The danger of virtuosity

The length of a conference title and the ease with which speakers adapt it to their research may be inversely proportional. “Virtuosity”, the single-word title of the conference from which these papers derive (with its subtitle, “An interdisciplinary symposium”), laid itself open to multiple interpretations and it got them. But with enough different interpretations one can begin to get a sense of what a concept can do; and the five papers here offer glimpses of the variety of approaches that “Virtuosity” affords researchers. But what of the phenomenon it names?

It was hard to leave the conference without a sense that virtuosity has become a problem. Ginsborg’s participants show just how difficult the term can be for musicians. On the one hand it seems to describe a level of excellence that surpasses the norm; yet nowadays it is a level that is required for anyone entering the profession. It is feared as a target, routinely denounced, and yet so normal now as hardly to exist as a separate category except when it can be repurposed to apply to abilities other than the technical. When every student can play a transcendental étude, virtuosity has to be recognised by something more than an ability to get around any number of notes. Stachó’s sensitive discussion of rhetorical characterisation sees virtuosity in this more expressive sense, a particular operationalising of Rodriguez’s apt view of virtuosity as intensification.

Parncutt’s wide-ranging search for underlying drivers is understandable given a set of behaviours so obviously driven by powerful needs. More immediately, virtuosity is an outcome of competition: behind idealistic talk of artistry musicians must always strive, in the ruthless neo-liberalism that the music business so efficiently performs, to out-play their rivals in fluency, reliability, punctuality, collegiality, health, good looks, and musical affect. Being able to play anything perfectly, fluently and safely within current performance style (the process analysed insightfully by Lisboa et al.) is simply a necessary starting-point before other kinds of virtuosity come into play. And so the modern musician is required to be both human and superhuman, expressive and brilliant, moving and thrilling; no longer one at the expense of the other, but both on every occasion, if they are to rise above the graduate average and attract attention. How much stress does this induce? How many drop out (“The sacrifice of a lost childhood”, to which one of Ginsborg’s participants refers)? How many are made ill? (“Nothing but disappointment and sadness”). Is virtuosity simply the market doing its ruthless business, selecting the strongest and weeding out difference, the absence of which only makes the task of differentiating oneself harder?

In this environment, the old debate between expression and accuracy (“I would much rather play musically … [than give] a technically flawless performance”) is redundant. We hear it again in Ginsborg’s participants not so much because it is still a real issue – like it or not, musicians have to provide both to have a hope of getting rewarding work – but rather because the anxiety that perfection induces needs a discourse through which it can be expressed and the old clichés come easily to hand. Part of that anxiety is rooted in the increasing impossibility (a product of runaway selection, Parncutt might observe) of astonishing an audience. When a soloist can play anything, faster, more thrillingly and wearing less than anyone else (Malcolm, 2016); when orchestras play without conductors, from memory, distributed artfully among the audience; ¹ when song cycles are routinely theatricalised; ² when dead performers reappear as holograms with orchestra; ³ what remains for young performers in search of careers? How now to astonish and yet to persuade?

Whatever else it may be, modern virtuosity is a political and an ethical issue. Does it do more harm than it is artistically worth? Does anyone care, as long as it’s financially productive for those who pay the bills? Is it reasonable to demand that performers feed our need to be astonished and at the same time persuade us that they are bringing us closer to the composer? Or does this simply intensify the cognitive dissonance which is at the heart of the classical music business, setting up an impossible conflict between an artistic belief system and a free-market economy? Music science has insights to offer here, although its arm that reaches into social science may be the one most likely to explain what is going on and how we are to get out of it. Ginsborg’s study points in an important direction.

A persuasive view of how virtuosos are made may be found in a recent book by Izabela Wagner (2015) which deserves to be widely read. Wagner was a parent of a child violinist being prepared for a career as a virtuoso. But she is also a sociologist; and so she was able to use her insider access to the rarified world of the international virtuoso class and the competition circuit to write a close-up study, one that a sociologist who observed as an outsider could not have achieved. The results are shocking. We see how parents, with the best of intentions, conspire with teachers, silently looking on as teachers bully and threaten young children to practice to the exclusion of all else, to forego other education, to obey their teacher without complaint, as far as possible without contributing anything of themselves. Through routine, children become willing slaves, hoodwinked, like their parents, into believing that if they do exactly as they are told they will become the next Heifetz. Wagner shows how teachers on the virtuoso circuit promote the idea that only they can lead a child to international stardom. She exposes the way in which students who leave a teacher, or who are expelled for being insufficiently obedient, are never spoken of again, maintaining the illusion that all the teacher’s students will succeed, alongside secret fear, among those remaining, of stepping out of line. She shows also how the teacher and student become mutually dependent: the teacher needs the student to preserve, perform and pass on their own approach to technique and interpretation, so that the teacher’s memes are reproduced; while the student needs the teacher’s support to make contacts, win competitions, get work. She shows how teachers actively intervene to prevent people who challenge them from getting work. She reveals the extent of corruption in competition judging, the promotion of the judges’ students, the bending or ignoring of the rules to produce a result that promotes the judges’ interests, the way in which judges and organisers interchange from one competition to another. ⁴ Above all, in the ways in which untruths are promoted and repeated in order to maintain the effectiveness of these teachers’ grip on power, the world Wagner describes evokes nothing so much as a police state of the sort in which she grew up and which in the West we like to imagine we have (or had) got beyond. ⁵

Classical music then, in training and practice, is bedevilled by problems of conformity: conformity to the imagined wishes of the dead composer; conformity to current norms (minimising paid rehearsal) and to the need, if one wishes to be employable, to sound the values of the musical state more thrillingly and more persuasively than one’s competitors. With this impossible demand comes stress and other kinds of performance-related ill-health. The culprits are the belief-system and the financial model. Of these two, the belief-system is the quicker to address. We need to do this. We owe it to performers to think about their lives, not just as professionals but also as children. What is the point of spending 18–20 of the most difficult years of anyone’s life, learning to make performances that have already been made over and over before you? For the sake of children’s health and mental wellbeing, quite apart from all the other considerations, it is imperative that we turn the education of virtuosos into something collaborative and creative, so that we can turn concert life into something less competitive, less predictable and less routine.

If we need virtuosity at all, perhaps we need virtuosity in imagination, in innovation, and in improvisation; virtuoso creativity, not virtuoso conformity. We certainly need an end to the runaway spiral of ever-more spectacular reproduction. Performers need to become more like composers; composers need to be more able to acknowledge the contribution of performers in making music. There is lots to learn and relearn from historical virtuosity, and much of it may be inspirational for innovative performers. ⁶ But we also need new kinds of musicianship, new performance styles, new forms of virtuous playing.

There may, as Stachó’s contribution suggests, be a place here for music science in exploring the fundamentals of musicianship and, alongside describing what musicians do, in showing how these fundamentals may be newly combined and applied. An essential step, beginning to be acknowledged (e.g. Juslin & Timmers, 2010), is to be able to account for the surprising extent of change, in what might seem the basic rules of performance grammar, documented by 120 years of recordings. Habits that now seem natural, for example slowing down at phrase-ends, would have seemed unnatural in the later 19th century when speeding through cadences was a norm (Cook, 2013; Stachó, 2012). We need to be able to explain both as implementations of more fundamental principles. A major challenge, then, if we are to gather useful data from participants, is to devise experiments that are not dependent on current performance norms. The evidence of recordings suggests that safe assumptions about what might or might not be experienced as “musical” are fewer than we suppose. Musical dynamics (in the fluid sense, not just loudness), and the patterns of change that characterise them (which shift over time) may be a more important focus for study than specific musical parameters or behaviours (Leech-Wilkinson & Prior, 2018). Virtuosity is relative to all of these, and inhibiting of creativity to the extent that it enshrines and glorifies a particular set of habits. In an environment in which experimentation (both scientific and artistic) needs to be prioritised, virtuosity may be best sidelined, at least until musical practice has been opened up to a much wider range of socially and politically (and thus economically) acceptable approaches to being musical.