Philosophers are familiar with social distance. This follows from their approach to truth and truth seeking. Plato’s allegory of the cave makes this point: ordinary perception arises through the projection of shadows inside a cave. When all are captured by urgent perceptions, appearance seeks to assert itself as a norm of truth. The philosopher questions this condition and seeks light beyond the shadows. When he returns from his journey outside the cave with the perplexing narrative of the derivative and contingent nature of common experience, the captivated society rejects his account. This is particularly so where perceptions are viewed as essential to survival. An emphasis on survival transforms all into a herd and regards those who dare to differ as threats.
A crisis always reminds us of the need to clarify fundamentals of thinking. As social distance disrupts our otherwise mesmerised existence and creates its own inverted world, musicians are discussing and illustrating ways to perform music in a virtual realm. At times some of these attempts, cute and endearing, suggest that it may be possible to substitute the embodied, physical presence of musical performance with manicured audio-visual productions. There is even a suggestion that real-time ensemble collaboration might be achieved with increased technological advancement. At this point, nothing could be further from the truth. There are ontological reasons why such attempts may be no more than a play with shadows in Plato’s cave.
Musical and artistic performance is created through human intentionality. The tone and ensemble of a performance are reflections of an imagination which directs our thinking into the future. Musicians perform together, because they think together. They do not play together because they react to each other. They anticipate their playing and actions. Musicians think together in advance of the sound. The sound is a mere reflection of this thought process which has already been substantially completed by the time a tone is heard. Ensemble performance is possible because the musicians’ anticipation is guided by a multiplicity of cues and suggestions. These allow the musician to create her imagined performance in dialogue with other musicians and through spontaneous, intuitive decisions.
This process of listening ahead, of hearkening, must occur in a shared space because it is essentially embodied and dialogical. The shared space provides opportunities for detailed cues to the intentionalities of the musicians participating in the performance. These cannot be obtained in the flattened landscape of two-dimensional, audio-visual media which always comes inevitably too late and reduces in any case the performer’s embodiment to audio-visual dimensions.
The audio-visual productions on the internet can be suggestive to our imagination to be sure. However, we remain far more reactive to vision and sound than in embodied performance and there can be no immediate, spontaneous musical dialogue within this medium. They resemble shadows – technologically produced and airbrushed appearances concealing intentionality behind appearance. They remind us of an attractively made-up woman who appears ravishing at night only to reveal herself to be very ordinary in the morning. There are many possibilities how we might make sense of this dissonance. One possibility is that a selective emphasis of the medium creates an unbalanced attention in the first instance ultimately misleading us. Another relates to the purpose and value of our imagination in relation to appearance. For the musical performer, imagination must largely direct the anticipation of the performance more so than its perception.
Ensemble performance, however, does not only depend on the co-ordinated determination of content through the imagination of the performers but crucially on such a determination in time. Timing in performance relies on the complete engagement of intent, otherwise known as freedom and spontaneity, which is not predictable and asserts itself in the moment. The freedom of spontaneity makes music specifically expressive and human and qualifies musical performance importantly as a form of human communication. An artistic performance of a musical ensemble distinguishes itself from an aligned ensemble performance. While the latter might be achieved through simple objective temporal co-ordination (say, a mechanical beat) the former establishes an internal, organic temporal relationship. The internal relatedness is created by the work of musicians with each other in the moment. Not only must musicians be present in the same space, they also must be able to direct temporal unfolding through their common intuition of time and timing. A music making in the virtual world relies on reactive responses to cues or requires entrainment to essentially mechanical beats. A main condition for musicians to anticipate their playing fully and dialogically seems to be the active creation of temporal flow through the intentionality of play. The cues which communicate the intention of the performer to her fellow performers are not objectifiable in audio-visual form. By the time they become manifest and objective to explicit experience or knowledge their value and relevance has already perished. If we forget that intentionality sustains both time and tone in music and instead focus on the sounding reality we reduce music to a play of appearance and remove from it the characteristics of art. We banish the musician and the listener to a cave of sonic shadows.
