For the past few years, the practice of sharing concerts through the Internet has been growing considerably. From YouTube premieres to Instagram Lives and platforms dedicated to streaming the programme of major concert halls, individual musicians and big institutions have been exploring ways to share music in the digital domain.

This increase of interest in online concerts was particularly experienced between 2020 and 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic. With the restrictions to social gatherings to contain the spread of the Coronavirus, and many concert halls and other music performance venues being closed, many performers (including myself) turned their attention to the possibility of presenting their music performance through the Internet.

Besides being an alternative for that particular moment, we could notice some positive possibilities offered by digital concerts. For example, they can reach further audiences, and allow for multimedia explorations.

However, online concerts can also negatively affect one of the essential aspects of the live music experience: the relationship between performer(s) and audience.

In my own experience of the online concerts I gave during that time, I could not help missing a feeling of connection - although I knew that my spectators where there ‘at the other side of the screen’ and we would even interact via chat, I could not feel that we were together. 

I asked myself:

- what can we do to bring up a feeling of being together when we are experiencing a concert remotely?

Then, reflecting on how to address this question, I carried on asking:

- if we invite the audience to participate in the creation of an online concert, how would the participatory proposal make an impact on the experience of music through the Internet?

- would the interpersonal relations and affective aspect from the participatory process help us feel more connected when watching our concert remotely?

From those questions, my postdoctoral research project was born: music as an invitation - liveness in digital piano performances through participating audiences.^[1] 

In this 2-year practice-based research project, I invited participants to join me in online workshops to create online concerts collaboratively.

For the first year of project, the invitation was aimed exclusively to adult participants who self-identified as women. I then had a group of 14 women from 7 countries, who met monthly through video-conferences, for around 7 months. The participants themselves decided how they wanted to develop the creative process, and how they wanted to present the final result of this collaboration. The online concert resultant of this process was a collage of the material produced by the participants throughout the project. This collaborative concert received the title music as an invitation (year 1: 2023-2024), and it was presented as a YouTube premiere on the 6th April 2024.

In the second year of the project, the invitation was focused to teenage girls ages 13 to 17 years old. I had a group of 6 girls from 4 countries. The participatory process with these girls lasted for approximately 4 months, with the aim of realising a piece of music that composer Alwynne Pritchard wrote specifically for this project. The participants had some specific tasks to achieve for this piece, which involved them writing creative texts, interacting with each other’s materials, exploring the sounds of objects of their everyday lives, and recording short videos. Thereafter, the material produced by the participants integrated a piece for video and piano called Hecate writes, which was performed in a live-streamed concert titled rsvp: piano, toy piano, electronics, and actions on the 28th March 2025 at the Grieg Academy, in Bergen, Norway.

This short handbook will share the learnings from these participatory concerts, which were developed as part of the music as an invitation project.

Using these two concerts as case studies, I will attempt to briefly present the basic steps on putting together participatory online concerts. I will also discuss some relevant points to be observed during those steps, drawing specifically from my experience in the music as an invitation project.

The aim of this book is primarily to offer insights for the production of artistic works: online concerts. Therefore, I have tried to trim out jargon and elements that are more pertinent to academic contexts. However, since the experiences narrated here have come from online concerts which were part of a research project, sometimes some academic tone may emerge, incidentally.

As it is reasonably common in practice-based projects, the roles of artist and research leader were blended in the music as an invitation project. Also, in participatory works, sometimes the roles of artist and facilitator are combined. Taking this into consideration, here in this book I used those terms interchangeably. Although this blending of the roles of artist, project leader, and facilitator may not be appropriate for some projects, here it expresses the context of my activities in the music as an invitation project.

Regarding the participatory focus of this book, it is fairly understandable that, any performance, intrinsically, involves audience participation. As Gareth White highlights, ‘without participation performance would be nothing but action happening in the presence of other people’.^[2]

Indeed, for a work to be a work of art - be it a piece of music, a theatre play, or a painting, for example - the listener / spectator / viewer must actively make sense of it in their minds:

... works of art aren’t received like a package sent from heaven; rather, you only get raw material and need to complete the work of art within yourself.^[3]

However, in this book we will focus on concerts where the audience is tangibly involved in the music-making process. This means that, in this case, the criteria for audience participation, includes a creative contribution to the realisation of the music content and/or to the production of the concert.

Participatory performance is defined here as a form where the audience is able to affect material changes in the work in a way that goes beyond the inherent interactivity in all live performance.^[4]

Also, here I differentiate between participatory and interactive works. For the purposes of this book, I am seeing ‘interaction’ as the proposal to do some kinds of exchanges with the artwork,^[5] while ‘participation’ relates to ‘involving the audience in the creative process, transforming them into active participants’.^[6]

While works that fit more into the ‘interactive’ category also can be seen as involving audience participation, in this book I will focus on proposals which offer the audience a greater degree of active engagement, indeed creatively contributing to the work^[7] - be it a piece of music or the online concert as a whole.

It is relevant to note that the experiences that provide the basis for this book were indeed small-scale in terms of the number of participants. Also, they involved the use of reasonably affordable infrastructure, as well as requiring average Internet-user level of technological knowledge.

This considered, this book has no intention of being comprehensive, nor a timeless guide. Rather, this volume can be seen as a glimpse into situated experiences on putting together participatory online concerts. And this is a topic, which, by its very nature, is in rapid and constant evolution.

My aim is that this volume can contribute to other curious and adventurous artists and producers who are interested in exploring creative ways to share music with their audiences. Here, we are experimenting with the possibilities offered by the digital domain, challenging its limitations by involving people in the action of making music even though remotely, and, ultimately, to do what music does best: bring people together.

Introduction

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1

Conclusion

References

Acknowledgements