The Absence of Audience in Virtual Music: Appendix A

By Gerald Ens

In Defense of My Neighbour’s Breath: A Critique of Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir via the Praise It Receives

The astoundingly high praise Eric Whitacre’s virtual choir receives, in words that elevate it far beyond some encumbered real choir, is both unnerving and illuminating. “Imagine the whole entire world in that type of harmony,” states the top-ranked YouTube comment on Whitacre’s TED Talk, with over 3400 upvotes as of September 16, 2020.[1] The tenth ranked comment on the same date claims that “[this choir] is the very best, most beautiful side of humanity.” The 19th ranked comment on the virtual choir’s first performance reads, in part, that “connection like this over the Internet displays that even though there are hundreds and hundreds of cultures, religions, races etc. they all form together as one through their love for music.”[2] I have no quarrel with the high praise people give to the music they listen to, in YouTube comments and elsewhere. What I mean to point out is that these comments are not directed at Whitacre’s compositions,[3] but at the sheer existence of the virtual choir.[4] The glowing expressions of hope and praise do not celebrate that people can sing together (which is indeed a remarkable miracle obscured by the frequency of its occurrence), but that they can sing ‘together’ in this way.[5] Consider the ninth ranked comment on Whitacre’s TED Talk: “It's amazing to think that this is what started it all. Now a snowball effect is taking place, everyone taking part in creating many virtual choirs all over the net. It really is wonderful, brilliant, and beyond beautiful.”[6] Whitacre himself describes the “poetry” of his virtual choir as “souls all on their own desert islands sending electronic messages in bottles to each other.”[7] He goes on to say that “people seem to be experiencing an actual connection. It wasn’t a virtual choir… I know myself too, I feel this virtual esprit de coeur…with all of them. I feel a closeness to this choir, almost like a family.”[8]

These are astonishing claims to make about people with whom you have not had a single conversation, or indeed any sort of back and forth encounter. Nor has this choir participated in any joint activities (like singing together), let alone actions of powerful solidarity. (There likely had not been many conversations between individual Copts and Muslims in Tahrir square in 2011, but their remarkable actions of solidarity – perhaps most visually arresting when Christians surrounded and protected Muslims during the call to prayer – would make Whitacre’s comments on their lips much more appropriate.) Instead, machines have put together separate, individual actions, making them appear as a joint activity. This process substitutes us out of the substance of such joining. That is, the kind of joint action that creates incredible and often enduring moments of group solidarity is not simply people deciding to do something together, each with her own separable action; rather, our mutual engagement with each creates not only the activity but also builds the connection between us. This is what political theorist and radical democrat Rom Coles observes when he describes how, as people share stories and participate in such personal acts of political solidarity, something emerges that is “not simply an aggregation of different self-interests.” Instead, “participants…develop increasingly relational senses of their interests and orientations in ways that often transfigure the senses with which they began.”[9] Each one opens to the other in an ongoing give and take that builds us up together and makes us responsive to one another.

Or rather, this happens when we are successful, which is far from guaranteed because such opening, giving and taking, is inherently risky. I thus point out the complete absence of risk in Whitacre’s virtual choir, where you can sing a wrong note but it will not matter; where you can ‘be a family’ with others without worrying about whether you will get along. But as Christine Pohl notes, “we can protect ourselves from such difficulties only by cutting ourselves off from our relationships.”[10] The virtual choir is a family only insofar as we have removed relationships (i.e., figuring out some way or other of ‘getting along’) from family.

The absurdity of this thinking is on full display in a chorister’s comment that Whitacre presents: “It’s great just to know I’m part of a worldwide community of people I never met before, but who are connected anyway.”[11] The reasoning here reads something like: ‘we do not know each other (we’ve never met), but despite this we know that we know each other.’ In other words, for Whitacre it appears as though community is entirely disconnected from the everyday work of being together or abiding with one another. Instead, community consists of a momentary emotional rush. This fits well with contemporary liberal sentimentalities that allow the white middle class in the West to express and ‘believe in’ their love for and belonging to a universal humanity, even as (many of) their real connections consist of economic and political exploitation. As Pohl points out, we say we want to belong and yet we resist being encumbered in any way by place or by others, including by whether we might be hurting others. We thus rely on “brief, occasional, and intense” feelings to conjure the illusion of “community on our terms,” with minimal responsibilities and lots of exits.[12] In contrast, Pohl rightly argues that such an image works against our ability to live into community, for “communities in which we grow and flourish…last over time and are built by people who are faithful to one another and committed to a shared purpose…. Our lives are knit together no so much by intense feeling as by shared history, tasks, commitments, stories, and sacrifices.”[13] Thus, far from a fleeting emotion that I can summon up apart from others (this is perhaps especially easy to do if I have never met them), “the essential nourishment of healthy communities is fidelity to the thousand and one small demands of each day.”[14] The experienced chorister will no doubt here think of the thousand and one small demands that a choir holds in common together for every moment that it sings together.

The flimsy connections that the virtual choir offers – not even between us, but between our images – dissolve as easily as the emotional highs stimulated by another’s image, too often substituted for relationships. For this is ‘connection’ without any sense that the other knows me or degree of confidence that the other will be there for me if I need her, a confidence that I receive by coming to know and trust the other. Pohl observes this in her argument that mobility is parasitic upon community (which connecting via a virtual image infinitely amplifies). “Commitment to a place and a people means that relationships can be formed that are able to withstand trials and disagreements, but often people move in and out of congregations and communities before deep roots are established…. The possibility that people will leave during a crisis often further destabilizes an unstable situation.”[15] The easy connections made available by the hyper-mobility foisted upon us contain within themselves already, regardless of any ‘intention,’ a momentum directly at odds with the kind of fidelity and promise-keeping that make relationships nourishing rather than draining. Fidelity and promise-keeping not only mark and enable our presence to one another; our bodily presence to each other in the daily work of living together also enables practices such as fidelity and promise-keeping.

I do not mean to nitpick or point out some mere inadequacy in this notion that ‘we have never met but I ‘sense’ that we are true family.’ It is rather that this kind of thinking actively hurts our ability to build community (and to collaborate musically); it is of a piece with the economic, social, and political forces that erode community and foster our disconnection from one another. Likewise, the enthusiastically proffered sentiment that the virtual choir illustrates the best of human harmony aligns with an Enlightenment understanding of human relationships, which does not see common understanding and human relatedness as something we must forge, but as something we have already, if only we strip off all ‘secondary’ (especially bodily) markers of identity. But such ‘inclusivity’ does not make for peace and harmony. It instead erases difference, including the way that difference is generative for relationship-building and holding things in common. That’s because this universal inclusivity demands that people conform to a certain account of reasonability (or relationability) in order to be counted as human beings. It neglects the reality that peaceable relationships are not a thing we might possess but people acting in ongoing relationships. Peace practitioner John Paul Lederach argues that this is why, while official negotiations and peace accords rarely produce lasting peace, “significant changes in peace processes often take place in off-the-record conversations around tea, supper, or a late-night drink.”[16] Furthermore, it is because relationship-building invests into rather than away from specific connections across and amid difference that the relational spaces where breakthroughs are possible have much “to do with eating and the sensuous perceptions of breaking bread, dipping stew, and sipping tea.” Relationships demand all of our embodied perceptions, and so, Lederach notes, even across great hostility, “when a space is created that incites the broader use of sensuous faculties, people become more human.”[17]

As Willie Jennings shows, it is no coincidence that liberal understandings of a ‘universal humanity’ arose at the same time as the European colonial venture. The connection is that such universalism undermines all other forms of identity, ‘freeing’ or displacing people from particular ways of life by universalizing the earth. That is, it removes the three-dimensional topography of place as the integral source and marker of a person’s identity and creates interchangeable, and therefore exploitable and movable, commodities on a two-dimensional map, units that the colonial administration can fully ‘know’ about (or know that they know) without in fact knowing at all a place and its people.[18] Every place then becomes fluid, able to “morph into the colonial order.”[19] For example, once identity and imagination are “displaced from…specific land,” agency comes to be constituted by consumption, beginning with land, which becomes a commodity to be bought and sold rather than that which discloses and bestows one’s place and belonging.[20]

The racialization involved in such commodified identity is core to Jennings’s argument. Displacing bodies from their place and evacuating place of its substance allows for the arbitrary marker of race to assign identity and to assert whiteness as the ‘neutral’ marker of ‘rational’ humanity, not so much a visible characteristic as the organizing frame for a universal human essence beyond difference. In contrast, people must live out and constitute a place-based identity; it has everything to do with one’s particular knowledges and relationships and the inherent connections this relational knowledge has to one’s moral and social sensibilities. The emergence of modern, universal humanity is the process by which “whiteness replaces the earth as the signifier of identities.”[21] Whiteness becomes the means of calibrating identity “through possession of, not possession by, specific land,” so that owned black bodies can work owned colonial land.[22] The rational and neutral European observer and arbiter, who belongs to no place in particular, “stands…between bodies and the land, and he adjudicates, identifies, [and] determines” identity and value.[23]

I suggest that the elevation of virtual space as an enhanced version of humanity and community further closes off “the possibility of new identities bound up with entering new spaces,” fostering insularity and erasing both difference and reconciled relationships.[24] “I think this is what heaven will be like,” states the author of the 19th ranked comment on Whitacre’s TED talk, giving voice to the ghostly, disembodied understanding of salvation, popularized by the consumer religion of American Protestantism (a very different understanding of salvation and encounter with the divine from that of the world which birthed the organ and its thunderously material voice of heaven). Jennings comments at length on the heresy of such an anti-material account of goodness and salvation, showing how it stultifies the formation of our intimate sensibilities by means of encounters with others and their places.[25] That is, the vision of a body-less heaven comes alongside a vision of unity or reconciliation in which others cease to make a meaningful impact upon me, in which there is no need to join with other bodies in material intimacy.

We see this in a comment from a chorister that Whitacre highlights in his TED Talk: “As I am in the Great Alaskan Bush, satellite is my connection to the world.”[26] Notice how, according to this comment, the Great Alaskan Bush is, apparently, not part of the world. I take this to suggest that the psychological power of this kind of image-driven ‘connection’ with the insubstantial other does far more to exclude real persons and places than it does to join them. This fits the thesis that for the most part the corporate-owned and monetized internet does not connect local places to each other, but displaces and erases them. Sharing in a common humanity becomes abstract in a way that lends itself to exploitation.[27]

In this vein, it is extremely revealing that the praise for Whitacre’s virtual choir often morphs into other liberal pieties that are closely related to the illusion of salvation via disembodiment, but on appearance totally unrelated to the virtual choir itself.

For example, this comes from the eighth ranked comment on Whitacre’s TED talk, with over 1800 upvotes as of September 16, 2020: “please don't give up on your dreams. Don't say ‘I can't do it.’ Because you know what? You can.” Does this commenter mean that everyone can become a composer as successful as Whitacre (if only such a person works hard enough or believes enough in herself)? Or does this commenter mean that anyone can submit a video to Whitacre’s choir? The former claim is obviously untrue and is furthermore cruel to so many who have not been able to succeed as composers (which has at least as much to do with luck and social position as with ability);[28] the latter claim is so banal as to utterly disprove this commenter’s own rhetoric. What is interesting is that this commenter gives voice to a (consumer) fantasy in which no sort of materiality whatsoever can limit a person even though such a fantasy has, seemingly, nothing to do with Whitacre’s project. Indeed, materiality as such appears as sheer obstacle in the remarkable ideology evinced in the 12th ranked comment on Whitacre’s TED talk video, with an astounding 339 upvotes, which reads, in its entirety: “This is something only the Internet could spawn: 2000 people, all together.” The allure of a false connection bestowed by technology has such a grip on us that it blinds people to even the incredibly obvious fact that 2000 people or more have gathered together countless times throughout human history without the internet, including for all manner of musical performances.

William Cavanaugh points out that this fantasy of the self unlimited by any materiality favours the celebration of the “spontaneous gratification of one’s wants” that capitalist consumption promises us. Within this ideology I need not others, practice, discipline, or tradition but only to believe in myself; such ‘belief’ is counter to doing anything at all, but extremely conducive to branding oneself via shopping.[29] Indeed, as Cavanaugh shows, the myth of ‘vocation’ arose alongside a brutally coercive displacement of workers from the land, for “capitalism needed to free work for wages” and did so by destroying communal and familial self-sufficiency.[30] Vocation, in this sense, is an ideology justifying the exploitation of labour that must conform to the ever-shifting demands of the job market. It is no wonder, Cavanaugh observes, that so many young adults are so paralyzed, anxious, and lonely when they have been told over and over again “not only that they can and must choose their life, but that they must maximize that choice and choose their best life.”[31]

Cavanaugh thus argues that there is an important sense in which our material limits are a blessing. He points out that “being finite creatures of a good God is not a fallen condition; the Fall occurs precisely when humans rebel against their limitations.”[32] Further arguing that “we are not sovereign…choosers but fragmented selves” who cannot know what we want and whose decisions and activities shape our future desires, Cavanaugh gives voice to a “hope…that, in the crucible of our encounters with others, the fragments of our lives will be gathered up and used to tell a story that is broader, more nuanced, and much more interesting.”[33] Indeed, as Jennings argued earlier, in order for my connection to others to have substance, I must come to embrace some of the limits that they set upon me. In a choir, the singing bodies next to me set important limits. In Whitacre’s virtual choir, these limits vanish, inspiring some, it would seem, to make the proclamation that ‘you can do whatever you can dream.’ 

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.