The Absence of Audience in Virtual Music

Of Musical Contagion on the Occasion of Earth World Collaborative’s “Be There” Virtual Concert

By Gerald Ens

Introduction: Presence, Resonance, and Virtual Choirs

I learned of Eric Whitacre’s virtual choir, now in its second decade of existence, from my choir director during my undergrad at Canadian Mennonite University. She was appalled. “Choir is about community, about listening to and learning from one another!” Granted, proponents of the virtual choir would probably say that community – singing together – is precisely what the virtual choir offers, only that it also extends this community globally, so that emplacement and physical presence (and singing ability: the final mix can always turn down to a negligible volume less talented singers[1]) need not interfere with my ability to connect musically with others. But here lies the virtual choir’s worst offence: it not only does away with community, mutual listening, and musical connection, but it provides a powerfully deceptive semblance of these things while in fact undermining their foundations.

Every chorister knows the kind of work that goes into singing well together: with your ears you slowly train your voice – indeed, the full motion of your body – to the sound of those around you, submitting the movement of your embodied sound to theirs even as they join with you.[2] As one of my choir directors frequently put it, “listen louder than you sing.” Breath joins breath to become one, given over and perfectly responsive to the demands of the song being rehearsed or performed. If its members are well-disciplined in the art of singing and have sung together often, a choir can start a song precisely in sync, even without a director’s cue. (The more I learn about human communication and embodied sociality, the more I suspect that even choristers’ heartbeats become synchronous as the sound from their voices blends and unifies, so connected do a choir’s bodies become.) This embodied being-in-tune with other people is what makes being part of a choir so pleasurable and so powerful; it is, if I may make so bold, a nod towards the redemption of our flesh. The book of Revelation depicts the redeemed church singing its praise to the slain lamb.

The virtual choir purports to provide this connection.[3] And it fails. For it lacks these practices of mutual musical subordination– of letting myself and my sounding body resonate with another’s – and these practices are integral to choral community.[4] Our voices cannot inhabit each other in common breath without the ongoing corporate and corporeal work of building into one another.[5]

***

This essay attempts to name how significant it is that the audience is absent in virtual performances. Virtual choir is not the same as a virtual performance; but they connect at the crucial points of presence and resonance. In what follows, I elaborate on these two terms via an examination of how an audience participates in a musical performance in ways that are integral to musical performance itself. My argument is that an audience’s literal bodily presence with performers makes possible the literal resonance of the performers’ music in audience members’ bodies. Such resonance with present bodies coinheres with and enables the kind metaphorical presence and resonance that separates music from brute noise. This happens as performer and audience share in the music and in so doing share in one another. I present three different aspects of this sharing: how the musician shares her work with the audience, shares in the pleasure of music with her audience, and shares in an investment in the music with her audience.

The Covid-19 pandemic has shuttered most possibilities of physically-present live performances, and I by no means wish to critique artists for doing their best with limited options in trying times. However, the shift from in-person to virtual concerts is momentous and devastating, and at Earth World we worry that musicians and audiences alike, in an effort to make the most of what’s available, have not sufficiently reckoned with this. That musicians of all stripes feel and grieve the lack of an audience we do not doubt, but such grief may be hard to account for in a culture which so depreciates our embodied relationality (it has, after all, celebrated virtual choirs for more than a decade). This essay thus strives to give voice and legitimation to the musician’s grief over the loss of her audience.

Shared Work

The difference that a present and resonant audience makes for a musical performance is perhaps most obvious in the importance we place in sharing our work with others. It feels good for one’s hard work to be noted, appreciated, and enjoyed.

If this point is easy to see and common to our experience, its legitimacy may be harder to perceive. The seductive image of the solitary and heroic artist tells us something like this: ‘while we all crave appreciation and glory for the work we do, the mark of the real artist is to become so true to his[6] work and his vision that he no longer suffers for an audience or a lack of one; his devotion to the art itself makes him impervious to the trivial matter of other people.’ There is a glimmer of truth to this sentiment. An obsession with popularity, numbers, and appreciation is indeed craven. And it is a gross error to equate sheer popularity with quality, creativity, skill, depth, goodness, or truth. We are right, in short, to be suspicious of the self-absorbed artist who cares far more about the glory he receives than about the work of art he creates.

These legitimate points can, however, easily hide the fact that art is made to be shared. A certain kind of vulnerability to audience and reception is part of the very logic of musical creation and performance. Notice the similarity between the two artists in the previous paragraph – the one obsessed with popularity and the other with his art – in regard to their self-centeredness. Both perform a withdrawal from the world in their artistic pursuits. But if intentionally crafted sound is not to fall upon attentive ears, what purpose at all does it have?

We humans labour in order to be of use to ourselves and others, so that we can live well (or at least survive) together.[7] Likewise, we learn freedom not by severing our obligations to one another and becoming autonomous but by learning how to be of service to and receive from one another; freedom is about finding our place among others, which is why it is always a matter of gift or grace.

The idea that work is or ought to be a mode of self-fulfillment and self-expression, in abstraction from what our labour actually does for ourselves and others, is a disabling ideology of late-capitalism; it constitutes a moral exhortation to narcissism that splinters community and worker solidarity and leaves us alienated from others who must become subservient to our (dreams of) ‘authentic’ self-expression.[8] Investment in the value of work itself, considered apart from what it does and for whom, only further locks us into solitary loneliness.[9] Good work, in contrast, provides the opportunity to contribute to others’ lives, to do what needs to be done, and thereby to learn community through the skills and dispositions of cooperating with and relying upon each other.

If we take away from the work of art its usefulness to other people, it is to its poverty, not its exaltation. Of course, art also exceeds sheer utility: my point is not to reduce worth to practicality, but to point to the standing that art has in human living and human community; music will not often manufacture something or make something happen, but, to use Jeffrey Bilbro’s words, “it is a way of happening, a way of talking and living and sustaining community.”[10] Art is good work because of the way it can speak, what it can reveal, the impact it can make upon us in the present and in the future, and the emotions into which it can draw us. Most importantly, art is ‘of service’ because it is how we live; a certain musicality touches every aspect of our lives together and apart. And, I will add, this argument about art being in service to community does not diminish the importance of honesty and artistic integrity; indeed, these items derive from an artist’s responsibility to community, for they are only relevant issues for someone who has something to say or perform to another.[11]

In one of his great essays on artistic creation and aesthetics, Maurice Merleau-Ponty elaborates on how art belongs to the lived history of the world, writing that “expression must go from person to person across the common world that they live.”[12]  Merleau-Ponty’s point here is not only that artistic expression must have a receiver of one kind or another in order to be expression, but also that we always receive and draw our expression from others. The author and poet receive language from the particular worlds of which they are part; the painter does not seek to represent brute reality, but works within a world of culturally influenced and corporeally oriented perception, seeking to live a communication with this world. Likewise, we may posit, the musician receives and is drawn into a world of human and more-than-human sound, assembled for her indebted, and only thereby authentic, re-assemblage.

The artist is not self-originating but belongs to the material of her world. This material is not simply raw matter for the artist to use: it only appears to the artist as part of a world and thus is always already full of meaning.[13] It is oriented, has names, associations, uses or the lack thereof, and most foundationally presents itself as something meaningfully different from the artist, something that she encounters in difference. To be sure, this belonging is no passive thing, for this difference and encounter relies on the artist also offering and asserting her own difference. Merleau-Ponty calls this a “labor of manifestation” that is in fundamental continuity with our perception, which always takes place within a world and is thus also “the invention of a world.”[14] This is why, for Merleau-Ponty, “the idea of complete expression [or a finished work of art] is nonsensical”: artistic creation is always ‘in process’ because belonging to the world is not a state one might achieve but an ongoing activity, a lived relationship-in-difference that is our being; sense and meaning emerge within the architecture of a linguistic (and musical) world that we continually inhabit and lend ourselves to.[15] Thus, to say that music belongs to and has its genesis in the world is to say that it belongs to the human relation to the earth, to both belonging and estrangement, such that in my musical expression I strive to “create a path between my life and that of others.”[16]

I can now address an objection some may have had to my argument thus far: the simple fact that many people make music in solitude and presumably have done so for millennia. It certainly still counts as music when someone plays or practices music in solitude. Indeed, many can give themselves more freely to the music they play when alone in an empty space.

However, in such cases of solitary music-making I am still taking up a world of music that I have received in relation to the world. Being in solitude is itself a relational phenomenon. “I can certainly cease to be a part of society,” Merleau-Ponty notes, “but I cannot cease to be situated in relation to it.”[17] There is a sense in which solitary musical performances still points towards audience and its importance; that is, the power of this music made in solitude rests in its relational origin and destination.

This is no abstract argument, but core to our experiences of making music and the significance of music to our lives. Consider Simone Weil’s keen observation that “when you are given true affection there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship.”[18] Weil indeed posits that we only find true solitude in relationship; there is solitude only in the triune relationship that we call God, such that “relationship is the fulness of being.”[19] In an essay penned during the Covid 19 pandemic on solitude and art, James Smith observes the flipside of Weil’s point by way of reference to the Buddhist Sutta Nipata (which Weil would have been well versed in): “The creature concealed inside its cell— a man sunk in dark passions is a long, long way from solitude.” Smith then cites Montaigne effectively: “Ambition, covetousness, indecisiveness, fear, and desires hardly abandon us just because we change address.”[20] Hence the experience of many who like to make music (and this would hold true for many other artistic forms), where the only thing more freeing than making music by oneself is making music alongside the truly intimate other.

Smith expands on this by illustrating how the kind of solitude essential to making art is “a surrender to fascination—a retreat that is nonetheless turned to the world.” [21] In other words, we arrive at solitude in cultivating a high quality of intimacy with the world, and the art we make is vulnerable to the world not only because it arises out of that intimacy but because it reflects and seeks to evoke in the viewer or listener that same quality of intimacy. Arising from, calling forth, and seeking out intimacy, art is “an open risk, looking for an end in communion…. The artist loves the world by retreating from it.”[22]

Here are some ways to connect this argument to the everyday, tangible experiences of performers and audiences. For one, there is a sense in which I am the audience when I make music alone: there is no point in making this music if I remain unmoved by it. Understanding the performer’s body as a sort of specially attuned audience helps us also to see why it is that performers are often even more moved than an audience. There is also the fact that many musicians, from the most casual to the professional, often find their drive to make music enervated if they are too long divorced from any sort of audience or community that will hear and participate in their music. This doesn’t happen to everyone, but I suspect that each of us know many once enthusiastic musicians who now lament that they ‘hardly ever play any more.’ Could the absence of a prospective audience be partially responsible for this condition? Consider further the person who lives in fear of submitting her music to the ‘hearing’ of others: this fear of rejection is the fear that people will not share in the music with the performer-as-audience and thus this fear itself marks the importance of audience. In any case, the concern of this essay is not with people playing music on their own (a reality that I celebrate, though it is also worth noting how unthinkably, impossibly impoverished the world would be if all people who made music only did so in solitude) but with virtual performances, with music that musicians deliberately make public even as they (having today very little recourse) exclude audience from this public performance.

It is, in sum, part of music’s very logic to be given a ‘hearing’ (of one kind or another) in the world. This is what distinguishes it from the brute sound waves of, for example, earth’s prehistory. Merleau-Ponty’s words are worth quoting yet again: “The work that gets accomplished is thus not the work which exists in itself like a thing, but the work which reaches its viewer and invites him to take up the gesture which created it.”[23] If performing music is not to be self-defeating, then it is right for the musician to crave an audience with which to share her music.

Shared Pleasure

When the receiving, resonant bodies of a present audience respond in pleasure to a musician’s music, the musician is not only right to feel gratified, but frequently responds with a pleasure of her own. In so doing, the performer and audience together share in the pleasure of that particular music and also in the pleasure of sharing pleasure itself.

We live in a time when authorities tell us to distinguish firmly between social distancing and physical distancing, and so we need a reminder that it is tremendously pleasurable to share in pleasure with others and that such sharing is thoroughly of the body. For example, sharing bodily in something funny exponentially magnifies the hilarity. Laughter takes on a life of its own in a group with resonant others (with comedians suffering an even worse fate than musicians during the pandemic), swelling with a life of its own and compelling response. Laughter is contagious, as is well-demonstrated by the popular early-adolescent activity (in my circles at least) of lying down in a chain of heads upon bellies; one person starts a (forced, at first) laugh and soon everyone is laughing uncontrollably.

There is a similar phenomenon with grief. Solidarity in grief and pain has a way of at once relieving grief’s bitterness while deepening the grief itself, along with its healing power. Grief isolates, which is why the grieving need space: in which they can be present with each other, and perhaps more importantly, where others can become present in compassion to them. Again, it is hard to overstate the importance of bodily proximity here. Much of ‘being with’ someone in great anguish will simply involve sitting with her and offering the comforts of tender touch, as well as responding to bodily cues and opportunities as they arise in the context of one’s bodily proximity – facial expression when dropping off food (which masks obscure). We might describe such sensitive proximity as a matter of posture of body and spirit, each co-emerging with, informing, and enabling the other. Such solidarity not only manifests in but emerges from presence and contact, one’s body and bodily presence acting as a capacity and source for understanding, solidarity, and compassionate resonance. Robert Pogue Harrison indeed suggests that “it was perhaps through grief that the human voice gained its first articulations,” for it is by submitting “the emotive spontaneity of grief” to “an interpersonal nexus of participation” that grief gains a voice and becomes something we can process.[24] As part of the same argument, Harrison explains why “we may safely assume…that the human voice sang before it spoke”: the spontaneity of passion finding meaning and expression in relational resonance, a communication of our acoustic relationality itself.[25]

An extended observation by Merleau-Ponty on what happens in an engaged conversation illustrates this theme effectively.

It is said that the recording of a conversation which had seemed brilliant later gives the impression of poverty. The presence of those who were speaking, the gestures, the physiognomies, and the feeling of an event which is taking place and of a continuous improvisation, all are lacking in the recording. Henceforth the conversation no longer exists; it is, flattened out in the unique dimension of sound and all the more disappointing because this wholly auditory medium is that of a text read.[26]

The pleasure of a conversation, in other words, is far more than the bare sum of its parts. It creates its own being of expression: the pleasure of together participating in a common creation, which lasts only as long as the two interlocuters are in dialogue with each other, and of sharing in that pleasure. Sharing in expression joins us into what Merleau-Ponty elsewhere calls “a single fabric.” As he elaborates, “the objection which my interlocutor raises to what I say draws from me thoughts which I had no idea I possessed, so that at the same time that I lend him thoughts, he reciprocates by making me think too…. My words and those of my interlocutor are called forth by the state of the discussion.” The other ceases to be an object and becomes my collaborator as “our perspectives merge,” this elevating experience only enhanced by participation in the other’s elevation.[27] This phenomenon of bodily co-inherence is so irreducible to the mere exchange of information as to be foreign to it.

It is simply no fun to perform music without an audience. Listening to good music is pleasurable and sharing this pleasure enhances it. Typically, when someone has just heard a great song, her first impulse will be to show someone else, to share together in the pleasure of that new music and its discovery. Likewise, many performers report feeding off of an audience’s energy, only it is a ‘feeding’ that does not deplete but loops back to the audience, adding immeasurably to a performance (what we might metaphorically describe as an added presence or resonance). This is no mere pleasant byproduct of music and musical performance, but this shared presence to and pleasure in music is integral to music’s ongoing genesis. Bodily presence and resonance are key for such a loop of energy, for bodies attune to each other and the music at the level of (mostly) unconscious gesture. Consider how while attending a sporting event, your body can be so in tune with the moment that it is only after you start cheering or booing, after you have risen from your seat, that you become aware of your actions.

At twenty-first century classical music concerts, it is often less obvious to the outside observer when an audience is truly engaged. But performers report that they can gauge an audience’s attention. The most prominent sign is an audience’s silence: the more silent the audience, the more engaged they tend to be; after the piece is done, people hold their breath, afraid to break the silence. The performance, as the saying goes, takes your breath away. T.S. Eliot gives voice to this experience of being so wrapped up in a performance, calling it “music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all, but you are the music, While the music lasts.”[28] The music transfers into the audience’s bodies. (The attempt to artificially create this experience happens when conductors hold the cut-off for far longer than is necessary, trying to create an extraordinary moment, but audiences detect this nonsense instantly.) This moment, when the music extends into the silence that follows, simply cannot happen during a rehearsal or a recording (unless the performers themselves or a sound engineer unexpectedly become audience[29]).

In one recent incident, a child broke this “pin-drop” silence by exclaiming “wow!”[30] Both audience members and performers experienced this moment as something special, with many observing that it was the perfect recognition of a remarkable performance. The orchestra’s CEO describes it as “one of the most wonderful moments I’ve experienced in the concert hall.”[31] The child’s grandfather later identified the nine-year-old as a great lover of music, and as someone who, being on the autism spectrum, had perhaps five times before this “spontaneously ever come out with some expression of how he’s feeling.”[32] This child’s ‘wow’ not only underscores and expresses the experience of concert goers and performers at a remarkable performance, it also gives voice in a new way to the relationship between performer and audience, displaying and enacting their mutual intunement with each other.

In contrast, the absence of an audience (or a disappointingly small audience or an audience that is literally present but inattentive or otherwise not ‘resonant’) at the end of an awesome performance can make an impact rather like a punch to the gut. Such a performance calls out for the child’s ‘wow.’ There is a great emptiness to creating something immensely powerful and not then being able to share in that power and pleasure with others.

We cannot extricate music – melody, rhythm, and tone –from the bodily matrix in which our consciousness is birthed: of sounding language (harsh and lovely), smiling (or disapproving) faces, and tender (or rough) touch. In her searing and beautiful ethnographic account of the Canadian Inuit, Lisa Stevenson uses the term ‘song’ for those “forms of recognition that [do] not depend on knowing the ‘truth’ about – or fixing the identity of – another person.”[33] Observing that “our physical life depends at least in part on our linguistic life – that is, that we must be called in order to be, that every human is vulnerable to not being called” – she describes how “a particular kind of attention, figured by song, can make space for the existence of another, and thus in a certain sense call that other into being.”[34] This is how we are in relation to each other, together and apart, weaving and calling forth the stories (and music) of our lives into one another’s bodies, “animating the other.”[35]

“Song” is a way of seeking another or “singing to someone… as company, as a presence.”[36] It means “seeing a human before you (instead of seeing someone as human).”[37] This seeking and being found, giving and receiving, that makes us human (however violent and tragic it can become) is inseparable from the great joy of being together in love. Consider, for example, how sex only ‘works’ (as anything other than masturbation with another object) when both partners are experiencing pleasure and can take pleasure in the other’s pleasure. “If you get deep you touch my mind / Baptize your tears and dry your eyes,” sings Beyoncé in a joyous reverie of sexual reconciliation.[38] During the pandemic, many have rediscovered from their balconies how music, performed in mutual presence to one another, calls forth community.[39] So also, the bodily gift of a musical performance is a pleasure designed for the mutuality of bodily response.

Shared Purchase

The presence of a gathered audience and their resonant bodies gathers together many different activities and moments wherein the audience can buy into the performers and the music, acts of investment which performers then reciprocate. This mutual purchase that audience and performer offer to the music via one another helps to increase and focus the commitment and attention one gives to the music, thereby enhancing the resonance of that music.

Different cultures and occasions will have different types of musical investment, but a few common examples are worth mentioning. There is of course the act of gathering itself, making the effort to be at a performance (at a time that someone else determines and that all audience members share) and devoting one’s time to it. There is also the remarkable gift of silence and (hopefully) attention. Dancing (unfortunately uncommon for most audiences of classical music) continues to be the embodied gift and participation of a resonant audience to much of the music played around the world. Such investment – the bodily enactment of an audience’s gifts of presence and resonance – matters for both the performer’s and the listener’s ability to participate in the pleasure, beauty, and power of music.

The knowledge of an upcoming concert and one’s commitment to gathering at it also provides and catalyzes further opportunities to open up and attend to a piece of music before and after the event itself. I fondly recall having a discussion with a widely beloved and long-retired choir director (his conducting days – with the exception of the lay church choir! – long behind him) about an upcoming performance of the St. Matthew’s Passion, the retirement concert of his own junior colleague. This is someone who knew the Passion thoroughly. Yet he described enthusiastically how he was carefully studying several different recordings of it (as well as reading biographies of Karl Barth, which somehow he seamlessly worked into the discussion) in anticipation of the event, in order that he might experience what was sure to be a magnificent concert to the fullest extent possible. Many of us will be content to spend a day or two listening to the artist or piece of music we are going to hear live; but even this modest preparation increases our intimacy with the music and our capacity for it to move us. I stress that the upcoming event, which will happen and which therefore we cannot put off, is what inspires this attentive listening. I do not mean here to overly elevate the importance of preparatory listening or indeed any concert preparation. The point is to give just one example of the way that our participation, as audience, in a live concert opens up and calls forth a various array of presence to and resonance with music.

For my part, I find that nothing better prepares me to hear music than having performed a piece. The work of learning a piece well enough to perform it opens my ears to its beauty, magnificence, craft, and coherence (or, less opportunely, its banality). This example crosses over to a related point: the much more substantial ways that the performer invests in the music by practicing and learning it, and also (indirectly but considerably) via the time-consuming work of attaining the bodily-musical skills necessary to learn and practice such music in the first place. The musician learns a piece for performance in response and reciprocation to the (anticipated) gifts associated with an audience’s presence. An audience’s simple yet profound acts of investment into a musical performance lay, as do all gifts, an obligation upon the performer; in this way, this demand calls for and calls forth the performance. We might even say that in some respects the audience precedes the performance and the performer.

I am articulating a vision in which audience and performer require one another’s mutual investment in order for the music to ‘work’ or ‘happen,’ but by no means do I want to place the musician at the slavish demands of her audience. Merleau-Ponty again provides a compelling description of this complex process of mutual purchase, showing that the link that connects two parties at the moment of expression means that the choice between myself and others is a false one. He points outs, for example, that to utterly deny myself for others (i.e., my audience) “would deny them too as selves” through my refusal to engage with them.[40] Art is not flattery, and this is for the sake of the audience’s dignity as well as the artist’s. Instead, Merleau-Ponty writes, “the public [the artist] aims at…is precisely the one which his work will elicit.”[41] The artist’s investment in the art invites a world as part of a perpetual conversation; it reaches out for an audience to come along and participate in that art and thereby discover itself. In this way art is about gathering and building in common, where such shared activity also cultivates a certain kind of solitude and individuality. The artist, Merleau-Ponty argues, “is no more capable of seeing his paintings than the writer is capable of reading his work. It is in others that expression takes on its relief and really becomes signification.”[42] With a receptive audience, the artist can emerge as a distinct individual with style and voice.

In short, audience and performer together offer themselves to a musical performance, the performer’s greater offering making possible the audience’s lesser one. The performer’s work enables the common offering to a piece of music, in which the audience would not otherwise be able to participate. On the flipside, the gift of the audience makes legible the performer’s greater sacrifice in the first place, offering an opportunity for the performer to be of use to her community. This mutual commitment to the music by ‘buying into’ each other creates a kind of resonant capacity between performer and audience, so that a performance can much more effectively come alive with significance.

Part of what creates this sort of significance is the latent possibility that imbues all gatherings: meeting old friends, surprising conversation, riots disrupting the performance, unexpected hugs, an enthusiastic crowd. Each gathering of living bodies is filled with possibility, for bodies can do what we do not expect. The fact that there is almost nothing more jarring for the living than to experience a cadaver close-up illustrates this point. This body which used to contain the capacity to get up to something – maybe it attended a few concerts or even played in a few – can no longer do so, yet it can look exactly like it did when it was getting up to all kinds of things.

Furthermore, when people gather for a similar purpose (like attending a concert), which their presence enacts and displays, it can focus and intensify these possibilities: common commitments and experiences open up people to further experiences of solidarity. Suddenly the person you always find it hard to talk to becomes an engrossing conversation partner. It is a matter of ‘being there.’

Conclusion: Sharing an Image and “Being There”

Earth World is not alone in our attempt to create a meaningful connection to an audience during this pandemic. Most musicians are desperate to reach an audience and people desperately need music right now. What is unusual about Earth World’s approach is that, in bringing an audience into the performance itself, the final production of Earth World’s virtual concert will include performers and collaborating audience-participants onscreen.

I will conclude this paper by asking what it might accomplish to bring an audience into the virtual concert space. Does it redress the concerns in this paper about the absence of audience?

There are a number of ways in which Earth World’s audience-performers will be present. These audience members will, in reality, commit to give their time to perform a listening of the concert. The fact that their listening will be part of the performance holds them accountable to their commitment. The format places particular demands upon audience-participants, including signing up in advance, providing an email, and setting aside a time to give sustained attention to the performance. There is also a measure of accountability: if a person signs up and then does not follow-through, the organizers and performers will know. The format also invites creative and engaged participation: part of the final product will include audience-participants reacting in real time in their own spontaneous performance. Such demand for commitment and participation invests the audience in the performance. I anticipate that because of this, audience members will be much more easily and naturally excited for it, will want it to succeed, will be thinking about it beforehand, and so forth, which will enhance their attention and perception. And the performers’ awareness of this attentive audience will loop back in turn to the performers.

It is worth spending a moment considering how this contrasts with the much lower commitment of the person who wants to and/or says she will listen (attentively) to a virtual concert or recording, but whose listening is not integral to the virtual concert. Such a person can falsely perform their commitment by adding a comment or a like; letting the video play on mute for three seconds still adds a view count. In the case of a live-stream, friends and family can show their support by playing the performance on mute while their device lies on the counter or in another room. It would be unfair to attribute such common actions to a lack of care. We should rather assign blame to the difficulty of virtually attending – of literally lending one’s attention in a virtual context – performance art. Our audio-visual devices and platforms are not neutral media and would not be neutral even if there was not massive profit involved for the companies – Facebook, Apple, etc. – offering the most commonly used technologies. As they are, these technologies are profoundly oriented against the performance, creation, and appreciation of music.[43] Indeed, the difficulty of attending to any sort of performance art on common audio-visual devices encourage those forms of support (meaningless clicks and false view counts) that cut out both the performance and the audience. It is Earth World’s hope that by providing audience members with the opportunity to commit to their presence in our performance, these technological obstacles might be lessened.

At the same time, those who have noted my stress upon the corporeality of performing, listening, and coming together will know already that I think there are many ways in which the audience of this virtual concert will not be present or resonant. Earth World is certainly aware of this gap.

As I have tried to show, the connection between audience and performer (and among the performers and audience members) is a thoroughly bodily joining. In her long-poem, Comma, Jennifer Still plays with the orthographic connections between breath, heart, hear, ear, and create, allowing the relationships between these words to multiply.[44] Still’s fragmentary gestures continually return the reader to the fragile fleshiness that binds our bodies together, to one another, and to the breaking earth. It is, she shows, upon the matrix of these corporeal ligaments that our words hang and emerge, and together with them all emergings and recedings of our (creative) life together.[45]

Throat singing, which often has “no discernible words, just the breath – rhythmic, guttural, staccato – being passed from one body to another,” may be the best auditory analogy to Still’s poem.[46] Lisa Stevenson weaves Inuit throat singing into her use of the term song (which I describe in greater detail above) to show how we can be generously present to one another. She opens her book with the image of two women at a Thanksgiving dinner, exchanging breath and sound, faces almost touching, as they throat sing together: “Buzzing, panting, the older woman’s voice comes in and moves up and down as if plucking the lower rhythm, teasing it almost. The sounds and rhythms pass from body to body, echoing and playing with each other, growling, buzzing, yelping.”[47] This is an act of participating in another, invoking and receiving her, a vivid instantiation of how significance is often less about sheer content and instead about the experience “that someone, an Other – a fleshy material being is speaking or even singing.”[48] Such practices relate closely to the vital human practice of naming, a connection that Stevenson makes via a presentation of the Inuit practice of using grunting sounds and repeated phrases “in a tender, loving voice” in order to create, foster, and communicate intimacy and connection. For example, “an adult will have…a particular string of words [and tone] for a specific child,” ushering her into self and world, into presence and resonance, via profoundly corporeal song.[49]

Our capacity to hear music (as opposed to the inhuman illusion of sound-data) is a matter of being able to corporeally participate in the music via this same network of fleshy ligaments. It involves giving bodily ear and is connected to the corporeal and proximate breath we share with others. It cannot be entirely sundered from the joining of our beating hearts, a joining that is part of the music that welcomes us into the world. The never ending rhythm of our hearts means, as John Cage observed, that there is no true silence: even in a soundproof chamber he heard his heartbeat and the blood coursing in his veins.[50] It also means that when we are physically present with others, we are always in contact with their sounds; our body unconsciously registers and incorporates the sound of the other’s heartbeat and breath, even when other noises make such sounds inaudible. Isaac Villegas perceptively notes that holding worship services over Zoom isn’t “quite church.” Such gatherings are rather “symbolic gestures of community, a simulacrum of communion. At best, these are our digital prayers for the restoration of worship in the flesh.” As he points out, “the images we present of ourselves are designed for the other’s gaze. The ordinary becomes a performance for the camera…. The technology does not allow for the vulnerable reciprocity of eye contact, to behold the fleeting moment when you are beholden – the flicker of mutual knowing. On Zoom, we are onlookers, voyeurs of virtual social relations” which is, I would suggest, no more evident than in the awkwardness of trying to sing together over a virtual platform.[51]

Likewise, there will be no such bodily cues by which audience and performer consciously and unconsciously communicate and connect with one another in Earth World’s “Be There” concert. Our bodies will not harmonize with each other in the audience or with the performers, nor with the music in quite the same say. We will not be immersed into a setting not of our own making without the typical fare of (often virtual) distractions. The experience of being in-rhythm with others and their cascading energy, being in bodily proximity to breath and heart, the instruments of our flesh, will all be absent.

I bring up the fact that Earth World’s audience will in important ways not ‘be there’ not as a critique, but because I believe that the genius of this concert is the way that its prominent and conscious act of bringing the (virtual) audience into the virtual performance names the importance of audience and laments its absence. Some elements of Earth World’s “Be There” concert perform this lament explicitly. Vincent Lauzon’s first sonnet celebrates the resurrecting life we receive in our fleshy presence to music at a concert, cut short by the “deafening song” of the pandemic, which covers us in “dark absence.” Meanwhile, Sarah Ens’s poem takes us through the slow process, wrought upon us by the pandemic, of unfleshing the words and silencing the sounds that mark our connection to one another, simultaneously undoing our sense of self and reality. The opening musical piece, “The Voices of Silence,” declares that “the world is what we see, and at the same time we must learn to see it,” reminding us that when our relations to each other, the world, and ourselves break down it is essential that we re-examine the world, ourselves, and each other. In this piece, text and close-up images move us through a world in an attempt to open up facets of our own world that we may have missed, so that we might develop deeper, more meaningful relationships with the world, ourselves and each other. Part of this re-examination involves looking again at the meaningful relationship that performers and audiences have, so that we can lament its loss.

In this concert, the audience will not simply be absent; rather, the audience’s image in the final product positively names the absence of an audience; including the (image of) an audience documents both its presence and absence. Just as performers have adjusted to watching themselves perform on video, audience members will feel the odd self-estrangement (or ego-rush) of watching themselves as audience members when they attend the final production. There is a certain solidarity in declaring our absence from one another, a togetherness in noting and mourning our lack of togetherness.

Loudly announcing the absence of audience and its significance does more to highlight the importance of an audience’s participation in a musical performance than anything else I can think of in a world keen to proclaim and “construct a fanciful veneer of normalcy” via the virtual.[52] I applaud Earth World’s attempt to thus reimagine the audience-performer relationship in the context of our current virtual-concert reality, questioning also the ways by which so much Western music has already ‘lost’ its audience by marginalizing and dividing it from the performance.

Appendices

Notes

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Author’s Acknowledgements

I owe great thanks to Joel Peters who read and commented in depth upon multiple earlier drafts of this essay and helped to compose some sections. Conversations with Joel – both those that have occurred over the years and those that were specific to this project – were critical to the development, crystallization, and formulation of many of the ideas in this essay. Thanks also to Sarah Ens for her superb copyediting and to Andre Forget for some helpful suggestions on a late draft.

About the Author

Gerald Ens is a PhD student in Religious Studies at McMaster University under the supervision of Dr. P. Travis Kroeker. His primary research interests include Christian ecclesiology, Christian ethics, philosophical theology, Mennonite theology, phenomenology, and political theology. His current work brings together theological, ethnographic, and sociological research to examine and constructively engage trends in Mennonite churches from lay to professional leadership models.

Ens’s publications include “Boundaries Thick and Permeable” (Zwickau Press), an examination and constructive proposal for ecclesial boundaries. Ens holds a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship and a Harry Lyman Hooker Senior Fellowship.

Ens holds an MA from McMaster University and a BA (Hons) in Theology and Philosophy from Canadian Mennonite University. He has many years of ministry experience in Mennonite Church Manitoba’s camping ministries and will probably preach a sermon if you ask him to.