... the global-neutral-style (GNS) ...

       

            Despite many of you have asked me, I will not comment publicly nor in writing, on the results of the 2025 Chopin Competition.

        But, what I do want to speak about is something maybe deeper, a change I’ve felt growing inside our musical world for some time now; a world I belong to, love, and owe so much to. I’ve admired it, drawn strength from it, and yet, something within it keeps me uneasy. So, this isn’t a "verdict" from above, but a humble confession from within, by someone who has lived inside the very system he now questions.

        Let me be clear: this is not an attack on those who make these competition events possible. Quite the opposite. The organizers (patrons, musicians, teachers, volunteers) generously devote their lives to keeping music alive. They give time, energy, and passion so that art can still have a place in our distracted world. And for that, I am deeply grateful. Yet even with all their goodness, something larger is shifting: the “spirit” of how we make and hear music.

        What we witness today in the so-called "classical music" world (a world/guild basically sustained now almost entirely by "interpretation") is a kind of “Global Neutral Style” (let's call it GNS): a kind of Musical Esperanto. It is breathtaking in precision and polish: every note perfect, every gesture absolutely immaculate. But often, what we gain in perfection, we lose in life. The sound dazzles, but not often speaks. Performance becomes presentation, curatoriality (is that even a word? LOL), operating under a kind of empty fluency protected with the mask of an outer shell of accuracy (also avoiding ambiguity, keeping time, etc). The "work" is thus “curated” rather than “conjured”; the line becomes schematic; legato turns into a perceptual trick; rhythm hardens into grid. Everything becomes more and more abstract: texture, form, clarity, diction, versus meaning, semiosis, allegory, symbol, actorial embodiment, etc. Clarity reigns (like in each instance of the pixel numbers in each new iPhone HD camera), yet often it is a sterile kind of lucidity: precision without the fruitful ambiguity from which depth is born. Sound ceases to mean and becomes something merely shown.

        I don’t exclude myself. I’ve felt the quiet thrill of faultless hygiene, the vanity of seamless control (although I could never do it with the frequency and polish of these wonderful pianist-contestants, as much as I tried…). But the more perfect it gets, the more the spirit thins. The line between discipline and desolation can be whisper-thin.

        By design, competitions accelerate this. It’s just how it is. Systems that must rank, inevitably privilege what can be counted over what can be felt. It’s easier to agree on an impeccable onset than on a truthful pause; easier to tally a lack of blemishes than a plenitude of meaning. The safest path is the one that offends no one (I know, it's a cliché, but it stills holds truth), the contender who eludes censure eclipses the artist who haunts memory. Most of the times, of course not all… The exception confirms the rule, as they say...

        Underneath all this lies a total shift in the performer’s archetype. The pianist now becomes "custodian" of a cerebral archive, a curator in a mental museum of styles (baroque, classical, romantic, contemporary, Bach, Chopin, Viennese Classics, etc). We master “hallmarks,” stylistic presets, deploy protocols, and iron out the internal ruptures where a work actually speaks. Timbre gets prized for its sheen, not its cargo of sense. Phrasing ossifies into pose; gesture into protocol. The body functions at apex efficiency but no longer enacts narrative, only regimen.

        It’s tempting to blame fashion or lineage, but the root is deeper: our era’s total fixation on the verifiable. Technical translucence is enthroned as a proxy for revelation. The paradigm pivots, from discourse to artifact, peril to prescription, invocation to exposition...

        Here, a kind of “Path-of-Form” tradition enters (I don’t know how else to call it): a venerable ethos of rigor where mastery is not utility but a sort of path toward transcendence. It exalts perseverance, deference to form, ritual practice, and moral rectitude. Technique becomes virtue, a conduit of purification. The self recedes so the form may appear in luminous neutrality; time tends toward the eternal present; precision becomes devotion. Of course, this can yield an astonishing serenity...

But, it has a shadow. When dissolution eclipses assertion, serenity risks becoming stasis; purity, vacuity. Conflict fades, and with it redemptive possibility. Narrative withers. The human subject, reduced to conduit, loses the dignity of resistance: the power to found meaning amid fracture...

        By contrast, an alternative, a “Voice-and-Drama” tradition that was forged in dialectical fire is (or was) also possible: art as theater of will, where sound wrestles destiny and makes interior life audible. Technique serves the irrepressible interior, not the other way around. Here the performer does not vanish but affirms. Imperfection can seal authenticity. Risk forges revelation. The musical act is not emanation but event, a defiant making in time...

        Our globalized epoch, the Global Neutral Style (GNS), favors the path-of-form tradition, modernity’s technocratic apotheosis. Objectivity, formalism, measurability, reproducibility, amplified by immaculate discipline, literally flatten the symbolic, affective, allegorical, rhetorical, into the literal: the score as manual, interpretation as compliance. Polysemy atrophies. Rhythm geometrizes; rubato calcifies into preset. Again, I insist, the performer becomes a brand-curator, navigating style-rooms (baroque, classical, romantic, contemporary) while a work’s inner fissures are smoothed to uniform gloss.

        And yet, the danger lies precisely in our habituation to the flattening. With time, we actually cease to perceive the loss of relief, the absence of depth. We got totally used to it (myself included). What once would have struck us as lifeless now reads as “pure,” “objective,” “professional." The collective ear adapts to a world without chiaroscuro. We no longer sense the silence beneath the sound or the breath beneath the rhythm. Thus we find ourselves in an Emperor’s New Clothes situation: the musical body parades naked, stripped of mystery and meaning, yet the crowd, conditioned by consensus, praises its invisible garments of precision. The poverty of spirit is mistaken for refinement; the disappearance of danger for maturity. And the few who still hear the void risk being labeled eccentric, romantic, or worse, unprofessional, amateurish, etc...

        Philosophically, this literalism mirrors the technical framing of reality: music treated as resource rather than revelation. Purity becomes a moral imperative. The ritualized onset, poised, controllable, replaces invocation with protocol. Art is quietly deportivized: prowess quantified, risk neutralized, excellence commodified.

        To this regard, beginnings of performances are an interesting thing to observe. In fact, there was a time when the beginning of a performance was an invocation, not a calibration. The performer approached the instrument like a priest an altar: unarmed, uncertain, trembling with expectancy; or, more paganly, like a Dionysian celebrant stepping into the circle of dance, about to surrender to a current greater than intention. In both cases, the air before the first note was not silence but potential, charged with the tension of creation itself. Heidegger’s idea of the "Ur-Sprung", literally “primordial leap/plunge” or “springing-forth”, named that instant: origin not as point zero, but as rupture, the sudden bursting into being of what did not yet exist.

        Today, that leap has been totally tamed. The modern ritual of the start (and this can be particularly seen in the 2025 Chopin competition), the solemn stillness, the micro-pause of concentration, the immaculately choreographed exhale, has become a rite of control. It resembles the stance of an Olympic diver frozen at the edge of the platform, or the pole-vaulter balancing on the threshold of flight: an immaculate suspension of motion in which the body rehearses the future jump a hundred times before it happens. This moment of hyper-awareness, beautiful yet sterile, turns into a kind of psychosomatic obsession with bodily proprioception, the worship of internal alignment over external risk. The focus narrows to the measurable: muscle tone, breath rhythm, hand angle. The gesture is perfected before it is even attempted.

        The purpose is no longer to summon the unknown but to guarantee the known. The old passionate beginning (even as the public still applauded), reckless, inspired, a step or plunge into the void, has been replaced by the managerial beginning, where every gesture is optimized, every risk neutralized.

        Before the note, one now performs the liturgy of preparation: the poised hand, the symmetrical breath, the alignment of body and bench, the little handkerchief. It is the pre-performance equivalent of tuning a machine, ensuring that no accident, no surprise, no inspiration will disturb the program. What used to be an "Ur-Sprung" has turned into an "An-Sprung": not a leap from the ground of mystery, but a push-off from the platform of routine.

        The tragedy is subtle. That pre-note stillness once contained the birth of sound; now it contains only its permission slip. The first note no longer breaks through but unfolds on schedule. The abyss has been surveyed, fenced, and lit.

        To recover the "Ur-Sprung" is to remember that beginnings are sacred because they are dangerous. They require faith, not assurance. Every true start must court disorder; otherwise, it is not a beginning but a continuation….

        Ok, all good, you can say. But then why do we cling to competitions? I don’t know, it's difficult to say; but I do have a hunch. Maybe we cling to them, still, because we all crave drama in an anesthetized age. These "arenas", in a certain sense, do stage a modern myth, that of heroes, the ascent, the crucible, the verdict. We all watch for catharsis. But the spectacle can mask a loss: artistry distilled into combat, performers into gladiators, juries into arbiters, audiences into voyeurs of controlled peril. The unscarred outshine the unforgettable...

        This "Path-of-Form” tradition typically starts very early with highly structured, standardized methods, relentless daily repetition, and close adult oversight. Improvisation is minimal; technique is the moral base of art. Specialisation is key. The teacher speaks with hierarchical authority; the student internalizes models until gesture becomes second nature. Virtuosity is not vanity but a spiritual sign: the purity of the stroke in calligraphy, the effortless arrow in archery, the unruffled surface of sound. Repetition engraves neuromuscular cultures; technique is becoming...

        The “Voice-and-Drama Tradition”, on the other hand, often prizes expressive freedom earlier, sometimes, yes, at the cost of a uniform technical base. It conceives technique as a means, vessel for interiority, so “too perfect” can feel suspect if divorced from utterance. It treats time narratively (history, conflict, resolution) rather than ritually (present-as-eternity). Rubato there is not a preset but an event, a local decision born of harmony, rhetoric, and breath.

        I guess, although I'm not entirely sure, that neither tradition completely owns the truth; each distorts when totalized. I guess when the “Path-of-Form” metaphysics is uprooted from its spiritual soil, it can decay into formalism without soul: neutral surfaces, perfection without risk, uniformity without meaning. And when the "Voice-and-Drama" metaphysics forgets form, it decays into pathos without craft. Maybe, yes. But today, no doubt, the “Path-of-Form” is dominant, totally hegemonic; so today, at least, in 2025, the danger is definitely formalism without soul, and not pathos without craft. Maybe this will change, I don’t know; but I can only speak of the times I live in.

        What happens is that the present canon of recordings, juries, conservatory metrics, and international prizes encodes the same criteria everywhere. The result is thus a style without place: transparent, exact, disemboweled of symbol. What some attribute to a region is, in fact, modern technocracy in its purest cultural clothing...

        Still, there are artists, across all passports, who resist. They sing. They improvise. They compose. They breathe time instead of counting it. They treat timbre not as fetish but as carrier of meaning. They restore discontinuities inside a piece; they let phrases say rather than merely sound. They remember that to play is to invoke....

        And so, then, what must change? Maybe we must re-center voice. Teach every instrumentalist to sing daily; make breath the metric of phrase. We must re-legalize risk. Reward ambiguity handled with purpose, not only clarity handled with care. Re-bind technique to meaning. Treat difficulty as sacrifice in service of sense, not as spectacle. Reintroduce invention. Require composition and improvisation in training and evaluation. Re-humanize time. Tempo as habitat; rubato as decision; silence as presences, not pauses. Maybe we must reform forums. Competitions that host colloquia, collaborative rounds, contestants' own compositions and improvisations and multiple roles (maybe conducting, teaching), and spoken intent; festivals that mentor rather than rank. I don't know. I certainly don't claim to have the answer... But something has to change.

        I write this out of love for what our world could be, and out of fear of its amnesia...

        To conclude, this Global Neutral Style basically thrives in SPECIALIZATION, in what David Epstein (in his book “Range”, thank you Anthony Romaniuk) calls “kind learning environments”, closed, repeatable, tightly-scored domains where doing more of the same yields more of the same. But music is what he calls a “wicked environment”: patterns shift, contexts mutate, audiences breathe back at you, halls lie to you, pianos sulk, and meaning never repeats. In wicked worlds, generalists, those with a broad lattice of skills, metaphors, and cross-domain analogies, tend to flourish (in music, those who perform, compose, improvise, teach, write, etc, and not just do one thing...). That’s "Range": sampling widely, delaying narrow specialization, optimizing for match-quality rather than résumé symmetry...

        Our art once assumed this. The greats were rarely single-lane: Bach taught, improvised, engineered organs, copied, arranged; Liszt conducted, transcribed, evangelized; Ravel composed, orchestrated other people’s dreams; Bernstein composed, conducted, lectured, televised, and midwifed culture. Even the recitalist of old was expected to compose cadenza, extemporize prelude, accompany, arrange, teach, write, to live as a musical citizen, not a guild technician...

        Hesse’s amazing novel “The Glass-Bead Game” (thank you again Anthony Romaniuk) imagines an order of specialists who weave connections across all knowledge (mathematics, music, philosophy) into a supra-language of patterns. The risk in Hesse is what we face now: a game so perfect it forgets the world. The promise in Hesse is also our path: interconnection as vocation. The point isn’t to become encyclopedic; it’s to cultivate transfer, letting harmony tutor rhetoric, letting poetry inform rubato, letting choral breathing recalibrate piano touch, letting composition and improvisation re-oxygenate interpretation...

        Concretely, a GENERALIST musician today (and not a SPECIALIST one) might sing daily to keep phrasing accountable to breath. Improvise and compose to keep time flexible and meaning causal, not decorative. Double in ensemble roles (coach, continuo-mindset, chamber instincts) to restore relation over display. Read and steal across borders, architecture for form, poetry for cadence, dance for rhythm, theology for silence. Teach not only pieces but practices (partimento, counterpoint, solfeggio, jazz, flamenco, conducting from the instrument).

        In Epstein’s terms, you build a toolbelt that travels, so when the hall, piano, jury, or life blindsides you, you don’t tighten the script, you change the story. The "Path-of-Form Tradition" gives discipline; the "Voice-and-Drama Tradition" gives risk; generalism gives options, the ability to recombine both traditions on demand, in the moment, in that room, with those lungs...

        Specialization is not the enemy; but premature lock-in is. Let specialization be the endpoint of curiosity, not the curfew on it. The musician who can cross the border, between singing and playing, between writing/composing and performing, between solo and ensemble and improvisation, between score and world, will remain legible to human beings, even as the metrics keep changing. Range is not breadth against depth; it is breadth in the service of deeper depth...

        So here’s the hope: if we re-center voice, re-legalize risk, and re-learn range, the halls might change temperature... Ok, yes, maybe we’ll still polish, but now we’ll also breathe! We’ll still practice scales (or not, LOL), but some days we’ll practice metaphors too! We’ll still respect protocols, but we’ll also throw a small, tasteful party for surprise!

        And if one night the tempo misbehaves, the trill goes rogue, or the left hand files for independence, good. That’s the down payment on life. The audience didn’t come to hear a laminated human; they came to meet a mortal with a pulse!

        Because in the end, what can also explain all this is that one of the quiet tragedies of our time is that art has begun to envy science. We crave for it the same prestige, the same aura of certainty, the same armor of objectivity. A century of anxiety about legitimacy has driven musicians, critics, and institutions to speak the language of data: “accuracy,” “rigor,” “empirical evidence,” “standards,” “evaluation.” What once was the realm of ambiguity and wonder now borrows the diction of laboratories.

        Competitions and conservatories have adopted the epistemology of the sciences: everything must be demonstrable, replicable, peer-reviewed, free of error. The “Global Neutral Style” is simply this ideology made audible: music as a measurable phenomenon rather than a symbolic event. The phrasing becomes data, not discourse; the gesture, a variable; the performance, a controlled experiment whose success is the absence of noise.

        But music is not a hypothesis to be confirmed. It is the noise itself, the beautiful interference of flesh against form.

        Kant drew the boundary: phenomena for science, noumena for spirit. The natural sciences study what can be explained; the human arts dwell in what can only be understood. When that line blurs, when the methods of physics colonize the provinces of feeling, art withers into an imitation of certainty. We lose not only mystery but permission; permission to be wrong, partial, porous, human.

        The irony is that what art offers, science cannot: the experience of polysemy, that is, multiple meanings coexisting without collapsing into one truth. The scientist asks, What is this really? The artist asks, What else could this be?

    The first closes the door; the second leaves it ajar, so that air (and spirit) can enter.

    In an age addicted to verification, art’s task is to reclaim unverifiability, uncertainty, as its sacred right. To reassert that not everything valuable can be proven, and not everything proven is valuable.

    The language of art is not formula but metaphor: and metaphor, by definition, is leaky. It refuses one-to-one correspondence. It thrives in the gap where meaning shimmers but never settles.

        When art chases the credibility of science, it forgets its own vocation: to be the mirror that fogs when someone breathes upon it.

       Let science keep the measurable; let art keep the mystery.

    Let the laboratory cultivate precision; let the concert hall cultivate ambiguity, contradiction, permeability, play.

        For if music ever becomes as certain as gravity, it will no longer be able to move us…