This July we have once again received a special gift of music in our spacious and resonant sanctuary from the Chamber Music Society of the Carolinas. Led by J and Rachel Freivogel, who constitute half of the Jasper String Quartet, we have stepped apart from the ordinary sounds of life for a few afternoons of small-ensemble, world class music. This year they have put together a program in remembrance of our 250th Declaration of Independence entitled “The Great Experiment.” What has struck me, as I watched and heard the performers weave their lines in and out of the tapestry of a piece, is that chamber music like this, so resonant of the 18thcentury in which it emerged in its classical form, is a kind of musical template for the politics envisaged by our founders. Their (and our) experiment in governance is mirrored in the constantly evolving “experiment” of chamber music performance. Here’s what I hear in it.
Chamber music, like its jazz combo relative, places performers in a milieu of commonly understood relationships of tones, tempos, rhythms, and volumes. The performers are bound together in common adherence to certain conventions of action and response. While each player has a vital expressive role, they are enmeshed with each other in a search for a totality of sound that has its own logic and fullness. The personal performance of each player demands thousands of hours of private work and self-discipline in order to participate in the public event of their common work. So is our republican experiment, as we have painfully experienced today, dependent on the personal virtues and behaviors cultivated throughout a lifetime by each citizen, whether in office or not. The democracy of performers is contained within a constitution of common norms, values, and purposes.
Is this not also the key to the founders’ vision of a republic in which the common good is sought through the constitutionally regulated interplay of individual expressions? Is it not a governance of the whole through a commitment to some fundamental norms, rules, and habits that inform the contributions of each? Yes, there are dissonances and tensions, even puzzling departures from anticipated forms. These are intrinsic to the power of the music as it raises and resolves the tensions created by the players’ contributions. And there are surprises as well as agreements that come at the end of a movement or a work. All of this is on a scale in which the musicians are known to one another, in which they take their cues from each other through direct eye contact. It requires courageous soloing as well as modest self-restraint. Each player is governed by a respect for an emerging common “logic” of a piece. They are not held together by one who dictates “from above,” but by their schooled commitment to their common enterprise.
This, it seems to me, powerfully echoes the normative vision of how democratic and republican governance should operate—through argument and persuasion, through tension and reconciliation among players on a common level. The founders knew that this process required small, participatory republics. It could only succeed by their interdependence in a federal, constitutional order that protected their small scale and integrity. Like the chamber ensemble, they are fragile vessels of mutuality constantly threatened by the oceanic waves of mass movements led by demagogues.
This enlightenment vision, with its rationality, interpersonal scale, and invitation to full democratic participation, was soon challenged by the growth of large orchestras in the Romantic era whose numbers and volume soon gave rise to the domination of the conductor over the ensemble. The purpose of this orchestral music became the evocation of passion and feeling more than the satisfaction of beholding interwoven but rational complexity. Musicians were supposed to look at the conductor, rather than each other, to follow the script. Rather than feed each other with invitations at each step of the way, they were supposed to obey the baton of the leader. The celebrity conductor, at the head of a seeming army of instrumentalists, appealed to mass audiences to support this enormous enterprise. Its contemporary and now dominant form is the celebrity rock band with its thousands gathered in amphitheaters around the world.
As a mirror of this development, Republican governance fell into a two-century struggle with authoritarianisms and mass movements in Europe and the Americas, one that convulses our common life to this hour. How fitting that we remember the spirit of our Founders’ constitutional republic with the music of a chamber ensemble! It is a challenge to all of us to hone our own contribution, discover together deep unitive patterns of reason and excellence, and work together to produce something beautiful for future generations.