Virtuosity
Sonya Lifschitz, Music
Virtuosity is a dynamic, embodied dialogue between maker-performer, material, and context.
It thrives not on speed or precision alone, but in the capacity to destabilise tradition through a rigorous interrogation of method, meaning, and form.
Here, sound is not a product but a proposition—an invitation to listen as a radical act of co-authorship.
It is not merely mastery over a medium, but a deep inhabiting of its evolving potential.
Virtuosity demands continuous renegotiation at the edge of practice, where facility and imagination converge to reveal ever more distilled articulations of the work.
Clare Britton, Visual Artist
In response to Sonya Lifschitz
I have understood virtuosity as being very, very good at something.
Sonya Lifschitz and the piano.
Sonya’s definition gets at something deeper than mastery, and it holds the door open. Considering “the edge of practice”, the “distilled articulations”, and “embodied dialogue between maker-performer, material, and context”. Within her definition, I see space for artists I admire who have a deep uncertainty that animates their work.
Sonya’s definition considers the hard-to-name things that happen when a performance works, when something takes place between performers, materials and context and uncertainties coalesce into something bigger and shared. Hard to put into words, but if you’ve ever been in a theatre and held your breath at the same time as a group of people, you know it.
Paying attention to a river has been a big part of my work and isn’t something you can really develop virtuosity in. Walking has a rich tradition, but it’s such an everyday skill that it doesn’t have a virtuosic nature. Sonya’s definition also allows space for collaboration with a body of water, with the scholarship of other writers, artists, and thinkers, with Country, and with the longer, deeper rhythms and histories of this Bidjigal land. The point of her definition is that virtuosity is about what happens when a work becomes more than the sum of its parts.
Such a productive and generous definition of the term and something to keep working for, hoping for an appreciating when we see it.