The advances of digital technologies have opened up new possibilities for music performance. Through the Internet, our performances can reach audiences beyond geographical barriers. Not confined to a specific time and place, individual listeners can experience concerts at their convenience, from wherever they are.
However, with those possibilities, online concerts also bring challenges regarding one of the most precious aspects of live music: its ability to bring people together.
How can we feel ‘being part’ of a music experience which we are watching remotely, many times with no interaction with the performers nor other audience members?
In the experience of the music as an invitation project, explorations of participatory ideas for the audience can greatly help to build this bridge in the digital context.
As a participant of the music as an invitation project said:
I'm grateful to have met inspiring people during this process of creating music together. Even though each of us joined this process almost from another end of the world, I felt close and connected to other participants while exploring curiously together what music means to us.
For me, as a performing musician, the experiences of developing participatory projects have brought challenges, but also new and gratifying perspectives for my practice.
Among the challenges, there was the stepping out of the usual ‘introverted pianist character’ and sending out invitation. There was also the opening of ‘my’ space of creativity to other people, and trying to build honest and meaningful interaction despite the layers of technology and physical distance among ourselves.
For months, instead of the usual intense dedication to piano practice, most of my work consisted of engaging with people and managing the many practical aspects of the participatory process. I could not help the rise of some doubts in my head such as:
- ’where is the artist’ in this new collaborative context?
Then, I realised that, instead of loosing the ‘artist-I’, she was actually gaining new horizons. It was as if the ‘I’ was amplifying to the point of becoming ‘we’, and this process was infused with affection and liveliness.
‘We’ is the result of an ‘I’ that opened up (that opened up to what she is not), that expanded, placed herself outside, expanded herself.[1]
As the composer Alwynne Pritchard has commented that Hecate Writes ‘is in essence a framework for the girls to be free to explore their creativity. In a sense, a space for them to be’, I could now also see my role as a performer under a new light: to offer frameworks for music experience to happen.
As White delineates, ‘people who invite participation are making art when they do so'.[2]
The practices of audience participation temporarily re-shape our social being, (...) and perhaps, on occasion, allow us to perceive ourselves anew.[3]
The online collaborative process also gave me the opportunity to engage in rich dialogues with women from different locations and life contexts, and build relationships throughout the collaborative process - something could not have possibly to happened if we were in a traditional set up. Resonating with the experience of one of the participants:
For me, the best part of this project was to met women from many countries around the world and be connected with them through music.
The experience of these participatory online concerts revealed the diffusion of single authorship into collaborative activities. And, more than offering singular artistic experiences, participatory art indeed works towards constructive social change.[4]
This volume was therefore written with the aim of being a useful and practical tool to other artists and producers who are interested in exploring participatory online concerts.
In this book I shared the step-by-step experience of putting together the participatory online music performances of the music as an invitation project. The idea of this volume is be to an exchange of learnings from a very specific project, with modest infrastructure and small-scale audience reach, which, nevertheless, made a lasting positive impact on the participants - myself included.
[1] MACÉ, Marielle, Isadora Bonfim Nuto, and Marcelo Jacques de Moraes. 2023. Nossas Cabanas : Lugares de Luta, Ideias Para a Vida Em Comum. Rio de Janeiro: Bazar Do Tempo.
[2] WHITE, Gareth. 2013. Audience Participation in Theatre: Aesthetics of the Invitation. London: Palgrave Macmillan. P. 195
