Alongside putting my longer Facebook posts on here this year, I’m also going to dig into the notes I took during my PhD and share any insights that might be hidden in there. Here’s a thing about the distinction between “user generated content” and what I’ve described as “community originating context”, where what the audience create isn’t just “stuff”, it’s meaning.
(From Sept 2019) While a live recording contains nothing concrete of the experience bar a possible registering of the reverberation via live mics, there is much potential to invest semiotically in the experience of the recording by coupling it to narrative. The narrative may be official – sleevenotes, sanctioned commentary from the artist or a journalist – or it may be in the form of what often gets dismissed as “user generated content” but is perhaps better understood as “community originating context”.
When music is made for a specific and somewhat bounded community, their response to it and the remembering of those who were at any of the gigs released as recordings becomes part of that narrative. In the same way that the history of recording relied on the elevation of studios to sacred spaces in order to tell the story of those records, even to the point where the Beatles named an album after the studio where it was recorded, the story of the origins of a solo recording act as a tool from which to construct an experience. Record listening has always relied on narrative construction – including our relationship with the band, where we bought the record, the equipment the room we’re in, the peers with whom we share this music, the artwork, sleevenotes, format, press/critical reaction and the events in our lives that it soundtracks. Some of those are weakened in the digital but many can be enriched and carried with the work, even if ephemerally as weblinks or known spaces for responding.
Without an audience, there could be no purpose, hence no meaning.
For an artist, having an audience is releasing inspiration into the world, allowing the audience to transform the created works into memories of their experience, and it is beautiful.
Long live your blog!
I’d say the process of creating is the purpose/ release . Whether it ends up finding an audience or not. I’ve always liked the analogy that we’re all an essential ingredient to make this earth stew taste just right. And I’ve learned that the medium doesn’t really matter. It’s the process of creating, seeing ideas collect and evolve and form into something. Whether it’s a storyboard for a film, an instrument’s sound or a sketch for a planned forged metal piece. The idea that if I don’t have an audience I’m not gonna create is another thing to jam up the flow of creativity. And that’s a sensitive flow. “Don’t Think, Feel “ as Bruce Lee said in Enter The Dragon. I wanted to be a filmmaker out of high school and ended up being an artist blacksmith percussionist. Following some path not laid out by my thinking mind. Though I can look back and see this led to that led to that. Keep on creating! Your audience might be found long after your gone.
Hi Cary, thanks for your comment. I think that particular orthodoxy is what I find myself separate from, but only temporally – the development of my practice happens because I play and create and build a vocabulary that makes sense of the world around me. But because I have a known audience for my work, their permission, their invitation and post-fact their meaning-making with the thing expands the nature of the work. Them not being there wouldn’t in anyway invalidate the creative act, but it would change it, and their additions to it expand its presence in the world. 🙂
Otir! So lovely to hear from you 🙂 That transformation is such an interesting process. One of my favourite singers, Paddy McAloon from the band Prefab Sprout once said that ‘the audience finishes the song’ – that without their reaction to it, and the meaning they create the song itself is unfinished.
Being a Deadhead, I fully appreciate the magic that happens in the live shows. A group consciousness sort of thing. A give and take.