How many times have you heard music today? Maybe you’ve got a radio alarm clock. Maybe there was an ambient wash of sound playing in a shop. Maybe you streamed something at your desk, or had a CD on in the car, or were one of the innumerable people plugged into their smartphones on the pavement. Right now in the UK, music is more widely available than ever before. Anyone with an internet connection and a suitable device can access millions of tracks, the full gamut of styles from the entire history of recording.
This is musical culture in a digital age.
Well, sort of. In December 2016, sales of vinyl records were reported to have outstripped digital downloads for the first time, in a defiant moustache twirl celebrating the joys of analogue. Last year also marked the 10th anniversary of the “Live in HD” broadcasts from New York’s Metropolitan Opera – a series that beams live opera performances to thousands of cinemas in 70 countries worldwide. And its success is based on the promise of giving far-flung audiences access to the real deal, in real time. Meanwhile, in the music industry as a whole, ticket sales for live gigs are now unequivocally where the serious money is made – even if the future of many smaller venues seems increasingly uncertain.
So what’s going on? Why does live music still matter in an era of digital everything?
Dr Matt Brennan at the University of Edinburgh hopes to offer answers. He’s organised the UK Live Music Census, the first of its kind in the world. For 24 hours from noon on Thursday 9 March, Brennan and his collaborators will be making a survey of all live music in six UK cities: Glasgow, Newcastle, Oxford, Leeds, Southampton and Brighton. Although groundbreakingly large-scale, some of its methods are surprisingly lo-tech – in Brennan’s words, “dozens of volunteers going out into the night with clipboards and counting sounds”. When we spoke a month before the census, 500 volunteers had already signed up. Professionals and music lovers elsewhere in Britain are being invited to complete the picture with their own surveys online until 8 May.
How do you decide what counts as “live”? Would Brennan disqualify a Metropolitan Opera live in HD broadcast? “We probably would ... We’re defining a live music event as one in which musicians (including DJs) provide music for audiences and dancers gathering in public places where the music is the principal purpose of the gathering.”
Opera in cinemas is out; DJs are in? It’s a very 21st-century conundrum.
Back in 1999, Philip Auslander wrote a book called Liveness, in which he insisted that the definition of “live” changes constantly. He questioned whether we should even try to distinguish between live performances and those entangled with technologies of production and dissemination. Most of the audience at any large-scale gig will see the artists on screens rather than in the flesh. And they’ll all listen via sophisticated sound equipment and powerful amplifiers. That’s assuming the artist is singing rather than lip-syncing.
Auslander later recalled that Liveness gave him a reputation as “the guy who hates live performance”. Yet one digital revolution later, his basic argument that live and non-live are messily mixed up still stands. In fact, it seems more pertinent than ever in an age of live-streaming and alternative forms of online interaction.
But in one respect, Auslander was way off the mark. His book concludes with the suggestion that “any change in the near future is likely to be toward a diminution of the symbolic capital associated with traditional live events”. Which is to say: he assumed, because of the blurring between live and non-live, that people would care less and less about live performance.
Today, if anything, though, the reverse is true. In a music industry tormented by streaming and piracy, live performance now provides a more reliable income for bands. Oli Steadman and Tom Hodgson, bassist and trumpeter with indie-folk outfit Stornoway, remember the advice they were given when starting out: “Don’t treat your tour as the business card for an expensive product; make a product cheaply – and that’ll be your business card to go out and tour. Live is where everything comes in.”
Hodgson reckons that for band and fans alike, the pleasure of live performance comes down to the “sheer proximity to the sound that’s being produced. So there is something very present about having the musicians right there. You can see their their sweat, their anxieties, their energy. I think that’s what people go for. What makes it special is that it can’t be reproduced, it can’t be pirated, it can’t be bootlegged, and each show is totally, totally unique.”
But both musicians admit this visceral effect depends on the size of the gig. Hodgson describes playing the Other Stage at Glastonbury as “a very different type of performing, because the stage is so big. Your bandmates are so far away from you, the audience is really far away from you. And we all wear in-ear monitors, which means you have a very odd mixture of what you can hear – everything else is blocked out.” Steadman agrees: “You’re so close to isolation that you almost come full circle to what it’s like to be in a recording studio. The only thing you can perform into is your mic.”
As an experience for the musicians, it sounds pretty far removed from the idealised “authenticity” or “presence” of a live performance.
But even that desire to connect with your audience is specific to certain times and certain types of music. Early 19th-century audiences chomped, slurped and chattered their way through opera performances, only tuning in for the highlights. Conventions have changed, of course. Most classical musicians today are probably less keen than Stornoway to hear their audience during a performance.
Gillian Moore, director of music at London’s Southbank Centre, is convinced it’s crucial to offer different experiences of music of in a variety of settings. She enthuses, for instance, about SBC’s Clore Ballroom – “where anybody can just rock up or pass by, where you could just bump into a live orchestra”. But she’s also adamant about the importance of providing opportunities for “the almost religious-type silence of listening to Mitsuko Uchida playing Schumann, one single pianist, captivating 2,700 people who are almost breathing at the same time”.
For Moore, there’s a continuum between those extremes, one that goes for all genres of music. And this is, of course, where digital media can come in, reaching new audiences, making new kinds of musical experiences such as the Philharmonia’s 2016 Virtual Orchestra project. But no one wants to claim that such experiences are equivalent, never mind the same as live performance. As Stornoway’s Steadman described performing for live TV and radio: “It’s something very, very different to being in a room full of warm bodies, people moving – it felt very clinical.”
And maybe that’s the heart of the matter. You can experience musical performance, musical sounds, via any digital platform, anytime, anywhere in 2017. But that very sense of musical ubiquity has changed our investment. The age-old possibility of being together with other warm bodies, engaged in a shared emotional experience, has gained new significance. In a digital age, it’s liveness that sells.
- The UK Live Music Census starts at noon on 9 March, and you can contribute until 8 May: uklivemusiccensus.org
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