When Everyone Manages, No One Manages

In many ensembles, nobody is officially responsible for recordings, scores, or working files. Each person records on their own, jots down their own corrections, stores their documents wherever they like. This horizontal approach makes sense — but without a shared structure, it produces invisible chaos. And a substitute musician who arrives for the first time feels it immediately.

The invisible chaos

The problem is not immediately obvious. At first the ensemble functions because everyone remembers. You know that Pierre recorded the March 14th rehearsal, that the corrected score is in Marie's phone, and that Julien found the right tempo on YouTube.

But this knowledge exists entirely in people's heads. It is nowhere else. And as soon as a musician is absent, goes on holiday, or leaves the ensemble — part of the collective memory disappears with them.

The symptoms appear gradually: recordings that can no longer be found, contradicting versions of scores, rehearsals where work already done is repeated because nobody remembers where a piece was left off.

Why appointing a "responsible person" is not enough

The instinctive solution is to name someone: a secretary, an archivist, a digital coordinator. That fixes the problem in the short term. But it creates another one: dependence on a single person.

When that musician misses a rehearsal, the files are not up to date. When they leave the ensemble, everything starts from zero again. And often, that person ends up feeling alone in carrying something that should belong to the whole group.

The challenge is not finding the right person. It is building a system where everyone can contribute without anyone having to carry everything alone.

Participatory democracy applied to the repertoire

In a group that works well horizontally, contribution is naturally distributed. Each person brings what they can, when they can: a recording captured on a phone, an annotation on a score, a link to a reference version found online.

The problem is not that contributions are missing. It is that they have nowhere to land together. Each musician enriches their own copy. The group, however, does not advance.

Imagine the opposite model: one record per piece, visible and editable by all. Each musician can deposit what they have captured — a rehearsal recording, a video they found, a tempo annotation. No permission needed, no need to go through anyone. The group accumulates collective knowledge with every individual contribution.

• Paul records the rehearsal from his phone → he adds it directly to the piece's record
• Sophie finds a perfect live version for phrasing → she adds it as a reference
• Marc notes the correction at bar 32 → it is visible to everyone from the next rehearsal onwards

Everyone remains autonomous. But contributions accumulate in the same place. That is the difference between a group working in parallel and a group working together.

What this changes for substitutes

The arrival of a new musician is the ultimate test of an organisational system. If the repertoire exists only in the heads of long-standing members, integrating a substitute is a long and frustrating process — for them and for everyone else.

With a shared, collectively enriched repertoire, it is a different story. The substitute has access to everything from day one:

• Recordings of recent rehearsals to hear where the group stands
• Scores with corrections already annotated
• Reference videos for each piece
• Structure and tempo notes

They can work alone before even the first rehearsal. They arrive prepared. And the group can move forward without stepping back to bring them up to speed on three months of work.

It is also a form of respect: the collective work accumulated on a piece does not restart from zero with every line-up change. It remains, available, ready to be passed on.

Taking action without reinventing everything

The transition to a shared repertoire requires no revolution. It begins with a simple decision: choose a common place where contributions land, and stick to it.

The rest follows naturally. When musicians see that their contributions are visible, accessible, and used by others — they continue. The habit builds itself, because it is useful to everyone, not just the person doing the archiving.