Dresden in 1844, Wagner had a baton made from a thick ebony staff with ivory knobs at either end.

[5] Some conductors like Pierre Boulez, Georges Prêtre, Leopold Stokowski, Valery Gergiev, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Kurt Masur, Seiji Ozawa and Yuri Temirkanov, however, choose not to hold a baton, preferring to conduct only with their hands.

Said Princess Eleanor von Liechtenstein, "Hayden [sic] gave the tempo with his two hands;" and wrote a Swedish relative of Franz Berwald, "on a higher level stood Haydn himself with his baton.

The Halle Orchestra reported that Daniel Turk used a baton in 1810, with motions so exuberant that he occasionally hit the chandelier above his head and showered himself with glass.

Several famous jazz conductors that used these specific batons include Quincy Jones, Gunther Schuller and Richard Rogers.