The traditional and most prevalent way to teach chamber music, not only in conservatories but also in music education in general, is some variant of the master-apprenticeship. From an outside position, the teacher acts as a representative of the Chamber Music Guild, guarding its sacred flame, as it were, instructing and elevating an ensemble of students to the guild’s standards of musical interaction.

The fundamental question sparking the project titled The Collaborative Chamber Music Teacher (CCMT) in 2018 was as simple as it proves increasingly urgent: what happens if the teacher of chamber music actively joins the group and becomes an agent of change, not from an external position, but within the ensemble proper? From this deceptively simple point of departure, any number of secondary research questions are derivable, and the international project group will undoubtedly address many of these as the researchers present their findings later this year. Ultimately, substantiated and well-argued answers pertaining to whether and to what extent such organisational modifications could prove conducive to attaining the institutions’ overarching and strategic objectives for the topic of chamber music, are eagerly anticipated.

So far so good concerning the instrumental interest invested in the project on an institutional level. On a more personal note, I would like to elicit some reasons why this project appears crucially important to me and, by inference, why I think its emergent findings might well prove to be so for most of my colleagues, too.

It might seem a paradox, but after more than 20 years as a full-time professor at the Norwegian Academy of Music, I have reached a point where the sense of grappling with the role of being a professor carries greater urgency for me – and entails greater difficulties – than ever before.

Time passes. The academy changes; students change. And, sure enough: I myself have changed. I envisaged approaching 50 years of age and having spent half of that life in academia as an apex of sorts: I visualized myself at this point wielding a certain academic power and commanding authority, even expecting to enjoy doing so. Well, to the extent this might be the case, I do not enjoy it particularly. Why not? Why do I feel, more often than earlier, as if I keep rummaging through my mental toolbox for pedagogical implements, structures and ideas that seem non-existent or at least out of reach for me, when and where I need them to be at hand? To elaborate, I bring in the German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas.

Habermas’s notion of the power-free discourse (Herrschaftsfreier Diskurs) – with ‘discourse’ a term largely interchangeable with ‘dialogue’ and ‘action’ – makes for an argumentative hub central to his magnum opus Theory of Communicative Action (Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns), published in 1981. The power-free discourse is distinguished by certain main characteristics. Its situation features a group of dialogue partners on an equal standing with each other (Gleichberechtigte Kommunikationspartner), all with equal opportunities to assert their meaning (Gleiche Mögligkeit sich zu äuβern). Their discourse concerns a topic of mutual interest (Symmetrische Situation), and the dialogue is regulated and governed by argumentative consensus (Entscheidungen durch den Zwang des besseren Arguments) – the common acknowledgement of the better and stronger argument’s pre-eminence.

Habermas describes an ideal and highly normative situation, and many postulate its impossibility in real life. Leaving all discussion aside about the practicability of the power-free discourse: if asked to explicate an optimal instance of group dynamics in ensemble playing, I believe a majority of chamber musicians would come very close to approximating Habermas, or at least very near to emulating his position. His is indirectly a description of how chamber music and its practice is ideally conceived by its practitioners, and in some privileged instances the power-free discourse and its feasibility is demonstrably showcased when chamber music is performed at its best.

Could this imply that chamber music should be taught as closely to this ideal as possible in higher music education? If yes, does that in turn entail that professors and their agency as teachers ought to be an integral and integrated part of the ensemble in order to authentically live up to the quintessential idea of chamber music? And, thirdly, by extending this line of reasoning (albeit with a risk of rhetorical straining): should, even, the prevalent way of teaching chamber music in academia – within the framework of the traditional master-apprenticeship – be dethroned and regarded as downright inauthentic in dealing with its own subject matter?

My own contribution to the CCMT project mainly took place at its initial design stage and later in the capacity of ‘facilitator-coordinator’ when the two ensembles (a trio – Brahms Opus 114 – and a piano quartet – Mozart KV 493) were formed, starting to generate research material in the form of documented rehearsals and performances. What I have since observed about the project’s unfolding renders me very excited and hopeful that there are upcoming findings that might provide insights that can guide and alter the way we philosophise about teaching chamber music – perhaps even results with substantial transfer value for other strata and subjects in higher music education.

Whether and how chamber music – or any subject, for that matter – as a power-free discourse would be possible in academia or not, is a complex question that hardly receives its exhaustive answer through this first instalment of the CCMT project. Personally, however, I enthusiastically await and embrace all the possible aid I can get to ultimately realise the role of the university professor as I would like to see it: wielding logos without centricity, pathos without professorial posturing and ethos without asserting excessive authority.