**Abstracts**

#### **Introduction: Setting the Stage**

#### **by Mine Do ˘gantan-Dack**

Ensemble performance research has emerged as a thriving area within music psychology and music performance studies over the last few decades. There are various scholarly and historical factors behind this development, including the growing interest in the social, collaborative, communicative, and collective nature of musical behaviour and practices, as well as the philosophical challenges posed by post-modern thinkers to the notion of the "autonomous individual" as the basis of moral and political value. In this introductory chapter, I discuss these and other factors that have motivated a surge in ensemble performance research recently, and explain why the term "chamber musician" rather than "ensemble musician" has been adopted for the title of this volume. I also discuss how the COVID-19 pandemic revealed the fundamental relationality and sociality of human existence, and the extent to which a music performer's artistic being and becoming rely on other musicking individuals. In this connection, I emphasise the idea that all music making is an intersubjective and social experience. This introductory chapter also provides detailed summaries of the other contributions to the volume. One of the important themes that connect all the chapters is that 21st-century chamber musicians have various educational and professional concerns and needs that are different from those of their counterparts in previous eras. In addition, the authors share the belief that 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. As an edited collection, this volume makes an important contribution to the growing research literature on chamber music performance, which exists largely as individual journal articles.

#### **Chambering Music**

#### **by J. Murphy McCaleb**

Chamber music occupies a complicated position within 21st century society. Borne out of a tradition of participatory domestic music making, the term now simultaneously refers to both an activity and a repertoire. However, there is little evidence that either of these maintains a similar cultural locus to chamber music's origins. The modern activity of chamber music has been primarily professionalised and elite, with its repertoire as part of the established canon of Western Art Music. Within musicological writing, chamber music is regularly noted as being emblematic of an equal society and characterised by its intimacy. Paradoxically, this equality and intimacy is within a performative framework that is exclusionary: although chamber music is still hailed as an intimate art form, there are limits to its inclusivity. Whilst it may have been more accessible at its origins, it does not fulfil the same societal niche now. This chapter attempts to evaluate chamber music as a form of interpersonal musicking within the 21st century, prompting an exploration of how chamber music may be redefined to escape potential anachronism.

#### **Encounters with Participatory Music**

#### **by David A. Camlin**

This chapter explores the creative tension between the "aesthetic" and "participatory" dimensions of music's power—where the performance of music is about the performance of "relationships" as much as it is about the performance of "works". It explores the significance of such a tension for the emerging professional musician, primarily by analysing the experiences of a small group of undergraduate students from the Royal College of Music, London, UK, in their encounters with participatory music as part of their studies. In particular, it discusses the impact of such experiences on students' perception of their own musicality, in terms of benefits to aural memory, improvisation skills, and emotional communication in performance. Their descriptions of their encounters with participatory musical practices suggest that, far from being a distraction from or a negation of their emerging identities as performers, the experience helped them to locate their own musical identity within a more holistic understanding of the complexity of music's humanising and emancipatory potential for people and society. The chapter highlights some of the epistemological challenges that students trained in classical musical performance may face in order to participate authentically in participatory/socially engaged musical practices. It concludes with a summary of the perceived benefits for students of engaging with such practices, especially those benefits which might support their development in the practice of chamber music.

#### **Empowering the Portfolio Musician: Innovative Chamber Music Pedagogy for the 21st-Century Artist**

#### **by David Kjar, Allegra Montanari and Kerry Thomas**

The portfolio musician is not a 21st-century concept. Any history of music reveals numerous performers whose careers entailed multiple and various musical sources of income. However, 21st-century musicians are profoundly cognizant of the role conservatories play in their careers. They see themselves as multifaceted socially conscious individuals, rather than technicians on a singular path to artistic success. Confronted by an oversaturated market and the immediacy of income required to pay exorbitant student loans, sole employment in an established organisation is less viable—and less desirable. Faced with these realities, 21st-century emerging professionals are prone to experiencing identity crises and often receive little assistance from their conservatory curriculums (SNAAP 2014). Calls are growing louder, however, for a radical rethinking of how musicians are educated in ways that are essential to 21st-century careers (Sarath et al., 2017). In this chapter, we amplify that call by investigating institutions that represent diverse approaches to chamber music education. We consider chamber music for its unique structure; most chamber music ensembles do not use a conductor and do not respond to an external artistic prompt. Consequently, chamber ensembles emphasize nonverbal, empathetic communication between musicians. They also operate on an increasingly independent basis; members occupy additional roles, serving as both business and artistic managers to successfully engage the public. Thus, chamber-music training provides a good case study for analyzing the changing social and economic landscape of the 21st-century music profession. Moreover, building on our analysis of educational modes used by institutions for training portfolio musicians, this research investigates what now constitutes chamber music. How does repertoire, personnel, venue, and listener–performer–composer agency define it? Additionally, how do or can conservatory curricula deliver such a new definition for their emerging professionals? This line of questioning serves the larger purpose of understanding the innovative role chamber music plays in contemporary collaborative music making and listening, responding to current hypotheses and discourses on the empathetic nature of music. We examine contemporary issues in chamber-music pedagogy with a mixed-method approach. We survey faculty, students, and alumni of American and UK institutions to gather big data on the state of conservatory training. To nuance these data further, we conduct interviews with faculty, staff, and students in standout chamber music programs. Finally, we focus on innovative chamber music endeavors at our present institution, investigating the Chicago College of Performing Arts string chamber music program and the 1st-year professional training course.

#### **Evolving, Surviving, and Thriving: Working as a Chamber Musician in the 21st Century**

#### **by Caroline Waddington-Jones**

Existing research into chamber musicians' careers has offered insights into both musical and social aspects of these musicians' work together. However, in addition to their tendency to focus solely on the experiences of string quartet musicians, these earlier studies document the experiences of chamber musicians of the late 20th century. With the rise of the internet and digital technologies, innovative approaches to audience development, and cuts to arts funding and education, much has changed for UK-based chamber musicians in the 21st century. This interview study with professional chamber musicians at different stages in their careers explores the challenges that these musicians face and the wide-ranging set of skills that they have developed in response. The vocational nature of this work is emphasised, and many of the financial, entrepreneurial, and logistical challenges are outlined. Various barriers in relation to equality, diversity, and inclusion are identified, and implications for higher music education and for the future of the profession are explored.

#### **Transactional Culture of the Portfolio Career Chamber Musician: A Case Study by Jane W. Davidson and Amanda E. Krause**

The literature and case study data presented in this chapter explore the micro- (interpersonal) and macro-level (organisational/cultural) experiences between professional chamber musicians, the venues that engage them, and the audiences in attendance. They are explored in terms of a series of transactions—acts of giving and receiving and embracing the need to compromise. From this perspective, emergent themes include the delicate balancing of economic, esteem, and diversification values for both performers and venue in planning; music cohesion and interpersonal social interaction as important at all levels and across all stages of planning and executing performances; and considerations of the balance between familiar and novel encounters, informality, and experiences of social inclusion regarding interactions amongst performers and audience members. It is clear that both specific and subtle transactions shape the motivations, planning, and execution of ensemble performances. While stakeholders all inevitably have different and varied experiences, their transactions contribute to the virtuous cycle of the embedded environmental social, cultural, material, and technological factors and the action afforded that constitutes chamber music performance. The "art of ensemble performance" seems to be a distributed process that is dependent on critical interdependent transactions amongst all stakeholders.
