A Music Café Experience

by Joel Speerstra

Tucked away in Smarano, a little Dolomite village in Val di Non, thirty
people gathered around Italian café tables in the autumn of 2001. Twenty
international students together with a dozen or so music professors
attended the Smarano International Organ Academy and Joel Speerstra decided to begin their ten day conference by focusing on a question that mattered to them all. It mattered, regardless of their diverse cultures, their
varying languages, or the breadth of their individual professional musical
experience: "What are the limits to freedom in music?"

Because of some constraints around the opening event, they had time for
only two sessions of roughly 20 minutes each. There were four Café guests to each table and at the end of the first round, one person moved and three remained. "What happened with this exchange was that the conversation didn't seem to stop at all," Joel said, "And I found it quite remarkable that even though students and teachers were all mixed, everyone had experiences to share, everyone was heard, and even for the professors it was a different sort of forum for exchanging experiences than they normally encountered in their master classes."

Beginning the conference by breaking the standard pattern of information sharing: teacher to student , allowed the Café conversations to flow into subsequent conversations held over the course of the entire event. Because the key question revolved around individual experience of the different behaviors of various instruments, everybody had experiences to share. Again, because of the way the rest of the event was structured, feedback actually happened all week, rather than in a shared feedback session immediately following the Cafés.

"Conversation, because it is such a natural behavior, created an opening
for the week that was, for each of the participants, not in any way a
contrived experience." This Café insight, at least at one table, became a
metaphor for the conversation itself which was reframed to focus on the
difference between "experience" and "behavior" in worship. Liturgy for
instance, can perhaps at its best, be the ongoing behavior of a community, rather than trying to manufacture a specific "worship experience." Café Conversation, likewise, may not at its best be about manufacturing a "conversation experience," but like liturgy, holding the space open for the natural behavior of conversation to happen.

Threaded into the second round of conversation was a deeper understanding of the relationships between different kinds of historical keyboard instruments and the natural gestures they invite because of the various limitations found in the instruments themselves. "There is a World
Café-like dialogue behavior that takes place when music is played," Joel
explained, "A free conversation between the instrument, the literature
written for that instrument and the performance itself."

Some Café learnings:

—People didn't want to stop talking; next time there would be three rounds instead of two.

—While the Café set up the ongoing process of delving deeper throughout the week into the key question and the subsequent questions and sub-themes that it created, there seemed to be a disappointment that in subsequent conversations, the psychological space for holding and deepening the conversation wasn't there. People assumed and hoped the initial level would continue, but without the Café structure which allowed participants to concentrate on that particular question and nothing else, Joel's observation was that the later conversations more readily dissipated.

—Acoustics are very important to Café settings; the Smarano tables were
far enough apart in a large space so that other conversations weren't
intrusive. Don't choose a room with really live acoustics.

—Another time, Joel would like to begin and end the event with Cafes,
bookending the question, so to speak, and allowing the intervening insights to be integrated and shared at the small tables.

The Smarono Café proved to me and to many in attendance that people are so hungry for meaningful conversation, for a space in which it's OK to speak "from the heart."

Joel Speerstra is a musician and occasional World Cafe host.