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Introduction: Setting the Stage

Abstract

 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.

Table of Contents: The Chamber Musician in the Twenty-First Century