Virtuosity, Art's polarizing medium.

I used to live in a city that, in many artistic circles, possessed an emblematic distaste for displays of virtuosity in the arts, particularly the performing arts. It was not difficult to hear reviews that dismissed dance or music performances exhibiting high levels of technical precision as elitist or devoid of depth. After a while, the criticisms of virtuosity I was hearing sounded more like a party line or a credo instead of actual personal reflection on an artistic work. What started to interest me was how common this admonition was and how uniform the criticism seemed to be.

To get to the bottom of this distaste for virtuosity, let’s look at what virtuosity in art is and how the disdain for it became a password for admittance to a certain socio-artistic cadre.

What is virtuosity?

Virtuosity in the arts can be identified as any action or implementation that requires a high degree of practiced skill and precision of execution. That is a pretty weighty and open-ended definition, so one way to look at it would be to imagine virtuosity as a display of a skill level that is unavailable to nonspecialist or novice practitioners. This often (but not always) coincides with some kind of finely honed physical prowess. Good examples would be the most revered djembe players in Guinea, West Africa; the most sought-after tabla players in India; a ballet dancer in a national company; or a top touring concert violinist.

Achieving great levels of skill provides the artist with a broader range of expression. Finely honed craft allows for articulate expression of ideas because when you endeavor to master the medium you will move through technical and conceptual barriers to create what you want to create in the ways you want to create it.

The virtuosity Effect

Virtuosity in music has a few useful and effective functions. Firstly, displays of prowess create the impression that the artist possesses special or otherworldly talents, especially to a listener unpracticed in the art form. For evidence of this, look no further than to folklore for stories of deals with supernatural powers that have endowed virtuosi with skills far too sublime to have come from mortal means. There are stories from cultures all around the world that describe virtuosic performances as being supernatural phenomena not explainable by natural means.

Importantly, since a virtuoso has access to seemingly otherworldly abilities, the virtuoso is also seen as one who is a suitable vessel for these powers, which increases the mystique of the performer as someone who is possessed of a hidden or occulted faculty. I say this is useful because virtuosity, via the above-mentioned associations, is one way that artists connect to the imagination of the audience.

In a less supernatural assessment of this dynamic, audiences will often wonder at the focus and dedication necessary to achieve such skill. This serves as an inspiration for what is possible with human determination. Audiences may then reach conclusions that generate and proliferate myths of aggrandized austerities or madness permeating the life of the virtuoso.

Let’s now examine some of the recurring sentiments fueling the anti-technique rhetoric.

Virtuosity is elitist

There is an incorrect assumption that high levels of technique are the province of an upper class afforded the leisure time to develop high-level precision in their art form. This is false; virtuosi are found all over the world among musicians of diverse means in their respective societies.

Virtuosity is not musical

Another reason technique-laden performances strike a sour chord with some is that virtuosity is often wrongly pitted against musicality in general. The assumption here is that technique and musicality cannot truly share the same space. This is like saying the “how” cannot exist alongside the “why” in a problem-solving puzzle.

This is a simple causation/correlation fallacy working in conjunction with personal taste. In this case, if personal distaste for a piece correlates with the display of virtuosity, then the cause of the music lacking in some way is the presence of virtuosity.

This argument is the first clue that the person you’re talking to has a standing aversion to the display of virtuosity. The listener is hearing surface details as opposed to the overall story of the piece. The only bit of honesty in this argument might be in the fact that the presence of high-level technique does not guarantee artistic success. If technique is present alongside neglect with regard to other aspects of the piece, it can create an impression that the artist prioritized technique at the expense of the overall efficacy of the piece.

If the piece is full of technique and has no other redeeming features, then what the listener really takes issue with is the lack of story, form, or general spirit of the piece. They are too distracted by the presence of technique to understand what the real failure of the piece is.

A piece can seldom stand or fall on technique alone. For proof of this, refer to the many beautiful works by artists that are technically average or below average in their mediums. If all you hear is technique, then it means the piece has poor structural support in other ways.

Inversely, virtuosic performances with good structural clarity are often successful. North Indian raga performances and Bulgarian wedding music are good examples of this, as are many of the great concerti, to name a few genres.

When a piece is supported with strong concepts and durable form, it will succeed, regardless of whether it has an exceedingly high or low level of technique. This is one reasons that forms remains useful over many generations, while the actual vocabularies and techniques used within them can evolve based on taste and technology within a relatively short amount of time.

Virtuosity for virtuosity’s sake

There is also a false dichotomy in the assumption that the presence of technique makes a piece “all about technique”. This is again a listener issue.

If the listener can only hear technique when technique is present, they might consider that they have a value system that sees virtuosity as an untenable musical presence. Rather than make all music conform to their value system by disqualifying the presence of technique, they should consider that their value system is subjective and inflexible when it comes to the kind of music they consider viable.

I have found that often this coincides with the listener being personally challenged by the presence of technique because it is something they cannot do and therefore they attempt to legitimize their own abilities by disqualifying ones they do not have. I’ll elaborate more on this in the section before the conclusion.

Virtuosity is just showing off

Another common argument I have heard is that technique draws attention to the player as opposed to the piece.

Focal points in music are not a problem, as is evidenced by hundreds of years of melody-based music from all over the world.

The viability of a piece of music depends on the music creating the environment it intends to, and whether or not that happens is dependent on what set of responsibilities the music has. Many times the only responsibility the music has is to be a form of self-expression for the composer or performer. In an ideal scenario that self-expression will also capture the imagination of the audience, but it is naïve to imagine that will happen uniformly for all attendees. That lack of uniformity shows that the listener's value context will skew how effective a piece of music is. When someone disqualifies a piece due to the presence of technique, they are simply declaring that the presence of something that they perceive as technical causes them to do two things at minimum: stop evaluating objectively and make a highly subjective pronouncement of unviability.  I have heard people criticize a performance by saying, “It’s not all about technique,” to which I respond, “Then stop making it about technique”.

Some people might amend their criticism by clarifying that they disdain technique only for themselves, whether listener or performer. This is still a problem because there is no need to call out choices that you simply do not have to make; you can just proceed in the way that you choose and not bother with ways of creating that do not pertain to your value system. If you feel the need to call out a set of techniques then you are just venting your own issues with them and thereby talking more about yourself than any actual way that art works.

The declaration that the presence of technique compromises musical realness, honesty, or humility is an anti-musical claim. It demonstrates that the person who holds that opinion has a deaf spot in their ability to hear music when a show of technique is present. It is a pressure point or an internal switch that shuts off their ability to hear sound as art. This is truly ironic, considering that there is a considerable amount of crossover between people who despise technique and those who create music where the entry-level assumption is that all sound is musical or that all sound is a viable active listening experience. Examples include artists working in experimental sound design and all the modern heirs apparent to musique concrete.

Despising technique is against the axiom that all sound is worthy of active listening. Many people who are perfectly willing to implore you to listen to experimental noise compositions, despite being challenging to endure, are perfectly unwilling to extend that same mindset to virtuosic pieces with fast solos in a rock or jazz piece. They will challenge themselves only for sounds that support their value system. That is fine until you start taking down other musical value systems while claiming that you are willing to challenge yourself as a listener. Those two things are opposites.

I have seen this a lot in the dance world as well. People are happy to talk about how brave a piece is when the main performer stares into the audience for long unbroken periods of time, but if there is one high kick in the piece they shut down and pivot to an admonition that dancing is “not just about high kicks”.

For people maintaining a distaste for virtuosity, consider that virtuosity is indeed vulnerable. Artists are putting themselves out on a difficult limb in front of people while they perform demanding tasks that have a high margin and cost for failure. They are putting on display many hours of work that have to justify themselves over the course of a short evening. It is not the only way to be vulnerable in music, but it is one way.

Virtuosity is not representative or relatable

Lastly, art is one of the few places where you can see pedestrian technique routinely praised beyond high levels of skill. We don’t do this for any other profession from which we are expecting a certain outcome. You wouldn’t want it of anyone providing any service to you. You wouldn’t want it in any sport or any form of government. (And for readers thinking that sports and government don’t utilize potent creative display of symbols meant to unify people, consider that stance carefully.)

With the rise in musician discoverability on social media and the addiction to short-term and viral attention spikes people are more likely to like something that they feel they can do. People increasingly approve of artistic products that they feel they themselves could create and increasingly sneer at art that seems like effort to achieve, writing it off and proliferating a culture in which a technically advanced skill set is barred from acceptance and thereby poses less of a threat to people who do not possess that skill set.

Interestingly, alongside this, there also exists, thanks to social media, an incredible amount of 90-second or shorter displays of intense virtuosity. This also fuels anti-virtuoso sentiment because, in such a short amount of time, it can be difficult to balance the virtuosity with other artistic elements to support it, making the short piece seem “all about technique” and furthering the impression that virtuosity necessarily creates one-sided performances. These two factors are supported by a third social media phenomenon in the form of one-minute “just do this….” style lesson videos. These learning snacks are meant to engage the aspiring artist by promising that being a musician yourself is just a matter of learning a sequence of short, easy-to-digest lessons that will make you sound like your favorite records. This is not a huge problem, and people who learn from “learn to play the easy way” style lessons will progress according to where their path leads them.

I am bringing this trend up because it supports a critical culture wherein we feel like we should have relatively easy access to skills that we see on display and where we don’t, we feel alienated. This is like saying, “If I can’t have it, no one should.” I’d also go so far as to say this is a broader social phenomenon. For example, if a very tall person dunks on you at the rec center basketball court you might walk away grumbling, “Well, at least I can find pants in my size. I wouldn’t even want to spend that much time on the court. It’s not all about dunking”.

In conclusion

Disdain for technique in music is a trend that exists in certain artist cultures. It has become a dog whistle and a kind of virtue signal that the criticizer values “realness” and “honesty” or is “anti-elitist” and “down to earth” or “values the piece as opposed to individual prowess”. Calling out the presence of technique is typically met with slow silent nods and general acknowledgment that the criticizer is an advanced listener with a nuanced criterion for how to create art in a wholistic and humble way.

The fact remains that if you are espousing a disdain for technique in general and are met with validation for that, you are really just succumbing to a trope for some easy-won credibility among people doing the same. And that exchange has nothing to do with music at best and, at worst, is anti-musical in that it discredits an entire aspect of art making which is impossible to do with any credibility.

Of course, high levels of technique are not necessary to make art work, just as their presence also does not disqualify a piece from working or not. History has many examples of both in cultures all over the world. The actual techniques that render a work are typically the most surface aspect of a piece, so if you as an observer shut down at the display of technique in art by saying “Art is not all about technique,” it means that sadly you are making it all about technique, because you are unable to see past that means of rendering the piece. It means you can’t see past the “how” to engage your imagination as to the “why”. Many people cite examples of entire genres or categories of players who have incredible technique and make ineffective music. If that is the case for you, then you just don’t like the music and you’re simply distracted by the fact that technique is on display. There are just as many people making ineffective music that makes little use of advanced technique, and in neither case is the presence or absence of technique the deal-breaker as to whether or not the music is effective. Here’s to hoping that we all proceed with an open and engaged ear.

Overcoming Artistic Plateaus - the art of skillfully reaching into the unknown

I used to work as a sous-chef in a kitchen that produced a certain amount of meals a day for a mid-size company. Each day there was a menu that had to be prepared, and the chef that day would see the menu as they came in that morning. One day I was working with a secondary chef who was very good but still somewhat in training, and she admitted that she wasn’t exactly sure how to make the specific soup that she had to make that day. When I asked her what she planned to do she said, “If I can’t make something I just pretend I am someone who can”. She did not laugh when she said this, and it was clear that this was a very real mental exercise that she used to boost confidence and allow her trained culinary intuition to work as intended when a challenge was encountered. The soup came out great, even if it was a variant of its more typical rendering.

All practicing artists experience a similar challenge that is often referred to as “the plateau”. This is often described as a phenomenon wherein the artist feels as though they do not have access to the combination of skill and/or knowledge to create work that they feel is reflective of growth in their field. The plateau may manifest as the musician thinking they have sounded the same for too long, being blocked from being able to create the kind of work they really want to create, not knowing how to work with certain tools and ensembles effectively, not being able to compose effectively, or any number of related stumbling blocks. The experience of this kind of plateau is that progress is out of your hands, and you do not know how to proceed. This article offers some practical advice to allow you to work through the plateau and achieve the kind of work that you intend with your practice. 

The first thing to be aware of is the developmental structure of the plateau. 

In order to overcome a plateau we will utilize a powerful feature of the brain: the ability to process information subconsciously. When I refer to the subconscious I mean the processes that the brain engages in without us being consciously aware. A simple example of this: You are having dinner with friends and you forget the name of your cousin’s colleague in the story, you leave it at that and 5 minutes later the name comes to you. This is so common that often in this scenario you say, “forget it, it will come to me later”—  and it almost always does, and always at times when you’re thinking of something completely different. The processing power of the subconscious mind is much greater than the conscious mind, in that the way it functions is non-linear, highly relational, and creative, and searches for answers from many more points of view simultaneously than our conscious mind does. This agility in combination with the reinforcing of neural pathways when done intentionally can greatly aid in overcoming feelings of stasis in artistic endeavors. 

One of the first mistakes we make in learning and developing an artistic practice is that we set up many points of resistance where they need not be. A few examples of these self imposed blockages might manifest in the following non-comprehensive list of sentiments:

1. The teacher on your shoulder - Relying only on a value system set up by an overly dogmatic teacher. “Harmonically simple music is sub-par”, “Playing with drum set will obscure the richness of your instrument” “Simple expositions are for pop music which is facile” etc.

2. Fear of wading too deep into the water - Self-doubt around your own ability to innovate or work at the scale you ultimately want to leading you to hedge your bet when it comes to conceiving of projects. 

3. You can’t get there from here - Inventing preliminary steps that act as ways to procrastinate working towards your goal. “I need a better instrument” “I shouldn’t make a full show’s worth of work until I have a commission” “I’ll start taking lessons again after I master the stuff I already know” “I can’t write this work until I know who the other players will be”. 

4. Lost in the field - Basing your own work on someone else’s who has had success and feeling like you have to emulate them.

Setting up these points of resistance actually fortifies naturally occurring blockages instead of allowing them to work as intended. Yes, that is correct, I did just assert that artistic blockages or plateaus serve a function, and understanding that function is the key to working with them. We often think that we are practicing effectively if we are making steady progress, but this is rarely accessible to advanced practitioners and more typical of beginners absorbing a lot of rudimentary ability right at the start of the learning process. This is because at the start of the endeavor the questions we are answering are simple questions, such as “how can I hold my finger in this place for the proper duration” or “what pitch does that symbol on the page equate to”. This stage of learning is involved with a lot of memorization and rudimentary, albeit fine, motor skills. There are, of course, difficult plateaus in the beginning stages as well, but the keys to them are a bit more readily available as a teacher might simply point out that the student should relax their shoulder or minimize movement in some way to achieve a desired effect. At higher levels of proficiency, where style, developing instincts, and perspective come into play, progress is slower and can often only be found through personal exploration and inquiry, and that is where this method becomes  useful. The beneficial function of the plateau is that it serves as a digesting and assimilation period for all that you have learned so far. It serves to codify your style so you can build on your current knowledge base. Compare it to learning a language. At first you are translating from your native language and eventually you get to a point of fluency where you are thinking in your second language but perhaps you could expand your precision with verbs and add more precise vocabulary. That would not be possible if you were still tenuously gripping the information you learned before moving on. The previous lessons should be embedded in instinct and a period of time with this relationship to a stage of achievement is experienced as a plateau. Thus the first part of this method is realizing that the plateau is both foundation and frontier, the plateau is the door that is its own key and this paradox disguises its nature. 

---

Step 1: Assess your practice

Start with looking at or reading your work. If you are a musician make a short recording of yourself “performing” for 5 or 10 minutes after each practice session and listen to it before you go to bed and then again before you start practice the next day. You won’t have to do this for very long before you can write down or mentally identify the current state of your work, its habits, and patterns. The first step is also the point at which you get a sense of your experience up to that point, make a note of where you think your style and ability is and what key influences in your practice are the most apparent. These influences can be other practitioners but also contexts, for example the context of a recital hall or a certain kind of gallery can be a contextual backdrop against which you have been forming your style, in some cases you might not have considered this before but try to identify it. 

Step 2: Set your goals

The second step is to identify where you want to go beyond your plateau. This is the most creative step in this process as you have to essentially give qualities to a level of achievement that is currently outside your reach. Here you will imagine the kind of sound, look, or quality you want to achieve insofar as you are able to experience it. To do this you will simply use any terms that you have at your disposal to describe and imagine the feeling or quality that this level of achievement creates for someone experiencing the work. Write it down or make a mental note. This step can be simple like a short list of words or elaborate like imagining a simple narrative of some kind that might evoke the qualities you are trying to achieve, art galleries or travel are good inspirations for this. If you want to get very elaborate, imagine this level as an alter ego that has free access to this level of achievement, and develop a detailed mental conception of this character’s life, their body language, habits, and general pace of life. Plenty of very well-known artists have created under pseudonyms for this reason. We also often hear professional fighters and other athletes talk about “channelling” a certain quality when they perform their work, this is the same thing. In this step, imagine the context that the next level will work in and how it feels to experience someone in your field operating at that level. This can be very specific. If you have been struggling to improve a very specific thing in your work and are not exactly sure how to fix this, think in detail about how it feels when you experience someone in your field doing it perfectly. 

Step 3: Pose The question

The third step is to formulate the question of how to arrive at this new level in your practice. It is important that you make this a question, say it out loud or write it down and remember that the information that comes back at you will directly, sometimes annoyingly specifically or generally, answer that question. I am reminded  of a successful composer I was speaking to who told me that when they get stuck on a piece they take their hands off of their instrument, close their eyes, and ask out loud, “what’s next?”, the answer would always come to them based on the stated goal of the composition of course (step two). Some examples of questions might be, “how can I bring out balanced range of dynamics in my playing as I imagined”, “how do I improve my sense of depth in my paintings as I imagined”, “how can I extend my dynamic range without sacrificing power like these artists that are my influences.” Essentially you have to pose the question to yourself specifically so your subconscious can get working on it. 

Step 4: Make inroads for the answer

This is a step that sends the message to your mind that you are ready to receive this information. It also reinforces the feeling that not only are you ready to receive it but that from where you are, you are accessible to it and it to you and that the information you need is available. For this step get into a scenario where you can visualize. Sit, relax, be quiet, or get in some kind of state where you can play out a scenario in your mind like the following. This example will work for a musician but can be adapted for any discipline. Imagine you see yourself on a path outside and a short distance ahead of you there is a large library. You walk into the library and take a seat in one of the tables suitable for seating multiple people. You might chose to be aided by a librarian or browse the shelves after setting the intention to find the sound or answer you are looking for. You look through the shelves and eventually you see a spine with your name on it. You pull it out, take a seat and look at the volume knowing that it contains some information regarding your question. Open the book in the middle and wait for a word or even a moving image with sound to appear that tells you something about your question. Alternatively you can imagine going into a concert hall and taking a seat in the audience and seeing the aspect of you that has achieved this goal take the stage and begin to play sounds that have an answer to your artistic riddle. As with the question, the more detail the better. If you want to utilize the natural power of the sleep cycle, just remind yourself of the question before you go to bed and upon waking or in a dream you may get some information. 

One thing to keep in mind when formulating these kinds of questions is that you are asking them of a higher level of awareness from the standpoint of a relatively lower level of awareness. That being the case you might ask the question in a way that contains assumptions that are rendered moot when the answer comes back, and that is ok. Sometimes the real power of specificity in a question is that it engages the mind more thoroughly and adds something like weight to the question. Taking time to pose your question well will tell the subconscious, “this is a priority”. Equally as importantly, It also tells your subconscious that you want to be aware of the answer when it is done processing. We have plenty of information coming from our subconscious that causes us to have attractions or aversions that we are not consciously aware of. Creating the question with firm intentionality and awareness helps to ensure that the answer will follow the same path back out, one that we are aware of.   

We can work beyond our limits in this way because, while the conscious mind is well suited to grasping things it can see and understand in a demonstrable and linear way, the subconscious is fine working with feelings, symbols, abstract qualities, and unanswered questions. It will access a vast store of experiences to generate possible answers for your questions, and the answers are often incredibly effective. Sometimes the answers are far from anything you would have come to trying to grind out a problem with your conscious mind.

Here are some examples of the kinds of new directions you can get from this realm: You might want to improve your punching power and have been working to little effect until you realize that it was actually footwork that was the key. You were working hard on depth in painting using light and dark, but realized it was actually about texture. You wanted to play faster, and realized that it was all about relaxing. You wanted to be more flexible, but realized that isolating muscles that you were trying to stretch was actually working against you. You wanted to find the perfect texture for a string quartet, but you realized that what is keeping your textures from working like you want is the use of texture over time in a form. You want to play louder, have been using heavier strings and hitting harder, but realize that lighter strings with even technique bring out much more sound and choke out the sound table of the instrument less, resulting in much more volume, and you also realized that a very minor change in the angle of the hand vibrates the strings in a way that makes it work with the sound table of the instrument instead of against it.

Finally, these ideas are not meant to replace rational, conscious thought or set creative thinking up against linear rational thinking. Rather this technique is meant to accompany modes of thinking we are more familiar with, not supplant them. 

It is worth a word of caution that we can feed our subconscious all manner of information to process on purpose or accidentally, so it is alway best to use language that avoids any sense of negativity, fear, or inequity towards oneself or others. We don’t take vitamins with dirty water, so while you are reflecting on your goals you could do much worse than to begin and end with an affirmation that you wish for equanimous prosperity for all beings and make sure you really feel that.