ABSTRACT

Music ensembles offer a unique variety of scenarios that differ in terms of social complexity, participants' expertise, and musical structure complexity. This chapter provides a novel conceptual framework, based on the application of the resilience concept, for the investigation of the strategies developed by ensemble musicians at various levels of expertise to achieve coordination and a satisfying level of individual and group expressivity. It reveals the compromise achieved by most experts between a risk-taking attitude and a robust capacity to cope with internal perturbations and related external perturbations. The chapter proposes examples, taken from published studies on music performance, of critical situations in which the individual and group factors that influence the success of the performance could be thoroughly studied through the resilience framework. It also provides an original and incisive perspective on known cases typical of music ensembles, which can also have implications for the development of novel strategies for training musicians.