Practice as research

Music, to me, is a communal activity. I have not consistently found joy in practicing the cello alone. In quarantine, my opportunities to make music with other people have been drastically reduced, and at times I have gone over a week without touching my cello. I’m getting a master’s degree in cello performance. What the hell does that mean to me? What is the significance of this degree?

Traditional performance degrees are about increasing technical command of the instrument, ideally to further the clear communication of musical ideas. The thing is, if you don’t know what your musical ideas are or if they’re rooted in active conversation rather than in predetermined thought processes, it’s not easy to communicate them within an incredibly restrictive technical palette such as that which forms the backbone of standard cello technique.

There is so little that actually legitimately interests me about standard repertoire anymore. I have no desire to play any canonical works that I have not already played. Some works I will keep returning to in my own time and in private, notably the Bach suites, probably also the Elgar concerto, but I don’t feel a need to perform them. I don’t really feel a need to “perform”.

Performing is, to an extent, reflective of the impact that capitalism has had on the arts. A performance can be presented as a product, something that will make money, an experience that people are told they want because, look, all these people who you want to emulate go to classical music concerts. A performance is really the only time we as musicians wear a uniform (and what a restrictive, outdated, classist uniform it is). Performances are necessary to prove to the world that music is a legitimate field of work; without them, our artistry would be invisible.

Performances necessitate rehearsals and thus a hierarchy is created. There will always be those who hold back in rehearsal, saving their best for performance; there will be those who give everything all the time. And then there are those for whom giving everything is not an action we do at our instruments but rather a way of life. We are constantly thinking, processing, refining, applying what we have just done and learned in an infinite loop of endless alteration. Notice that I do not use the word “improvement” anywhere in this. Improvement works as a goal, an ideal, and it is possible to conceive of ourselves as constantly improving, but only if we accept that backtracking, setbacks, bad days are improvements of their own kind, without which we wouldn’t be able to properly contextualise our victories.

What do I do, then, if I don’t perform? What is this performance degree about?

I’ve already answered that a little bit in that I’ve spent a significant part of this degree asking questions and engaging with the thought processes set out above.

Quarantine has had a huge effect on how I think about performance. Whenever I am with someone else, regardless of who they are, I am performing a version of myself. This performance varies widely depending on context. I am generally recognisable as the same person, but I do subconsciously edit my performance of myself to fit the situation I’m in. Performance is less of a discrete action and more of an ongoing state of being, not just for me but for every person.

In that sense, then, this degree is about the process of more fully integrating my practice as a cellist and as an artist into my performance of my self and my identity. To do that, I have to be very honest with myself, and as I often do when I’m honest with myself, I am putting that honesty online.

This is all very theoretical and good, but what do I actually do?

I don’t consider myself primarily a cellist anymore. I value the time I have spent developing the skill of playing the cello; I don’t intend to stop being a cellist. This is where I stopped writing for a few hours and went away and edited some of the other pages that are on my website. My “about me” section now includes the following paragraph:

“Simply put, I consider my primary purpose to be processing my experiences and relating them to the experiences of others using art as a medium. I am an instrument for expression and for communication. I also use other instruments for these purposes, mostly my cello, my voice, and words.”

And this . . . is it. Fundamentally I’m a person who thinks about things and uses art to explore and convey their thoughts. And while I could have arrived at this conclusion in a number of ways, I’ve done so through spending 5 years in higher education as a cello performance major, and I don’t regret any of that. My practice as a cellist has been research into who I am as a person and that is infinitely valuable to me.