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This weekend, Giancarlo Guerrero raises his baton to begin the Nashville Symphony’s concert season with a new “right hand man” sitting to his left.

Jun Iwasaki is the orchestra’s first full-time concertmaster in two years. He’s responsible for a sort of musical choreography.

Concertmaster Jun Iwasaki (lower left) leads the Nashville Symphony’s first violin section

You could say it’s up to the concertmaster to tell the orchestra when it’s time to stop doing their own thing and start sounding like an ensemble—and not just by signaling that it’s time to tune up at the start of the concert.

It’s Jun Iwasaki’s responsibility to translate the director’s abstract musical ideas into concrete musical techniques. He puts it in the form of a question: “to achieve that sound at that dynamic at that speed, where can we do it, how can we do it?”

Choreographing the Bowing

A string player’s bow is up to thirty inches long. Changing which part is drawn along the instrument can make a big difference in how the music sounds. Iwasaki demonstrates on his violin, first using just the portion closest to the frog. That’s the bottom of the bow, and its heaviest part. As the bow bounces on the strings, the first few notes of Beethoven’s Fifth sound just as you’d expect: strong, almost brash.

”Everybody knows it like that, but there’s so many ways you can play those four notes,” Iwasaki explains. “For example I can play it all at the tip, very soft.” He plays the same notes, almost as if they were a lullaby.

“It can be loud but it can be smooth.” This time, he uses the frog end again, but never lifts the bow off the strings.

“You want everybody to blend,” says Iwasaki. “If you’re on the same part of the bow, it really makes a better blend.”

It’s Iwasaki’s job to decide the technique for the entire string section. So when they seem to be moving in perfect synchronization—bows going up and down all together—they’re following the concertmaster’s lead.

Maestro Guerrero says it sets the tone for the whole ensemble. ”Remember that the string section is the biggest section in the orchestra, not only the violins but the cellos, the violas and the string basses, and they have a huge impact on how the orchestra produces its sound.”

Leading Via “Telepathy”

At the Nashville Symphony’s first rehearsal of the season, Iwasaki doesn’t say much. He doesn’t tell the other strings how to bow the music. Instead, he plays with bold movements that the rest can easily see and follow. As he locks eyes with other musicians, his facial expressions and gestures reinforce those of the conductor.

”Everything that you can think of if you were talking to somebody and you wanted them to really follow your how emotions were going through the story, that’s what the concertmaster wants to do while they’re playing.”

Of course, what he needs to convey could change at a moment’s notice if conductor decides to try a different approach. That’s where chemistry comes into play.

Guerrero says he found just that when Iwasaki auditioned with the orchestra last season. ”Looking over and he would look up at me and it’s amazing, it’s like, we didn’t need to say anything. He knew exactly what I wanted and I knew exactly how he was going to deliver.”

Concertmaster Jun Iwasaki and Music Director Giancarlo Guerrero

Guerrero is just beginning his third year here. He and Iwasaki have only been working together for a matter of days. But in Nashville, there is precedent for a long-lived partnership between concertmaster and conductor: violinist Mary Kathryn VonOsdale worked alongside the late Kenneth Schermerhorn for nearly two decades.