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- Title
Music-making and the organisation: Researching the orchestra at work.
- Authors
Cilling, David
- Abstract
Few organisations require the level of empathetic activity that is exhibited by the members of a symphony orchestra in concert (Cilling, 2014; Service, 2012). Most of the literature is, however, concerned with the institutional implications of orchestral endeavour (Bathurst & Ladkin, 2012), leaving communication and coordination between individual musicians in performance largely unexplored. In order to address this lacuna, I recently undertook a study of my own experience as an orchestral player for which I developed an autoethnographic methodology underpinned by the phenomenological approach to perception of Merleau-Ponty (2002, 2004), and the framework for "sensemaking" in organisations of Weick (1995, 2001). The picture that emerged was one of an embodied musician engaged in a cycle of ongoing "sensemaking" and "sensegiving" activity, underpinned by kinaesthetic empathy (Pallaro, 1995; Parviainen, 2002), which I describe as a kinaesthetic loop. This loop draws on and is generated by auditory, visual and physical information given and received by individual players, mediating the acoustic space between musicians and thus, ultimately, under-pinning collective coordination of work in the orchestra. While not directly concerned with therapeutic practice, the development of these ideas nonetheless required a thorough, rigorous, and methodologically coherent interrogation of my own story as I sought to research and understand how bodies, minds and creativity connect through empathetic interaction. I offer this approach as one way forward for therapists and performers alike who may be seeking to discover more about how we make and work with music.
- Subjects
SYMPHONY orchestras; MUSICAL performance; ORCHESTRAL musicians; AUTOETHNOGRAPHY; MUSIC therapy
- Publication
New Zealand Journal of Music Therapy, 2014, Issue 12, p106
- ISSN
1176-3264
- Publication type
Article