Background music
I had an interesting performance experience recently. Hybrid Groove Project was invited to perform at the Baltimore Contemporary Museum’s opening night party for their new exhibit Broadcast. However, instead of doing a set where we were the central focus, we performed in a smallish room off of the main exhibit area, which also featured an open bar and hors d’oeuvres. So rather than have peoples’ rapt attention for a performance of pastlife laptops from start to finish, partygoers wandered in and out, stopping to absorb a few minutes of HGP while chit-chatting and washing down small plates with wine in little plastic cups. What made this performance interesting was not that John Waters loitered at a cocktail table very close to us for a decent 5 minutes, but that instead of being the main focus, which classical/new music performers usually are for any given performance, we were background music.
I didn’t experience this as a negative, but rather as a realization during our performance that I filed away into the mental folder labeled “Things I’ve Never Encountered In Performance As A Classical/New Music Player.” Clearly this is not a sensation foreign to classical musicians—I think of the string quartet at a wedding reception or that piano player in Nordstrom—but for me it was something new. While classical music of the old dead-guy variety is often used as background music to create the perfect candlelit dinner mood or lend some (upper) class to an event, new music is generally presented in a manner that asks audiences to engage with it on a more than superficial level. And as a new music player, I’m used to feeling (and feeding off of) the audience’s attention and energy. So becoming aware, quite keenly, that people were checking us out for only a few minutes (sometimes coming in after we began a piece and leaving before its conclusion) threw me a little off balance.
Of course, I didn’t expect to have a captive audience at the event. And I wasn’t taken aback by people coming and going, talking while we played, gorging themselves on cucumbers stuffed with goat cheese, or generally just not paying attention to us. HGP plays in a lot of spaces where people eat, drink, and talk while we’re performing. Part of the reason we like to perform in spaces like those is precisely because it takes a bit of the edge off of a musical genre that could sometimes use a drink or two to loosen itself up. At the same time, bringing new music into those venues hopefully communicates that it’s not just for jowly, cranky old men and turtlenecking professor types.
So it wasn’t so much the setting that was alien to me. What was unfamiliar was that I suddenly had to find a way to channel some energy despite the fact that most of the people in the room were listening passively. It’s something I’m sure I’ll grow more accustomed to as HGP continues to perform in “non-traditional” spaces. Or maybe I won’t have to if new music takes over the world in the near future.