and you should provide me with a good one to read! I've always thought it was weird a conductor was viewed as in 'charge' of people who are all using sheet music but I also know that a central coordinator that tells everyone to start and shit is probably important
how much influence does a conductor have? how do they interact with the other artists artistically and economically? i would love to peer into this a little bit
Not an expert, but I think they're a bit like DJ's. Some of those are famous too, right? And the musicians are like tracks, except they don't always keep their tempo, volume and pitch automatically, so the conductor job is more difficult than a DJ's. The conductor fine tunes all of this. Telling the individual musicians when to start and stop, how fast to go, how loud to play. The sheets leave plenty of room for interpretation.
Lots of other things are controlled by the conductor, too.