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WIKI-PIANO: EXAMINING THE CROWD-SOURCED COMPOSITION OF A CONTINUOUSLY CHANGING INTERNET-BASED SCORE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2020

Zubin Kanga
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Abstract

Alexander Schubert's WIKI-PIANO.NET is an internet-based score, commissioned by the author and performed by him on an international tour from 2018 to 2020. The website score contains modules of notation, text, images, video and sound that can be edited by any member of the public, similar to a Wikipedia page. This article explores the huge volume and variety of content added to the score over the first 20 months after the premiere, and the extreme compositional approaches and unusual patterns of internet behaviour displayed. Examining these contributions offers insights into the online culture of new music, including its approaches to humour, its creative competitiveness, its mastery of memes, and its sophisticated subversions of the relationship between composer, performer and audience.

Type
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Information
Tempo , Volume 74 , Issue 294 , October 2020 , pp. 6 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

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Footnotes

Zubin Kanga's research was undertaken as part of a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Royal Holloway, University of London.

References

1 Alexander Schubert, WIKI-PIANO.NET for piano and internet, self-published website-based score and documentation, 2018, www.alexanderschubert.net/works/Wiki.php.

2 For further biographical information, see www.alexanderschubert.net.

3 Marko Ciciliani, ‘Music in the Expanded Field’, Lecture at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse, 2016. Available at voicerepublic.com/talks/wide-is-the-new-deep (accessed 1 July 2019); Jennifer Walshe, ‘The New Discipline’, Blog on Borealis Festival website, 9–13 March 2016, www.borealisfestival.no/2016/the-new-discipline-4 (accessed 1 July 2019). I also use the term ‘new interdisciplinary music’ interchangeably with the two above. It should be noted that, although Schubert is often grouped into these categories, he rejects these labels as only useful for marketing. See Kanga, Zubin and Schubert, Alexander, ‘Flaws in the Body and How We Work with Them: An Interview with Composer Alexander Schubert’, Contemporary Music Review, 35/4–5 (2016), p. 537CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Born, Georgina, ‘On Musical Mediation: Ontology, Technology and Creativity’, twentieth-century music 2/1 (2005), p. 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Wilson, Judith, ‘In Memory of the News and of our Selves: The Art of Adrian Piper’, Third Text 5/16–17 (1991), p. 61CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Rebecca Lentjes, ‘Robert Ashley, Giordano Bruno, and The Infinity of the Everyday’, Music & Literature, 6 February 2015, www.musicandliterature.org/features/2015/2/5/robert-ashley-giordano-bruno-and-the-infinity-of-the-everyday (accessed 20 December 2019).

6 Luke Dahl, Jorge Herrara and Cara Wilkerson, ‘Tweet Dreams: Making Music with the Audience and the World Using Real-Time Twitter Data’. International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, Oslo, 2011, www.nime.org/proceedings/2011/nime2011_272.pdf, p. 272; Leshao Zhang, Yongmeng Wu and Mathieu Barthet, ‘A Web Application for Audience Participation in Live Music Performance: The Open Symphony Use Case’. International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, conference proceedings, Brisbane, 2016, www.nime.org/proceedings/2016/nime2016_paper0036.pdf, p. 170; John Lewis, ‘Tin Men and the Telephone: The Jazz Band You Control with a Smartphone’, The Guardian, 23 August 2017, www.theguardian.com/music/2017/aug/23/tin-men-and-the-telephone-ronnie-scotts-tinmendo-smartphone-apps. Another recent case is Jennifer Walshe's opera, TIME TIME TIME (2019), whose duration is determined by the net entropy of the audience over time, measured using infra-red cameras. See also examples in Atau Tanaka, Nao Tokui and Ali Momeni, ‘Facilitating Collective Musical Creativity’, Proceedings of the 13th Annual ACM International Conference on Multimedia (New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 2005), pp. 191–8.

7 Private correspondence between Alexander Schubert and Zubin Kanga, 18 June 2017.

8 Antony Cuthbertson, ‘Reddit Place: The Internet's Best Experiment Yet’, Newsweek, 4 November 2017, www.newsweek.com/reddit-place-internet-experiment-579049.

9 Private correspondence.

10 See www.wiki-piano.net.

11 Statistics collected from WIKI-PIANO.NET site documentation (accessed on 31 December 2019).

12 Alexander Schubert interviewed in the Podium Festival documentary short on WIKI-PIANO.NET, 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDvPM5U1htw (accessed 10 January 2020).

13 See further discussion of the demographic makeup of users, below.

14 Further context see Anonymous authors (wiki), ‘Steamed Hams’, Know Your Meme, knowyourmeme.com/memes/steamed-hams (accessed 10 January 2020).

15 Correspondence with the author, 23 April 2018.

16 These comments were in response to one of the WIKI-PIANO.NET concert films, posted to the facebook group ‘4′33″ Dangerposting' on 27 May 2018. This is a selection of the 22 comments, and this is one of several posts within this group about the piece.

17 Hutcheon, Linda, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 3Google Scholar.

18 Shifman, Limor, Memes in Digital Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), p. 56Google Scholar.

19 Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, pp. 79–81.

20 Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, p. 100.

21 My strategies for performance are explored in more detail in a separate forthcoming article.

22 Gopinath, Sumanth and Stanyek, Jason, ‘Technologies of the Musical Selfie’, in The Cambridge Companion to Music in Digital Culture, ed. Cook, Nicholas, Ingalls, Monique and Trippett, David (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), p. 107Google Scholar.

23 Gopinath and Stanyek, ‘Technologies of the Musical Selfie’, p. 93.

24 Ciciliani, ‘Music in the Expanded Field’, p. 26. For perspective, Rutherford-Johnson has discussed the ways in which the new digital media and marketing landscape have affected contemporary musicians, ranging from those attempting to embrace new audiences, to those making a point of resisting these marketing methods and attempts at popular appeal; see Rutherford-Johnson, Tim, Music After the Fall (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), pp. 38–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Walshe, ‘The New Discipline’.

26 Audience members (all composers attending the Summer Courses) in conversation with the author after the Darmstädter Ferienkurse performance on 18 July 2018.

27 Alex Temple, ‘Composers, Performers and Consent’, New Music Box, 24 November 2015, https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/composers-performers-and-consent/ (accessed 12 January 2020).

28 Groth, Sanne Krogh, ‘Composers on Stage: Ambiguous Authorship’, Contemporary Music Review 35:6 (2016), p. 694CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Shlomowitz, Matthew, ‘Where Are We Now?’, TEMPO 72, No. 285 (2018), p. 73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Barthes, Roland, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image-Music-Text, trans. Heath, Stephen (New York: Noonday, 1977), p 146Google Scholar.

31 Kramer, Jonathan D., Postmodern Music, Postmodern Listening, ed. by Carl, Robert (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016)Google Scholar.

32 Kim-Cohen, Seth, In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art (New York: Continuum, 2009)Google Scholar.

33 Born, ‘On Musical Mediation’, p. 7.

34 Goehr, Lydia, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 2Google Scholar.