Is it more important to be seen than heard?

BY CHRISTOPHER HEALEY, COMPOSER

Many of us who wear the label of ‘artist’ know that a career in art is like the movie Inception, except that instead of layers of dreams, we traverse layers of increasingly strange and fantastical niches, spiralling ever downwards until we find a place that seems suitably strange for our work to call home. Or perhaps, in the words of the late Sir Terry Pratchett, it’s really just ‘turtles all the way down’. But making art (whatever be your specific poison) and working out where that art belongs is only a small part of what it means to have a career. As a young composer who will likely be considered ‘emerging’ well into his 40s, I have wrestled much less with the making of my work than with the seemingly unending challenge of getting it in front of people who might be moved by it.

In a recent email exchange with CutCommon editor Stephanie Eslake, we were discussing whether or not it would be worth talking about an upcoming performance of my Saxophone Quartet in Holland. Seeing as many of those who might read about my work are based in Australia, and therefore could not attend concert, my first thought was not to bother. But my second thought (I know, right? Go brain!) was that often, it is strangely more important to be seen to do things than for those things to actually be heard.

Often, it is strangely more important to be seen to do things than for those things to actually be heard.

It’s possible that reading this, you’re thinking, ‘Well, duh’. But perhaps not. Personally, I have always clung idealistically to the old adage that if you build it (and it’s good enough), people will come. The government of Burma certainly thought so, too, when they built their new capital city Naypyidaw, unveiled in 2005 and to this day remaining more-or-less empty. Sometimes in music, like in Burma, building it — no matter how huge — just isn’t enough to make people interested.

This is not to say that I was ever quite so idealistic as to think that if I wrote a really, really great symphony and put it in my desk drawer, the music fairies would arrange for it to be premiered by the New York Philhamonic. I said I was idealistic, not delusional. Rather, what I’m talking about is the fact that composers are working with sound, and humans are “overwhelmingly visual creatures” and that this might have some significant implications in terms of building an audience.

It gets worse. Not only is the human brain hardwired to devote a lot more power to processing visual information compared to auditory, but thanks to the internet, our attention spans are dwindling and now thought to be as short as eight seconds long. For composers and musicians who haven’t yet got the fame-factor on their side, this is not a pretty picture (‘ba-dum tsh’). Not only is music not visual, but compared to an eight-second attention span, even a ringtone-length piece of music can require a conscious effort to stay with until the end.

With the invention of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, SoundCloud, and all the rest, it’s now incredibly easy to get your work in front of people. You just upload, hit ‘share’, and voila. Unfortunately, in most cases, that shared work will drift by like a tumbleweed through a ghost town, rolling past and then out into no man’s land, perhaps briefly seen but never heard. I’ve witnessed this firsthand with my own music, and I’ve also seen it with composers who are at the top of their field. The most obvious example I’ve seen of this recently was when a very well-known composer posted a listen-back link on Facebook to a recording of one of their works and received a whole five ‘likes’. Meanwhile, the images the same composer posted that were related to one of their work — pictures of the music, rehearsals, performances, etc. — typically received more than 10 times that number of ‘likes’. If you don’t believe me, find a well-respected composer, and try to find an example of a shared recording of their work that has more interaction than the picture of what they ate for dinner.

Let’s consider further, however, that everyone who liked the picture of dinner saw the picture. But what of those five likes for the shared recording? Did five people actually click the link? Did they listen to any of the work? Did they listen to more than a few moments of it, let alone the whole thing? If I were a betting man, I would put money down that not one person who saw that link spent more than a few minutes skimming through the recording.

I had noticed this trend in my own sharing of my works via social media. I would say that, more often than not, it’s a coin flip as to whether a recording I share of my own work gets any love at all. Honestly, the Starship Enterprise could learn a lot about stealth technology from my music.

For a long while, I thought it was a combination of everyone being too busy looking at cat videos, and that my music just really sucked big time. At some point, however, I started paying more attention to the social media presence of some much more successful composers, and I was pretty startled to realise just how little love their actual music gets.

You might say that the proverbial penny had been dropping for a long while; a slow, tumbling descent that would have been even too slow-mo for the Wachowski sisters (The Matrix). But it wasn’t until realising that this is perhaps a universal composer-problem, rather than a me-problem, that the penny finally hit the floor — and it did so in total silence. There was no epic music complete with thundering brass, nor even the chink of metal against a tiled floor. Just total silence, still and deep and wide. The penny, having been seen, had accomplished its metaphorical purpose, and wasted no energy on trying to be heard. The realisation was out there.

Like that penny, I am finally realising that developing an audience in music is probably more about being seen doing interesting things than it is about people actually listening to your music. If you’re anything like me, that’s a pretty uncomfortable realisation, as there’s nothing I want so badly as to be able to contribute to my community by writing and sharing music with people. Unfortunately, human nature means that what ‘sells’, even if you’re not getting paid, is often the story that people see rather than the music they hear.

There’s nothing I want so badly as to be able to contribute to my community by writing and sharing music with people.

The music itself exists in a transient moment: a sliver of the ever-now, and thereafter lingers in the fading memory of the ever-then. This is doubly so with contemporary music, which so infrequently gets repeat performances. If social media is anything to go by, however, what an audience wants most is to feel like they are, in some small way, part of the story of a work. Because in so doing, that story adds value and meaning to their own lives; whereas being offered an isolated musical experience just symbolises a story that is fundamentally separate to their own. And as strange as it seems, telling that story as a composer probably has a lot more to do with the visual cliff-notes than with the music itself. The music is just the final test, the boss battle at the end of a level of Sonic the Hedgehog. Whether people turn up to cheer you on really depends on if you’ve given them a reason to care that you’re playing in the first place — just showing up isn’t enough. After all, stop and consider: How much of a work’s story is actually the performance of the music itself? A composer might have spent hundreds of hours of working time on a piece that will exist for less that 100th of that amount of time.

This story is told in the music itself, but also in your comments to the musicians, how you talk about it with your friends, every Facebook post, every interview or mention of the work; in the program notes and in the talking that happens around a concert. It’s likely that many of the people who encounter a story of your work may never encounter the music it is referring to. They may form their opinions of your work from the story you’re telling about it, just as much as from the work itself.

To be sure, I’m not suggesting that we make up an exciting story about a boring piece of music, because in the long run that can surely only backfire. I think, however, that many artists, especially young and still learning artists like myself, can be excruciatingly, agonisingly, disablingly aware of their own failings and shortcomings; the rejections both overt and subtle, piling up around us like bleak mid-winter snow, shutting us off from the world.

What does this all mean for young and emerging composers like myself?

Well, here are the take-aways that I have spent way too long coming to realise:

1. The first is that, generally speaking, ain’t nobody got time for that. People, even your best friends, won’t listen to your music unless they have already specifically set aside time for it. You may have heard of such an occasion: it is generally known as a ‘concert’. And really, this is still the only way to present your work to people.
2. Second is that the whole story around your work is just as important to your current audience — and likely even more important to your potential future audience — than the work itself. I don’t mean your image or your personal brand, or repeatedly telling people that you’re ‘the best there is and no one is better’. I mean your and your work’s story. It is that story that invites people to be a part of the work’s life cycle.
3. Third is that, if you can, tell the story with pictures rather than words, and save the music itself until people are ready to hear it.
4. Lastly, the twists and turns of a work’s story, like life, aren’t always up to you, but the telling and the meaning are yours. Embrace it!

I am, however, very much still learning how to exist with my music in this rather strange world. If you have any additional thoughts, suggestions or insights, please comment below to continue to the conversation.

Christopher Healey is a young Australian composer and PhD Composition Student at the University of Queensland.

You can support him by visiting his website, Facebook page, or listening – really listening – to his original music. Get started with the works below, or find the scores here.

Birches (recording).
Christopher Healey (score and album artwork). Solo flute played by Brigette Tubb.[purchase_link id=”2036″ style=”button” color=”red” text=”Add to Cart”]

Springtime Dances, Winter Weeps (recording).
Christopher Healey (score and album artwork). Solo flute played by Brigette Tubb.[purchase_link id=”2049″ style=”button” color=”red” text=”Add to Cart”]

Images supplied.