Have you read An Equal Music, by Vikram Seth? It’s a beautiful novel written from the viewpoint of a second violin player in a string quartet, which particularly resonated with me because of its very real descriptions of the agonies and ecstasies of ensemble playing, rehearsals and performances. Thoroughly recommended.
I’ve been playing in small ensembles such as quintets, sextets and octets ever since I started to play the horn, and here are some observations about the way that they work.
The big thing about the smaller musical ensembles is that they have no conductor, so it’s up to the group to self-manage its delivery of the music to the highest standard that it can collectively attain. It brings to mind the challenges of committee decisions, which some joker described thus: a camel is a horse designed by a committee.
The trap for all musical groups is that given half a chance they will gravitate to playing at a mediocre, metronomic pace, with insufficient dynamic range. The problem for me personally is that my technique sometimes only just gets me by: sometimes I find the music I play so challenging that I have to be satisfied with the difficult goal of playing something rhythmically correct and note-perfect, with little room for adding any expression regardless of how much I would like to.
So how does a musical group avoid delivering a camel-like performance? Frankly, I have no idea how the true professionals get to the level they do. The quality of the Australian String Quartet is extraordinary for example - every phrase shape, every nuance of rubato perfectly executed as a cohesive group. But perhaps more achievable for us mere mortals is the quote from the Black Dyke band that that each member should constantly strive to "step beyond the line of the ridiculous". Excessively soft, excessively loud; too punchy, too short, too smooth. The musical director always preferred to be able to say to a player or section in a rehearsal, “that's too much: less of that please”. It reminds me of my brief journey into drama at high school when the teacher stressed over and over the need to use a level of diction that sounded way overdone.
Still missing from the Black Dyke approach in a conductorless group is leadership: who actually takes on the role of the musical director? Whereas a real conductor is clearly responsible for adjusting musical expression, without one the leadership roles must emerge from the respect of the other players. After all, they have to choose to be followers. It is startling how a single new player introduced into a group, somewhat more talented than the rest, can lift everyone’s standard just by the way that they interpret the music.
Another means for improvement is undoubtedly the recording. It's confronting to hear all the flaws, and I feel I am only at the beginning of adjusting many aspects of my playing since hearing myself in group recordings. In Arbor we’ve been privileged to have 5MBS FM recording several of our concerts, and a couple of years ago it suddenly dawned on me that my typical tuning slide position must have imperceptibly crept inwards by about half a centimetre over the years, and I was lipping down my tuning note, then sometimes playing noticeably sharp. I’ve just re-started a hobby of doing my own recordings as well - being a techo at heart I quite enjoy it. See this other post about the approach I use.
So that’s all I can think of right now. The dynamics of all the groups I’ve played in, and the roles I have taken up, have been very different.
Apropos nothing, apart from the fact that I found it when looking for a cartoon to illustrate the camel/horse thing, here's a hilarious (at least for me as an IT Project Manager) set of pictures about project management.