Accountability
This post is part of a series discussing how to build trust into artistic practice, allowing artists to create artistic experiences that stand in the gap of ideological, cultural, and social differences and reaffirm our connection to our shared humanity. This series uses the acronym BRAVING from Brené Brown as a set of tools to understand the anatomy of trust and how we can best apply it to a variety of musical settings; previous posts in the series will be listed below:
For the next element of trust, accountability, I want to take a slightly different approach. In the past two posts, I’ve been primarily basing my exploration of each element on guiding actions included in Braving the Wilderness by Brené Brown. In this book, she discusses accountability as follows: “You own your mistakes, apologize, and make amends.” There is value to understanding accountability as taking ownership for mistakes and their consequences. Artists are intimately acquainted with mistakes. We make them all the time in performances and teaching, and hopefully we recognize that these mistakes can be viewed as opportunities to learn from and grow. In fact, I like to tell students that there is no such thing as a perfect performance or lesson, there’s always something we could do better. Part of being an artist is that knowledge that you are always reaching for that next level of artistry.
However, despite the value of discussing accountability in this way, I believe there is more to this discussion. I want to examine what it means to be accountable to an artistic practice in a restorative fashion rather than one based on retribution. To do this, I’m going to rely on a different understanding of accountability pulled from Community: The Structure of Belonging by Peter Block. In the book, he describes accountability as choosing to confront ourselves with our own freedom. Freedom is not an escape from accountability, as popular culture so often misunderstands, but instead we become accountable when we choose to accept and act on our own freedom.
I find this central question related to accountability to be fascinating: What have we chosen to do of our own free will, and how will we follow through with intention?
However, before we can really dig into how we each want to answer that question we also need to think about what it means to be free. In my musical experiences, and I imagine this is the same for many other people, I’ve discussed freedom in terms of performing (such as without tension or pain), programming (picking the repertoire you want to play as opposed to it being prescribed), improvisation, and even tonality.
What is missing from these notions of freedom is a clear path for how to achieve them. So as a means of discussing not only how we achieve freedom, but what its activities and experience look like when we work towards it, I want to refer to the idea of Freedom as a Paradox laid out in James Clear’s book Atomic Habits. He describes the paradox of freedom as follows: the way to expand your freedom is to narrow your focus, such as in the following examples:
-Stay focused on saving to achieve financial freedom
-Stay focused on training to achieve physical freedom
-Stay focused on learning to achieve intellectual freedom
One example of narrowing focus to achieve freedom in musical terms could be the way we think about improvisation in jazz. Many of the best improvisers devote enormous amounts of energy and thought to learning scale patterns, understanding complex harmonies, and composing their own tunes. They use this tremendously narrowed focus and extensive learning to then create seemingly spontaneously composed melodies. Improvising is continuously making choices, and in order to be truly free in those choices, we need real understanding and trust in our own facilities. The secret here is in the preparation: by learning and familiarizing themselves with the conventions of the art form, the best jazz improvisers discover the freedom to focus on making music, responding to their fellow musicians, and even break down the conventions every once in a while.
I appreciate both James Clear’s discussion of freedom and Peter Block’s discussion of accountability, because the focus is on the process, not the end result. Process is where the most important aspects of accountability live: ownership and choice. Agency is our path to confronting our own freedom; we have to make the decision to become the author of our own experience. We decide what value and meaning shows up in our artistic practice, and we are responsible for creating the world we live in, even if we have inherited it.
I can think of many points over the past few years where I have had a thought like this one: “Why does what I’m doing right now really matter?” I’ve realized that this question arises from being untethered from my own practice and a lack of ownership. Being able to trust our own artistic practice requires accountability, which is a natural byproduct of taking ownership for the world we live in, our place in it, and deciding to act as the creator of what it can become.
Accountability in our personal artistic practice demands that we think differently about our concept of art. I already referenced this a bit in the previous post about Reliability, but if we get away from the idea of art as a product, and instead think of it as part of the fabric of society and a vehicle for social connection, then we become more concerned with the process than the end result. Every artist and musician has felt the drudgery of making art. Whether it's endlessly practicing a technical passage to learn it for a performance or following up on email after email to coordinate logistics for a gig, there are times where our creative activities feel like work. This is all part of our artistic practice and we need the drudgery in order to have the transformative creative experiences we chase. The highs and lows of an artistic practice cannot exist without each other, but as long as ownership and choice is in the process, we are making art, even through the tough times.
Thinking about being accountable to a practice is especially poignant during this period where many of our creative activities have been sidelined by the pandemic. How do we hold ourselves accountable to an artistic practice that isn’t just satisfying a need to produce something? As artists we are driven to create, and I imagine that many people reading this can identify with the feeling of guilt for not making as much art during this time. I know personally after years of experience as a saxophonist and student, confronting the pandemic and graduation at the same time left a large gap in my typical artistic activities that I had no idea how to address. The answer to that question comes back to ownership and choice. In many ways, losing typical artistic experiences has forced me to confront my own freedom and choose the ways I am an artist. This blog and the research that it entails is one of those major artistic practices to which I am now holding myself accountable, and while it is new and even a bit uncomfortable at times, I am finding self-trust in my work because I am taking ownership of the world I live in and deciding to act as a creator for what it can become.
Up until this point we have talked about accountability to ourselves and our own artistic practice, but accountability is also vitally important to trust in interpersonal work. When working with groups of people accountability comes from our ability to set intention in artistic spaces. A great example of setting intention in artistic spaces from my own experience comes from my work with the Fuego Quartet. When we founded the group, we took time to discuss how we wanted to run rehearsals and what expectations we had for preparation and behavior from each member. We arrived at the motto: “Leave your ego at the door,” and by setting that intention collectively as a group, we have developed a culture that allows us to work effectively and efficiently in service of the group’s goals. What would it look like to give the same care to setting the intention of every artistic space we create with everyone who participates, not just the performers?
If we expect accountability from participants in our art, then they must have a hand in creating it. This does not necessarily mean they have to compose the music or perform a part, because there are many elements that come together to create a complete artistic experience. There is more of value in that space than just the art itself. When we begin to plan a musical event we should recognize the artistry in relationships between people and we can involve all participants in the process of making choices such as venue, audience arrangement, programming, food and beverage availability, and so much else. This collaborative approach (that leaves no detail untouched) shares ownership with all participants and avoids the problem of people walking into an artistic experience with ambivalence. We can change the mindset from someone else (the artist) owning the room to the belief that this space and experience is something we create together. Just as in our personal practice, accountability in interpersonal settings is founded on ownership and a choice to cocreate.
Group accountability in artistic experiences is essential to the mutual trust required when music is used as a vehicle for human connection, which often can address social and cultural issues. The most important concern in these cases is the invitation: who is welcome at the table and is being held accountable. We must invite everyone to the table and expect intentional participation, which can take many forms, even dissent. Artistic experience has the potential to create spaces in which communities can solve problems and envision new futures. All we need to do is ensure that we have involved an equitable and inclusive representation of the community in the artistic process. When we hold each other accountable to that process, then we can find the mutual trust necessary to create real change through relationships with each other.
I’ll close with a quote from Peter Block, since he describes accountability and the choice to create the world we wish to live in through mutual trust more eloquently than I can:
“Whatever the world demands of us, the people most involved have the collective wisdom to meet the requirements of that demand. And if we can get them together in the room, in the right context and with a few simple ground rules, the wisdom to create a future or solve a problem is almost always in the room. All you need to ensure this is to make sure the people in the room are a diverse and textured sample of the larger world you want to affect.”
