Violinist vs. Egregore. Friend or Foe?

The concept of the egregore was discovered by the Hittites. It’s most common definition is “group thought”, in which the collective energy generated by a number of people thinking the same thing conjures up a metaphysical entity which is capable of modifying the behavior of those around it. The term derives from ancient Greek and means “he who has been awakened”.

It’s thus an ancient power in a modern world, but egregores have never been stronger then they are today. They gain their influence through communication, be it subliminal, person-to-person, text-messaged, internet, televised, etc. and communication is now more developed than ever before in history. The more people are thinking the same thing, the more powerful that egregore becomes, and we live in the global village now.

Egregores have two major effects on human beings. The first is that people can be conditioned, within a group, to do things they would not if taken as individuals. This applies to everything from stampeding crowds to social volunteer work, from army combat to a bidding run at an auction, from panic on the stock market to marketing fads. Oscar Wilde put his finger on it when he said that “fashion is so intolerable that it has to be changed every six months”. Fashion egregores working for this or that designer often make us buy things we don’t even like, but hey, they’re trendy, right?

The second effect is the one that most directly concerns us here. A crowd cheering a football team to victory, actually helps it obtain that victory, through influence over concentration and adrenalin. Imagine a stand-up comic in Las Vegas, playing one night to a crowd of Obama supporters and the next night to a crowd of McCain supporters. The mood of the audience will be different, and this difference will undoubtably reflect on the quality of the performance itself. Likewise, a warm, well-disposed, appreciative audience will help you play your solo Bach better. A nervous, non-attentive audience probably will not.

As players, we all have our own egregores, and the great soloist will have a potent one to serve him or her. It will convince people to travel distances to stand in line to attend a concert, and will create great expectations, which usually means at the end of the concert that people are convinced they heard great music even when, well, perhaps it wasn’t that great. A typical trait of an egregore is in fact that it tries to convince you to abandon rationality and simply believe, and the less individuals are rationally-inclined or knowledgeable, the more susceptible they will be to it’s influence. Concertogoers who heard Paganini in person actually claimed to have smelled brimstone when he appeared on stage, that’s how diabolically effective Paganini’s egregore was.

This however is a double-edged sword. Your egregore owes you nothing and cares about your well-being about as much as the planet Neptune does. The stronger it becomes, the more dangerous it will be. If I were to have a memory slip in a Bach solo passage and make a mess, no one would take notice, because as a violinist my egregore is pretty well non-existent to say the least. But if, say, Itzak Perlman did, you’d read about it in the papers. And a few bad reviews in a row can spell the beginning of the end even for the greatest soloist, if it starts to shake his or her self-confidence.

As a musician, the first step in doing something about this is accepting and understanding the concept of the egregore itself to begin with. With that behind you, you’ll be able to concentrate on trying to manage it and make it work for you.

I thought I’d share this with you because the egregore is one of the subjects of the marketing class I teach at the Stradivari Institute, within the context of the principles of the rational vs. the emotional. The egregore is one of those everyday forces that no one seems to really notice, yet they shape our existence in just about every possible way, from the food we eat to the car we drive. Define the problem and you’re halfway there to solving it.

But I’ll step aside now and let those members of violinist.com who play publicly more often then I do to share their views and suggestions, should they desire to.

Dimitri Musafia

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