Thinking Telematically: Improvising Music Worlds Under COVID and Beyond

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic lockdown brought much attention to live music making via the internet, amplifying the previously marginal fields of livestream concertizing and networked music performance. Drawing connections among recent publications, artists’ creative strategies, and his own experiences, the author surveys questions about musical telepresence that arose in this process, including reflections on the nature of musical liveness in an increasingly digital industry, the creative potentials of networked music making, and the value of “thinking telematically” about cultural production and social change.

Acknowledgements

These ideas are indebted to my many telematic collaborators, including Mark Dresser, Nicole Mitchell, Myra Melford, Geri Allen, George E. Lewis, Mario Humberto Valencia, Sarah Weaver, Pauline Oliveros, Chris Chafe, Juan David Rubio, Tata Ceballos, Jason Robinson and Yoon Jeong Heo, among others. Thanks also to the many colleagues and students who worked with me over networks during the pandemic, and to Mariángeles Soto-Díaz and Mark Lomanno for insights on an earlier draft.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Shana L. Redmond, Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 17.

2 For more on the history of these terms and distinctions, see Eric C. Lemmon, “Telematic Music vs. Networked Music: Distinguishing Between Cybernetic Aspirations and Technological Music-Making,” Journal of Network Music and Arts 1 (2019): 30.

3 For the NPR series, see https://www.npr.org/2021/02/12/966660174/alone-together-jazz-couples-stuck-at-home. For more on Tepfer’s livestreams, see “Playing Music Together Online is Not as Simple as it Seems (Video),” Video by NPR Jazz Night in America, July 15, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/07/14/891091995/playing-music-together-online-is-not-as-simple-as-it-seems.

4 Especially during the early, more restrictive phases of lockdown, many musicians found creative ways to perform outdoor, socially-distanced concerts. See for example the description of outdoor jazz performances in NYC in fall 2020 in Margot Boyer-Dry, “A Bright Spot in the Pandemic Gloom: Jazz Is Everywhere in New York,” The New York Times, November 20, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/20/nyregion/coronavirus-nyc-jazz-concerts.html.

5 See Alan Scherstuhl, “Live From New York, It’s Jazz at a Distance,” The New York Times, May 31, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/arts/music/jazz-smalls-coronavirus-concerts.html.

6 Monika Herzig, “What the World Needs Now Is Jazz,” Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études Critiques En Improvisation 14, no. 2–3 (2021), doi:10.21083/csieci.v14i2.6431. Another data-based study focused on musicians’ resilience during the pandemic is Carrie Cai et al., “Breakdowns and Breakthroughs: Observing Musicians’ Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic,” in Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Yokohama Japan: ACM, 2021), 1–13, doi:10.1145/3411764.3445192.

7 See Avery Kleinman, “Jazz Venues Have Been Hit Particularly Hard by the Pandemic. They Are Hoping the Worst Is Over,” The Washington Post, October 15, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/jazz-venues-pandemic/2021/10/14/83dc32d8-2798-11ec-8d53-67cfb452aa60_story.html; and Nate Chinen, “The Blue Whale, Beloved Hub of the Jazz Scene in Los Angeles, Announces Permanent Closure,” WBGO Jazz After Hours, December 31, 2020, https://www.wbgo.org/music/2020-12-31/the-blue-whale-beloved-hub-of-the-jazz-scene-in-los-angeles-announces-permanent-closure.

8 Karen Ng and Scott Thomson, “COVID-19 and the Creative Music Ecology,” Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études Critiques En Improvisation 14, no. 1 (2021), doi:10.21083/csieci.v14i1.6424.

9 See https://www.artsforart.org/onlinesalon.html.

10 See Sara Atske and Rew Perrin, “Home Broadband Adoption, Computer Ownership Vary by Race, Ethnicity in the U.S.,” Pew Research Center (blog), https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/07/16/home-broadband-adoption-computer-ownership-vary-by-race-ethnicity-in-the-u-s/ (accessed October 23, 2021); and Hansi Lo Wang, “Native Americans on Tribal Land are ‘The Least Connected’ to High-Speed Internet,” NPR, December 6, 2018, https://www.npr.org/2018/12/06/673364305/native-americans-on-tribal-land-are-the-least-connected-to-high-speed-internet.

11 Laura Risk, “Imperfections and Intimacies: Trebling Effects and the Improvisational Aesthetics of Pandemic-Era Livestreaming,” Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études Critiques En Improvisation 14, no. 1 (2021), doi:10.21083/csieci.v14i1.6471. Though not specifically related to livestreams, Risk draws in part here on Eric Drott’s analysis of streaming audio; see Eric Drott, “Music as a Technology of Surveillance,” Journal of the Society for American Music 12, no. 3 (2018): 233–67, doi:10.1017/S1752196318000196; also influential is the earlier work on liveness by Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2008). For a detailed discussion of the aesthetics of “liveness” in jazz musicians’ response to the pandemic, see Asher Tobin Chodos, “Simultaneity, Synchrony and Liveness: Jazz Confronts the Pandemic,” Jazz and Culture 4, no. 2 (2021) (forthcoming).

12 The distance threshold for tightly synchronous performance, in the conventional sense, is roughly 500 miles. For a brief explanation, see “Playing Music Together Online is Not as Simple as it Seems (Video),” cited above. For a more detailed overview, see Michael Dessen, “Networked Music Performance: An Introduction for Musicians and Educators,” Medium.com, September 18, 2020, https://mdessen.medium.com/networked-music-performance-an-introduction-for-musicians-and-educators-d31d33716bd2.

13 For example, the communities of users and developers around JackTrip (https://jacktrip.org) and Jamulus (https://jamulus.io), two prominent NMP softwares, expanded rapidly during the pandemic, and JackTrip eventually developed a new platform (Virtual Studio) aimed at reducing cost and complexity for large ensembles with musicians performing from home, a usage scenario inspired by the needs of musicians during the pandemic. Many musicians new to this technology brought technological expertise that helped expand the tools, such as pianist Dan Tepfer, noted above, who helped create an important new feature (“broadcast mode”) in JackTrip that began as a creative solution to his own experiences with NMP livestreams. In addition, new, open source NMP apps, most notably Sonobus (https://sonobus.net), were created by developers during the pandemic, aimed at simplifying the end-user experience without sacrificing quality.

14 See Cristina Rottondi et al., “An Overview on Networked Music Performance Technologies,” IEEE Access 4 (2016): 8823–43, doi:10.1109/ACCESS.2016.2628440.

15 For more on the role of microtiming in African diasporic musical practices, see Vijay Iyer, “Microstructures of Feel, Macrostructures of Sound: Embodied Cognition in West African and African-American Musics” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1998).

16 For background history on telematic music making, particularly interculturally, see Roger Mills, Tele-Improvisation: Intercultural Interaction in the Online Global Music Jam Session (Cham: Springer, 2019); and for an introduction to both technological and conceptual aspects of the medium, see Rebekah Wilson, “Aesthetic and Technical Strategies for Networked Music Performance,” AI & Society (2020), doi:10.1007/s00146-020-01099-4. Examples of telematic experimentation during the pandemic are numerous and include the NowNet Arts Online Performance Series (https://nownetarts.org/series-2020), which created an ongoing space to accommodate many new participants in NMP, and the Quarantine Sessions led by JackTrip software developer Chris Chafe and others (https://chrischafe.net/quarantine-sessions/).

17 Jason Robinson, “The Networked Body: Physicality, Embodiment, and Latency in Multi-Site Performance,” in Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound, and Subjectivity, ed. Ellen Waterman and Gillian Siddall (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). For more on the term Afrological, see George E. Lewis, “Improvised Music After 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives,” Black Music Research Journal 16, no. 1 (1996): 91–122.

18 Eric Lewis, “Black Time in the Age of COVID: Improvising Afrologically in Both Telematic Performance and Public Health Policy,” Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études Critiques En Improvisation 14, no. 1 (2021), doi:10.21083/csieci.v14i1.6456. For more on microtiming and rhythmic feel in Afrological rhythmic practice, see Iyer, Ibid.

19 Roy Ascott, Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

20 Naomi Klein, “How Big Tech Plans to Profit from the Pandemic,” The Guardian, May 13, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/may/13/naomi-klein-how-big-tech-plans-to-profit-from-coronavirus-pandemic.

21 For more detailed suggestions on using networked music for socially-transformative music education, see the final sections of Dessen, “An Introduction” (Ibid.); see also the organization Teach to Learn, which facilitates online music educational partnerships throughout the world (https://www.teachtolearn.life).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Dessen

Michael Dessen composes for improvisers, performs on trombone and computer, explores creative music technologies, and works to expand spaces for cultural innovation in higher education. His teachers include Yusef Lateef, George E. Lewis, and Anthony Davis, and he is a Professor at the University of California, Irvine, where he co-founded an MFA and PhD program in Integrated Composition, Improvisation and Technology (ICIT), and served for four years as chair of the Department of Music.