Watching music

The Urgent Moment

During the dark days of Covid, dark for theatres, concert halls, orchestras, opera houses, choral societies, festivals etc, beginning on Friday, the 13th of March, 2020 and lasting for between 18 months and 30 months, depending on where you were and what local, regional or national laws permitted, live performance indoors was largely prohibited and even outdoors, people were likely obliged to keep their distance. For performing artists this meant no audience, no performing, no developing of the projects programs and plans which had been brewing for some time.

For people in all of the performing arts including the world of music, the horror started to set in very quickly and then came the search for solutions. In warm weather, impromptu performances in parks and alleys allowed musicians to use their charms and members of the public to enjoy moments of lighthearted gathering in uncertain times.

In many parts of the world, artists took to what came to be known as the “Digital Pivot”. Live or recorded music was released on social media platforms – from the living room or kitchen, using good smartphone cameras, and techniques, which over time became more and more sophisticated. In Canada, the National Arts Centre started a program of one-hour presentations on YouTube for ten artists, paying artists $1000 per live stream. This increased to over 700 artists live-streaming on the National Arts Centre Facebook channel. In Germany, celebrated pianist Igor Levitt famously performed 50 Hauskonzerte from his living room, which he posted to Twitter, from March 12 to May 24 and then a 15-hour marathon of Satie’s appropriately named, Vexations, on May 30-31 from a studio in Berlin.

Some artists found artistic partners in the form of videographers and developed a collaborative style with practitioners of film – the so-called Seventh Art – which found support from public and private funders.

Some musicians mastered the art of Spotify or YouTube success “formulas” with good quality pieces and good performance standards and made enough money to turn their fortunes around.

Already existent platforms including Idagio, Medici, and Marquee and Film Festivals specializing in films of and about music found more submissions of varying quality.

Pedagogy online in the form of regular classes and one-on-one teaching and coaching, which had been considered revolutionary by some and dubious by others when Pinchas Zuckerman started vaunting it, became obligatory.

Creative initiatives by schools, universities, and institutions (e.g. the Library of Congress (USA), University of the Andes (Colombia) the University of British Columbia (Canada)) led to the creation of online platforms presenting recorded performance as well as contextual or educational presentations which allowed for learning about a great variety of musical traditions and forms of expression, from many parts of the world

Documentaries and non-commercial bio-films like the magnificent, Igor Levit – No Fear, allowed the audience to explore the thoughts and the lives behind the sounds and experience of the concert hall performance. In some instances, there was an emergence of collaborative creative partnerships between videographers and musicians to produce stellar video productions of live performances. This increased the dynamic of the collaborative creation of music with the art of film/video for the preservation and transmission of the music . The relationship between music and video art as a multi-media art form as in the work of interactive work or film animation with music as found in the work of Eve Egoyan and her various musical and visual media collaborators, or in the 60-Second commissions of composers and videographers produced by Guy Livingston in the Netherlands. A stunning presentation of this is the work funded by the Canada Council for the Arts of films made to pre-existing music by composer Jérôme Blais performed by soprano, Suzie Leblanc in Mouvances. The short films made by young film-makers of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia results in a stunning collection of cinematic gems, settings of film to the poetry and music of Blais’ songs, in turn, settings of the poet Gérald Leblanc.

SIGHT AND SOUND

AUDIO RECORDING : Some Historical Background

Until the invention of sound recording in the second half of the 19th century, the only way that people could hear music was to be in the presence of the music makers. Musicians on all continents in communities created mood, purpose, and occasions for shared attention and intention for audiences large and small. Social groupings with a variety of purposes from spiritual to martial, were the context for the creation of repeatable, catalogues of music, hymns oratorios, military parades, court dances, etc. The style of music created recognizable musical brands.

Composer-performers, including Mozart and Chopin, performed their music on tours to charm and increase the audience for their work. They were seeking champions, patrons or appointments to courts, or institutions. The people who had access to the music were limited to those who had access to the institution where the music was performed. Orchestras and opera companies evolved to present performances to ticket-buyers. Whatever access one might have to music, it was a local, in-person event. Whether by invitation or membership in a Church, Synagogue, court, community or other institution which supported the production of music in its mission, or by virtue of purchasing a ticket to a produced event for the public music was a shared experience in the presence of the music makers and other listeners.

In 1877, Thomas Edison developed the first phonographic cylinder and by 1896 it was released commercially. The evolution of sound-recording can be marked in relation to the technology from tin to wax cylinders (1877-1925) and then electrical microphones (1925-45) and tape recording (1945-75) and the digital age (1975 to the present)

This revolution in the means of recording and sharing recorded sound, allowed much greater access to performances of composed repertoire and improvisational moments, from the beginning of notated music to the present. Music lovers of a wide range of means were able to purchase recordings and the equipment to play them back; radio broadcast equipment became a means of sharing live and pre-recorded music.

In the 1920s and 1930s, numerous National Radio orchestras were established in Europe. Some were renamed or abandoned during the Second World War. In some parts of Europe, Orchestras were established in the Postwar period with the establishment of new independent Nations in Europe.

In the United States, on Christmas night, 1937 the NBC Radio Symphony Orchestra played its first concert under the direction of Arturo Toscanini, which continued until 1954 when Toscanini resigned. It was then renamed, Symphony of the Air, under the direction of Leopold Stokowski.
Radio was a great medium for disseminating both live and pre-recorded music.

In Canada he Vancouver CBC Orchestra, which was the longest-lived of the Canadian Radio Orchestras was founded in 1938. Others existed in Winnipeg, Toronto, Montreal and Halifax. These orchestras could be heard live across Canada and the live capture, sometimes was turned into commercial recordings or kept for the archives.

In the Soviet Union, the government would stage arena concerts which broadcast nationally to one hundred times more people than would fit in the stadium. These concerts were intended to create a common purpose for the citizens of the new system of human salvation.

The Metropolitan Opera in New York began broadcasting live audio performances on December 25, 1931 with a performance of Engelbert Humperdinck’s, Hansel and Gretel. Radio broadcasts of live performances of opera and other musical presentation, in Europe and North America became a regular phenomenon.

SOUND RECORDING: Benefits and Challenges
Sound recording and Radio was an extraordinary gift to the world. They made the music of so many composers and performers available, at the flick of a switch, to millions of people around the world, creating a global community of shared appreciation and engagement with certain repertoire and singular interpretations.
However Sound recording created a somewhat limited connection to music and underscored, appropriately, the sonic nature of music. A sub-category of music, “Sound art”, emerged from this idea of music as sound. Some live performances of electronic music were presented in a darkened auditorium with only equipment on stage, not a human being to be found in the “live” performance. The public’s shared experience in a common environment justified the concert event.

It is likely that, from the early 20th century, with the development of sound recording of increasingly good quality, more people were connecting to music exclusively as sound. The dissemination of music on synthetic discs spinning on transmission devices at 78, 45 , and then 33 rotations per minute, as well as later on tape and CD, as well as radio broadcasts, creatd a global culture of music as exclusively an aural and sometimes solitary experience.
A listener, might experience the music in an environment completely detached from the making of the music itself. Consider the division of attention in the context of listening to the radio while driving in urban streets or country roads. The sound of the music might accompany cooking, cleaning, carving wood, changing tires, or sitting in the living room with children playing. It could be background or it could command complete attention but it was “only” sound.
Since the beginning of life on the planet, music has always been present in the form of the music makers including birds and crickets or the howling of wolves. Human beings only experienced the world of sound as an embodied creation.

SOUND + AUDIO RECORDINGS: Mediation as connection or distance
The 100 or so years of sound recording, and radio-only access to music has been both a gift and also an aberration. The development of more multi-valent access to music through video, although still mediated, allows us to explore the notion that music is related to senses other than hearing. There is a visual and a visceral component in the best of these productions.
On March 20, 1948, Arturo Toscanini led the NBC Radio Orchestra and simultaneously, Eugene Ormandy conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra in the first two televised live broadcasts of a Symphony Orchestra. During the 1951-52 season, the Chicago Symphony broadcast live on a local Television station with a feed to 22 stations.
Television networks, producers, filmmakers, documentarists and musical educators all started to become interested ways of pressenting live music to audiences for wider simultaneous access, pedagogical purposes and for archival purposes.
CBS and NBC began their orchestral broadcasts in 1948. In Europe van Karajan was becoming a TV star with the Berlin Philharmonic; the Vienna Philharmonic New Years concert was a TV extravaganza, and in New York, Leonard Bernstein was proving himself to be a charismatic TV personality and public pedagogue on Omnibus (1954) and the Young People’s Concerts, televised from January 1958, in addition to being a brilliant musician.
In 1961, the International Music Media Centre (IMZ) was established in Vienna to document, share, inform and serve the milieu of filmmakers on music as well as the film festivals and eventually the platforms which presented their work.
In 2012 the IMMC released a wonderful documentary addressing the history of films on music and reflecting on the value of the relation between music and the seventh art of film.
The expansion of proprietary channels from the Corporate networks of NBC or CBS, the State networks including Radio-France, the BBC, and many others around the globe, or institutional platforms including the Metropolitan Opera, the Berlin Philharmonic (Digital Concert Hall) and the charming Smalls Jazz Club video online simulcasts and archives have all established models for how this can work. On the internet, came multiple platforms for dissemination, including Medici, Marquee and Idagio, some with institutional connections as Marquee has with the Royal Opera House of London.
In 2020, along came Covid-19, with the concert hall lockdown. Everybody was looking for a path which would include the artistry of film/video makers and the ever-improving technology and the artistry of film/video. Musicians were exploring the various forms of marriage of music with image. Platforms multiplied and then many did not survive the Covid era of investment. All are looking for an investment model which supports any part of the production from the conception to the dissemination of the film work. Each is struggling to find the financial model which makes this still-emerging universe of music on screen, viable for all of the artists and producers involved and which values the curiosity and engagement of the public.

OBJECTIVES: Capturing and Disseminating music on film
There are multiple objectives. I would like to discuss three:
· Visibility for the art work, the artists and the performance
· Revenue generation
· Broadening cultural access in a society and across a variety of borders.

The paths to the goals of visibility and revenue generation are sometimes distinct, sometimes they intersect and sometimes they are stubbornly parallel and never the twain shall meet.

Artists create. Composers compose, improvisers improvise, and performers choose from extant works, study them, and bring them to life. During the COVID days musicians could not perform in front of audiences in most of North America and Europe with some exceptions made for some outdoor events and eventually significant arrangements in internal space. Without going into the logistical and financial challenges that these arrangements brought with them, suffice it to say that live performance was either forbidden or severely restricted. Contracts were cancelled, re-scheduled, re-cancelled and so on until things moved on. However some artists found a variety of ways to keep their work going: composers did not immediately require audiences so they could benefit, although restlessly, with time to compose; already recorded work was seeking a greater reach on sound distribution platforms from Radio and Satellite transmissions to internet platforms like Spotify and Soundcloud.
Jean-Michel Pilc, an improviser for whom every note is freshly selected and sometimes a surprise even to himself, made regular live streams shared on the internet – at no expense to the viewer and little expense to the musician.

Igor Levitt gave over 50 short Hauskonzerts from his Living Room – a different piece each evening. , The National Arts Centre of Canada became a vehicle for both sponsoring musicians and distributing their live streams with jerry-rigged video pick-ups. The NAC program started as a $1000 payment to a musician for one hour of music, live from a safe space, usually at home, for 10 musicians and then exploded with sponsorship to over 700 sponsored one-hour presentations, all distributed through Facebook.

The visibility was of great value both to musicians and to music lovers. In some cases, there was revenue to the performer although rarely did composers receive royalties at least in the first wave of digital streaming. Composers were neglected partly due to ignorance as to the difference between composer rights for the use of music live on stage and those for distribution of recorded sound in which revenue is generated. The sense of urgency to get something happening, to lift the gloom, allowed forgiveness for unwittingly breaking rules. Under the grim circumstances of COVID, even the low-fidelity sound and shaky camera work of live streaming provided some satisfaction of the reciprocal desires of the artist and the music lover to share in a music encounter.

It is said that wars bring new technology which serves the period of conflict and finds new uses afterwards.During Covid, the art-music world learned to use the newly accessible and relatively inexpensive versions of sound and video recording technology for capturing both planned and impromptu performances. Institutions experimented with a variety of platforms for distribution of live-streaming. Once COVID was winding down, and some performances, even without audiences, were possible, the use of higher-quality technology for sound and visual capture allowed for a variety of means of distribution as well as conveniences. Community concert series were able to have live performances without an audience and share it for free (much simpler in terms of rights for the performers, composer, and creative team) or for a fee which then engendered royalties and rights which were often unknown or ignored. The service to the community of a stay-at-home audience was to keep a musical performance presence in their lives. Ontario’s Flato-Markham Theatre, under the leadership of Eric Larivière, developed high-quality performance videos of popular performers on their stage in front of an empty hall to share on protected digital platforms with their community of subscribers. In some extended rural areas, networks created viewing opportunities for audiences with protected access to shared streams. Po Yeh, the director of the Prairie Debut network in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, created streaming video of live performances to share amongst all of the presenters under her umbrella.
Two very interesting examples of streaming in the jazz world are worth mentioning. One pre-dates the pandemic by many years. Smalls Jazz Club – a truly small space in a Greenwich Village basement — started streaming concerts over a decade prior to the onset of Covid, with the stated purpose of building a fan base for the art form and for the artists. Here is what their website states about this:

Smalls Jazz Club was one of the first venues to utilize live-streaming and streamed their first show in September of 2007. Since then, Smalls and Mezzrow have live-streamed all of their shows and built an international audience of on-line fans and supporters. Our goal is to share the music created in our clubs with the world.

It is generally believed that Smalls started this with a donor and although all of their live-streams are available for free, the supporting business model seems to include membership, which gives access to the archives of all performances since 2007.
Another interesting example of stream-sharing came from a jazz club in Massachusetts which live-streamed performers in an empty venue and then shared the stream with Jazz clubs in other parts of the world to disseminate to their at home audiences in Japan, in Canada, and in other parts of the USA. The model was a boon for artists and audiences. It allowed streamed live-performance to reach music-hungry and largely house-bound audiences in other parts of the world. Simultaneously they brought traffic to their web-sites, expanding their fan-base and allowing the online purchase of recordings and merchandise.

Financial investment for these many initiatives came in a variety of forms. Some came from organizations’ unspent operating budgets or emergency government funding during Covid. Some funds were provided by donors or commercial sponsors. In most cases, it was considered a stop-gap solution for a temporary problem with the idea that it would cease when the health emergency was over.

When vaccinations and public interest suggested that the lockdown should be phased out, and performance venues could operate with live audiences, most returned to their well-worn business models, terminating their experiments with internet distribution. The cost and complexity of the production as well as the uncertainty of creating a viable business model with this technology are the main factors for ending the use of video streaming.

Some larger institutions, with funding from operating budgets, sponsors or donor were able to continue to find a viable way to continue using their newly acquired expertise and infrastructure. One Orchestra manager commented, “We’re all TV producers, now”. The technology would come in handy not just for audiences but in one case, that same Orchestra , was able to have the composer attend rehearsals and the performance of a premiere when her attention was needed for another premiere on the same dates and travel between the two was impossible. During rehearsals, the composer, listening through the equipment available in the concert hall, gave her notes to the assistant conductor who then passed them on to the conductor.

VIDEO: Advantages and challenges
What video of a performance brings to the music-lover is an opportunity to watch the music being made. This is an obvious but also a challenging task for the videographer. What can the eye add to the ear in the individual’s engagement with music? Here are a few thoughts.

The eye is more demanding of attention than the ear so a video will keep the listener engaged more attentively than just audio.

The eye can share additional information about the music – making – seeing how the conductor is interpreting a passage can help us understand what we might be listening for, interpreting the signals of the arms and perhaps rhythm of the baton or even the conductor’s body. Observing the performers and their physical engagement with the music-making, seeing where the chamber musicians’ eyes are focused, engaging with their partners, can reveal information about the connections between the different musical “voices”.

Other information which can be offered is the composer’s score which can be made available to accompany the sound offering reading for those who read music or visual dynamics for those who can not read music directly. In song or opera, the libretto cn be made available while listening. Some platforms can offer a choice of visual information so that the “listener” can toggle between the variety of visual material: the performer, the score, the text – and program notes on the piece, the instruments, the composer, the performers, etc.It is also possible to have a visual interpretation of the music. As a choreographer may bring out an interpretation of music as Balanchine, Ashton or Pina Bausch interpret music in visceral form of dancers’ bodies, a great filmmaker may also interpret music in the use of visual material created for the work. In Canada, the work of Norman McLaren stands out in the early uses of film animation to bring the eye to the ear in engaging with music.

WATCHING MUSIC: Costs and benefits
There are costs attached to creating the multiple sensory-mediated engagement with music. There are costs of technology, time, and talent.

The equipment for sound and visual capture is evolving both in its capacity and its cost. Good quality capture can be done with high end i-Phones and the quality will likely increase over time. The finest quality and integrated multi-camera and -microphone technology for capture are increasingly available but still costly. Venues for captures need to be sound proof as well able to have the desired conditions of natural or theatrical light and darkness available.
Editing requires equipment and a work environment of varying costs and efficiency. This detailed work requires investment of talent and time.

There are also differences in the costs of the music itself in rights payments for the music as well as commissioning and rights for the additional members of the creative team whose work will be on display on this video format. The rights may vary according to the level of monetization of the work and the platforms on which it is displayed.
The development of private channels from the NBC and CBS networks, public television such as Radio-France, the BBC and many others around the world, or institutional networks such as those of the Metropolitan Opera, the Berlin Philharmonic (Digital Concert Hall) and the charming Smalls Jazz Club which broadcasts online and manages archives are now solid operating models.
There are many examples of platforms for dissemination on the Web, such as Medici, Marquee and Idagio, already mentioned, some of which have institutional links, as in the case of Marquee, with the Royal Opera House in London.
When suddenly…
In 2020, Covid suddenly appeared, which caused the closure of concert halls.
Everyone then began to look for a path that would allow them to take advantage of the know-how of film and video craftsmen and the increasingly refined and effective technologies associated with these two genres.
In other words, musicians began to explore different forms of marriage between music and image.
Platforms are multiplying – many will not survive the end of the special investment programs that have appeared over the course of the epidemic.
In the process, everyone went in search of a financing model that would make it possible to ensure each of the budget items, from the conception to the distribution of the finished film.
All of them are struggling to ensure the financial survival of a new way of doing things that is still in its own making, and that relies on the curiosity and commitment of the public, to succeed in showing music on screen and making this practice financially viable for the artists and producers involved.
OBJECTIVES: Capture, broadcast and bring music to life on film

RECOMMENDATIONS:

As WATCHING MUSIC is part of the ongoing evolution of how listeners and music-makers engage with each other, it is a vital feature of our human culture and society. The exploration is worthwhile. But the technology that we have now, the productions which are already available as well as those being created even as you read these words, need to find access to the wider public.

Platforms for watching catalogues of curated works as in the excellent and inexpensive Canadian platform Arts.Film and some similar platforms around the globe (see some suggestions in the notes) are a good place to start. Public Television is another. In Canada, one of the most consistent is Quebec’s Fabrique Culturelle.. Platforms for music have been increasing their video content. At the same time music video platforms have been used by “concert” music artists for both visibility and revenue.

A culture is built through acquaintance, familiarity and embrace. Internet platforms for sharing of information, pedagogy, recordings and live events is essential in a community, country, and world with so much creativity and so many forms of cultural expression. It behooves us as citizens, and policy makers to explore and embrace means for this engagement.

We invite readers to send information about other platforms and methods of sharing music and cultural content on the internet.

More references:

How to:

https://www.linkedin.com/advice/3/what-best-ways-create-promote-virtual-concerts-digital-jcdge

History:

Berlin Philharmonic Digital Concert Hall:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Concert_Hall

Met Live in HD

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Opera_Live_in_HD#:~:text=Beginning%20on%20December%2030%2C%202006,via%20satellite%20into%20movie%20theaters.

Leonard Bernstein – Young People’s Concerts

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_People%27s_Concerts

Carnegie Hall – Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts