Research Blog

I.

The central challenge of studying something like music is that it can be very hard to notice the difference between things that are valued in a culture, on the one hand, and claims about universal ‘mechanisms’ on the other. The scholarship of Western Classical Music (or ‘WCM’) has witnessed a significant turn towards scientific and quasi-scientific perspectives in the last few years; and because classical music sees itself primarily as a literate culture, it has been very useful for research into performance to adopt basically the same models and assumptions. The commonly held view is that proper WCM performance is connected to the faithful rendition (or ‘interpretation’) of notation, in such a way that corresponds to current aesthetic judgements. For this reason, when a scholar studies performance in this tradition, they tend to treat the symbols of notation as a stable baseline, with different performances acting a bit like the waves on top of a stable body of water.

So far, so uncontroversial, one might think. But all is not necessarily clear cut, because this attitude quite significantly changes what one imagines music to be. In a fancy word, it changes its ontology.

Classical music seems to depend to an unusually large extent on the powerful symbolic reductions of notation. And so it seems entirely natural that performance should be ‘disciplined’ by it, and by the abstractions people derive from it. The most common of the latter is the common (but utlimately unsustainable) idea of ‘the work itself’.

It is not hard to see, however, that this approach creates an essential division – and in my view a completely nonsensical one – between the ‘classical’ world, and any other musical culture one might care to name. Surely music is always experiential, oral, aural, and embodied, no matter to what extent one wants to use symbols to enable it? The problem, then, is that enthusiasm for the power of symbolic representations has overstepped sensible boundaries: it has started to hinder, rather than enhance, our capacity for coherent explanation of the strange human activity of music-making. That we make a division in this way is not a property of ‘the music’ in any intelligible sense. Instead, it is a product of the type of attention one pays to musical experience: in short, it is a matter of disposition.

This general issue gets particularly tasty when one turns to the growing literature on ensemble. In this context, a key topic of discussion – or is it an imperative? – is something called ‘ensemble synchronisation’. Indeed this quality is often treated as a de facto aim of (proper) performance: an ensemble is good if it is synchronised, and bad if it isn’t. (This is a slight exaggeration, but not much).

But what about the inverse proposition? Is performance really like this? Is it true that musical performances that ‘correspond’ to a static, lifeless representation are necessarily more successful, or even ethically superior, to those that don’t? What does such a concept of ‘adherence’ actually mean? Do other cultures share this oddly bureaucratic obsession?

Beyond these common-sense questions lies an even deeper layer of incoherence (which you will probably have noticed already). The very idea of ‘timing synchronisation’ already depends, in its entire logic, on seeing the symbolic representation as the ’real thing’, and the performance as a transient exemplar which either does or doesn’t measure up to it. But how tenable is it, ultimately, to posit a model in which music is thought fundamentally to be the succession of measurable, discrete sonic events, encoded into ‘hard’ notation?

A more sensible conclusion, I think, is that notation, however detailed, is always much softer in practice. It is only ever a shorthand: a lifeless representation that cannot operate on the same ‘plane’ as musical experience(s). It can enable experiences that have things in common, of course – but it is ultimately incapable of the regulation that classical music seems bent on attaching to it.

Many of the methods we use for studying music thus inherited the tacit assumptions of Western Classical Music - itself a very specific culture. This framework isn’t neutral at all, then, but such ways of thinking have become deeply conventionalised over time. A significant disadvantage of such unrecognised values is that the system is then inclined to entrench dominant artistic conventions, while discouraging challenge and critique. How might one get around this?

II.

This is where the evidence of early recordings comes in. The most interesting of these, for my purposes, are from the beginning of the twentieth century, when the technology was in its infancy and the playing styles were the most unlike those of our own time. But the crucial significance of this evidence has nothing to do with familiar claims to be ‘discovering correct performance practice(s) for particular musical works.’ That naïve, decontextualised view basically falls down the same rabbit hole we’re trying to climb out of.

A much more important implication of this evidence is that it reveals the fact of change. And sometimes these recordings show with visceral clarity that the values and conventions of ensemble performance were not always the same as those we believe in now. I ended up focusing on some remarkable recordings by the Czech String Quartet, made in the late 1920s (and I would absolutely recommend having a quick listen before reading on).

Such evidence makes it much easier to recognise that the performance conventions of our own time are themselves specific, and not generally applicable - or even ‘truths’ of excellence in performance. They are products of particular circumstances, events, beliefs, and constraints. These things are contextual ‘all the way down.’

It can be genuinely empowering to know that the conventions of performance – in tandem, of course, with people’s judgements of performances – are not stable over time. This knowledge certainly encourages musicians to look beyond the narrow windows of currently acceptable ‘style’.

But how significant is this recognition for the study of music?

I think there are a few different strands to this. As I said earlier, in theorising something like ensemble with the confidence of ‘objective’ language, it can be tempting to map discoveries about ‘how this human activity works’ onto widely held ideas about ‘what ought to happen in the ideal performance’. As the early recordings show, this runs the risk of circularity. Such models tend to reject evidence that do not fit with existing preconceptions: on that basis, a scholar might consider the Czech Quartet’s ensemble simply to be ‘worse’ than that of a modern group. I’m not saying this is what people claim; only that systematic frameworks that are too rigid will tend to leave that as the only consistent conclusion. But that conclusion seems a bit silly, at best, when you actually listen to what the performers are doing. It is different to what we’re used to, certainly; but does it lack meaning?? I don’t think so.

In practice, then, the world of music and the arts never operates on the basis of hard distinctions such as those implied by the dominant conceptual model of ‘good ensemble’, which is grounded on similarity, predictability, and regularity. In short, it needs performers to stick close to the ‘regulative ideal’ of notation. Ensemble is a perfect example, then, of how beliefs about aesthetic distinction can become ‘baked in’ to how we study it.

III.

It was my own experience of ensemble playing, and its special intensity, contingency, and specificity that caused me to doubt some of the basic premises of so much of the current scholarship of performance. What if classical music has been putting the cart before the horse?

One might be used to an elevated discourse that holds categories and objects (i.e., ‘musical works’) as the primary ‘content’ of music – and thus also of its investigation. But once that conceptual framework has been established, it can be very awkward to then map it onto the experiential nature of music. The two systems simply don’t interact coherently.

This diagnosis was directly reflected in the structure of my thesis. I began by looking at what people generally mean by ‘good ensemble’; and went on to argue that the traditional philosophical orientation of Western Classical Music places quite arbitrary limits on that definition. Those limits are specific to our own time, and they can be productively questioned by including early recordings in one’s purview – and, more importantly, the more general understanding that such things are always contextual, and that they change over time.

That was the context for a practical experiment in which my Florian Ensemble colleagues and I attempted to assimilate and ‘get inside’ the Czech Quartet’s very unfamiliar musical interaction — as far as we could, anyway, from their small selection of recordings. As I said, the idea of this was not to learn a late nineteenth century style to prove that we had ‘the answers’ to a particular repertoire’s performance practice. We were interested in using that process to reveal something much more profound about the character of Western Classical Music’s dominant conceptual model, and the blind spots it is inclined to set up.

This process of embodying an alternative ensemble concept suggested that musicians’ capacity to experience ‘togetherness’ is never intelligible in terms of discrete, black-and-white, static categories: things like ‘successful synchronization’ or ‘timbral matching’. This conclusion is quite radical from the point of view of modern criticism. But it is the logical end point of taking a much broader view of these questions: thinking in a more joined-up way, in which philosophical paradigms, historical change, and an appreciation of music’s experiential qualities, are all in the mix together.

Another important aim of this work is to articulate what ensemble is like to a player. As in the thesis, these posts and podcasts aim to rehabilitate many of the fine distinctions, emotional states and interpersonal relationships that are intrinsically beyond words and categories. Understanding what is going on here depends, too, on overturning classical music’s dependence on symbols and abstract art-objects. For as long as that convention dominates how music is talked about in certain circles, it puts up barriers to appreciating the richness, temporality and fragility of all musical experience. In order to ‘understand ensemble’ - and indeed to understand music at all – we need to break that cycle once and for all; and that is what this content is for.

I hope you enjoy reading and listening!