The UN-CONCERT
April 2021
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The UN-CONCERT was a one-time work of performance art (with an interactive twist), done over Zoom, in the spring of 2021. I was inspired by Naomi Clark's words from A Game Design Vocabulary : "An unplayed game is like a piece of sheet music: you can see its potential and imagine what it might be like brought to life." I wondered how sheet music might be perceived and interpreted if the audience could not hear the music being played aloud. I opened a Zoom room, invited 30 of my friends and family, shared my screen so my audience could see the sheet music I was playing, then muted myself and played each piece. I made sure to turn the pages on Zoom as I played, so my audience could follow along. Folks in the audience were advised to make their thinking and feeling known in the Zoom chat -- to write what they imagined the piece sounded like.
Some audience members were musicians, who could read sheet music. Others had never seen sheet music in their life. Written descriptions of the audience's collective imaginations of the music were fascinating, and varied wildly. Being a pianist of 20 years, I found myself possessive of these pieces of music, some of which I had been playing for longer than a decade. It was like watching an audience describe a child that I had fed, raised, and loved for years. It spoke to the intimacy of my practice as a pianist, and the intimacy between performer and audience.
Some audience members were musicians, who could read sheet music. Others had never seen sheet music in their life. Written descriptions of the audience's collective imaginations of the music were fascinating, and varied wildly. Being a pianist of 20 years, I found myself possessive of these pieces of music, some of which I had been playing for longer than a decade. It was like watching an audience describe a child that I had fed, raised, and loved for years. It spoke to the intimacy of my practice as a pianist, and the intimacy between performer and audience.