Abstract
Arnold Steinhardt of the Guarneri Quartet has described quartet performance as four musicians having a heart-to-heart talk in front of an audience of strangers (Steinhardt, 2000). As McCaleb observes in his Preface to Embodied Knowledge in Ensemble Performance, there is a certain magic experienced by, and an intimacy shared between, co-performers during ensemble performance, surpassing anything that arises in most other forms of social interaction. Ensemble performance has long held a fascination for musicians and researchers alike for this reason. Research into ensemble playing is of particular importance since almost all musicians across all genres rehearse and perform with others at one time or another. Most existing research in this area has sought to understand ensemble musicians’ social and musical interaction, with studies investigating co-performer communication, both verbal and non-verbal (e.g. Ginsborg & King, 2009; Seddon, 2005), group dynamics (e.g. King, 2006; Murnighan & Conlon, 1991), and various cognitive and social processes underlying co-performer interaction (e.g. Keller, 2014; Waddington, in press).
McCaleb’s book is a timely and valuable contribution to this ever-expanding field, drawing together many of these areas of study and re-examining the assumptions made in approaches to existing research to construct a new framework for examining co-performer interaction. Much of the existing research on ensemble performance has taken a sociological approach to understanding co-performer interaction, and has therefore been based on assumptions about similarities between ensembles and other social groups. An accomplished bass trombonist himself, McCaleb draws on his own experiences and insight as a chamber musician and argues that whilst these frameworks have yielded important findings, they fail to take into account the practical knowledge acquired by the musicians through their years of musical training and their experiences of performance and listening – their embodied knowledge. In addition, since it has been well documented that ensemble musicians spend the majority of their rehearsal time playing rather than discussing, McCaleb quite rightly suggests that it is ensemble musicians’ non-verbal communication as well as their embodied knowledge that must be key to our understanding of co-performer interaction.
Four research questions drive the work presented here and determine the structure of the book. Having offered an introduction into ensemble performance research and various related issues in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 is concerned with the first of these research questions: how do musicians interact and share information with each other when performing? McCaleb begins by reviewing existing research on co-performer communication – verbal and non-verbal communication, use of gestures, and leadership. He suggests that although significant progress has been made in identifying certain non-verbal elements of co-performer interaction, gaps remain in our understanding of how gestures are used and what they signify to musicians, as well as how musicians may exert leadership in performance and how musicians assume certain roles within ensembles. He notes that existing research has been based on the tacit assumption that performers communicate in a similar way to those in conversation, with information being sent intentionally from one person to another. With the use of examples from a quartet case study, McCaleb highlights the way in which intention and attributed intention in ensemble playing complicate the paradigm on which the models of communication and leadership used in existing ensemble research are based.
Chapter 3 considers the second of the four research questions: what is the nature of the information being shared in ensemble performance? Here, McCaleb explores how musical information is interpreted and shared through metaphor linguistically and multimodally in terms of physical motion and visual abstraction, and argues that music must be a multimodal experience rather than merely an auditory one. Building on this in Chapter 4, McCaleb proposes that the knowledge used by musicians in performance is inherently embodied. He first considers that such knowledge develops out of bodily experience of performance and can be used without necessarily being consciously recognized. As an example, he explains how the understanding a musician has regarding the relationship between them and their instrument seems to emerge from bodily experience. He goes on to consider how musicians add to this knowledge through non-physical experience such as listening, and through an understanding of musical elements such as harmony, characteristics of repertoire, and so on. Ultimately, he proposes that embodied musical knowledge is informed not only by the physical experience of performance, but also by non-physical experience, and is rooted not only in the experience of performance and listening, but also in the understanding of the relationship between the two. He asserts that musical performance requires engagement with this form of embodied knowledge.
Having conceptualized embodied knowledge in solo performance, in Chapter 5 McCaleb explores this, as well as the previously introduced ideas on personal and attributed intention, further and in the context of ensemble performance. Here, the final research question (“how does the physical relationship between the performer and their instrument relate to communicative and interactive processes of ensemble performance?”) is addressed. What follows from there is a fascinating, in-depth discussion in which the role of embodied knowledge in inferring the intentions of co-performers and adjusting subsequent behavior whilst playing together is analyzed carefully. Finally, McCaleb proposes a new framework for understanding co-performer interaction based on the conclusions drawn from this analysis. This cyclical “paradigm of inter-reaction” consists of three stages: 1) Transmitting: the sensory output of the performers (intentionally encoded or not); 2) Inferring: identifying the musical intention of a co-performer through embodied knowledge; 3) Attuning: adapting interpretation depending on the inferred intention and the unfolding performance. The key difference between McCaleb’s paradigm of inter-reaction and other models of co-performer interaction is the inclusion of his concept of embodied knowledge and the vital role it plays in conveying and inferring intention and in adapting throughout a performance. Importantly, unlike other frameworks, McCaleb’s framework also accounts for both intentional and unintentional communication, since encoding, a crucial element of sociological models of communication, is not included.
Although McCaleb’s framework, as it is presented here, does not consider in depth other factors that have been identified by Keller (2014) and others that may influence interaction, such as trust, pre-existing similarities between co-performers in terms of stylistic tendencies, and empathy, these were not intended to be the focus of this research. Also missing here, perhaps, are immediate practical implications for ensemble musicians as a result of this new framework. However, as McCaleb states at the outset and in his concluding chapter, where he calls for research on music to be intimately tied to making music, his aim was rather to conduct scholarly research on the subject of ensemble performance that was driven, tempered, and critiqued through his practical knowledge as a performer. As such, practical implications for ensemble musicians were not an aim of this book, although it is possible that some ensemble musicians will find this research useful in reflecting on their craft. Hopefully, future research will use the paradigm of inter-reaction presented here to better understand performing ensembles and potentially to develop some pedagogical applications for ensemble performance.
This book on embodied knowledge in ensemble performance is a welcome addition to a key area of musicology research and offers some new and valuable insights into co-performer interaction and musical development. McCaleb successfully fulfills his aim of offering an improved, more specific framework, treating co-performer interaction in its own context rather than viewing it from a broader sociological stance, as in previous research. The greatest contribution of McCaleb’s paradigm of inter-reaction is the emphasis placed on the crucial role of embodied knowledge in shaping ensemble performance, which other frameworks have not accounted for. Future work in the field will benefit from this framework and the new directions set forth here. With a clear structure, careful introduction to its various concepts, and great depth of inquiry, this is an essential text for scholars of all levels with an interest in ensemble performance. The inclusion of video excerpts enhances the arguments made, and the examples provided are well-chosen.
In addition to the obvious impact this research has for the field of ensemble performance, there is much thought here that will be relevant to researchers in musical development, music performance more broadly, and all areas of musical embodiment – another growing area of research. The potential contribution of this work to non-musical communication and leadership, as well as instrumental teaching and learning is also evident, and is outlined by the author himself as he reflects on his research in the concluding chapter. The foundations laid here for further exploration of embodied knowledge in performance in various contexts, as well as McCaleb’s call for more research to be guided by musical reflective practice, are exciting for future work.