About networking in chamber music ensembles, agreement of tastes, affinities of souls and affinities of temperaments…
Even during the Cold War, borders were permeable for well-known musicians from both blocs. During their international concert tours, they represented not only the musical traditions of their countries, but also their cultural values. Consequently, the fall of the Eastern Bloc drastically changed the cultural landscape.
The flow of emigrating musicians from the former Soviet Union was only one part of this process. East Asian countries, first and foremost Japan, hired renowned East European musicians on the one hand, and sent musically gifted young people to the West and East European music academies on the other. For instance, at the beginning of the 2000s, the piano department of the Moscow State Conservatoire had students from Japan, South Korea, China, the USA, Australia and South American countries.
True, the changes that took place paved the way for many talents. And yet, more and more complaints were to be heard from classical music concert goers that talented musicians from all over the world are playing the same repertoire equally well in the same way. Such standardization can be attributed as an unfortunate consequence of the internationalization of the classical music business. However, it concerned primarily the sphere of solo instruments’ performance.
By contrast, ensemble music-making – from duets to chamber orchestras – became the indisputable beneficiary of the cultural and geopolitical transformation of the 1990s. For one thing, the repertoire of chamber music is much broader: unlike solo and orchestral music, early and contemporary music play almost an equally important role therein as classical and romantic music. On the other hand, not only the open borders and numerous international funding programs, but also the economic components of the concert business proved to be conducive to international cooperation between young artists. Earning a living took place in a neoliberal way. Instead of receiving permanent employment contracts financed by taxpayers, the ensemble players supported themselves on sporadic fees. Although this did not ensure a long-term maintenance, in contrast to professional orchestras financed through public subsidies, the ensembles were usually much more motivated to take on great artistic challenges.
The appearance and names of the young ensemble musicians alone suggested to the audience that they had spoken completely different languages since childhood, had divergent ideas of good manners, and had grown up with often incompatible religious views. It was all the more impressive when, after only a few meetings together, their ensemble sounded as unified as one artistic personality. Indeed, any verbal language has serious limitations in communicating musical intentions. It is possible to specify how fast a piece or movement is to be played, at what measure the volume should be increased or decreased, or at what point the upbeat has to be shown with a nod of the head. The direction and intensity of the musical flow and its extremely nuanced changes eschew verbal clarification, though. The main challenge of a music ensemble is to master this hardly predictable musical stream in an absolutely synchronized way and present it for the audience as lively and in no way mechanical. Many musicians say that they do not really “make” music, but surrender to its flow or let themselves be carried away by it. Exactly how this comes about has always been one of the greatest mysteries of music. Some academic disciplines such as physiology, psychology, or even philosophical aesthetics have made serious steps towards understanding this puzzle.
“Indeed, any verbal language has serious limitations in communicating musical intentions.”
Alexander Jakobidze-Gitman
The Austrian philosopher and sociologist Alfred Schütz (1898-1958), for example, played every Saturday chamber music on the piano. He was convinced that “a study of the social relationships connected with the musical process may lead to some insights valid for other forms of social intercourse.” Whether we listen to music or create it ourselves, we would immerse ourselves in a flowing stream of consciousness. Music has no representative function and is therefore “the loneliest art.” A particular challenge for Schütz was the question of how music could be communicated at all, if “any kind of communication between man and his fellow man presupposes an event or a series of events in the outer world.” In contrast to orchestras, Schütz argued,
a close face-to-face relationship can be established in immediacy only among a small number of coperformers. … Consequently, each coperformer’s action is oriented not only by the composer’s thought and his relationship to the audience but also reciprocally by the experiences in inner and outer time of his fellow performer. … [E]ach, simultaneously, shares in vivid present the other’s stream of consciousness in immediacy. This is possible because making music together occurs in a true face-to-face relationship inasmuch as the participants are sharing not only a section of time but also a sector of space. The other’s facial expressions, his gestures in handling his in instrument, in short, all the activities of performing, gear into the outer world and can be grasped by the partner in immediacy.
It should be noted that Schütz had formulated these views long before the discovery of mirror neurons. Since the 1990s numerous studies of music ensembles have corroborated empirically what he has groped towards intuitively. The body language of the ensemble players, which is open to mutual observation, does not communicate their individual musical experiences, but functions as a kind of switch through which they access a musical flow that does not belong to any particular musician (not even to a composer!), but has an intersubjective character. The more diverse the appearance of the musicians looks, the more impressive appears the unity of the musical flow they create. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the aesthetic and political factors supported each other so strongly that ensemble music-making could easily be instrumentalized for eulogies of the neoliberal world order. In this dreamlike reality, success was allegedly guaranteed not by ethnicity and territorial affiliation, but by skill, congruence of tastes, affinity of souls, and affinity of temperaments. With publicity and media support, the nomadic biographies of young artists could be portrayed particularly romantically. The media were also freed from any concern about being politically, since world continents, genders and sexual orientations were represented quite evenly in many ensembles. But the main pillar on which the neoliberal functioning of ensemble music-making rested for a quarter-century proved particularly fragile: the unrestricted freedom of movement. For even before the outbreak of the COVID pandemic, it has been already threatened by such diverse social movements as Euroscepticism and ecological activism. During the pandemic, the miserable existence that most of music ensembles lead could be instrumentalized for ф diametrically opposite goal: to condemn the neoliberal order.
1
Schütz, Alfred. “Making Music Together: A Study in Social Relationship,” Social Research, Vol. 18, No. 1 (1951), pp. 76—97.
Alexander Jakobidze-Gitman establishes in WITTEN LAB Zukunftslabor Studium fundamenale the link with the world of classical music. And we are very much looking forward to experiencing again how he does this in his twofold activity as a lecturer and a performer – live on stage.
Dr. Alexander Jakobidze-Gitman, research associate at the WITTEN LAB Zukunftslabor Studium fundamentale, Department of Phenomenology of Music. Piano studies at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory. Postgraduate studies at the Royal Academy of Music London. Studies of cultural and artistic sciences at the Russian State University of Humanities.