Leading and organizing as collaborative, embodied performance
I was swept away by a recent concert — a performance that was part of a series from Chatter, an organization presenting concerts almost every weekend of the year in Santa Fe and Albuquerque.
The performance was thrilling, even visceral, as the music took shape in real time. I was not alone in my reaction. The responses around me were ebullient, and after both the Santa Fe and Albuquerque performances there was a shared sense of having been lifted and carried out of ordinary time.
The experience moved me to reflect more deeply on this performance, on performance as such, and on what it might reveal about my own work in leadership and organizations. I should be candid: the pianist, Jeffrey Chappell, also a composer in both classical and jazz idioms, is my teacher and friend, which sharpened my curiosity. I also had the privilege of watching, up close, the program take shape and was aware of the schedule of rehearsals with the two other performers of Bartók’s Contrasts, violinist David Felberg and clarinetist Jeff Brooks, in the few days after Jeffrey arrived in Albuquerque from San Jose, California.
A word about the program. Jeffrey opened with solo works — Ravel’s Jeux d’eau and the Piano Sonata of Charles Griffes, both requiring discerning and masterful command of the moment. After those works, a short poetry reading was followed by two minutes of silence that are a ritual at every Chatter performance. Jeffrey brought us out of the silence, offering one of his own compositions, Piano Misterioso, tranquil and sublime. The concert closed with the trio: Bartók’s Contrasts.
Ravel’s Jeux d’eau is a rendering of water in all its manifestations, and the rippling, flowing, and spraying figuration in Jeffrey’s hands was a virtuosic yet utterly natural emergence of luscious chords, melodies, arpeggios, and scales. Listening was a joyful and transporting experience.
Every listener brings their own meaning to what they hear. For me, the Griffes Sonata, composed in 1917–18, an early landmark of American modernist piano writing, moved between the angst of dissonance and stridency and passages of great melodic beauty, a challenging work of epic proportions. It seemed an anthem for our own anxious and uncertain time, in which I, at least, move between the poles of beauty and of tragedy and sorrow. Jeffrey drew out its every turn, dissonance breaking into melodic beauty and back again. It seized my attention and would not let go.
In contemplating this performance, it struck me that performance is far more than the arrangement of notes on the page, that is, the score that guides and constrains the performer. It is the execution, in real time, of decisions and intuitions about tempo and dynamics, and it is the enactment of relationships: the performer’s relationship to himself and to his instrument, to his fellow performers, and to the audience (the performers here were an all-male trio). In solo performance, Jeffrey is in dialogue with himself, with his intentions about interpretation, with his perceptions as the music unfolds, with the audience, with the ambience and the place, and with the larger social and historical context that shapes the meaning the audience draws from the sound. All of it interacts in the moment.
In the trio, this grows even more complex. Again, there is the performer’s relationship to himself, the physical connection to the instrument, the intellectual planning, the awareness and response in the moment — and now, layered onto all of it, the live dynamic among the three players on stage. It is an embodied experience of real-time action, an unwavering commitment to the present on the part of the performers. It is not an abstraction residing in a score, a transcription, or a recording.
What stunned me about the trio’s Contrasts — Chappell, Felberg, and Brooks — was its vibrancy, immediacy, physicality, musicality, and sheer excitement, especially given that the three had roughly four and a half hours together to come to know one another and to arrive at the decisions, synchrony, and coherence so astounding in such an extraordinarily complex work.
Yes, they are professionals and know how to do this. But what does that actually mean?
Consider just one dimension of the score’s complexity, which I had the chance to peruse: rhythm and tempo. The final movement alone moves through eight tempo markings across some fifteen sections, in shifting meters that include 13/8, for non-musicians, thirteen eighth-note beats to a measure. There is no way to hold that intellectually, mathematically in your head (not for mere mortals, at any rate). You have to feel it and, in a trio, feel it together, in synchrony, and communicate that pulse to an audience.
Here is what I keep returning to. First, the years of practice and study that had already produced shared values and a shared understanding of the music among the three. Second, the complexity of sense-making at work among them. Individually and together, they were responding to the moment, holding the decisions they had made alone and in common, communicating with one another in real time, and answering to what was emerging as they played. They were collaborating, bringing both their commonality and their differences to bear, and collectively responding to the context, the audience included. This is remarkable, and it is something above and beyond their expertise as musicians. Each knew the piece; it was in his repertoire, and each had listened to recordings of the work by other artists before arriving in the rehearsal room. Both Jeffrey and Jeff Brooks brought the sensibilities of jazz performers. All the performers had achieved mastery with their instrument. David brought a beautiful resonance to his tone and exquisite judgment. And Jeff brought an electricity and a kind of choreography, moving forward and back, rising from and returning to his seat, all in service of the music’s interpretation. And Jeffrey brought a broad range of touch and dynamics, an interpretation delivered beautifully and in concert and communication with all his fellow performers. It was a high-wire act of great beauty and delight.
So, back to leadership and organizing. Beyond expertise in a domain, leadership is the capacity to sense the room and the context, to respond and adapt to what emerges, to set a stage for collaboration, when it is warranted, and to honor the perspectives of others, acting in the moment in ways that shift patterns of intention and action toward shared purpose. The proof is in what happens in the present context, not what happened yesterday, or last week, or last year. Nor is it reducible to the individual capacities of those in the room.
Consider another timely case: recall the French national soccer team at this year’s World Cup, arriving among the pre-tournament favorites on the strength of its individual brilliance. Yet, for all that talent, they were undone in the semifinal by a Spain that had genuinely become a team and went on to lift the trophy. The lesson is not that the French players lacked quality but that quality, distributed across a roster, is not yet a performance. Capacity is potential; performance is enacted. A squad of virtuosos is a field of affordances, not an outcome, and what finally plays is not the sum of the players but what emerges between them, in the moment or fails to.
The same asymmetry governs musicians on a stage. Mastery sits latent until it is embodied in the unfolding present, and it is there, in the enacting, not the credential, that music and leadership alike are either found or lost.
This is Christopher Small’s insight in Musicking: “the fundamental nature and meaning of music lie not in objects, not in musical works at all, but in action.” Leadership and organizing, likewise, live in the action, not in the plan. They are relational, embodied, and emergent; their dynamics unfold in the moment. Especially in our era of heightened complexity and uncertainty, effective leadership requires an awareness of context, involving one’s relationship to oneself and to others, the relationships among those others, the intentions in play, and a sensitivity to the historical, social, and other forces bearing on the situation.
What does this bring to light? That one can prepare intellectually and emotionally, and still what comes to bear in the moment depends on an awareness of the many factors shaping the dynamic and on the capacity, both individual and collective, to respond to them. There is a collective capacity, enlivened by the relationships and the setting; and there is each participant’s capacity to influence and shape it: to hold all these currents at once and to act, moving the whole toward right intention while honoring the multiple perspectives of those present and the context they share.
And since we are all, at the moment, preoccupied with AI and its reach, let me close here: music and leadership are profoundly human activities. They are embodied and relational, emergent, unfolding in real time. To experience live music, as a performer or in the audience, is enlivening and rejuvenating. Both kinds of performance explore, affirm, and celebrate who we are, our values, and our relationships.
With thanks to Christopher Small, Musicking (Wesleyan University Press, 1998).
