Summer concert season is upon us, a time for most music lovers to leave their headphone jacks at home and mingle in the sticky air on picnic tables and open pavilions. But it's just another three months for those who love music and don't care for concerts. Like me.For me, music is a scrim lowered into the world. A scene moves around me, and a separate group of thoughts and senses develops behind the melody inside a sheen of privacy. Fader on you, solo track on me. I listen to music to be alone.I'm no agoraphobe. I watch football at bars and baseball in stadiums, but sharing sports with 10,000 fans feels as natural to me as sharing music with a thousand strangers feels unnatural. Watching sports compels me to reach out, to high five, to shout and connect. Listening to music inspires all the opposite reactions: internalization, thoughtfulness, something private and quiet.
Same here. I've always appreciated the intricacies of studio wizardry over the spontaneity of live shows, though I sense that puts me in a minority. I've seen a few great club shows, but the majority of the arena/pavilion spectacles I've gone to have been largely forgettable. Music frees my mind to better focus and concentrate, which I like to do in solitude anyway.
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Mixed bag, here. There have been concerts that have been transcendent experiences far beyond listening to the iPod (Silver Mount Zion Orchestra, Current 93), concerts that are a lot of fun and enjoyable (Legendary Pink Dots) and concerts where all I notice is that my feet hurt and the beer is too expensive.
i've performed music. A ring of other musicians behind me, each making a sound that feels like a physical presence I could lean back on and let go into - it's this incredibly intimate thing that also feels like perfect solitude - that the place it takes me is into a very private communion with the music itself - and yet people are watching. But, I feel, *that's* why they watch it - to see that private moment happening and be transported into one themseves - If I didn't go to that place where it's between me and the song - the whole thing would be a flat, performancey thing.
If I can't get into my private place for some reason when i'm singing (same for hearing) music, I find it incredibly jarring and distinctly unpleasant - if it sounded good but i didn't get taken over by it I feel terrible for having done it.
but there is something about having that private, interior space in the company of other people that intensifies it for me...I can sing when i'm alone and still be transported by the song but it has the arousal factor of being with a lover when there are people i'm singing for - there is some kind of dynamic exchange between performer and audience - it's very real but how do you explain it?
it also doesn't help that i don't find my recordings convey the intensity that i've experience in live musical sharing...could be the lack of skill and detail in my recording experiences, for sure - because I certainly am moved by recorded songs very often.
anyway, just made me think that, from the other sideof the microphone, i'd definitely rather do it live, even for one person, than record it and that it's still, and must be, a very private experience.
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