Taking It to the Bridge: Music as Performance

Beyond Performance: Transmusicking in Cyberspace

319 David Borgo Beyond Performance Transmusicking in Cyberspace • An ensemble of thirty performers prepares to improvise music together. With only basic conceptual sketches agreed upon beforehand and a language of improvised conducted gestures to guide them, this performance already carries a considerable degree of risk. Add to this the fact that the musicians and their respective audiences are physically located in three distinct venues spanning nearly 3,000 miles and the notion of “creating music together in the course of performance” may appear to enter the realm of impossibility. • On the street, a young woman with conspicuous white cords dangling from her ears appears lost in the music she alone is hearing, and yet somehow also deeply engaged in and by her surroundings. At times she turns her entire body in response to loud sounds in her environment. At other moments she dramatically taps, shakes, and rotates the device she is holding. Sometimes she whispers garbled words, hums strange melodies, or uses objects and surfaces in her surroundings to create percussive sounds and rhythms. It is hard not to wonder what she is hearing and what compels her to these unusual activities. • A visitor to an otherwise sedate museum is asked to remove his shoes, don a brightly colored robe, and wear a blindfold. With assistance he enters a ritualized space full of unusual and disorienting sounds and sensations. Others who are similarly dressed saunter and even dance about, variously pulled together or swept apart as if by magnetic or other invisible forces. In reality, each participant is honing in on a personal “sound signature” that can modulate in response to one’s own actions , to the proximity of others, or to the subtle prodding of a hidden computer operator. These strangely clad and sight-impaired individu- 320 • taking it to the bridge als appear to be participating in a form of collective composition, and, some might even say, collective consciousness. What do these three moments of “musicking” have in common? Although it can be argued that practices related to these were in evidence, often in some nascent form, prior to the digital revolution or the emergence of “cyberspace,” their immersive, interactive, multi-modal, and spatially extended dimensions are in other ways quite new. Collectively they seem to tug at the very seams of our orthodox notions of music performance , that is, a localized and shared experience involving some variety of well-understood action-sound couplings unfolding in linear time.1 Perhaps because of this potential dissonance with conventional understandings of music performance, discussions surrounding newer forms of music engagement tend to polarize rather quickly. Are these newer technologies and practices democratizing the musical experience, opening the floodgates of creativity on a mass scale? Or do they invite a sort of “mass amateurization” that robs music of its former depth and required discipline? Do newer technologies afford more immersive, intense, and deeply personal engagements with sound? Or do the considerable technological investments and the ever-present worry of industrial manipulation actually make the music less direct, less engaging, somehow less “real”? Are we experiencing new possibilities for combining sonic exploration and social interaction, perhaps glimpsing emergent properties and decentralized behaviors that are difficult for humans to intuit or imagine ? Or do these practices actually increase isolation and dependency and potentially decrease music’s diversity? Can we reconcile our conventional notions of “presence” and “effort”—aspects central to Susan Fast’s argument in favor of the “live” concert event that begins this volume—with these new musicking scenarios? The slippery notion of “technology” may be the most common inroad to discussions about how music is created, consumed, experienced, and ultimately perceived in the contemporary moment (at least among the relatively affluent), but both “technology” and “music,” despite the ease with which we use these concepts in our everyday lives, are remarkably polysemous terms. Computer science pioneer and occasional professional jazz guitarist Alan Kay once described technology as “anything that was invented after you were born.” Kay’s light-hearted comment highlights rather perceptively how “technology,” as a notion, is inextricably linked to a user’s frame of reference. Martin Heidegger framed the issues with considerably more nuance in his 1954 essay “The Question Concerning Beyond Performance • 321 Technology.” For Heidegger, technology involves “the manufacture and utilization of equipment, tools, and machines, the manufactured and used things themselves, and the needs and ends that they serve. . . . The whole complex of...