Instrumental ensembles

Abstract

Instrumental ensemble playing is a creative process involving real-time interpersonal coordination of sounds, gestures, and musical ideas by two or more musicians. In this chapter, we discuss the psychological mechanisms supporting ensemble coordination. Musicians’ abilities to anticipate, attend, and adapt to intentional and unintentional variability in each other’s playing are central to maintaining coordination during expressive performance. These abilities involve a combination of effortful and automatic processes, which musicians draw on to different degrees, depending on the musical context. Coordination is also partly supported by the affordances (action possibilities) that emerge from the evolving relationships between musicians and their physical environment. For many ensembles, offline preparation sets the groundwork for coordination in later performances, giving musicians opportunities to practice technical skills, familiarize themselves with each other’s playing style, and establish shared landmarks relating to their interpretation of the music. When coordination is successful, a shared sense of togetherness emerges among ensemble musicians. Feelings of togetherness may strengthen as musicians find themselves aware and highly focused on each other’s contributions to the performance, and at the same time able to coordinate seemingly without effort. Following our discussion of psychological mechanisms, we outline the implications that this research has for music education, the development of techniques to enable ensemble playing in networked conditions, and the development of technologies for musical interaction.