About the project:

The project “Echoes from the torn down fourth wall” seeks to bridge the gap between art music and community singing. The project’s concert format, which maintains an intense, abstract approach to the musical material throughout, includes several passages where the audience sings along to well-known Danish songs. Ideally (though perhaps only theoretically possible), the concert format should not collapse into a regular sing-along format, not even during the sing-along passages. Most of the chosen songs are from the Danish songbook Højskolesangbogen (untranslatable; ‘The Folk High School Songbook’).^[1]

The concert format and the project renegotiate cultural heritage, but in a way that is both empathetic and yet almost disloyal towards the tradition: the songs are not treated as sacred relics but rather as found objects; objects that belong to no one and owe no one anything; objects which can be recalibrated quite thoroughly and to which new meanings can be attached. If the songs are changed dramatically, that is not meant as a statement about this being the only way they should be sung. On the other hand, the treatment of the songs can be seen as stemming from the idea that only through continuous renewal can a cultural heritage be kept alive. However, there is also another undercurrent in the project’s relic-handling ethos: it did not feel sufficient to create slightly altered new versions of the Højskolesangbogen song material if the results were to become an interesting artistic statement; for the project to achieve a truly contemporary artistic vibration, a more transformative takeover of the Songbook may be necessary.

In the following, I will critically outline two traditions that I have been deeply schooled by. Thus, all criticism is also self-criticism.

I’ve found it interesting how the 50s and 60s avant-garde in compositional music in some ways subjugated the audience’s sensory apparatus as an adequate reference point for when or whether art ceases to be relevant. Although a lot of music has passed through the stream since then, it is as if some of these notions still live on in the narrative of the avant-garde as ideally unlimited in its abstraction, regardless of whether it is perceptible by a human sensory apparatus. Put bluntly, post-war art music’s dismissal of legitimate sensory experience still influences how ‘new music’ is perceived, both internally and externally. It is difficult to imagine an audience humming along to a concert performance of Pierre Boulez or Karlheinz Stockhausen – not just because the music is beyond the technical reach of most audience members’ voices, but also because the surrounding aesthetic would consider such a participation opportunity vulgar. To fully understand the distaste for the popular in this part of the avant-garde tradition, however, we must also see it in the light of the experiences of World War II, and Art’s subsequent self-understanding as a defence against the kind of mass psychosis and seduction of the people that the barbaric catastrophes of the 1940s had sprung from.

In a stark contrast to this whole continuum, we find the Danish songbook Højskolesangbogen,which remains, even today, rather aesthetically untouched by the possibilities that have emerged structurally and vibrationally in music since 1910 – despite well-reasoned regular additions of new songs. Heard from within the musical universe of the Højskolesangbogen, any contemporary music maker post Bela Bartok, Lili Boulanger, Igor Stravinsky, Charlie Parker, Mary Lou Williams (to name just a few artists who were active in the first half of the 20th century) must appear as a profound otherness, outside the field of what one can relate to while singing community songs. 

What I find deeply interesting about the Højskolesangbog songbook tradition, however, is the extensive mass of shared references that a Danish audience is not only cognitively, culturally and linguistically familiar with but also physically aware of, as a bodily memory. 

This is also the main reason the project is not working with new songs in the Højskolesangbog repertoire. The project is not about renewing the material in the Højskolesangbog but renewing the approach, the aesthetics, the experience. When this is done in relation to older material that the listener has sung since e.g. morning assemblies in elementary school, the songs’ empathetic activation of memories can open up new ways of listening to abstract music.

The crucial point here is not simply that communal singing is juxtaposed with poly-tonal, texture-oriented improvised music but that, by juxtaposing the two phenomena, completely new ways of experiencing both musics become accessible to participating audience members. The familiar songs will seem new to the listener, by being situated and experienced in completely new landscapes. The songs are thus not simply rearranged but rather act as foreign elements in a different soundscape; each song becomes a symbolic reference, pointing out of the work. And the abstract musical forms will be experienced through the body, through the memory of the vocal cords, through the listener’s childhood music experience, through the changing seasons of bygone decades. For a modern music professional, this may seem unremarkable. Yet, in my experience, many listeners who are not music professionals experience abstract music as primarily speaking to linguistically oriented parts of their consciousness. It is thus a central ambition of the project to offer the listener sensory, bodily, engaged, and activating ways to experience abstract music.^[2]

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Perspectives on listening experiences in the project 

When the performers in my project incorporate elements from song material that the audience has known since childhood, it seems to create a different kind of resonance with the listeners than when newly composed material, or free improvisation, is performed, as has been the case in most of my earlier artistic practice. The familiar material is transformed spontaneously before the listeners, almost beyond recognition – yet retains a thread back to the familiar. 

This approach reveals several perspectives on different types of listening, which operate differently in this project compared to most of my previous work:

- Radically new, abstracted versions of recognisable material naturally facilitate a kind of recognition experience that is otherwise rare in multi-tonal music. The familiar songs are not merely recognised but experienced as transformed – yet still recognisable, which is crucial. When the audience is also invited to sing along to what they know, the shift in the familiar material is felt not only intellectually by the listeners, but also as an embodied experience: ‘singing this song, which I know so well, doesn’t usually feel like this in my voice/soul/ears.’ Equally intriguing is how the encounter between the known and the unknown creates a new way of hearing and inhabiting the unknown music: with their own voice, engagement and recognition as keys, the listener accesses the multi-tonal music – not just audibly but in the physical, emotional, bodily reaction to participating as a co-singer in the abstract, multi-tonal-sounding reality.

- While the audience senses (wonders) whether it is NOW that the improvised, polyrhythmic, multi-dimensional music calls for their participation as a singer, they listen not only with their ears but with their entire body, vocal cords, and rich cultural baggage. In this way, it becomes clear that the musicians not only play instruments, arrangements, compositions but also play with, on top of, and against the memory of the audience. And that the musicians play along with, on top of, and against the audience’s cultural heritage. In the same way, it becomes clear that the audience’s listening is not only observational, experiential, emotional, or structural but just as much seeking and recognising cultural markers, symbols, personal memories, and associations. In other words, a symbol-reading, recognition-seeking, hermeneutic interpretation is a central part of the audience’s embodied presence in the music. It is also clear that the audience will certainly experience or find more of these connections – both within and beyond the work – than the musicians themselves may be aware of.

- When the musicians play (with/on) more than the sound universe actually heard, and when “the theme of the music is outside the sound,” it also becomes clear that the overall message of the music is not necessarily constituted in the musician’s own sound but rather in the way the musician plays and suggests something to the audience, beyond what the musician’s “own sound” consists of. (And, as a small, interjected point: Whose sound? Isn’t the whole metaphor of having/playing/mastering your “own” sound also a rather market-oriented terminology when it comes to understanding what happens in the interaction between the musician and the community’s cultural baggage? As if the musician’s “own sound” can be commoditised and sold.) In other words, that the listener’s embodied, cultural heritage is anything but a blank canvas on which artistic expression is projected. 

In my search for a general articulation of what I aim for and hope that the project can do for the audience’s listening through body and memory, I will summarise as follows:

Through altered versions of known historical material, the project aims to renegotiate conventions about our musical history and identity. At the same time, the music engages the listener’s subconscious and memories – personal, cultural, and physical. I also intend for the audience, as acting (enacting), not-just-observing participants, to experience access to an embodied opening of the sensory apparatus. This opening can allow familiar songs to be experienced in new dimensions and makes even complex music accessible, immediately and viscerally, through the body, cultural heritage, and memory.

^[1] Højskolesangbogen – called by its Danish name in the rest of this exposition – is the most widely distributed songbook in Denmark and is generally considered to include the most ‘important’ songs of the Danish cultural heritage. It has been published since 1894, is currently out in its 19th edition, and has sold more than 3 million copies, in a country with less than 6 million inhabitants. Much more on the songbook and its reception and influence on established notions about Danish cultural life is presented throughout this exposition.

^[2] When I use the word ‘abstract,’ I think of it being defined by embodied realities: An abstract rhythm is one that it is challenging to clap or dance to, an abstract melody is hard to sing or remember exactly – etc. 

Echoes from reading I: Spectator roles 

In The Emancipated Spectator, Jacques Rancière examines various notions throughout the history of theatre on the role of the audience in theatre. These include the critical position which, roughly speaking, argues that a spectator who remains detached – merely observing, not physically affected by or participating in the artistic process – occupies a disembodied, disengaged, position, and that this position of distance prevents the spectator from truly understanding the work:

“The viewer is faced with an appearance without knowing the production process of that appearance or the underlying reality. Secondly, the role of the spectator is the opposite of acting. The spectator remains immobile in his place, passive. Being a spectator implies both being separated from one’s ability to understand and one’s power to act.”^[1] 

In this view, the spectator’s non-participation in the production process leads to a lack of understanding of what is going on, and a state of mere spectatorship in the face of what is otherwise a fiction leads to a passivisation of the spectator’s way of being in the world. 

For theatre thinkers who have found the disempowered spectator position problematic, two main approaches have emerged. One is the Brechtian ideal, in which Verfremdung (alienation) breaks the illusion of reality on stage, prompting the spectator to engage more critically and actively in their own lives. The other is a search for a meta-theatre where all spectators are participants, where actors converse and interact with the audience, and where the audience does not necessarily know who in the audience are performers and who are “just” spectators.

In Ranciere’s retelling, this discussion appears to be connected to the idea of “the contradiction between the truth of the theatre and the simulacrum of the play.”^[2] That is, the play is not real because the actors are not truly loving or killing each other, even though it appears that way.

From this kind of thinking arises the ideal of theatre/art platforms without regular spectators, where everyone becomes active participants, not just passive viewers. It can take the form of a dream of a non-separation, a non-alienated being in the aesthetic experience, where one is not only watching but interacting. As Rancière writes, “The principle of both kinds of criticism is found in the Romantic vision about truth as non-separation.”^[3]

In Rancière’s diagnosis, the underlying analysis, perhaps also an underlying frustration, is based on a series of notions of equivalence and opposition: “... the equivalences between theatrical public and community, between gaze and passivity, exteriority and separation, mediation and simulacrum; the opposition between collective and individual, image and living reality, activity and passivity, self-possession and alienation.”^[4]

As a music professional, with a background in both European and Afro-American music forms, this for me is highly related to the discussion about what George Lewis^[5] has called Eurological and Afrological approaches to music. For example, where and when is it an ideal that audience roles are clearly separated from those of the performers? Is every utterance from the audience a disturbance, or could it be considered a contribution? Is there room for coughing, dancing, singing along? Why and why not? And in the concert situation, is there a clear boundary between stage and audience, or rather a completely open continuum where guests can position themselves freely, depending on the venue, the mood of the day, or their own preference? 

From the post-WWII history of musical ideas, one could also mention a post-Cagean view from which the boundaries between art and life, between music and noise, between work and disturbance, can be perceived as deeply romantic or at least outdated.^[6] Or, in the Western world’s majority public sphere, the collapse of the idea of separation and distance as ideals in art could be perceived as connected to the philosophy and music of the 1960s youth rebellion, not least exemplified by the Beatles’ and the rock concert format’s recalibration of the perception of art and listening positions in music.

Based on sociologist Hartmut Rosa’s concept of resonance, my project can also be rearticulated as an ambition to give both audience and performers access to an experience of something uncontrollable that we can resonate strongly with; a surrendering to something shared, greater than what we can plan individually. As Rosa outlines the theme in the book The Uncontrollable,^[7] there is apparently a high degree of correlation between the pairs of concepts that, throughout the history of the sociological analysis of modernity, are given the following series of different expressions: for Marx, alienation versus transformation; for Adorno, objectification versus vivification; for Arendt, world loss versus world reclamation; for Blumenberg, illegibility versus intelligibility; and for Weber, disenchantment versus enchantment. And thus, for Rosa himself, resonance (with the world) versus the experience of silence (from the world).

Viewed from within this series of conceptual pairs, it becomes clear that the project attempts to enliven, to enchant, to animate, to make the encounter with music resonant through participation, to allow the audience access to the ‘inside’ of music that they cannot control, not even predict. Again, with a double ambition: on the one hand, to make familiar music more uncontrollable, resonant, alive, enchanted, and animated by transforming it and making it the object of a contemporary artistic sensibility. And on the other hand, to make unknown, more abstract musical forms accessible to the audience as resonance, as animation, as enchantment – by letting them meet the audience in a situation where the audience participates, not just observes.

In Ranciere’s discussion of the audience’s passivity in relation to a possible participatory non-separation lies the foundation for positions that we encounter across museums, theatres and education today. Under the banner of terms such as inclusion, participation, and outreach, exciting renegotiations are taking place on where the power of definition resides in aesthetic and communicative fields. However, some of these positions have problematically tended to regard any passive spectator role of the audience as alienating, and any competence of the performer as elitist. As Ranciere accurately notes, the opposition is several hundred years old.

Simon Høffding, Mette Rung & Tone Roald have argued convincingly^[8] that we risk flattening our understanding of what constitutes the aesthetic experience if we impose such highly normative value systems on the dichotomy between active engagement on the one hand and ‘passive’ perception on the other. Instead, they suggest allowing many different modes of viewing, interacting, and listening to coexist in our cultural institutions – both the actively engaged and the passively contemplative. Høffding, Rung & Roald write: “Is it possible to structure the art museum such that different ways of engaging with artworks are taken into account? To work reflectively and carefully with zones or areas that prioritise either active engagement or the more ‘passive’ reception? And finally, can all of this be done without promoting elitist narratives or compromising current, successful use patterns?”^[9] 

To rephrase in my own words: Under the pressure of a participatory agenda that has been present in many artistic and cultural domains these years, it can seem as if we know what participation is, while it is a lot more difficult to define what art is. As a society, are we becoming increasingly unclear about the essence of aesthetic experience, artistically, cognitively and politically? Or, to put it polemically: We believe we know what community is – but what is art? 

The same Simon Høffding, who (among many others) has made himself available for dialogue about this project, also points out that the notion of passivity on the part of the listener, in the non-participating concert institution, is decidedly wrong: An overwhelming degree of bodily response, including unconsciously synchronised micro-movements among the spectators, can be measured in a concert format where there are otherwise no visible movements in the audience. In other words, the audience’s active engagement in the aesthetic experience is present, even during so-called passive listening. It takes place mentally as well as physically, measurably, even when it is not visible to the naked eye.^[10]

It is a pressing question in contemporary art and cultural communication whether, in the name of the broadest possible communication, we risk devaluing the aesthetic experience itself, and by extension, the indefinable existential meaning of art for us – when we prioritise the audience to interact rather than observe, to define rather than experience, to co-create rather than understand what art, as already created, can offer as art. 

At the same time, it is clear to me that in the project “Echoes from the torn down fourth wall” I don’t see this question as an either-or but very much as a both-and. The intention is not to have the audience participate in ways that obstructs their experience of high-level contemporary music-making. On the contrary, the goal is precisely that their participation should give them access to experiencing this music, as art, in an even deeper, more resonant relationship between performers and audience. It is the project’s claim and hope to show how this is possible without diminishing the music’s artistic, musical depth.

In short, the key question is not whether the audience is active or passive, nor is participation a social or moral imperative. Rather, it’s about whether the concert situation allows the audience to resonate more deeply than they are used to, with musical forms that they might otherwise find alienating.

^[1]Jacques Rancière, Le spectateur émancipé. Paris: La fabrique, 2008, 7–29. All Ranciere quotes in the UK version of the present text are translated from Danish to English by Anderskov, based on the French-to-Danish translation in: Den Frigjorte Tilskuer. Kultur og Klasse. Årg. 42 Nr. 118 (2014): Deltagelsens æstetik, translated by Torsten Andreasen. 

^[2]Rancière, Le spectateur émancipé.

^[3]Rancière, Le spectateur émancipé.

^[4]Rancière, Le spectateur émancipé.

^[5]George Lewis, Power Stronger than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008) and Gittin’ to Know Y’all: Improvised Music, Interculturalism, and the Racial Imagination, in Critical Studies in Improvisation, Vol. 1, No. 3 (2005), etc.

^[6]John Cage, Silence (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1961); A Year from Monday (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1967); and Richard Kostelanetz, Conversing with John Cage (New York: Limelight Editions, 1988).

^[7]Hartmut Rosa, The Uncontrollable. Source: The Danish translation Det Ukontrollerbare (København: Hans Reitzels Forlag, 2021).

^[8]Simon Høffding, Mette Rung & Tone Roald, “Participation and Receptivity in the Art Museum – A Phenomenological Exposition,” in Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 50, No. 3 (2016): 91–108.

^[9]Høffding, Rung & Roald, “Participation and Receptivity in the Art Museum,” 91–108.

^[10]In conversation, 23 November 2023, discussing among other things an upcoming research article from the project MusicLab (https://www.uio.no/ritmo/english/projects/musiclab/2021/dsq/data/), to be released after the deadline for this article.