Common Practice
An initiative where the people who make the music also answer for it.
We are a group of musicians who share responsibility for what we play, how we play it, and why. The core of the group changes over time, and no one owns it. The people who direct this music's artistic choices are not paid for making them, and they play in the programs they shape. The musicians we invite to each program are paid properly, on full professional terms.
Ownership
In many professional settings, a musician's hands are hired, but their judgment is not. The program, the tempo, the balance, the number of rehearsals, and the reason for the concert are settled elsewhere. The player supplies the physical execution and little of the interpretive agency, and often has no say in whether the work deserves to be played this way at all. Marx called this alienation: labour separated from its product, from the activity itself, and from the people doing it beside you. A player can perform superbly and still feel absent from the decisions that made the performance.
Common Practice starts from the opposite premise. The core shares responsibility for every element of the work, from choosing repertoire and shaping interpretation to selecting venues and setting schedules. Decisions are reached through shared deliberation, not hierarchical command. If a phrase is wrong, it is partly ours. If a program is bold, that is partly ours too.
Kant described the experience of beauty as disinterested: a judgment not tied to what one stands to gain from the object. We take that as a working ideal. When no one in the core has a fee riding on a choice, the only question left in the room is what the music asks of us. This is not the only honest way to make art. It is the one we have chosen to build.
The Practice
Aristotle separated two kinds of activity. Poiesis is making something whose value lies in what is left behind, like a chair or a house. Praxis is action whose value lies in the doing, with nothing left over to be separated from it. For Aristotle, a well-lived life was praxis. Music sits awkwardly between the two. A score can look like an object, and a concert can look like a product delivered on a given evening. The musicologist Christopher Small argued against that picture. He proposed the word musicking, meaning that music is not a thing but something people do together, in a room, at a particular time. A piece does not exist and then get performed. It exists in the performing.
We take this seriously. For us the concert is not the reveal of something finished in private. It is one session of a practice, and the practice includes every rehearsal, every disagreement about a bar, and every hour spent on intonation. The audience is welcomed into it, and nothing changes in kind when they arrive. Eugen Herrigel, describing his years of Zen archery, wrote of mastery as the point where discipline stops aiming at the result and the doing becomes the whole of it. That is the direction we want to work in.
The name comes from here. In music theory, the common practice is the shared harmonic language of the era that includes Mozart. For us it also means a practice held in common.
Money and Autonomy
Money is not the measure of this work, and it is not a condition of its continuing. Guests are paid. Core members are not. If funds come in through tickets, grants, or patrons, they go first to the musicians we invite and to the costs of the work itself. If they do not, the work goes on. Payment should never decide whether a rehearsal happens, whether a program is played, or what it contains.
This is not a retreat from the world. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu observed that artistic fields have long defined themselves against direct commercial logic, like an economy turned inside out. The more a field protects its judgments from the market, the more weight and trust those judgments carry. Autonomy is what gives an artistic decision its authority. We are not claiming purity, and we do not judge the many sincere musicians who work within the market. We are making one design choice: the people who decide what the art is should not depend on it for income, so that their decisions can stand on the music alone.
Where We Begin
We open with Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466, arranged for reduced orchestra. It is one of only two Mozart piano concertos in a minor key, and its darkness is structural, not decorative. The soloist does not rise above the orchestra's turbulence. They are drawn into an argument already underway, which suits a group that wants to make its decisions together.
This is a beginning. We start inside the common practice, the repertoire ahead is open, and we want to write it with composers.
The Invitation
We extend invitations to performers and guest artists for individual programs, on full professional terms. We seek out composers interested in writing for this specific room, where the work is built inside a shared practice and free from commercial imperatives. We prefer to begin these relationships in conversation.
For those who want to witness this practice, the door is open.