Last night I was engineering a livestream for a mixed media event and I was thinking about what it means for a small cast of characters to come together for a purpose such as this.
Sometimes it doesn’t even matter what the end result is, it’s the fact that it happened. We all showed up, the performers, the organizer and the small audience both online and in-person.
We don’t really see the cast of characters that make a novel happen, but sure enough behind the scenes there are editors and readers who give early feedback that help shape future drafts. There are the bookbinders and the people who work with the pulp and paper before that stage. The graphic designer and the merchants who sell the book to you. The customers who make up the best-selling lists that the industry riles around. The people who write the lists of the 100 books you need to read this summer even though you have time to read only one.
Sometimes I might write music in isolation, but again, there’s a cast of characters. The people who made the software that sampled the piano. The luthier (or factory technicians) who shaped the guitar. All the music that I have grown up listening to and will either borrow from subconsciously or intentionally.
A holiday week makes me think about gatherings, and today I am reflecting on the experience of what happens at concerts. That all these people are getting together, the audience on the floor and the musicians on the stage above them. And when this meeting happens, there is some kind of electric magic. The world outside will melt away and people will be transported to somewhere new.
In many ways, music is one of the most frustrating art forms of them all because can’t really see it. We can only feel it. We can just see musicians dancing around or weird music videos, but we can’t see the art of music and by extension anything related to sound. A waveform doesn’t count.
But what a concert does have going for it is it shows you the cast of characters coming together. Whether it’s the band, or the roadies who come out on stage during the show, and most importantly all the wacky people in the crowd, sometimes it’s just the act of showing up and spending your night in this way, shrugging at the new price of beer, the new price of everything in general and saying wtf it doesn’t matter in the end, I just want to get out of the house and enjoy myself for a few hours.
It would be disrespectful for me not to mention that I don’t go out to shows very much any more.
However I believe that there are new opportunities for musicians and organizers to livestream concerts with a level of effort that is not being marketed to me yet.
I feel like many things involving the post-pandemic are going back to binary thinking - “we either go back to the office every day, or we’re flashy and fully remote”. And with concerts I do believe that a hybrid approach will be most effective at making use of the impacts of what has happened.
People really do want flexibility as much as we scoff at them for not doing things the way we see the world.
Because I really would like to watch the symphony in my pyjamas as I did during the pandemic. And maybe the experience would inspire me to get off my butt for the next performance?
Let me know if you agree or disagree?
Thank you for gathering with me to read this newsletter today, and I wish you a great rest of your weekend and the week ahead 🤠
Elliott