Music Beyond the Chamber: NZTrio and Embodied Communities

NZTrio is more than a traditional piano trio that performs music from the classical repertoire: it is a professional chamber ensemble with a difference. The members of the Trio, totalling three musicians and two administrators have a community orientation. Their vision is to forge links into other artistic, educational and business fields and in doing so they create and participate in events that evoke visceral encounters. In this way they confirm Esposito’s view that communitas is disruptive of stasis and that to belong is to change. In community, identity is disrupted and new possibilities of the self can emerge. This becomes possible through provocative performances that implicate the body. For instance, shouting commands through a megaphone in Jack Body’s O Cambodia and the repeated pattern of chords in the third movement of Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 2 are emotionally and physically encountered as audiences feel what it is like to be both perpetrators and victims of violence. NZTrio uses music like this as well as works from the standard repertoire to create aesthetic experiences rich in options for communion. Furthermore, through professional development events, business leaders and young people gain the opportunity to understand how the physicality of leadership works in a high performing team.