Sara Garfinkel
The radio in my car only works intermittently. One day while driving to London it began to broadcast halfway through a programme about why people like certain artistic things and why they don’t like others. A person from a committee told how they had a new initiative to measure whether they were funding things that people like. They would give listeners at concerts questionnaires to complete as they left a concert, with questions similar to those used in a composition assessment – did they find the work cohesive? Was it well written? Did they appreciate the structure? And so on. I began shouting at the radio. Listeners aren’t contemplating these things while they listen! And when they leave the theatre or concert hall, they are, hopefully, in an elevated dream-like state which cannot be punctured by measuring their experience in such a way. At least that is my experience.
As I shouted another speaker said “You are so wrong. Listeners don’t react in that way, it isn’t their experience, and I don’t believe that it is a cognitive exercise, but a physical experience.” I began shouting at the radio again “I have to talk to you!” And then the radio died.
A week or so later I had just played Lauda (con sordino), the piece that Gavin Bryars wrote for me, with Gavin and James Woodrow in a concert at a church in Hampstead. It had gone particularly well, and I had the sense that all three players together were above the music, listening to it with the audience. A woman approached me as I put my cello away. “I have to talk to you!” she said. “I think that when you play, and particularly when you play with your colleagues, that you go somewhere else, you go somewhere with them, and you take the audience with you. You took me there just now, and I think that it’s a specific physical thing that is happening.” I replied that this was terribly interesting to me and that I would like to know more. In fact, I had just been listening to a woman on the radio talking about precisely this idea. “That was me!” she said.
Dr Sara Garfinkel’s research into interoception between musicians suggests that among particular players in particular situations heightened physical awareness can lead those performers to understand each other’s heartbeat rate, slowing down or speeding up their individual rates until they coincide. She believes that in extreme situations, these players can have the same effect on their listeners.
She does not have any theories to answer the strange circumstances in which we met.