She was appalled. Every chorister knows the kind of work that goes into singing well together: with your ears you slowly train your voice β indeed, the full motion of your body β to the sound of those around you, submitting the movement of your embodied sound to theirs even as they join with you. This embodied being-in-tune with other people is what makes being part of a choir so pleasurable and so powerful; it is, if I may make so bold, a nod towards the redemption of our flesh.
The book of Revelation depicts the redeemed church singing its praise to the slain lamb. The virtual choir purports to provide this connection. This essay attempts to name how significant it is that the audience is absent in virtual performances. Virtual choir is not the same as a virtual performance; but they connect at the crucial points of presence and resonance. In what follows, I elaborate on these two terms via an examination of how an audience participates in a musical performance in ways that are integral to musical performance itself.
Such resonance with present bodies coinheres with and enables the kind metaphorical presence and resonance that separates music from brute noise. This happens as performer and audience share in the music and in so doing share in one another. I present three different aspects of this sharing: how the musician shares her work with the audience, shares in the pleasure of music with her audience, and shares in an investment in the music with her audience.
The Covid pandemic has shuttered most possibilities of physically-present live performances, and I by no means wish to critique artists for doing their best with limited options in trying times. That musicians of all stripes feel and grieve the lack of an audience we do not doubt, but such grief may be hard to account for in a culture which so depreciates our embodied relationality it has, after all, celebrated virtual choirs for more than a decade.
The difference that a present and resonant audience makes for a musical performance is perhaps most obvious in the importance we place in sharing our work with others. If this point is easy to see and common to our experience, its legitimacy may be harder to perceive. An obsession with popularity, numbers, and appreciation is indeed craven. And it is a gross error to equate sheer popularity with quality, creativity, skill, depth, goodness, or truth.
