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.