Together but not ‘together’

How do you study ‘ensemble’? It’s a complex, humane, and elusive topic, and it crystallises all sorts of challenges inherent in thinking about music. Most articles on this subject, whether in the popular press or formal scholarship, adopt a tone that blends the supernatural and the prosaic. In other words, investigations of ensemble do not just purport to explain ‘what’s going on here’. They also marvel at the ‘wondrous’ manner in which humans are able to ‘synchronise’ their performance in just the way that is apparently a prerequisite for a suitably beautiful, effective result.

The problem is that these explanations often fail to distinguish between things that are valued in a particular culture, and grand claims about universal perpetual ‘mechanisms’. The idea of ‘ensemble synchronisation’ - a common trope of the academic literature - presents a fascinating example of how the scholarship of performance is sometimes inclined to entrench, rather than to question, dominant artistic conventions. Listening to some early recordings can be an amazing antidote to this belief. Such evidence reveals that the performance conventions of our own time are manifestly specific, and are far from consistent historically. The examples I focused on were some remarkable recordings set down by the Czech String Quartet in the late 1920s. (Have a listen!)

This lack of clarity in distinguishing between conventions and capacities is especially unhelpful when scientific and empirical methods are becoming increasingly influential in the study of the arts. In ‘theorising’ ensemble with the confidence of quasi-objective language, it is all-too-easy to see claims about ‘how this human activity works’ as interchangeable with ‘what ought to happen in the ideal performance’. And this runs a real risk of circularity, because such models tend to reject evidence that do not fit with their preconceptions. My contention is that the world of music and the arts never operates on the basis of such hard distinctions - indeed it cannot.

In this project, I looked closely at the relationships between ideas about aesthetic distinction – which involve accounting for the peculiar philosophical habits and social structures of classical music – and the methodological foundations of the methods people have used for studying ‘ensemble’.

It was partly my own experience of ensemble playing - particularly its intensity, contingency, and specificity - that caused me to doubt some of the basic premises of the scholarship. Once one starts to look closely at this cultural environment and its de facto ideology, it is hard to escape the conclusion that classical music has been putting the cart before the horse. This is even clearer when you adopt a ‘performer’s-eye-view’. Early recordings can be remarkably powerful in this context: they are like a surgeon’s scalpel. Their evidence can be surprising, disarming and alarming. And taking its implications seriously cuts through layers of inherited beliefs, allowing one to see the conventions of one’s own time more clearly.

If we know that the norms and philosophies of ensemble performance change to this extent, what does that tell us about the basis of our attempts to understand it? What sorts of beliefs influence one’s musical judgement? How does one distinguish between negotiated, fluid aesthetic norms, and claims about human nature? As my research progressed, it became clear that a great deal of confusion resulted from the fact that discussions of classical music have been dominated by abstraction(s). The way we talk about music, in other words, tends to imagine a world in which categories and abstract objects (‘works’) are treated as the primary ‘content’ of music, and thus of its investigation. But this is fundamentally to misunderstand the experiential nature of music.

This idea proved crucial to unlocking ways of thinking very differently about ensemble. It was also reflected in the structure of the thesis: I began by looking at what people generally mean by ‘good ensemble’, and show how the overarching (and interlocking) organisation of classical music’s ideology places unnecessary limits on that definition. But I also looked at this topic more practically. Together with my Florian Ensemble colleagues, we attempted to assimilate and ‘get inside’ the Czech Quartet’s very unfamiliar musical interaction.

These approaches both pointed towards a single conclusion: that it is ultimately nonsensical to equate an ensemble’s capacity to experience ‘togetherness’ with discrete, black-and-white, static categories - such as the idea of ‘synchronization’. (Broadly, this refers to the timing of musical ‘events’ to take place at the same moment).

In some ways this conclusion is radical – certainly from the point of view of modern performance imperatives. But it is supported by thinking philosophically, historically, and experientially. In the thesis, then, I am trying to articulate what ensemble is like to a player, and to rehabilitate the significance of fine distinctions, emotional states and interpersonal relationships that will always lie beyond words and categories. Crucially, it presents a new way of framing classical music’s dependence on abstraction. That convention dominates how music is talked about in certain circles, but anybody can recognise, I think, that such things are far less important to its experience. Once we break the cycle, to escape these loops of intellectual incoherence, the real business of ‘understanding ensemble’ can begin!