The UN-CONCERT
April 2021
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The UN-CONCERT was a one-time work of performative, interactive art done over Zoom, in the spring of 2021. Inspired by the line "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." from Naomi Clark in A Game Design Vocabulary, I was curious as to how sheet music may be perceived and interpreted if the audience could not hear it 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 and "listen". As for rules, the audience were told to make their thinking and feeling known in the Zoom chat -- to write what they imagined the piece sounded like.
While I have been playing the piano for more than 20 years, most of my audience did not (or, could not at that time) read sheet music. Their written descriptions of what they imagined the piece to sound like were fascinating. Many times, the words people used to describe the same piece were wildly different. I caught up on reading everyone's descriptions after the event, and I was stunned by how possessive I felt of these pieces of music, some of which I had known how to play for 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.
While I have been playing the piano for more than 20 years, most of my audience did not (or, could not at that time) read sheet music. Their written descriptions of what they imagined the piece to sound like were fascinating. Many times, the words people used to describe the same piece were wildly different. I caught up on reading everyone's descriptions after the event, and I was stunned by how possessive I felt of these pieces of music, some of which I had known how to play for 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.