The Promise of Virtuosities
摘要
This brief concluding chapter begins by considering the use of the term virtuosity in contemporary culture before gesturing toward the ways that the virtuosities described throughout the book continue in musical life today. I close by reflecting on the persistent problems of virtuosity and the dangers of it as a glorification of work in our age of precarity. Although the extreme reactions to virtuosity outlined at the beginning of the book remain—some consider virtuosity a distraction whose demise would be progress, even as others look to it as emancipatory excess that might free us from mechanisms of control—I argue for a phenomenological view that insists on the dynamic flexibility of a phenomenon defined by so many different relationships. Ultimately, I suggest that an openness to other potential virtuosities may provide a way forward, precisely because virtuosities (like the human beings that produce them) are not fixed for all time.