**Introduction: Setting the Stage**

#### **Mine Do˘gantan-Dack**

The preparation of this volume for publication coincided with what has become one of the greatest global health crises in living memory, the COVID-19 pandemic. Overthrowing established and familiar ways of life in a matter of a few weeks around the globe, this unprecedented situation brought great challenges and uncertainties for humanity. The social fault lines that the pandemic laid bare as it crumbled economies and social structures globally prompted some profound reflections on our relationship with our planet and our fellow human beings. The necessity of lockdowns and various quarantine regimes in fighting this disease brought the *fundamental relationality* and *sociality* of human existence into full view. While digital communication technologies played a vital role in helping individuals, families, and communities cope with feelings of loneliness and desperation arising from enforced and prolonged physical isolation these *virtual* settings at the same time foregrounded their own "otherness" in relation to human intersubjectivity, as established and sustained in *actual*, face-to-face contexts (Dos Santos et al. 2020; Zhang et al. 2021).

As musical performances started to be cancelled within days following the official declaration of COVID-19 as a "pandemic" by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 11 March 2020,<sup>1</sup> performers not only had to deal with the artistic and emotional impact of these cancellations, but also face a long period of financial uncertainty. In an interview she gave on 13 March 2020, British classical violinist Miriam Davis noted that "On top of the sadness and anxiety of the virus situation, every musician I know is now facing bankruptcy", adding that her performance of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto was cancelled with just 4 hours' notice following "the cancellation of every other concert in my diary for the next 2 months" (Classical *f*M 2020b)—a sequence of events that I experienced first hand, as I myself went from performing 20–25 chamber music and orchestral concerts each season to the prospect of performing no concerts for an indefinite period of time. While I tried, similarly to other musicians, to carry on with an adjusted version of my daily practice routine during the lockdowns (Gersten 2020; Nusseck and Spahn 2021; Wilson 2021), the absence of face-to-face music-making contexts soon threw into sharp relief the extent

<sup>1</sup> Wigmore Hall, the Royal Opera House, the Royal Albert Hall, and the Barbican Centre in London closed their doors until further notice during the week starting Monday, 16 March 2020. Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C., and the Berlin Philharmonic Hall had already shut down the previous week. The cancellation of various music tours and festivals quickly followed (Classical *f*M 2020a).

to which a music performer's artistic being and becoming rely on other musicking individuals, and highlighted the existential significance of music therapist Gary Ansdell's words: "it takes two to musick" (Ansdell 2014, p. 160). Indeed, a performer is always part of a cultural, artistic, and affective community of musicking individuals and makes music with and for them even when they are physically distanced or absent. There *is* a sense in which all music making is an intersubjective and social experience. Musicologist Nicholas Cook said as much when he wrote that "there is no music-making that is not in some sense collaborative" and that "there is in a sense no such thing as a solo performance" (Cook 2013, pp. 69, 286). A cardinal component of learning to become a performing musician in fact concerns cultivating, foregrounding, valuing, and promoting the fundamental relationality, sociality, and mutuality of music-making practices.

While *ensemble performance research* emerged as a thriving area within music psychology and music performance studies over the last few decades,<sup>2</sup> the great majority of the literature on this topic exists as individual journal articles.<sup>3</sup> Some milestone publications in edited book format that contributed significantly to the consolidation of music performance studies as a discipline during the 21st century either do not feature the topic at all or give it little space.<sup>4</sup> Indeed, it is only very recently—in February 2022—that the first edited collection entirely dedicated to research on the psychological, social, cultural, and musical processes involved in ensemble music making—a volume titled *Together in Music: Coordination, Expression, Participation,* edited by Renee Timmers, Freya Bailes, and Helena Daffern—has been published (Timmers et al. 2022).

The surge in ensemble performance research has been motivated in part by the growing interest in the social, collaborative, communicative, and collective nature of musical behaviour and practices (Malloch and Trevarthen 2009; Sawyer 2014; Clarke and Doffman 2017; Cook 2018)—an interest that has been driven itself by wider historical and scholarly factors. Among these are the challenges that began to be posed during the second half of the 20th century—by post-modern philosophers such as Jean-François Lyotard (1929–1998), Michel Foucault (1926–1984), and Jacques Derrida (1930–2004)—"to the Enlightenment notion of the *autonomous individual* as the

<sup>2</sup> At the time of writing, Academia.edu, a networking platform for academics, lists 69, 860 research publications tagged under "music ensemble performance research".

<sup>3</sup> This is in contradistinction to the very large literature on chamber music *repertoire*, which exists in the form of books in addition to scholarly articles. See, for example: (Ferguson 1964; Berger 1985; Tovey 1989; Baron 2015; Keller 2011; Radice 2012; Murray 2015).

<sup>4</sup> For instance, (Parncutt and McPherson 2002) does not include a chapter devoted to instrumental chamber ensemble performance; Rink (2002), Davidson (2004), Williamon (2004), and Rink et al. (2017) each has only one chapter that discusses issues in ensemble performance. Two chapters in (Fabian et al. 2014) are concerned with this topic.

basis of moral and political value" (Do˘gantan-Dack 2020b, p. 42). Problematising the ideal of the self-determining individual, these challenges prepared "the philosophical grounds for the notion of the socially and discursively constructed self—the notion that one cannot be or become a self on one's own" (ibid.; also see Taylor 1989). Similar challenges were raised in psychology research, which, throughout the large part of the 20th century, promoted an understanding of learning and creativity as functions of the individual mind: in this connection, Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934) is often referenced as the initiator of a paradigm shift towards knowledge acquisition as a socially and collaboratively achieved endeavour (Do˘gantan-Dack 2020b, p. 42). During the last couple of decades of the 20th century, the impact of these developments started to be felt more broadly in the cognitive and social sciences as researchers began to explore the processes underlying human *intersubjectivity* (Carassa et al. 2008)—processes many of which are at the foundation of group music making. The emergence of *evolutionary musicology* around the same period is another factor that further stimulated scholarly interest in the social and collaborative dimensions of musical practices, as theories about the evolutionary origins and the significance of musicking in terms of its power to bring about physical and emotional coordination among individuals and to facilitate social bonding, social cohesion, self-other merging, etc., started to be proposed (Cross 1999, 2003, 2010; Huron 2001; Cross and Morley 2010; Dissanayake 2010; Morley 2013; Killin 2016; van der Schyff and Schiavio 2017). It would be difficult to overstate the role played by the paradigm shift in music scholarship during the 21st century in rendering ensemble performance research a thriving area: as the disciplinary ontology and epistemology continue to shift their focus from musical text to musical performance, from product to process, from music as autonomous works to music as socially and historically situated cultural practice, from the performer as a self-effacing figure in the service of *Werktreue* ideology (Cook 2013, pp. 13–16) to the performer as creative artist (Rink et al. 2017), the collaborative, intersubjective, collective, and participatory emerge as the artistic and educational exemplar in musical performance. Solo performing—which throughout the 20th century has been promoted as the highest form of musicianship and highest aim in a professional career in the western art music tradition (López-Íñiguez and Bennett 2019)—is being transformed into a sub-category within the increasingly diversifying musical activities and cultural roles undertaken by classical music performers.

Within this burgeoning research literature, there has been a proliferation of the terms "ensemble performance" and "joint musical performance" in preference to "chamber music performance" or "chamber ensemble performance", even when a particular research study focuses on what would standardly be considered as chamber music ensemble practice (e.g., string quartet, piano trio, wind quintet, or various duos performing western art music repertoire. See, for example, Rager et al.

2013; Schiavio and Høffding 2015; Bishop and Goebl 2017; Macritchie et al. 2018; Chang et al. 2017). Given that the terms "chamber music" and "chamber music performance" carry with them a specific cultural-historical baggage rooted in 18thand 19th-century European cultural ideals, the move towards more generic terms in research can be seen as one way that the discipline manifests its aspiration to engage with some of the pressing social and civil rights issues in the 21st century. "Ensemble performance", which, as a term, is neutral with regard to repertoire and performance personnel, can more readily serve a diverse and inclusive scholarship in music performance studies in comparison to the term "chamber music performance", and at the same time sidestep the complexities of the cultural-historical baggage that "chamber music" brings.

Nevertheless, professional performers continue to refer to themselves routinely as "chamber musician" in their biographies. To cite just a few examples: Nicola Benedetti's biography describes her as a "devoted chamber musician" (Benedetti n.d.); Toby Hughes introduces himself as "Double bass soloist and chamber musician" (Hughes n.d.) on social media; and pianist Marian Hahn is described as "an avid chamber musician" by the institution where she teaches (Johns Hopkins Peabody Institute n.d.). In an article published in *Strings Magazine* in 2015 sub-titled "19 String Players Talk About Their Passion for Playing in Small Ensembles", each performer interviewed uses the word "chamber music", and some refer to the "chamber musician"; none of them use the term "ensemble musician" or "ensemble music" (Anonymous 2015). Furthermore, in the context of programmes and courses focusing on historical and/or contemporary western art music repertoire, many, if not all, music education institutions continue to refer to the "chamber musician" who develops ensemble musicianship skills under their roofs. The Royal College of Music, London, for instance, notes on its website that "RCM students perform regularly as soloists and chamber musicians at major concert halls" (Royal College of Music n.d.); on the website of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London, one reads that "The Guildhall Symphony Orchestra and Chorus perform regularly in the 2000-seat Barbican Hall, while chamber musicians give recitals there as part of the acclaimed LSO Platforms: Guildhall Artists series" (Guildhall School of Music and Drama 2021).

There are several reasons I have chosen to adopt the term "chamber musician" rather than "ensemble musician" for the title of this volume. Firstly, I have conceptualised and designed this volume specifically with the aim of addressing the diverse challenges that twenty-first century musicians working in small groups face as music students and professional performers as well as exploring their multifaceted artistic practices. The volume is thus about musicians who routinely refer to themselves as "chamber musicians". In this connection, the chapters included in this volume collectively contribute to the growing criticism of the narrow artistic path imposed on practitioners of western art music performance—including chamber

musicians—by an ideology rooted in 19th-century discourses and practices that continues to generate various negative consequences, such as performance anxiety, the stifling of creativity, and career-related disappointments (Leech-Wilkinson 2020). Critical reflections on the unhealthy practices that have shaped classical music performance culture since the 19th century—such as its hierarchisation of musical roles and values, encouragement of perfectionism and of competition instead of collaboration, and discouragement of diversity (Scharff 2015; Hill 2018; Bull 2019; Leech-Wilkinson 2020)—form a unifying thread that runs through the various chapters in this book. The contributions go beyond identifying and critically scrutinising the diverse challenges that the contemporary chamber musician faces, however: they also explore novel developmental and professional paths through which the musical and social practices of the 21st-century chamber musician can become more relevant for and more closely integrated with 21st-century lives. This requires, among other things, engaging critically with the cultural-historical baggage that chamber music performance practice continues to entail and exploring novel pedagogical practices and career paths—not to mention novel repertoire for 21st-century chamber musicians. This volume, consequently, places the performer at its centre and introduces *participatory, collaborative, and socially engaged musical practices* as defining the emergent activity domain of the 21st-century chamber musician. The volume proceeds from a critical scrutiny of the cultural-historical baggage that the term "chamber music" has accumulated as repertoire and as activity over the last couple of centuries and moves through contributions that discuss institutional pedagogical issues and professional concerns as well as the inner musical and social workings of chamber music ensembles. The volume finally turns to an exploration of the experiences, attitudes, and values of amateur chamber musicians, an awareness of which is beneficial for the professional chamber musician in the 21st century.

In Chapter 1, Murphy McCaleb offers a new conceptualisation of "chamber music", both as repertoire and as an activity that will make it more relevant within contemporary cultural practices. In his words, he attempts to "evaluate chamber music as a form of interpersonal musicking within the 21st century." In the first section of his chapter, McCaleb discusses the problems involved in the definitions of "chamber music" provided in the literature. Observing that chamber music making deviated from its participatory historical origins, he goes on to propose a fundamental rethinking of the relationality that the practice engenders by placing the performers and the audience within radically egalitarian contexts. The model he puts forward foregrounds the intimacy of the relationships chamber music making encourages and the economy of resources it relies on. The result is a new practice that is predicated on not only making music in small groups but also on making musical and dialogic *relationships* and *experiences* with the participation of co-performers *and* audiences. According to McCaleb, this new practice requires a new term: *chambering music*.

The theme of participatory music making is picked up in Chapter 2 by David Camlin, this time in the context of an educational setting—the music conservatoire. The chapter first explores the tensions and challenges that emerging professional performers experience when they encounter participatory and socially engaged musical practices. Trained in accordance with the demands of a perfectionist and competitive culture based on the presentation of reified musical "works", classical performers, when they are exposed to different relationships in different participatory settings, are confronted with the task of re-evaluating their understanding of the notion of "musicality" and developing an awareness that this notion involves much more than being "perfect" in accordance with the dictates of a particular discourse. They come to realise in such settings that music making is at the same time, and fundamentally, the performing of human relationships. Among the important findings of Camlin's qualitative study are the many benefits that participatory encounters bring: these experiences teach the emerging professional performer how to respond and adapt to dynamically evolving and unpredictable environments; enhance their communication skills; increase their creative freedom; and significantly, find their own artistic voices. In Camlin's words, "The development of a more dialogic and relational mindset toward music making also represents an invaluable attitudinal shift which can help students transform the 'hotshot' mindset of conservatoire training into something more collaborative, in preparation for taking up professional roles in chamber music practice."

The concerns that are raised by David Kjar, Allegra Montanari, and Kerry Thomas in Chapter 3 resonate closely with the issues that McCaleb and Camlin articulate in the first two chapters of the volume in connection with the traditional discourses and performance practices of western art music. After providing a critique of the conservatoire culture, which is based overwhelmingly on the cultivation of a "sonic aesthetic", the authors emphasise the crucial role that chamber music making can play in educating socio-politically aware portfolio performers. Quoting Loren Kajikawa, who wrote that "music needs not only to become more diverse and inclusive but also to come out into the world and help to create spaces for everyone to play" (Kajikawa 2019, p. 171), Kjar, Montanari, and Thomas put forward the idea that the development of musicianship should include recognising the importance of community engagement. In this connection, they explore the innovative pedagogical approaches that are currently being implemented in various US institutions and mobilising chamber music training as civic training. By cultivating not only collaborative skills but also openness to cultural plurality, these novel chamber music performance contexts have the power to challenge the radical individualism (and indeed radical collectivism, I would add) that has become pervasive globally, and encourage the development of collaborative communities that flourish through the practice of inclusivity, diversity, and equality. Another important discussion

presented in this chapter concerns the dissonance that emerging classical performers experience between the training they receive in educational settings and the demands of the marketplace they face upon graduation. Recognising the problems posed by discourses that frame 21st-century classical musicking in neoliberal terms, Kjar, Montanari, and Thomas suggest that for performers to be able to contribute to musical culture as socio-politically aware musicians, they need to develop an awareness of the economic and political mechanisms that turn the wheels of musical culture: in the absence of such awareness, it is difficult to develop the ability as well as the resilience to negotiate and subvert the negative consequences of the demands imposed by the marketplace. In promoting the value of a more inclusive and diverse musical culture and the value of more socially engaged learning within the music conservatoire, Chapters 2 and 3 can also be read as contributions to the emerging field of Critical Higher Education Studies,<sup>5</sup> which "seeks not only to understand higher education, but also to critique its dysfunctional practices, and undo and transform its undemocratic and narrowly conceived structures" (Do˘gantan-Dack 2020a, p. 50).

In Chapter 4, Caroline Waddington-Jones focuses on the wide-ranging skills that professional musicians who carve out career paths in chamber music need in order to meet the challenges they face in the 21st century. As the author notes, these skills are "far removed from the music-specific skills that they and their predecessors honed over many years of musical training": they also include entrepreneurial as well as digital literacy skills. Waddington-Jones observes that as professional contexts for making a career as a chamber musician have become increasingly competitive since the 20th century—while funding opportunities have been on the decline—many classical performers are now turning to portfolio careers, which is becoming "commonplace" and "a great way to diversify income via music, or to add music to other career exploits" (Hatschek 2014). The chamber musicians who were interviewed by Waddington-Jones as part of her qualitative study also emphasise the potential of portfolio careers to make more rounded musicians. In spite of the various financial challenges and discriminatory barriers that 21st-century western art music performers face in establishing careers as chamber musicians, they continue to place chamber music performance at the heart of their portfolio

<sup>5</sup> Critical Higher Education Studies is a branch of Critical University Studies that "looks beyond the confines of particular specialisations and takes a resolutely critical perspective. Part of its task is scholarly, reporting on and analyzing changes besetting higher education, but it goes a step further and takes a stand against some of those changes, notably those contributing to the 'unmaking of the public university'" (Williams 2012). Critical Higher Education Studies promotes "engagement and dialogue on the evolving role of higher education (HE) in contemporary society and its link to broader political, social and economic structures at national, global and transnational scales" (Moscovits and Dillabough 2020). See also, (Arvanitakis and Hornsby 2016; Smyth 2017; Noble and Ross 2019; and Bottrell and Manathunga 2019).

work because of the high value they place on the musical experience and the repertoire, the collaborative opportunities the medium offers, and the creative control it affords. Similar to Camlin, and Kjar, Montanari, and Thomas, Waddington-Jones emphasises the need for higher education institutions to prepare their students for the realities of the profession outside the walls of the institution. In this connection, the author puts forward the important suggestion that embedding the development of self-reflection and self-insight into music curricula can further foster professional development. Crucially, she argues that music education institutions need to give more consideration to how they portray artistic and professional "success" to their students in order to ensure that they can make realistic or "informed decisions as they visualise their futures and design their careers".

In the next chapter—Chapter 5 by Jane W. Davidson and Amanda E. Krause the authors take the reader further into the career "realities" of the 21st-century chamber musician by exploring the ways they negotiate the different dimensions of the professional ecosystem of chamber musicking. Davidson and Krause adopt the term "transactional culture" to describe this ecosystem as a series of micro- (interpersonal) and macro-level (organisational and cultural) negotiations and dialogues—a continuous, deeply intersubjective process of giving and receiving, where compromise becomes unavoidable. Performing chamber music emerges as a "distributed process, dependent on critical interdependent transactions amongst all stakeholders." The chapter focuses particularly on those transactional processes that involve audiences and venues and afford chamber musicians performance opportunities. The authors argue that in order to be able to sustain their ensemble's identity and gain employment, chamber musicians need to collaborate with various organisations and create meaningful experiences for their audiences. These collaborations, and the transactions they involve, necessitate skills that go beyond the well-documented musical, cognitive, and social skills ensemble musicians acquire as they make music together. The discussion in this chapter once again highlights the pressing need to develop marketing and social networking skills and strategies in order to have a career as a chamber musician in the 21st century, as well as the lack of training in these kinds of skills in higher educational contexts. The case study presented by Davidson and Krause explores the relationship between chamber musicians, a particular venue (The Melbourne Recital Centre, Australia), and their audiences. Their findings indicate that all of those who are involved in the actualisation of a chamber music performance event—the performers, venue managers, audiences, and other relevant organisations—converge around certain expectations: high-level musical and ensemble skills, depth of emotional experience, audience engagement and the communication of intimacy, and entertainment. In addition, the case study shows that for the 21st-century chamber musician, a portfolio career has very much become a norm, and that building resilience through the

attainment and maintenance of musical as well as entrepreneurial and facilitative skills is an indicator of a sustainable career in chamber music performance.

Chapter 6 by Zubin Kanga reinforces many of the research findings presented by Davidson and Krause. In addition to discussing the skills that freelancing 21st-century musicians require in order to secure an income, Kanga scrutinises in detail the skillset that is required of performers specialising in contemporary music and utilizing technology. Kanga argues that in order to survive and thrive in contemporary musical culture, musicians working as soloists and/or chamber musicians need to learn at least some of the skills of agents and managers, marketers, PR agents, lawyers, fundraisers, project managers, social media managers, and compositional coaches—a perspective that captures my own experiences as a chamber musician managing the activities of a London-based professional piano trio, the Marmara Piano Trio, for more than a decade. While most of these skills can be identified as "entrepreneurial", Kanga notes the association of this term with "neoliberal ideologies of market power and economic growth" and argues that this does not sit comfortably with many musicians, for whom the priority is "rarely the maximisation of profit" but rather the creation and performance of new music, and the collaboration and sense of community that these activities afford. The author thus prefers to refer to these skills collectively as "non-musical" skills. One of the important discussions in this chapter concerns the issue of discrimination against women, ethnic minorities, and neurodiverse performers within freelancing and contemporary music contexts: while there is research about the contemporary music *industry*, there is currently insufficient research about the experiences of performers of contemporary music. The implication, as noted by Kanga, is that "discrimination among new music performers cannot yet be acknowledged or tracked" within the larger research community. Kanga's research on UK-based freelancing performers constitutes an important step towards rectifying this situation: the abhorrent stories of racism and misogyny that some of his respondents shared indicate the extent of the problem and the urgency with which it needs to be addressed, both in research and within the industry. The chapter also provides valuable recommendations for tackling the challenges that solo and ensemble performers of contemporary music face: these include the implementation of the non-musical skills that freelancing performers need within higher education music curricula; more funding for performers of new music; and greater collective organisation among performers themselves to share information, knowledge, and skills.

The next three chapters in this volume take the reader away from issues related to building professional careers in chamber music performance to the inner (psychological, social and musical) workings of chamber ensembles. While concern with the well-being of the 21st-century chamber musician continues to be a thread that connects all of the chapters in this volume, this unifying theme

appears in highly situated, local contexts in Chapters 7 and 8. Chapter 7 by Mark Hutchinson and Elizabeth Haddon turns to the context of the piano duet. Through an autoethnographic study, the authors explore the factors that contribute to the development of "partnership" during rehearsals and discuss the different values—values regarding intersubjectivity, collaboration, and creativity—that emerged from their lived experiences as partners in a piano duet. The authors explain that they employ the term "partnership" to refer "specifically to a dyadic collaboration that is highly mutual and that carries a strongly positive affective dimension." The experiential and reflective microcosm that Hutchinson and Haddon present in this chapter in fact constitutes the very groundwork from which the relational, social, participatory and collaborative skills that chamber musicians require and value in all professional contexts spring forth. In many ways, chamber music rehearsal processes function as learning grounds for the development of intersubjectively shared musical, as well as non-musical, values. According to the authors, chamber music making offers performing partners the possibility to forge a kind of relationship that goes beyond the typical transactional or collaborative interpersonal encounters where "the subjective boundaries of the participating individuals remain intact" (Rabinowitch et al. 2012, p. 116): in chamber music contexts, performers are also able to orient themselves "around the desire to transcend individuality per se" and explore what Rabinowitch et al. (2012) call "merged subjectivity". Picking up a research thread suggested by Camlin in Chapter 2, Kjar, Montanari and Thomas in Chapter 3, and discussed in Chapter 4 by Waddington-Jones—a thread concerning the importance of *self-reflection* in the development of the professional performer—Hutchinson and Haddon emphasise the role that their dialogic reflective writing and analyses played in the development of a meaningful partnership, noting that these also facilitated interpersonal growth and significantly contributed to "possibility thinking", a concept articulated by Anna Craft to highlight the creative drive human beings possess to transform "what is given to what might be in all aspects of their lives" (Craft 2015, p. 153). As the chapter highlights the affective and transformational pedagogical potential of chamber music making contexts, it also contributes to the growing literature on transformative and affective learning environments. The dialogic journal employed as part of this study attests to the authors' journey in affective learning, which is "concerned with how learners feel while they are learning as well as with how learning experiences are internalised so they can guide the learner's attitudes, opinions, and behavior in the future (Gano-Phillips 2009, p. 3), and in transformative learning, which involves "the process of effecting change in a frame of reference . . . When circumstances permit, transformative learners move toward a frame of reference that is more inclusive, discriminating, self-reflective, and integrative of experience" (Mezirow 1997, p. 5). Further research can explore the benefits of music curricula that explicitly

incorporate affective and transformative learning. The earlier chapters by Camlin, and Kjar, Montanari and Thomas can also be read as pleas for the inclusion of these pedagogical approaches in the education of chamber musicians in the 21st century.

Chapter 8 by Rae W. Todd and Elaine C. King continues to explore the dynamics of chamber music making in the context of rehearsals. Through case studies that scrutinise the post-rehearsal reflections of the participating performers on the documented rehearsal sessions, the authors discuss how professional chamber musicians describe their experiences of "play" during episodes of "playing music" and how they understand the notion of "play". "Play", as explored in this chapter, concerns certain social activities that are universally observed among children as well as among adults in a wide variety of contexts. The authors emphasise the difficulty of defining the phenomenon of play and its fuzzy conceptual and practical boundaries. They note that "playing music" does not necessarily overlap with "play" in making music: while the participants in their research project distinguished, in general, the "ordinary" realm of playing music from "play" during rehearsals, in some cases, there was slippage in the performers' descriptions of "playing music" and "play". The chapter also provides useful literature reviews on the phenomenon of play, and on music performance and play. Todd and King show that many of the characteristics of play as conceptualised in the research literature can also be observed in the context of ensemble music making during rehearsals. An important finding of their study is that chamber musicians experience moments of play as highly positive episodes, with the implication that making play a regular part of ensemble rehearsal would significantly impact the well-being of the 21st-century chamber musician. "Playing" while "playing music" can create more participatory experiences, encourage creative engagement with the music, and prompt performers to make the music their own—simultaneously weakening the negative effects of the work-centric ideology that has permeated western art music performance environments since the 19th century (Leech-Wilkinson 2020). The readers will note that Todd and King's empirical findings regarding play in chamber music rehearsals by professional musicians resonate closely with the hypothetical and playful chambering music session that McCaleb imagines in Chapter 1, where all of participants feel free to play with the piece they chamber together. Future artistic research projects can explore the conditions under which play, as a highly pleasurable activity, can be routinely introduced into live chamber music performance contexts.

The next chapter, Chapter 9 by Neil Heyde, continues the theme of "play" in the context of a particular piece of chamber music: Maurice Ravel's Sonata for Violin and Cello. Heyde argues that the performative constraints that Ravel built into this composition enable, and in fact encourage, playing with the musical materials in a musical "game". The chapter explores Ravel's Duo in detail in order to articulate "what is special about [the composer's] games [and] why performers love

playing them". Arguing that Ravel mobilises the natural musical resources of each instrument to create the structural design of the music, Heyde focuses on a particular game he identifies in the Duo, namely the game of "predictive listening", which involves, among other things, the management of the harmonics. Through selected examples from the music where the open strings or shared sonorities play crucial roles in performance, the author discusses how each performer needs to imagine, predictively before the event, the sound and shape of their ensemble partner's line, as the musical materials are handed over from one part to the other. In this connection, chamber music making emerges as an ideal site for developing aural skills and thereby improving musicianship (also see McNeil 2000; Slette 2014). In this chapter, Heyde also highlights the opportunities that Ravel's Sonata for Violin and Cello opens up for immediate and intimate contact with the instruments and suggests that at times, the musical games invite the two instruments to work as if they were one instrument.<sup>6</sup> The emphasis the author places on the embodied-material foundations of chamber music making that intertwine the instrument, music, and the performers points to an area that offers much potential for further research. In Heyde's words, "Ravel's games seem to be particularly interesting in the way that they engage personal 'choice' with instrumental 'facts' . . . [as] he provides material not only for some strangely thrilling gameplay, but also a heightened awareness of the curious intimacy that we have with our instruments and instrumental selves."

In Chapter 10, Maria Krivenski presents research that provides an opportunity to compare some of the basic social and musical processes of ensemble music making as they unfold in synchronous and asynchronous contexts. Asynchronous group music making in online virtual ensembles became ubiquitous during the COVID-19 pandemic (Fram et al. 2021), as music performers were cut off from live, face-to-face, interactive, and synchronous performing contexts and resorted to technologically mediated practices to create some form of collaborative musicking. Noting that these mediated ensemble performances have been criticised for compromising too much and being poor replacements for the live, face-to-face musical encounters, Krivenski instead proposes explorig them as offering a *different* mode of ensemble performance that can artistically and pedagogically expand, rather than replace, traditional chamber music practices. The chapter presents the practice-based "Virtual Duets Project" that the author carried out during the pandemic with the participation of staff and students from a university music department in the UK. The ensembles featured in this project include voice and piano; violin and piano; two pianos; and electronic keyboard and piano, performing music by Franz Schubert, Lili Boulanger, Gabriel

<sup>6</sup> I made and discussed the same point in reference to the performance of Ravel's Piano Trio (Do˘gantan-Dack 2010).

Fauré, and Claude Debussy. The process of forming the virtual ensembles involved the preparation of "leading tracks" by the performers in each group, who recorded their own parts without any external guidance or constraint—a method that is unlike the more common practice of playing with a pre-prepared reference track.<sup>7</sup> Swapping their leading tracks with their ensemble partners, each performer was then asked to listen to and rehearse with the leading track created by their partner and record a "response track". The performers also engaged in synchronous reflective dialogue via Zoom, as they listened to early multitrack drafts prepared by the author of their ensemble performance together. One of the most important findings of this project is that technologically mediated, asynchronous chamber ensemble performances can have significant pedagogical benefits for music students in fostering a deeper understanding of the role of active listening in group music making. The chapter furthers the research thread initiated in previous contributions—notably in Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 7—regarding the role of reflective dialogue, by showing that dialogic reflection by the duet partners on their musical intentions was a key facilitator in the evolution of the creative process. Once again, dialogic peer-feedback and reflection emerge as fundamental tools that prompt deep learning—a process that involves the initiation of critical thinking, the creation of new connections between different concepts, and the integration of what is being learnt into what one already knows (Filius 2019, p. 14). While digital technologies have generated a culture of "being alone together" (Turkle 2011), Krivenski's contribution to this volume shows one way technology can be put to use to foster "being together alone".

Chapter 11 by Mary Hunter, the final chapter in this volume, is about amateur chamber music making and, in some important ways, brings the discussion full circle to the social-historical baggage that McCaleb unpacked in Chapter 1. Even though the ecosystems of professional and amateur chamber music making are intertwined through various social, financial and musical relationships, the experiences of amateur chamber musicians are under-represented in scholarly research. Echoing McCaleb, Hunter notes that this is partly because musicological enquiry prioritised chamber music as repertoire and focused on composers and works. Based on the ethnographic study she presents, Hunter argues that the attitude of amateurs towards chamber music as repertoire and as activity are distinct from those of professional performers. While amateur musicians do cherish the personal connections they forge with a cultural tradition that created "masterworks", the presumed ethical obligation to be loyal to the composer's intentions, which continues to drive performance making in the professional world of western art music (Hunter and Broad 2017),

<sup>7</sup> Reference tracks are usually generated using virtual instrument software or as pre-recorded backing tracks (Rutgers University 2021).

is either absent or significantly diminished in amateur settings. The attitudes and values of amateurs in relation to chamber music making are more similar to those that play out in the *chambering* contexts that McCaleb imagines in the first chapter with the aim of transforming the practice and rendering it more inclusive. As Hunter notes, the experience, which is cherished by amateurs, that "a work is more yours than the composer's, and that your version of it, however imperfect, is central to your sense of yourself as a musician" can also be empowering for professional chamber musicians.

As attested by the 11 chapters in this volume, 21st-century chamber musicians have various educational and professional concerns and needs that are different from those of their counterparts in previous eras. While they highly value collaborative opportunities, the distributed creativity, and the repertoire the practice involves and prioritise these factors over maximizing profit, they are also aware of the demands of the market that often require them to acquire additional, non-musical skills to be able to generate regular income as chamber musicians. The narrow artistic path that has been imposed on practitioners of western art music by an ideology rooted in 19th-century discourses and practices is no longer adequate to satisfy the artistic aspirations, and indeed the financial requirements, of a career in chamber music in the 21st century. Chamber music performance practices can contribute to undoing the unhealthy environments that have been shaped since the 19th century through the hierarchisation of musical roles and values, the promotion of perfectionism and of competition, and the discouragement of diversity (Scharff 2015, 2018; Hill 2018; Bull 2019; Leech-Wilkinson 2020). Music educational programs can present chamber music making as a pathway to developing performing artists who will also be active in society and culture as ambassadors of positive change, promoting—through their artistic activities—inclusivity, diversity, and equality. The research shared by the contributors in this book also draws attention to the crucial role that dialogic practices and reflection can play in the education of the 21st-century chamber musician. I hope that this volume will inspire musicologists, music psychologists, and music educators to undertake further research on the 21st-century chamber musician and that it will also inform policy makers about the contemporary ecosystem of ensemble music making and its values. Above all, I hope that this book will play a role in improving the well-being of contemporary chamber musicians and in empowering them—by motivating them to explore novel artistic and pedagogical practices and career paths, as well as novel repertoire—and rendering their artistic activities more relevant for and more closely integrated with 21st-century lives.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.

#### **References**


© 2022 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
