He can lead thousands of non-musicians through a group performance without uttering a word and counts Desmond Tutu as a fan.
Steve Barnett, more popularly known as The Silent Conductor, uses nothing but body language to teach unfamiliar audiences how to play musical instruments before conducting them as a human orchestra.
And the size of the audience is no barrier – Barnett has conducted crowds as large as 30,000, at the opening of 1999’s All-Africa Games in his hometown of Johannesburg. Neither do cultural differences hold him back – he has worked with audiences on all continents.
But one notable stop has been missing from his travels – he has never conducted in the Middle East. Until now.
The Silent Conductor will perform in the region for the first time tonight at a special event hosted by The Ritz-Carlton in Dubai International Financial Centre.
“I don’t have a background in music, but I played percussion a bit and I used to jam with friends,” says the 62-year-old. “When a jam gets going it’s a very special feeling. The energy is passed around the room – it’s like magic. Most people never get the chance to feel that, and that’s the sensation I want to share with people who have never even played music before.”
In Dubai, he will perform to 300 guests – a relatively small crowd for someone who’s conducted stadiums full of people and appeared onstage at London’s Royal Albert Hall.
But still, how exactly does he even get 300 people, many of whom have never picked up a musical instrument in their lives, to start playing together, in synch and in key, in just a few minutes?
The key, he says, is keeping things simple. Every member of the audience will find a percussive plastic tube under their seat, which sounds a note when struck.
Barnett home-crafts the instruments into one of five colour-coded musical notes, so by signalling who should play which colour and when, basic melodies can be collectively performed. And because the five notes makes up a basic harmonic scale – a G major pentatonic, if you’re interested – anyone who misses their cue and plays out of time is never playing off-key.
The rest of his job, says Barnett, is maintaining the audience’s focus with a mix of humour and mime.
“I think I’m a very good mime,” he says. “I’ve never really trained – it’s just something I’ve learnt through experience.
“I think because I don’t say anything, it comes down to a physical connection that everyone can relate to on a human level, an emotional language.”
Barnett has been performing as The Silent Conductor for more than 12 years. The idea came to him when he couldn’t face another day going to work as a cabinetmaker.
“I woke up one morning and said: ‘I want to change something’ – my wife just smiled at me,” says Barnett. His idea, at first, was to teach the world to drum.
“When I went out to buy my first load of drums, my daughters cried – they said: ‘How are you going to pay for my school?’”
Undeterred, Barnett started off by hosting drumming circles for business clients, as team-building exercises, before slowly introducing more instruments.
“It became very popular, and through working with it I realised that the less I said, the more powerful the message was,” he says.
Thus, The Silent Conductor was born.
“I like to think of myself as a motivational non-speaker,” he says with a smile.
Barnett works mainly on the corporate circuit, and his travels have seen him share stages with celebrity speakers including Bill Clinton, Liza Minnelli, Nelson Mandela and Tutu, who declared that he had “an exceptional gift”.
The size of Barnett’s audiences means he now owns “tens of thousands” of his musical tubes, in addition to a stockpile of “thousands” of drums.
“The reactions I get from people after a session range from ‘I had a really great time’ to ‘I had a spiritual experience’,” says Barnett. “Now, I’m not asking them to experience these things – it’s for each individual to feel that energy in the room.”
The Silent Conductor performs on Monday, March 30 at 7pm at The Ritz-Carlton, Dubai International Financial Centre. A limited number of free public tickets are available. Contact 04 372 2602 or difcevents@ritzcarlton.com
rgarrat@thenational.ae
