The article is based on material from a series of Dialogue Seminars conducted with teachers at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm. Descriptions of processes within the master/apprentice relationships serve as an empirical base for further reflections on the nature of practical knowledge and how practical and artistic judgement can be developed.

Problems of performance cannot always be attacked head-on by discussing them directly, so a linguistic circumvention of the problem often takes place. The creation of a language agreement where metaphors and figures acquire a situation-bound meaning is an example of this kind of circumvention. This situational language agreement is created within a field of tension between teacher and student. The teachers’ judgmental process of how and when to use language within this tension field is seen as a general example of a practitioners internal balancing in the actual moment of performance. The article argues that personal judgement involves an ability to balance several incompatible extremes of approach. To gain an overview of the forces affecting a practitioner, it may be helpful to see the practitioner as handling an array of mutually exclusive poles. The image of ‘paradoxical fields’ is offered as an expression of the practitioner’s movement between these poles. Examples of paradoxical fields include planning/spontaneity in a musical performance, breadth/depth in a students’ development and the tension between lyrics and music of a song.