The Symphony Orchestra as corps d’orchestre
A Genealogical and Socio-Semiotic Analysis of the Orchestra Musician’s Body and Individuality
Abstract
The symphony orchestra is historically constructed as a body-like hierarchical structure instead of a collective of musicians. This hierarchy causes the orchestra musicians to be ignored as individuals and molds their lives as machine-like means to the composer’s and the conductor’s ends. This subjection to the power also causes them to embrace these conditions and define themselves and the other musicians in this restricted view of being a musician, so they continue to perform this role and reproduce the power. I define this structure with its power relations, coining the term corps d’orchestre. In this essay, I make a genealogy of the orchestra using Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan as an axis to my analysis and examine its similarities to the state and society throughout the history of the transformation of sovereignty. I also discuss the other alternatives of professional musicians and elaborate on the consequences of choosing another path as a musician.
Keywords: orchestra, performance, musician’s body, Leviathan, power.
WARNING: This video may potentially trigger seizures for people with photosensitive epilepsy. Viewer discretion is advised.
Stills from the Video Article
Video Article Transcript
The symphony orchestra is historically constructed as a body-like hierarchical structure instead of a collective of musicians. This hierarchy causes the orchestra musicians to be ignored as individuals and molds their lives as machine-like means to the composer’s and the conductor’s ends. This subjection to the power also causes them to embrace these conditions and define themselves and the other musicians in this restricted view of being a musician, so they continue to perform this role and reproduce the power. I define this structure with its power relations, coining the term corps d’orchestre. In this essay, I make a genealogy of the orchestra using Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan as an axis to my analysis and examine its similarities to the state and society throughout the history of the transformation of sovereignty. I also discuss the other alternatives of professional musicians and elaborate on the consequences of choosing another path as a musician.
A Genealogy of Corps d’orchestre
Making a genealogy of the socio-semiotics of today’s symphony orchestra calls for several questions in ascending order: Despite hundreds of years of documented music and music composers, why do just a couple of composers’ pieces take up most of the symphony orchestra repertoires, and why do these composers represent an entire European art music history for the average audience? Why does everyone wear black? Why is the conductor the only person to communicate with the audience? What is the point of having percussions if used for one or two seconds during an entire piece? Why do symphonic pieces almost always require so many instruments to play the same passage? Is it necessary for all the musicians to always play sitting and move as little as they can? Considering the second half of the 20th and 21st centuries’ contemporary music composers and their pieces emphasize virtuosity much less than the previous centuries (and conceptual art forms openly reject virtuosity to stress the context instead of virtuosity aesthetics, including conceptual music); why is virtuosity still one of the main criteria to define the performer’s skills? What is the reasoning behind a standard repertoire only including the pieces written 150 to 300 years ago? What is the role of the symphony as an institution in this perception and the conservatory curriculum narrowing a musician’s life to sight-reading and virtuosity practice? Why do states of almost every country build enormous buildings for the orchestras they finance for one of the world’s less popular kinds of music?
Mind-Body Dualism of Modernity and its Reflections on Collective Music Practice
The thought of the modern mind that controls and rules the body because of its superiority has also been reflected in collective music practices; it created a composer-performer hierarchy. As the thought and design participant of the musical piece, the composer has been seen superior to the piece’s performers; the pieces are considered the composer’s property. Even though music production is not just about its creation on mind, music history is built on composers as the mind behind the music; the pieces they designed are regarded as their own.
Thinking of a symphonic piece to be embodied, besides the composer’s designing activity; there must be an orchestra of musicians to play; a conductor to direct; an architect to design the orchestra building and the stage; instrument makers to produce the instruments the piece requires; attendants, to manage the building, to organize the stage and the audience space, to sell the concert tickets and meet the audience’s needs; and of course, the audience. When all these tasks and labor are considered, the composer’s work seems like only one equal component of this vast collective work.
Orchestra musicians are always bound to what is written on the score sheet. They are trained to acknowledge that the sounds they make with their instruments only have meaning when they meet what the composer has written on the sheet. After years of musical training, the orchestra musician is charged to play the music sheet and listen to the sounds of the sheet. Regarding Marx’s alienation theory, this kind of labor includes as much alienation as any other laborer’s experience; the machine replaces the individual, and the mechanic subject becomes a replaceable element of the orchestra. When the performer becomes a stranger to their performance, they become an audience; music skips the performer-subject and transfers itself from the composer to the playing and listening audience. The musician becomes an absent referent between the composer, the conductor, and the audience: The ones that materialize the music are the musicians; however, critics mention the composition’s structural, aesthetic and semiotic aspects, composer’s skills, the conductor’s interpretation, and reactions of the audience. Thereby the individual musicians of the corps d’orchestre are disappeared from the language, the performance, and the perception.
Corps d’orchestre as Leviathan and its Power Relations
In his 1651 work, Leviathan, Hobbes defines the structure of the state, comparing all its organs to the organs of a human’s body. In Hobbes’s schema, sovereignty is the soul to keep the body alive and in motion; the officers of the court are the joints; reward and punishment on the performance of the duty are the nerves; the wealthy members of the community are the strength; counselors are the memory; laws are the reason and will; peace and harmony is health; rebellion is the sickness, and civil war is the death.
Hobbes claims that it is inevitable to convert to a Leviathan because of the “natural condition.” He also claims that, in the absence of central power, when two people desire the same thing, they become enemies and will not stop until one destroys another. In this natural condition, the production dynamics would be uncertain, so there would be no industry; without the industry, there would be no trade; without the circulation of money and people, there would be no culture, arts, letters, or society. There would be constant fear of danger and violent death; people’s lives would be poor, violent, uncivilized and short. Because a person’s desires and other passions are not wrong or even evaluable in themselves, the only thing that can stop the consequences of those desires is an external system of sovereignty. The power/subjection relations in the orchestra have similarities with the relationships of the organs in Hobbes’s Leviathan.
I use the term corps d’orchestre to explain the bodily functioning structure of the orchestra as a hierarchical but interconnected community. In the orchestra, the sovereignty as the spirit is the composer, who gives the holistic motion to the orchestra by designing the music which is performed as a whole body of musicians, and the musicians as performance units. If the orchestra that functions as a body requires a brain, the conductor fulfills the position by ruling and controlling the orchestra during the rehearsals and the actual performance. Including the conductor as the brain, an orchestra is similar to the standard appearance of a human body with its four limbs: a string session, a brass session, a woodwind session, and percussions.
Symphony Staging as Ritual, Performer’s and Audience’s Bodies as Sacrifice
The 20th-century philosopher Michel Foucault proposes abandoning the theory of sovereignty and Leviathan because it does not provide enough perspective to explain the power relations. Foucault mentions that power is not applied by the ruler to the subject, but it circulates in society and passes through the subject; it functions through networks, and the subjects are also the connections of the power. A circulating conception of power also explains the interrelations between the composer, conductor, instrument players, audience and critics. They all perform and protect the symphony staging with all its power relations. Musicologist Christopher Small defines this repetitive and collective performance as a ritual.
The institution releases its yearly or monthly program; people buy tickets for the symphony and become potential audiences. At the concert evening, they usually wear distinctive clothes depending on the aura of the institution; they wait for the concert at the foyer; and when the time comes, they take their seats and close their phones. Wearing their black outfits, the orchestra musicians come to the stage, or they are already on the stage, sitting quietly. They check the tuning in a couple of seconds; then the conductor shows and greets the audience with a bow; the audience gives applause; sometimes the conductor gives a short speech; and after that, they turn to the orchestra and start the concert. Since the concert is seen as an auditory embodiment of what the composer has written on the music sheet, neither musicians with their outfits, voices or facial expressions, nor the audience with their distracting voices, expressions or movements are allowed to harm the aura of the symphony. They willingly disappear from the visual and the auditory scene for the music piece’s sake; they become the sacrifice of the ceremony. When it ends, the conductor salutes the audience, then directs the musicians to stand up and salute. The audience gives another applause. The musicians leave the stage after the conductor, and the audience leaves the concert hall.
This is the established and repetitive ritual of a symphony concert at least in the second half of the 20th and the 21st century. The performers and audience follow the written or unwritten rules of the concert performance, and educate the novices on the rules by judging and sometimes excluding them for their mistakes. This ritual forms a similar structure to the Foucaultian view of society subjugated to power; it binds both the musician’s and the audience’s bodies on a second level: a biopolitical level. The ritual automatizes and disindividualizes the power by distributing it to people’s bodies, words, expressions and gazes.
A New Performance Paradigm to Redefine the Musician’s Body
Recording and reproduction of the music have changed the power relations between the composer, the performer and the audience. It added new elements to these relationships, like the producer, the manager and the recording company that hires the producer, the composer, the musicians, the recording studio, even the stage.
This drastic change in power relations has also affected the central positions of the composer and the conductor. Jazz started a new tradition with its own rituals, in which most of the times the musicians themselves are the composers; the sheet is reduced to a rough direction for the collective improvisation, and the audience participates with their bodies; they are no more hidden in the darkness and waiting for the end of the concert for the applause; they are visible, clapping their hands to the rhythm, shaking their heads, swinging, dancing, giving their applauses not even after the song, but after every improvised passage, or whenever the improvisation makes them excited. The audience started to pay for their drinks or the entrance fee of the club; instead of a ticket to the concert hall in which they become passive listeners with immobile bodies. As a sociomusicologist who writes on popular music, Simon Frith defines listening as the central performance; he claims that, because the audience interprets the work through their own experience, the embodiment of music occurs in the audience’s experience of the performance, and he calls this experience a performance itself. The musicians are no more the only performers; the audience and the musician perform together.
The music has become something to be defined with unique events, instead of pieces. Two performances or recordings of one music sheet became completely different; the only connections that remained between these two are the name and the melody at the beginning and the end. These performance dynamics not only damage the power of the composer as the spirit but almost entirely erase the concept of the composer who writes music to be performed by others. Without this concept, the conductor’s duty also ends; there’s no more music on the sheet to be taught to the musicians and direct in a specific way; because the direction of the music is not stable, it is continuously and spontaneously affected or determined by the musicians and the audience. When the music critics started to see jazz as an art form and compared it to the European art music forms including the symphony, a dialectic relation occurred between the two opposite rituals. They fed popular music in a dialectic way; popular music forms and scenes took ideas from both of these music styles.
The symphony orchestra, with its outdated repertoire, central hierarchy and ritualistic performances, is still required by the nation-states as the representation of harmony in a community subjected to the sovereignty. However, in the 21st century, it is only one of the many options for a musician. A musician’s options has become similar with any other profession’s in a neo-liberal system; one can choose either a salary-based life and serve to the system, or a free-lance job with more options but flexible and intense working hours, and again, serve to the system.
