Art and/or Craft?
I once had a really interesting conversation with instrument maker Marc Soubeyran, in which he insisted that making instruments was a craft, and demonstrably not an art. String instruments are primarily tools: they have a job to do, and if they aren’t made a certain way they just don’t work well enough to do that job properly. And this got me thinking…
The way this knowledge is passed down through many generations of master makers is not unique in the modern world, but it is becoming more and more unusual. The techniques and the materials haven’t remained exactly the same since the 1700s, but they’re extraordinarily similar given the length of time that’s passed. When an object simultaneously needs to ‘work’ as a tool and has aesthetic or historical value, you start to encounter some thought-provoking situations. So I thought I’d explore some of them here!
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The value of famous old instruments like Strads and Guadagninis continues to go up and up, such that fiddle economics seems to become more like the mad world of visual art with every passing year. One interesting thing to note about this situation is that the practical aspect of instruments - how they are to play - isn’t entirely decoupled from their economic value, but it isn’t a linear relationship either. Instruments are curious cases, because they involve at least two tiers of aesthetic judgement: bluntly, one that deals with ‘the sound’, which players mostly care about; and another that’s about provenance, workmanship, and visual aesthetics. The quality of the craftsmanship is obviously related to the sound, but when it comes to financial worth this is a rather fickle and unpredictable coupling. (I can’t be alone, for instance, in having had a go on extremely valuable instruments that sounded absolutely dreadful).
It’s surely a good thing that this heritage is valued and appreciated. Much like the elite end of the visual art world, however, the current market has a pretty confusing relationship with reality. The differential in prices is truly astronomical, and strikes many ordinary people as quite unhinged. There is an interesting possibility lurking here, one which brings together ideas about art, craft, and value. Could the fact that string instruments are functional tools actually have contributed to producing these extravagant economics?
Unlike the art world, in which expressive styles change quite dramatically over time, string instruments are essentially tethered to a golden historical period, and to a golden design ideal. Makers have tinkered with the patterns and techniques over the years, but it has remained amazingly stable, certainly by comparison with other musical instruments - let alone other objects! The high valuations attached to a group of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century instruments is partly because they work amazingly well as tools. Apparently, nobody has topped them since. (Although interestingly, even that idea is questionable now).
But the fact that there exists an aesthetic archetype for these objects - a ‘gold standard’ , if you like - then starts to create complexity all of its own. Art worlds are hugely invested in reputation, which means that value can start to diverge quite significantly from whether the individual instrument works all that well. It may be the effectiveness of those makers’ instruments that established the gold standard in the first place. But once you have an archetype with this much influence, there are many more (social) variables in play.
The quantity of these original, ‘great’ instruments is always going to decrease over time, as people (sadly and very occasionally) drop them down the stairs, or sit on them. The one thing we do know is that the number is not going to increase! Even though modern makers continue to make wonderful fiddles, that’s really not the point. The archetypes are insulated - by myth as much as anything. It’s that combination of diminishing supply with the unflinching ‘gold standard’ reputation that helps explain the extent of the price inflation we’re currently witnessing. The right hand side of the distribution has been going absolutely crazy, meaning that top soloists are increasingly loaned these instruments by funds and foundations, rather than owning them outright.
The enormous valuations of high-end instruments is socially unhelpful, for sure, but it’s also quite interesting for the philosophy of music and the arts. The financialisation of the best-known examples has meant that some elite instruments are locked away, both their sound and their value protected in bank vaults or glass cases. The “Messiah” Stradivarius, barely played in 200 years, and currently on display in the Ashmolean Museum, is an extreme case of the decoupling of visual aesthetics, historical significance, and phyisical condition, from its function as a musical instrument. The Messiah could fairly be described as an archetype - as a mint condition piece, it’s an ideal example, with whopping valuations. Yet it is unlikely to have many of the tonal qualities we would prize as musicians. Instruments that are not played for this length of time can take decades to ‘wake up’ tonally, no matter how beautifully made (or well preserved) they might be.
This curious sense of historical stasis, upheld to some extent by the ‘great tradition’ model of making, means that string instruments exist oddly between realms. There is the subjective, unequal, sometimes fickle, definitely elite critical discourse that’s characteristic of the visual arts; but at the same time, you also have unchanging, ‘ideal’ models, the physical constraints of vibration, and also - rather more obliquely - the tonal preferences of musicians. The fact that the instruments are tools has meant that they are strangely historically and culturally contained, insulated from the kind of expressive change that has characterised most other art worlds. The widespread agreement that the violin reached an unsurpassed aesthetic pinnacle in two dimensions - aural and visual - and that this occurred in one geographical region, during one historical period- Cremona at the turn of the Eighteenth Century - seems to have been a recipe for some pretty extraordinary social (and financial) phenomena.
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The relationship between art and craft is equally interesting in the teaching of (classical) musical performance. Most of Western culture regards the ‘artist’ as an authentic, expressive individual, whose creativity transcends their historical and social circumstances. But the classical music world is also peculiar in requiring a perpetual balancing act of performers. Musicians are encouraged to cede ultimate credit to the composer, yet they can receive all manner of criticism if their ‘personal take’ or ‘individual interpretation’ is not suitably distinguished in its ‘vision’ from the rest of the competition. I’m consistently amazed by how fluid (and confusing!) these demands seem to be.
Given the need to walk this tightrope, it’s interesting that many of the classical music world’s educational institutions are much more aligned, in practice, with the craft/apprenticeship model, than ideal notions of artistry. The rhetoric of ‘the music itself’ (or the even stronger claim to be ‘communing with the composer’) usually functions as a way of gaining the prestige associated with ‘pure’, untethered artistic contemplation. But on closer inspection, the actual teaching methods, practices and value systems of this culture are much more complex, and frequently blend art and craft in a way that’s reminiscent of the world of instrument making. Classical performance has its archetypes, too: great interpreters of the past, perhaps to be equalled, never to be surpassed; or the desire to believe in the ‘work of music’ as something fundamentally timeless. (It’s an abstraction which can be tinkered with, ‘interpreted’ a little differently, but whose ultimate prestige and authority cannot be denied). Masterpiece culture characterises both realms: one literally, the other metaphorically.
Learning classical performance is craft-like in the obvious sense that it’s often oriented around a ‘master’ practitioner. But more deeply, I think its value systems have a lot in common with guilds. A craft has standards, upheld by insiders who sanction a relatively circumscribed selection of acceptable (and thus accredited) work. It’s not only the finished ‘product’ that matters: that result needs to be obtained having demonstrated mastery of certain methods. The need to sign off on work - which in classical music mainly happens through things like ABRSM exams or final recitals at music colleges - is especially important in creating a close-knit community, drawn together by knowledge and experience. Such groups are inevitably somewhat protective of what they collectively regard as ‘the right way to do something’. Sometimes this will be based on tried-and-tested knowledge. But it can also produce a tendency towards resistance to change that’s much more arbitrary: in other words, a flavour of cultural protectionism that isn’t related to how well the original ‘solution’ actually works, but that ‘it’s just how we do things here’. Many music conservatoires were founded quite explicitly on a protective, conservative, ‘guild’ mentality that was designed to safeguard certain values and practices. (The clue is in the name). While much that these modern institutions now do is admirable and worthwhile, it’s also inevitable that some potentially fruitful questioning of norms is discouraged, both internally and in the wider culture, by that residual ‘de facto’ bias.
It’s been shown time and again that guild-like structures can be an extremely effective way for people to develop a deep understanding of something - especially something complicated. When the model works at its best, it doesn’t operate in a single direction: the master is also learning something from the process of working with an apprentice. I don’t mean ‘learning’ in a basic sense of directly transmitting information; that clearly goes in one direction. I’m really referring to the stimulating thoughts, questions and challenges that arise in the process of explaining something to somebody else, who doesn’t have the same experience or ‘insider’s perspective’.
Insistence that classical music be seen through a straightforwardly ‘artistic’ frame certainly encourages the elevation of master practitioners, but it doesn’t cultivate that crucial sense of exchange. An emphasis on individual vision - whether that’s via ideas of ‘pure, natural talent’, an increasingly brutal climate of competition, or a naive historical sense of ‘greatness’ - generally results in a narrow concentration of authority. And in the arts, as in politics, overly-concentrated authority tends to have a negative impact on open discussion, and, in turn, on pluralism. To put it simply: if we treat a small proportion of ‘masters’ as unconditionally correct, and everyone else as unconditionally deferent, as is so often the case in classical music, that differential will tend to shut the door on the mutual curiosity that actually underpins the effectiveness of ‘traditional’ apprenticeships.
To embrace exchange in this way is not to undermine standards. Just as in Marc’s workshop, in musical performance there are things we can do that work well, and many more that don’t - but the search for better ones generally benefits from interaction among people with different levels of experience. There can be both a hierarchy of knowledge, and a fruitful process of exchange, explanation, questioning, experimentation, and so on. Right now, a lot of classical performance culture looks superficially like it operates on a ‘traditional’ master-apprentice model, and it’s often talked about in terms of this shorthand. But while attitudes towards hierarchy and authority remain rigid, we’re actually drawing minimal benefit from the features that made that model so effective in the first place.
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I suspect that insistence on the doctrine of individual expression has blinded us to many of the positive opportunities that a craft-based recalibration might bring. We are actually surrounded by plenty of these opportunities already. But we tend not to notice them, perhaps because more collective, collaborative concepts have been cast as the antithesis of individual creativity - and are easily mapped onto ‘stuffy traditions’, conservatism, and so on. While complaints about the latter are often more than justified, I think that to double down on individualism in response would be to seriously misdiagnose the underlying issue. Surely we can do better than being doomed to compete in a depressing zero-sum game, in which hyper-talented musicians spiral towards an always-narrowing array of creative options, while all claiming to be expressing ‘their individual voice’? Paradoxically, it’s the obsession with artistic individuality itself which has done this to us. We need less of that naive, self-obsessed, utopian rhetoric, not more of it.
I was reminded of all this, strangely enough, after dipping into a really niche book called Software Craftsmanship [1]. It’s nearly 20 years old now - an absolute age in the tech world - and some of it unsurprisingly seemed a little dated, but it got me thinking. The author, Pete McBreen, proposes that the craft model provided a much more effective framework than the then-dominant ‘engineering model’ in producing workers with a sufficiently deep understanding of the challenging field of computer software. This was especially appropriate because of that world’s well-documented tendency towards exponentially-increasing complexity. Just like making string instruments, you definitely won’t get better results by throwing more personnel at the problem!
In some ways the author’s thesis was the epitome of neoliberal economics, in suggesting that the route to productive, reliable and efficient results was extreme competition. The author argued that three ‘master’ developers would do a much better job than 30 average ones; pay the really good ones an order of magnitude more, don’t bother employing the others, and you incentivise the kind of *really* thorough understanding that gets truly excellent results for a company.
This sounds a bit bleak on its face, but the model he advocated for bringing those people to that level of expertise was much more positive. It rejected bland, production-line norms, or inflexible and ossified ‘bodies of knowledge’. Instead, he advocated investing in a long-term, detailed and commited collaborative process, which saw people from different levels of the hierarchy work together. Crucially, this approach - at least in its ideal form - didn’t see the juniors as a burden on the company’s productivity, but as a chance for the experienced people to learn something about themselves and their craft along the way, not least because their questions would help guard against ingrained patterns of thinking.
In practice, what this model proposes is a bunch of fairly strict guidelines about how to do something well, which have been attained over a long period of time (and via many master-apprentice pairs). But that system also needs space to find improved ways of working, if they are available, and this means the role of the apprentice is not limited to copying, as an automaton, but also serves to provide a fresh perspective to the experts, who may have slipped into particular habits over time that they simply don’t notice. This builds in a well-calibrated motivation for incremental improvements. Norms and standards are vitally important; yet they cannot be policed too bluntly, because that leads to stultification and complacency. There is a central hierarchy, but exchange between curious people at different stages in their careers is a vital part of getting better results over time.
Classical music is a curious case because it combines a big chunk of this model - the first bit, about norms and standards - with a totally different value system that centres on the individual. The latter tends to dominate public discourse, both because expressions of individuality in our culture have much more idealistic prestige, and because ‘norms’ can more easily be characterised as limiting - especially when creativity is concerned. Unfortunately, whether they are cast as positive or negative, not talking about the role of collective norms at all creates a profoundly paradoxical reality for most musicians. For all but a tiny proportion of people who break out of it, every classical musician is subject to this delicate, complicated and sometimes fraught balancing act. What I’m suggesting, then, is that on its own the rhetoric of artistic individuality, far from being the route to liberation, pluralism and autonomy, is no help whatsoever in creating a healthier creative culture. We need to see the other side of the equation, and have an honest discussion of the (partial) guild mentality that, in practice, underpins most of the classical music world.
References
[1] McBreen, P. (2001) Software Craftsmanship: The New Imperative. Addison Wesley.
