Abstract
While music performance studies have tended to focus on solo performance or on performers as individuals (see for example how even the recent Oxford Handbook of Music Performance (2022) has only two chapters specifically dedicated to the case of ensemble performance over the course of its two volumes), there has been more and more interest in the past few years in studying collective musical performances and music ensembles of all sizes. Part of this interest comes ‘from within’ so to speak – from musicologists and music psychologists embracing a social turn and looking to understand in more depth the processes and mechanisms underlying joint musical activities (from rehearsal to actual performance) over a large range of artistic practices (see for example Clarke & Doffman, 2017). But this surge in interest is also due to a growing tendency within the social and cognitive sciences more broadly to treat musical ensembles as a paradigmatic group activity that allows for the systematic exploration of general issues related to joint action, group ontology, distributed creativity, and social cognition (Aucouturier & Canonne, 2017; D’Ausilio et al., 2015; Michael, 2017).
Packing 36 chapters in a little less than 300 pages, the edited collection Together in Music. Coordination, Expression, Participation ties together these two trends and offers an overview of the diversity of research currently done within this exciting field. The book follows a three-part structure, with the first part tackling the ‘meso’ level – that is, group interaction and communication during rehearsals, group organization, group identity, etc. – the second part, the ‘micro’ level – that is, decision-making during group performance, synchronization, fine-grained interactions, ancillary gestures, etc. – and the third part, the ‘macro’ level – that is, the long-term effects of collective musical practices on wellness, empowerment and development, or the embedment of collective musical practices within broader communities. Within each part, review papers presenting tools, theoretical frameworks, and typologies alternate with more focused papers reporting on specific case studies.
To say that I was eagerly waiting for a book like this would be an understatement. Having dedicated a large part of my research time for the past 10 years to exploring group improvisation, I am still fascinated and amazed by how complex joint music-making practices and collective musical behaviors can turn out to be. My expectations were thus high. However, I must confess that I was slightly disappointed by this collection, despite the presence of some genuinely interesting and stimulating parts.
Part of my issue with this book comes from some of the editorial choices that were made. As I said earlier, there are 36 chapters in this collection. This would certainly be appropriate for a larger handbook, but this is clearly too much within the limited space of the present book. As a result, chapters feel either rushed or decidedly too narrow in scope. Chapter 31 describes an extended 2-year longitudinal study with three youth orchestras involving a multi-disciplinary team in a mere four pages. Crucial details that would allow readers to assess the validity of the choices made by the research team are bound to be excluded in such a cramped space: for example, the statistical analysis performed by the researchers are not described or explained, nor are we provided with any rationale for the protocols used to assess the children's motor coordination. Conversely, Chapter 12 introduces a substantial amount of quantitative data on the rehearsal talk between two musicians over a seven-day rehearsal period but without really managing to provide the reader with a sense of a broader research context, making it hard to know what to really take from this case study. Overall, I cannot help but feel that the editors could have selected fewer chapters, thus allowing their authors to present in more details their study and to connect them more convincingly to the relevant literature (from this perspective, it is symptomatic that most of the case studies quote very few references, sometimes only two or three). It would have also helped in avoiding some unnecessary redundancies (there are for example two very similar studies on ensemble leadership within educational settings in the first part, and many overlaps of references and theoretical framings in the chapters from the third part, dedicated to collective music-making and wellbeing).
With such a diverse collection of chapters, total consistency is likely not to be expected. But statements that strongly clash with each other could probably have been avoided or editorially managed. For example, Chapter 22 presents a fascinating analysis of early recordings from the Czech Quartet (1928), showing in particular how these celebrated musicians were not always aiming for strict synchronization but used on the contrary (relative) asynchrony and autonomy as specific expressive strategies. Based on this thorough analysis, the author rightly concludes that the very conception of togetherness might shift over time (and, one might add, across genres and musical practices). However, the next chapter starts right away by stating that ‘successful synchronization provides a foundation for a high-quality performance […]. In the Western classical music tradition, expressive parameters such as dynamics and phrasing must be carefully aligned’, thus presenting as a general truth what we have just been shown to be dependent on artistic and historical contexts.
It would, of course, make little sense to discuss in detail each one of the chapters that comprise this collection. Rather, I would like to reflect within the remaining space of this review on some methodological and theoretical concerns that emerged while I was reading the book, and which are related to important challenges that we may need to address as a field.
First, and after reading so many case studies, this book comforted me in the idea that we could try to embrace more systematically a comparative approach in the design of our studies and fieldwork. In the studies that comprise this book, groups tend to be described and studied in isolation; we are often lacking any comparison point, be it a control group (there is not one single control group in all the studies reported in the third part of the book, which raises serious issues on how to interpret the supposed various effects of joint music-making on wellness or development) or a group that differs along a relevant dimension for the research question at hand (group size, group structuration, familiarity, etc.). Case studies can of course be fascinating for themselves. But they acquire most of their significance when related to other cases (or, at the very least, because they allow for comparisons of individual behaviors within the group, or to contrast the same group at various points in time). Without the presence of such reference points and cross-comparisons, the data collected through analysis, be they qualitative or quantitative, are bound to remain of a very descriptive nature. In that same perspective, and as the editors acknowledge, a wider diversity of musical practices and genres could be encompassed within such a comparative design. It remains problematic that all of the studies reported in the book only deal with a very narrow range of score-based, Western musical practices (that is, chamber music, choral singing, orchestra playing, with live-coding being the odd one out), when there are in fact so many different ways for people to actually make music together.
Second, I believe we could be more explicit on what we take to be the specificities of joint music-making, as compared to other group activities. Some of the observations made throughout the book on musical ensembles, be they on their identity, on their working processes, or on the benefits people take from being part of such ensembles, could be said of many other group activities (dancing, cooking, etc.) and types of teams (sports teams, theatrical troupes, etc.). As a consequence, some of the results reported within the book tend to sound a bit trivial, because they are just the same more or less well-known facts about teams, group behaviors, and collective practices applied to the particular case of musical ensembles. It may be worth focusing on aspects of such behaviors and practices that are more clearly tied to the specifics of the musical medium, or that could be more favorably explored within a musical setting.
Third, many chapters point to the embodied nature of music-making, or, more generally, approach music-making under the auspices of 4E cognition. While I am of course fully sympathetic with this approach, one unfortunate consequence is that it can led authors to put the emphasis on the analysis of bodily gestures and verbal interactions which occur around or during the performance to the detriment of the actual sonic interactions that arguably make up the core of a collective musical performance. Chapter 23 interestingly shows that performers were not less synchronized with one another when they could not see each other, suggesting that visual information does not play an essential role in the musicians’ coordination, but rather primarily serve a social function. In other words, there is no getting rid of sound when one wants to explain how musicians might communicate and coordinate with one another, and, more generally, achieve togetherness. This raises specific challenges, in terms of how we can extract and analyze the relevant information from the musical signals produced by the musicians, or how we can investigate the relation between the sonic output jointly produced by the musicians and the embodied nature of their interactions (such a perspective is sketched in Chapter 13). But it is precisely in these kinds of challenges that the interest of studying collective musical practices lies – allowing us to escape, to some extent, our natural tendency to ‘visuocentrism’, in order to focus on other modalities of interaction (that is, sonic interactions), and the role they play in the regulation of our collective behaviors.
Fourth, and finally, aesthetic issues are surprisingly absent from the book. Here, I do not want to suggest that we need to move away from the ‘participatory’ aspects of musical performances that have been neglected for so long, to focus once again on their ‘presentational’ aspects (Turino, 2008), although it would be worth investigating in more detail how the various interactions at play between the performers might translate into perceivable aesthetic properties, or how modes of coordination themselves might be treated as bearing aesthetic value by third-party listeners. Rather, following C. Thi Nguyen's analysis of games and other ‘arts of action’ (Nguyen, 2020), I want to suggest that the variety of agential experiences afforded by collective musical practices might very well be the object of the aesthetic attention of the performers themselves. Music is also enjoyed and aesthetically appreciated because it encapsulates such a wide range of ‘modes of togetherness’. Understanding in detail how agential and aesthetic aspects are connected within collective musical practices – how musical interactions relate to aesthetic emotions – should pave the way for many exciting studies in the future.
