I’ve been writing a little bit more about how performers can incorporate learning strategies from a variety of other disciplines to increase the efficiency and durability of their learning while reducing stress and anxiety. At the same time, I’ve been thinking about how this learning process should be focused on performance, particularly performance as community building. How might musicians practice and study in such a way that facilities the kind of connections between people that we hope for in the shared space of a concert?

In doing so, I’ve been thinking a bit about analogies, a powerful tool in my own learning and teaching. Analogical thinking is so powerful that Johannes Kepler used them to determine with great accuracy the orbital path of the planets. Key to analogies is schema abstraction: what Dedre Gentner calls “extracting common systems from representations” in order to promote “the disembodying of subtle and possibly important commonalities.” Analogies help us notice “alienable differences,” becoming aware of contrasts between two domains through finding high-similarity pairs. Our brains can easily notice relationships between systems. If there’s a blank spot or a change in one domain, an adroit analogist can connect another system, using structure-mapping to explain a mystery by comparing it to a pair in an analogous domain.

For Kepler, analogies were a powerful tool to investigate the unknown: in one example, the orbital speeds and paths of the planets. Kepler analogized that the sun might have a virtus mortix: a light-like power mediated by distance. Planets further from the sun move more slowly because they are further from this vis mortrix, much the way that objects further from a source of light are dimmer. Kepler used this analogy to determine an elliptical orbit path for the planets, eventually arguing that gravity controlled these orbits.

Musicians can use analogies when learning complex new actions by asking how the process at hand might be similar to something they already know.

So, are performers tour guides?

When we analyze and perform music, we’ll be thinking about exceptional performances, the extraordinary power of music. In order to do so, we need a sense of the ordinary. What, then, are the qualities of a bad tour?

Lack of a Thesis

Some tours highlight every detail, every building on a college campus or every painting in an art museum. Others meander meagerly between seemingly randomized waypoints. You might be excited to visit a Baroque cathedral, but not so excited after an hour-long summary of every bishop or clergy member buried within.

Isolation/Lack of Connection

The tour receiver is detached from their tour-mates. At its worst, this detachment manifests itself not simply as physical separation, but as imagined adversarial relationships. That man in the black hat: why is he going through the door before me? That women in the sun dress? She’s so close to the tour guide; I wonder if she knows them? That older gentleman? Why is he always answering the guide’s questions? Who does he think he is: some kind of ersatz docent? This feeling of bring left out grows and percolates, dominating your thoughts even as you investigate a wonderfully ornate 16th century clock donated to a royal family to commemorate the birth of some distant relative.

Perhaps the guide misestimates the level of knowledge of the people on the tour, delivering content already known, or material too jargon-filled to be helpful?

Here’s an example of someone being bored out of their mind by a tour guide…

Pacing

In 2014, I took a tour in the Guggenheim Museum in New York. I was exited to be there. I drove to be there, parked in New York to be there. The main exhibit at the museum was on Italian Futurism, featuring some of my favorite examples of Aeropintura, as well as some wonderful Campari ads.​

Our guide: a weaponized PhD candidate in Art History from NYU. We spent the first thirty minutes of the tour hovering over the first painting we saw, a delightfully structured Moholy-Nagy work. We didn’t even cover the museums’ wonderfully ornate water fountains, the use of triangles in the stairwells, the compellingly alluring factoid that the museum was originally grey, not white. Sigh. I ended up splitting off from my tour compatriots, stomping away to continue on my own.

Apathy

If a tour is a performance, what if the guide doesn’t seem to care about the subject? They mumble, gesture at a particularly nice bit of medieval architecture with the clarity of a wet noodle. Over time, the group itself becomes disjointed, geographically dispersing, eyes darting to objects which might have headphone icons on their placards, hands unfolding maps they thought unneeded.

Let’s extend the analogy to audio tours. A wonderful idea, but the pacing and engagement is often off. For some, the audio guide speaks too slowly. For others, the narrative arc is too prescribed. At times, the isolation of being alone in an audio tour negates the joy of communing with others over great art. During the peak of the Covid pandemic, many phenomenal musical organizations pivoted to live streaming. Despite the instant availability of world-class performances I found myself gravitating away from these streams. For me, the joy of a concert is the shared experience, the sense of community created by those in the hall, a perfect tour. If that quality is missing, I’d rather watch a music video.

“Good” Tours

The best tours highlight AND connect locations. They have a thesis which links what is on the tour and explain what is not and why. The best tours connect the audience with the subject matter both physically and intellectually. They facilitate a connection between the tour guide and the tour members. More crucially, they engender a community, comprised of all the people on the tour, either created during the course of the event or a pre-existing group.

The best guides have a knowledge of their community, its needs and desires, how it forms meaning from its experiences and how its history might inform its reception of the tour’s content. Expert guides have a knowledge of what level of subject matter depth is appropriate.

In short, great tours are relational, not transactional.

Great Performances

So, are musical performances tours? The two seem to be “high-similarity pairs,” sharing many common traits. Both need fundamental knowledge about art and its contexts. Both incorporate assumptions embedded in the art, and both seek to bring that art to life in a new context for a specific community at a specific time.

A great performance needs to articulate the text of a piece of music in a way that impacts others. But it needs to do so much more. A performance must use the shared space the music engenders to bind the audience together in a community. With luck, this community extends beyond the bounds of a concert space, living at least in the memories of those present and at best inspiring future collective action. Judging by the number of museum maps currently stashed in my home, many tours have fulfilled this mission in my life.

That said, because performances are judged on temporally- and culturally-contextualized parameters, there really is no such thing as an objectively great performance. Much the same way that our taste in fashion seems both objective at the time and so delightfully subjective with some distance (looking at you JNCOS!), musical fashion is a tangled knot when viewed with the some time.

There are, though, interpretations which are influential, timely and impactful. I would argue that most, if not all, impactful performances (and tours) are opinionated. Thus, informed opinions, manifested as interpretations which bring music to life with an eye towards connection, are the key asset performers must develop. The more opinionated and knowledgable the guide, the more memorable the tour.

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