European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music

Description

Abstract Virtuosity and (some of) its delusions Izabela Wagner’s Producing Excellence: The Making of Virtuosos (Routledge, 2015) manages the difficult task of providing a sociologist’s view from the inside. She offers a powerful critique of the training of western classical musicians. Resilience, language facility, diplomacy, sociability, strength, beauty, nepotism are all shown as necessary for success. Even more important are technical perfection under any conditions of work, and obedience however cruel or unreasonable the demands and provocations of teachers and jurors. An attribute entirely missing from this list, however, is creativity. Creativity is necessarily disobedient; and, as in any dictatorship, disobedient creativity is punished by exclusion. Thus, the successful virtuoso – the condition to which all young musicians aspire – is able to do anything in performance brilliantly except innovate. One may protest that international soloists are not all alike. But how unalike are they? Is even the most successful virtuoso free to explore alternative musicalities? No: like a spin-doctor for dictatorship, their role is to perform the norm, but to do it so well that we are happy to hear it. We can get a sense of what other kinds of musicianship might be possible from early recordings (which we are able to hear but are forbidden to imitate) and from experimentation. And at the same time we can challenge the official reasons for enforcing loyalty to the norm (power, of course, is the real reason). Faithfulness to the composer’s intention quickly fails, as a justification for norms, as soon as one listens to old recordings or thinks seriously about ethics. In sum, this keynote talk looks at various aspects of virtuosity from a critical perspective. I argue for a shift in focus away from obedience towards innovation, a shift that must be driven by experimental performance.

Period	3 Mar 2016
Event type	Conference
Location	Budapest, HungaryShow on map