Cover, Custom, and DIY? Memetic Features in Multimedia Creative Practices

Abstract

It is not unusual nowadays to attend a concert of contemporary music in which live performers and video projection are juxtaposed or truly interact. Internet video-sharing platforms and social media contribute to shape the way these materials are filmed and presented to the audience. My paper focuses on two composer-performers dealing with these kinds of technologies and audiovisual logics: Brigitta Muntendorf and Óscar Escudero. I pay attention to their respective pieces Public Privacy #1: Flute Cover (2013) and Custom #1 (2016). Beyond the inconsequential coincidence of a hashtag in their titles, some similar aspects of their creative processes are found, from the compositional conception to the interaction with performers for personalising the videos. I particularly consider theoretical elements of memetics for a diachronic observation of several creative choices. Finally, I evaluate the impact of participatory culture in the gestation of these pieces.

Keywords:

• Multimedia Practices
• Brigitta Muntendorf
• Óscar Escudero
• Memetics
• Participatory Culture
• Intertextuality

The curtain is opened to allow an old lady to enter the stage. She sits in front of the piano and starts to play the first movement of Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata. Her performance is, however, quite pretentious and sometimes gets merged, aurally speaking, with a transcription for wind orchestra of the score, played out of tune. By the end, the lady’s white hair completely covers the piano strings, while the music continues sounding by itself; she appears wearing a nightgown, smokes a cigarette, and takes a drink from a juice box. This is the synopsis of the nineteenth chapter of Mauricio Kagel’s Ludwig van (1970), which was one of several artworks celebrating Beethoven’s second centenary in West Germany within the complex political atmosphere of the time (Kutschke 2010). The film includes some references to the Nazi regime’s exploitation of Beethoven for propagandistic purposes. In particular, the pianist in the aforementioned scene is apparently a caricature of Elly Ney (Stavlas 2012, 76–77), who was clearly aligned with the Third Reich.

Forty-seven years after the filming of Ludwig van, Fabrizio André Bernard di Paolo—better known on the Internet as Lord Vinheteiro—uploaded to his YouTube channel the video 10 Beethoven Songs that You’ve Heard and Don’t Know the Name.¹ The Brazilian YouTuber plays ten short excerpts of famous Beethoven keyboard pieces or arrangements, with the first movement of the Waldstein Sonata among them. The video includes all the gestural jokes that have made him famous, like staring at the camera instead of the score with a quite inexpressive facial expression, or pointing towards the viewer during the rhythmic pauses of his left hand while using the sustain pedal. Additionally, he pretends to fall asleep when playing the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata and Für Elise. Compared with Kagel’s work, Vinheteiro’s parody of concert conventions are, at least at first glimpse, less political.

Kagel and Lord Vinheteiro’s audiovisual pieces share an ironic perspective on the Western musical canon, but are quite different as cultural artefacts. In between, temporally speaking, the golden age of music videos for television emerged (Kaplan 1987; Goodwin 1992; Vernallis 2004), further metamorphosed with the arrival of YouTube (Vernallis 2010, 2013; Edmond 2014), and is currently transforming again on new platforms such as TikTok (Shutsko 2020). It is not worth imagining what Kagel may have done in 2020 under these technological mutations if he were alive and received a new, similar commission. His influence as a pioneer is surely apparent in several creative attitudes today, but some multimedia practices require a particular scholarly regard, focusing on how the prevalent ways of creating and sharing audiovisual content on the Internet currently play a significant role in the field of contemporary music. I take for this purpose two works respectively conceived by Brigitta Muntendorf and Óscar Escudero as exemplary cases of how YouTube and social media more generally may shape creative processes. My goal is to unveil some of their artistic dynamics, as well as the exchanges and negotiations with their performers. Given that social media is a fundamental creative influence in both case studies, I consider the theoretical framework of memetics—i.e. the scholarly field of meme studies—particularly suitable for this task.

Memes, Internet Memes, and Music Video Memes

The nineteenth chapter of Ludwig van and 10 Beethoven Songs that You’ve Heard and Don’t Know the Name have a fundamental common trait beyond their similar stage presentation, their intentional comic purpose, and their shared intertextual references. They are reified trails of memetic processes, just like Theodor W. Adorno’s Philosophie der neuen Musik, the instructions of a Satisfyer, and the Gospels, for instance. Let me explain: biologist Richard Dawkins devoted the eleventh chapter of his celebrated book The Selfish Gene to human culture, providing an analogy with genetics. He coined the term meme for delimiting ‘a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation’ (Dawkins 2006, 192) which propagates under laws akin to biological ones. Indeed, the knowledge for performing actions—for example using a sex toy—, ideologies—for example a Marxist approach to musical aesthetics—, or beliefs—for example the idea of God—are cultural items that spread among individuals with variations over time.

The biological metaphor of memetics has seduced some authors, who have reworked the Darwinian approach to this topic (Distin 2005; Kronfeldner 2011). As a matter of fact, Dawkins’ concept began to trigger important debates about its usefulness in the social sciences and humanities by the end of the twentieth century (Blackmore 1999; Aunger 2000), with controversial issues arising, such as individual passivity or agency with regard to memetic processes. Almost any cultural item can be regarded as part of a memetic chain; even the father of the concept evoked the transmission of music as a paradigmatic example for explaining what a memetic process is (Dawkins 2006, 194). This choice may have inspired the endeavor of introducing memetics into the field of musical studies, which has been mainly carried by Steven Jan (2000, 2007, 2010).

The greatest success of the term, however, arrived with the widespread use of the Internet, in particular with the ubiquity of social media. Textual, visual, and audiovisual memes constantly overrun social media profiles, thus conditioning personal exchanges and interactions, inviting individuals to be part of this so-called ‘participatory culture’ (Jenkins et al. 2007). The sociocultural implications of Internet memes have gained scholarly attention in the last years (Shifman 2014; Milner 2016; Denisova 2019; Wiggins 2019); among the cited authors, I consider some ideas in the work of Limor Shifman to be most suitable for my forthcoming remarks on Muntendorf’s and Escudero’s creative practices. She defines an Internet meme by means of three intertwined features:

• (a) a group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form, and/or stance, which (b) were created with awareness of each other, and (c) were circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via the Internet by many users. (Shifman 2014, 41)

Video memes, and particularly those hosted on YouTube, are among the Internet memes that she has studied in more detail. In her words, a memetic video is ‘a popular clip that lures extensive creative user engagement in the form of parody, pastiche, mash-ups or other derivative work’ (Shifman 2012, 190).² YouTube gathers a large number of music video memes and musicologists are starting to approach them (López-Cano 2020), even those in which the music has been expressly modified or erased for comic ends (Sánchez-Olmos and Viñuela 2017, Viñuela 2022).

Neither Muntendorf’s nor Escudero’s multimedia artworks fit with the category of musical video memes. The video screen is a fundamental element in both pieces, but their respective multimedia apparatuses are conceived for live performance—although they may be filmed and finally uploaded to a web platform. For the same reason, these works do not fall in the broader category of Internet memes. However, some compositional strategies in both cases deliberately take advantage of multimodal elements and behaviors from the Internet world, with a strong emphasis on social media. In addition, their respective videos need to be customised for each particular performance, as some of the people involved also have to appear on the screen. The combination of these two particularities explains the suitability of Internet memetics for a discussion of both case studies.

For this purpose, it is necessary first to unpack some concepts within Shifman’s definition of Internet memes. Firstly, she does not consider Internet memes individually, but rather as a group of objects. This nuance is important for highlighting that Internet memes and viral content may overlap but are not equivalents: ‘the viral comprises a single cultural unit […] that propagates in many copies, an Internet meme is always a collection of texts’ (Shifman 2014, 56).³ Although some scholars have emphasised the relations between viral and memetic content on the Internet (Brodie 1996), virality is an issue of individual transmissibility—often based on emotional or useful content (Berger and Milkman 2012)—whereas the success of Internet memes depends on variability. Secondly, Internet memes are defined by the dimensions of content, form, and stance. The content alludes to ‘both the ideas and the ideologies conveyed by it’, the form to ‘the physical incarnation of the message’, and the stance to ‘the way in which addressers position themselves in relation to the text’ (Shifman 2014, 40). The complex concept of stance refers to the way participation is stimulated, the tone and style of communication, and the communicative functions. Thirdly, as the success of Internet memes depends on their repetition and variability, they have to contain mechanisms for unpacking and repacking some content within them. Mimicry and remix are the prime means for doing this. Mimicry simply involves the practice of redoing—rerecording a video, for instance—whereas remix brings into play particular technology-based manipulations (Shifman 2014, 20–22). These are not mutually exclusive practices of memetic replication, but the latter has particular implications, specifically in the context of artistic production (Navas 2012).

As the Waldstein Sonata scene in Ludwig van is currently hosted on YouTube,⁴ it would be possible to consider both Kagel’s and Vinheteiro’s videos mentioned before as part of a vast memetic process—diachronically speaking, because the property of awareness is not present here—of comic deviations of Beethoven’s music; consequently, a memetic discussion of these objects could be suitable. Nevertheless, I will directly jump into the analyses of Muntendorf’s and Escudero’s artworks.

Public Privacy #1: Flute Cover by Brigitta Muntendorf

Brigitta Muntendorf (b. Hamburg, 1982) is today a key figure among the German-Austrian composers who integrate elements of digital culture and social media in their creative practices. She founded the Ensemble Garage precisely to facilitate collaborative exchanges between musicians and diverse artists, with an eye to this digital shift. She has expressed concerns about the social implications of musical creativity in the digitalised Western world in several essays (Muntendonf 2015, 2016, 2018), and some authors have particularly shown interest in the theatrical and visual features of her oeuvre (Wieschollek 2014; Katschthaler 2018). Her most explicit theoretical contribution regarding the implications of Internet culture on the contemporary music milieu is her notion of social composing:

The consequence of the creative process in social composing is acting with and within real-digital communication models which also means, for example, that the interplay between artist and user, between art and social resonance, is a constant subject of controversy. […] [Social composing] requires a confrontation with the newly developed forms of communication in social media: the principle tweet / re-tweet and the idea of sharing and commenting, the principle of live chat, interactions in online communities or virtual reality in the presentation forms on Youtube, Youporn, & Co. (Muntendonf 2016)⁵

Social composing, with the mediation of YouTube, is a key feature of the cycle Public Privacy, which Muntendorf began in 2013. Each piece is conceived for a soloist performer with video and live electronics: Public Privacy #1 Flute Cover (2013), Public Privacy #2 Piano Cover (2013), Public Privacy #3 Trumpet Cover (2014), which also has a trombone version, Public Privacy #4 Leap in the Dark (2015) for electric guitar, Public Privacy #5 Aria (2016) for sampler, and Public Privacy #6 Voice–Bright no more (2017). In addition, practices on YouTube were a decisive influence on her theatrical work iScreen, YouScream (2016–2017).

The score of Public Privacy #1 Flute Cover has four main layers: an overall timeline for synchronising all the elements below; a layer for the flute, which sometimes incorporates specific bodily gestures; a schematisation of the way the video images are presented on the screen; and a summary of the most salient features of the tape. This last layer incorporates two textual references that help to rapidly identify the main distorted musical quotations in Muntendorf’s work: the theme Sadness and sorrow from the original soundtrack of the Japanese manga series Naruto and the music of the Korean YouTube video Gangnam Style. This choice is particularly meaningful in the context of Internet video memes and viral content, as manga music has been widely covered on YouTube,⁶ and the Korean video is one of the most shared musical content on the Internet so far (Jin and Yoon 2016; Jin 2018). This second source is not explicitly transferred onto the flute instrumental layer, but there is a short passage of the score—from 2’42” to 2’55”—in which the performer melodically alludes to the music for Masashi Kishimoto’s manga. Interestingly, this allusion makes reference to the descending profile of the synthetic strings in the introduction, which is also reproduced before in the tape, instead of quoting the main flute melody.

There are often rectangular signs in the video layer of Public Privacy #1 Flute Cover, representing the shape of a screen and sometimes split into smaller rectangles to indicate multiple screens. Some names or nicknames are embedded in these rectangular boxes, making reference to the original video sources which were borrowed by Muntendorf. They allude to mainly student or amateur flutists who decided to upload their own cover of pre-existing music to YouTube; the composer contacted them for permission to reuse their original material for her piece (see Table 1). The score also incorporates a box in the video layer with the expression ‘Video Solist’—video soloist in German. This allusion points to the performer, who has to prepare personal recordings similar to those of the YouTubers, in order to merge the new material with the borrowed, pre-existing material from YouTube. In so doing, the performer becomes sometimes duplicated during the live performance, appearing both on the stage and on the screen (see Figure 1). Muntendorf directs the whole process: she asks the flutist for the short videos by providing specific instructions, then remixes all the video material, and finally delivers a personalised video to the performer for rehearsals and the concert.

Figure 1. Screenshot of the YouTube video with Liz Hirst’s version of Public Privacy #1 Flute Cover (4’48”). On the left the video for this performance, on the right the live performance of the flutist. Hirst also appears on the lowest centered video box, and Daniel Adi on the low-left corner.

Table 1. List of YouTubers who agreed to give Muntendorf permission to use excerpts of their uploaded videos for the video of Public Privacy #1 Flute Cover (All accounts checked 20 July 2021).

Current nickname	YouTube account
Melissa.Flutes	https://www.youtube.com/user/MissMelflute
ralph raymond reyes	https://www.youtube.com/user/musikero19
beezus102	Deleted account
ChordsAndSwords	Deleted account
Jesus is a size 10	Deleted account
Allstarweekend5689	Deleted account
Nicole	https://www.youtube.com/user/Kagome811
Dameon Locklear	https://www.youtube.com/user/dameonlocklear
KeughtProductions	https://www.youtube.com/user/KeughtProductions
Shibuya Rose	Deleted account
Marianna Potato	Deleted account
inspirationalflute	https://www.youtube.com/user/inspirationalflute
Melissa Laurino	https://www.youtube.com/user/LaVieBohemex0x
Helon Morë	Deleted account
AlbaficaDePisces	https://www.youtube.com/user/AlbaficaDePisces

Muntendorf has uploaded two YouTube videos so far of live performances of Public Privacy #1 Flute Cover: on 23 April 2014 with Daniel Agi’s version⁷ and on 28 May 2017—but recorded in 2015—Liz Hirst’s version.⁸ Comparing both versions, it is evident that their respective videos are not exactly the same, as the composer has, for example, permuted some YouTubers’ positions. It is more interesting, however, to note that one of the short videos by Agi for his own version reappears in Hirst’s: Muntendorf has recycled a video of a professional flutist for a later version of her piece with another performer. A comparison of the previous lists of YouTubers and the one of flutists who have played Public Privacy #1 Flute Cover helps to understand the evolution of the global video through the different performances (see Table 2). Little by little, Muntendorf has substituted the amateur or student videos with her professional collaborators’ ones. As a matter of fact, there are some moments in the version she conceived for 2021—the last one available at the time of this writing—in which only professional flutists of the contemporary music milieu are shown (see Figure 2). This does not mean that the amateurs are completely absent: in Muntendorf’s words, ‘I still kept them in other parts of the video, but have shortened their appearance: sometimes they are just like an eyelash-long’.⁹ I will come back to this significant aspect later.

Figure 2. Screenshot of the video material for Martta Jämsä’s version of Public Privacy #1 Flute Cover (2’25”). From left to right, top to bottom: Liz Hirst, Isabelle Raphaels, Johanna Longin, Patrycja Pakiela, Martta Jämsä, Sonja Horlacher, Daniel Adi, Adriane Hill, and Carin Levine.

Table 2. List of first professional performances of Muntendorf’s Public Privacy #1 Flute Cover for each flutist version, from its premiere to summer 2021.

Flutist	Date	Venue
Daniel Agi	7/2013	Freiburg
Vera Klug	10/2013	not recorded
Liz Hirst	4/2014	Darmstadt
Alessandro Baticci	11/2015	Vienna
Sonja Horlacher	4/2016	Witten
Isabelle Raphaels	10/2016	Berlin
Malla Vivolin	2/2018	Helsinki
Shin Hoo Morgantini	4/2018	Berlin
Johanna Longin	4/2018	Frankfurt
Patrycja Pakiela	4/2018	Zurich
Adriane Hill	5/2018	Los Angeles
Anke Trautmann	10/2018	Nuremberg
Carin Levine	4/2019	Weimar
Martta Jämsä	7/2021	Viitasaari

Custom #1 by Oscar Escudero

Óscar Escudero (b. Alcázar de San Juan, 1992) belongs to a generation of young composers who, partially pushed by the economic crisis which strongly affected the milieu of Spanish contemporary music (Besada and Albertson 2019, 2–3), decided to pursue instruction and work abroad for a long time. He studied in Denmark with Simon Steen-Andersen and in Austria with Carola Bauckholt. These choices probably shaped an attitude toward new technologies in tune with some artistic trends in German-speaking countries, unlike the approach much more mediated by institutions like the IRCAM which can be seen in other Spanish composers (Besada 2019). Being younger, Escudero has less of a body of reflexive writings than Muntendorf so far, but he has addressed the issue of sharing musical content in social media (Escudero 2017), notably influenced by the philosophical theories of Han (2010). Some scholars have also payed attention to his musical production (Kjellsson 2020; Besada 2022).

Under the overarching concept of customisation on the Internet, Escudero began a series in 2016, which currently has three pieces, namely Custom #1 (2016) for performer, percussion, video, and electronics, Custom #2 (A digital melodrama) (2016) for three undetermined instruments, video, and electronics, and Custom #3 (Big data) (2016) for cello, piano, video, and electronics. The first piece of the series has different instrumental versions, as I discuss below. Further works in which Internet logics and technologies are explicitly shown on stage, such as The Flat Time Trilogy (2017–2018) and Subnormal Europe (2019–2020), were co-authored with Belenish Moreno-Gil. Both artists are cofounders of Clammy, a collective of ‘composers, multimedia artists, theorists, and youtubers’, as its Facebook page states.¹⁰

As happened with Muntendorf’s piece commented above, the score of Escudero for Custom #1 incorporates the multimedia layers he conceived for this work. The upper layer is for the video screening, with embedded screenshots of the video and musical notation for signaling precise moments of changes in the image. The video is a fake projection of the performer’s laptop or tablet on stage, and its images show typical actions on social media. The other layers are reserved for the performer and the percussionist; the first one has to synchronise a speech and some gestures with the video, while the percussion mainly provides a mickey-mousing counterpart of the actions in the video. Although this practice may recall old Disney productions, the technique is also present in many modern cartoons (Goldmark 2011, 266–269), some of which have spread via social media. As the composer’s notebook for the conception of Custom #1 reveals, he assigned particular instruments and idiomatic actions to sync up with specific elements of the video, like scrolling on a social media profile, clicking on an image, liking something, or typing text. For a perfect synchronisation of the performer and the percussionist with the vertiginous video, they both hear metronomic beats through small headphones during the performance.

The performer of Custom #1—who is often Escudero himself, in line with the attitude of several composers of the New Discipline (Groth 2016)—presents a lecture on a fail-proof method for becoming successful in social media. For this purpose, many examples from these platforms are provided, and the performer’s personal profiles are faked on the screen in order to give realism to the action. As Muntendorf also did, Escudero creates a fully personalised video for each performer. First, he asks the performers to give him permission to copy materials from their digital footprint. These materials are reused in Escudero’s personal social media profiles—which are currently empty for this purpose; he only uses his professional ones now for social interaction—to customise the video. These adaptations not only include personal photos, but also typed texts or allusions to current affairs, with particular attention to the worlds of art and politics. Second, the performers are asked to film short videos with precise content in terms of speech, bodily gestures, timing, and action, while freely adopting five different characters in terms of apparel, postural attitude, and background. The first of these characters must copy the real appearance the performer envisages for the concert as an Internet Doppelgänger, because a conflict with the real person on stage is part of Custom #1. Conversely, the four additional characters must strongly differ from this appearance. These avatars also interact in the final video, as, for example, in an almost choral section close to the end (see Figure 3). Third, Escudero sometimes includes faked references to the concert situation when an event is scheduled far enough in advance. For example, he uses Google Earth to make the audience believe that the video content is generated in real-time. The composer finally mixes all these materials and delivers an almost finished version of the video, which is then truly completed during the rehearsals with a shooting of the percussionist playing on stage. The contradiction between the ostensible real-time video and what truly happens on the stage, which closes the work, aims to question the recognisability and scope of faked Internet content against real facts.

Figure 3. Screenshots of different versions of the four-avatar chorus in Custom #1. Top: Sarah Maria Sun for the première; center: Óscar Escudero for the #1.4 adaptation; bottom: José L. Besada during the 5th TCPM conference in Lisbon.

There have been many variants of Custom #1 since it was premiered in 2016 (see Table 3). Beyond the elements summarised above, two additional modifications are important. First, the performer’s text has been translated into several languages. The original version was premiered in English, and has been adapted for Spanish, German, French, and Ukrainian audiences. There are even two Spanish versions of the text, as one of them was conceived for Guillermo Anzorena and reflects some of the singer’s Argentinian jargon. Furthermore, Escudero was asked to adapt the percussionist part for further instrumental situations. These new commissions led to the birth of Custom #1.2 for octet, Custom #1.3 for sextet, Custom #1.4 for string quartet, and Custom #1.5 for violin, saxophone, and percussion.

Table 3. List of first professional performances of Escudero’s Custom #1 for each different version from its premiere to end 2021.

No.	Performer	Musicians	Date	Venue	Languages
#1	Sarah Maria Sun	Johannes Fischer	03/2016	Heidelberg	English
#1	Roberto Maqueda	Víctor Barceló	07/2016 01/2018	Flix Alcázar de San Juan Madrid	Spanish
#1	Óscar Escudero	Roberto Maqueda	10/2016	Donaueschingen	English
#1	Belenish Moreno-Gil	Néstor Pamblanco	07/2017 09/2020 03/2021	Granada Salamanca Alcázar de San Juan	Spanish
#1.2	Sarah Maria Sun	Ensemble mosailk, Lennart Dohms (cond.)	11/2017	Berlin	English
#1.2	Gloria Jaramillo	Container Sinfonietta, Miguel Román (cond.)	12/2017	Badajoz	Spanish
#1.3	Guillermo Anzorena	Crossing Lines	03/2018	Barcelona	Spanish (Argentina)
#1	Rubén Martínez Orio	Miquel Vich Vila	04/2018	Grenoble	French
#1	Viktoriia Vitrenko	Lucas Gerin	04/2018	Kiev Odessa Lviv	Ukrainian and English
#1	Óscar Escudero	Néstor Pamblanco	05/2018	Toledo	Spanish
#1	Óscar Escudero	Carl David Österberg	08/2018	Aarhus	English
#1.3	Óscar Escudero	Crossing Lines	10/2018	Stuttgart	English
#1	María Domínguez	Pablo Paz	12/2018	Brussels Ghent	English
#1.4	Óscar Escudero	Dalia Quartet	12/2018	Madrid	Spanish
#1	Belenish Moreno-Gil	Juanjo Guillem	12/2018	Madrid	Spanish
#1.5	Cathrin Romeis	Dieornungderdinge	02/2019 09/2019	Berlin	German
#1.2	Óscar Escudero	Ensemble mosailk, Enno Poppe (cond.)	09/2019	Berlin	English
#1.4	Óscar Escudero	Gerhard Quarter	09/2021	Weimar	German and English
#1	Óscar Escudero	Alek Wnuk	09/2021	Warsaw	English

Discussion: Memetic Logics in Multimedia Musical Practices

Both Muntendorf and Escudero’s pieces described above have given rise to respective arrays of audiovisual materials which are linked to each particular performance. Taking this perspective, each set could be regarded, according to Shifman’s definition, as Internet memes. Indeed, properties (a)—shared features in terms of content, form and stance—and (b)—awareness of being part of the memetic array—perfectly match; property (c)—Internet circulation and collective action—does not apply, by contrast, as the videos do not emerge from interactions amongst many users. As this aspect is, however, simulated by both composers’ multimedia manipulations, I will ignore it for now, but come back to this substantial difference in my concluding remarks.

Both Public Privacy #1 Flute Cover and Custom #1 assemble elements of mimicry and remix. The mixing features of these multimedia pieces were detailed in the previous sections, but the mimicry deserves some discussion. In the work by Muntendorf, the tape does not explicitly depict the real audio of the YouTube videos she collected. This fact makes unrecognisable the original intentions of each YouTuber, and the final result could make the audience believe that they are working together to accurately cover Muntendorf’s piece. Their assembly may even give the impression of a collective remote performance of a shared score, as is the case, for instance, in Eric Whitacre’s massive Internet chorus pieces (Konewko 2013). The mimicry is much more steered in Escudero’s case, as he asks the performer to fabricate four different avatars for the video. However, this mimicking strategy goes beyond his own intentions. Escudero acknowledges that he has to ask the performers to avoid imitating Sarah Maria Sun’s premiere,¹¹ both the real action on the stage and her avatars, which is easily accessible on YouTube.¹²

Taking into account the dimensions of content, form, and stance of Internet memes, there are significant differences between Public Privacy #1 Flute Cover and Custom #1. In Escudero’s piece, the changes in the array of versions mainly affect the content and form. The form is modified above all by the individual customisations and the five different instrumentations, while the content and stance are mainly affected by the inclusion of current affairs, which draws specific attention to different topics depending on the audience. I will come back later to this particular feature. By contrast, the form of Muntendorf’s piece remains the same in the different versions and the content only changes through the personalisation for each flutist. Here, the salient aspect is the evolution of the memetic stance through the memetic array. Although the average audience is the same for the different concerts, the video evolution over time has a particular consequence. Little by little, a collection of likely anonymous YouTubers—at least for Muntendorf’s audience—are replaced by professional flutists who are presumably recognisable within the contemporary music milieu. This progressive mutation echoes the value of memes for highlighting collective identities through shared culture (Nissenbaum and Shifman 2017).

As Custom #1 is more complex in terms of its multiplicity of semiotic interconnections, it allows a deeper comparison with multimodal YouTube memes. Shifman (2012) has highlighted six particular features that tend to be present in the most shared and responded YouTube memes, namely ‘ordinary’ people, flawed masculinity, humor, simplicity, repetitiveness, and whimsical content. The majority of these elements are found in the several versions of Custom #1. The presence of multiple characters played by a single performer points to a dissolution of uniqueness, and the content is presented in a comic way. The multi-layered interactions are complex, but the final outcome is simplified by multimodal redundancy, as happens, for instance, with the musical mickey-mousing. Repetitiveness is also noticeable in the formal conception of the piece, especially with the repetition of the opening utterance ‘Hi there and thanks all for coming!’ in different ways, including the choral moment with the four avatars. Flawed masculinity—which may be interpreted on the Internet as an empowering attitude or, quite the contrary, as a mocking parody—is present in several versions. This aspect is particularly relevant in a comparison of masculine versus feminine representations in contemporary music memes which are currently found in social media (Freitas 2022). Escudero often shows himself as a non-hegemonic heterosexual male—with dyed hair and colourful nails—and one of Anzorena’s avatars is gender ambiguous with a long wig. I also felt tempted to play this game once: in a short demo of the four-avatar chorus I provided at Lisbon in 2019 during the 5th international conference Tracking the Creative Process in Music, one of my characters purposely copied the non-standard masculinity of Alexander Schubert, another mimicked a BDSM gay icon, and a third was an over-the-top transvestite, as shown in Figure 3. At the moment I made these choices, I was not aware of Shifman’s theories of YouTube memes, but my avatars were even more extreme, in terms of flawed masculinity, than those conceived by actual performers of Custom #1. Finally, the whimsical content of successful YouTube memes includes popular culture topics, and not serious concerns which may provoke controversial opinions, such as politics, religion, or sex (Shifman 2012, 197–198). Although Custom #1 is full of comic gags, they are not always whimsical. For instance, Escudero’s videos often contain ideological controversies, in particular in a passage where the performer fakes a real-time Facebook post (see Table 4). Interestingly, these controversial utterances are mainly found in the versions for other performers, while Escudero’s own performances are generally more humorous or related to daily life, although all the versions were fully conceived by him.¹³

Table 4. Comparison of the fake Facebook posts in the video for nine different versions of Custom #1 from 2016 to 2018. The post has been translated when the original language is other than English.

No.	Performer	Date	Content of the post
#1	Sarah Maria Sun	03/2016	The death of Pierre Boulez represents the farewell to one of the greatest musicians and thinkers of the XXth Century. Also, it’s the end of an era and perhaps an attitude in aesthetics and philosophy dominated by certainly questionable Adornian ideas, but that undoubtedly evolved the concept of listening and understanding of [STOP]
#1.2	Sarah Maria Sun	11/2017	The action of the security forces during the Referendum of Independence in Catalonia is certainly reprehensible in terms of violence but, on the other hand, it is undeniable that the Spanish state should preserve its unity and law enforcement with all the tools at their disposal:-)
#1.3	Guillermo Anzorena	03/2018	[Spanish] Jail for a song, court censorship on books involving corrupt politicians, removal of works of art … Spain is having a beautiful democracy! Luckily they still have Marta Sánchez.
#1	Rubén Martínez Orio	04/2018	[French] All religions since Jupiter preach morality. I would believe in a religion if it had existed since the beginning of the world, but when I see Socrates, Plato, Moses, Muhammad, I no longer believe. It was all brought to life by men.
#1	Viktoriia Vitrenko	04/2018	Ukraine must work to reestablish its sovereignty and unity, which has been a blow to the war, Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and the political reaction inside country.
#1	Óscar Escudero	05/2018	[Spanish] José María Íñigo’s death represents the farewell to one of the greatest figures of Spanish radio and TV in the second half of the XXth Century, but I will always support Constantino Romero.
#1	Óscar Escudero	08/2018	Nobody told me how to make an invoice or to prepare a tax declaration. However, I will never forget what a mitochondrion is or how to solve quadratic equations. Is this a valuable knowledge for a millennial?
#1	María Domínguez	12/2018	Did you ever ask yourself if you are an accomplice of hate and supremacism even though we all already know you hate Donald Trump [?] Thanks.
#1.4	Óscar Escudero	12/2018	[Spanish] Playing seated = like Saying tschh to your neighbour = like 8-minute pieces = like Program notes = like Explaining all that happens in your piece to the audience = like

Finally, the faked Facebook post in Custom #1 also deserves attention in terms of memetic content and stance. Pierre Boulez’s death was mentioned in this place during the world premiere of the piece; this post was paraphrased by Escudero in a version he performed two years later, this time alluding to José María Íñigo’s demise. Íñigo was a journalist who became very famous in Spain as he was for decades the voice commenting the Eurovision Song Contest for Spanish public TV. The ‘high-culture’ reference to Boulez for the premiere in the milieu of contemporary music metamorphosed thus into a popular wink for a performance in Escudero’s small home town. Íñigo is, without a doubt, more familiar than Boulez for a Spanish audience with no specific background in contemporary music.

Afterthought: The Participatory-Culture Paradox

As stated above, I purposely left the participatory issue of Internet memes aside for my analyses of Muntendorf’s and Escudero’s practices. Evidently, this aspect is somehow faked with the YouTubers’ covers in Public Privacy #1 Flute Cover and the multiple avatars in Custom #1. More important than this fact, the collection and management of all materials for the videos is completely centralised by both composers, who currently have the last word on accepting or rejecting the performers’ suggestions. Muntendorf acknowledges that she manages this task because flutists are not used to cutting and editing videos; she would be curious to know what the result would be if she did let them do this work.¹⁴ Escudero’s position is by contrast stricter, as he asks the performers to sign a contract with a clause preventing them from modifying the final video they receive. These facts reveal some paradoxical features in their relationship with the bases of participatory culture. Although Muntendorf’s notion of social composing focuses on the ideas of sharing and interaction, her approach to YouTubers and professional flutists are quite dissimilar in terms of borrowing and collaboration. In the case of Escudero, there is a non-irrelevant contradiction between his advocacy of a culture of musical hacking¹⁵ and the centralised high-tech control he creates around the compositional process and rehearsals. Specifically, his exchanges and interactions with the performers of Custom #1 are far from some trends of hardware hacking in electronic music (Collins 2006) and, broadly speaking, from the DIY culture in music (Jones 2020). My last remarks do not entail a critique of Muntendorf’s and Escudero’s creative position and their resulting aesthetics. I only stress that these creative strategies are very different from other compositional choices which intentionally open the doors for much less controlled participatory input from the Internet, as happens for instance in Alexander Schubert’s WIKI-PIANO.NET (2018) (Kanga 2020, 2021).

Schubert’s WIKI-PIANO.NET and Kagel’s Ludwig van are multimedia artworks in which collaborative inputs, whether predetermined or not—consider for instance Joseph Beuys’ engagement in Kagel’s film—, have been crucial for their respective achievement. Conversely, in Muntendorf’s and Escudero’s pieces that I have scrutinised, collaborative features are greatly filtered by their respective personal inspections of social media platforms such as YouTube or Facebook. I believe that an understanding of this perspective and its paradoxes, as I have tried to unveil in this article, is equally needed to grasp how the Internet influences multimedia creative practices today.

Disclosure Statement

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

Additional information

Funding

José L. Besada is funded by the Ramón y Cajal program of the Research State Agency of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, and the European Social Fund (ref. RYC2020-028670-I).

Notes on contributors

José L. Besada

Following two post-doctoral periods at IRCAM and at the University of Strasbourg, José L. Besada is currently a mid-term research fellow at the Complutense University of Madrid. His research focuses on the formal, technological, and cognitive features of both contemporary musical practices and music theory. Some of his works have been published in leading journals such as Perspectives of New Music, Tempo, Organised Sound, Music Analysis, and Music Theory Online. He currently serves on the executive board of the Société Française d’Analyse Musicale (SFAM) and is a founding member of the Sociedad de Análisis y Teoría Musical (SATMUS) in Spain.

Notes

1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHcm9sS94iE.

2 Emphasis in the original.

3 Emphasis in the original.

4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-KoEofNim4.

5 Muntendorf’s translation, retrieved at https://brigitta-muntendorf.de/words/social-composing-2015/.

6 The following violin cover of the flute melody has reached thirty-eight million visits (checked 18 December 2021): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mF3DCa4TbD0.

7 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbRTGxa54-s.

8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBJgP5oEIfQ.

9 Personal communication.

10 https://www.facebook.com/clammymusic.

11 Personal communication.

12 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vl4baHRkZpQ.

13 Personal communication.

14 Personal communication.

15 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1miwhAtXM8w&t=185s.