Sureshkumar P. Sekar, Independent Scholar
In this paper, I propose that in a multi-camera production of an orchestral music concert, audiences experience not only liveness but also ‘aLiveness’, which is ‘an experiential phenomenon that occurs when a perceiver becomes conscious that the perceived work of art is presenting, with least ambiguity, its most essential truth’ (Sekar, 2024).
I use concepts from intermedial and multimodal studies, especially Lars Elleström’s (2020) conception of transmediation, to discuss how orchestral music comes alive when it is transmediated into a screened experience. Elleström suggests that when a text is transferred from one medium to another, it is transformed. Music as notations on paper is transferred to sound when performed by musicians, and to moving images when the performance captured with multiple cameras is edited into a screened concert. A meaningful transfer means ‘keeping something, getting rid of something else, and adding something new,’ and it involves two stages: deconstruction of the source text (music and the music performance on stage) and reconstructing it to fit into the target medium (screen). Imbued into the transformed art are the traces of these two processes and therein lies the potential for aLiveness.
Furthermore, by comparing with Stephen Malinowski’s animations, Adrian Wyard’s visualizations, Disney’s Fantasia, and a moment in the film Amadeus, I illustrate how, like these other works of transmediation, multi-camera production of an orchestral music concert makes the music come alive, that is, makes music’s internal structure and patterns intelligible, and its pleasures accessible and enjoyable, to a much wider audience.
Biography: Sureshkumar P. Sekar holds a PhD from the Royal College of Music, London, where his research involved conducting an empirical study on the audience experience of film-with-live-orchestra concerts using online data—descriptive experiential accounts posted by such concert audiences on Twitter and online magazines. His research interests are audiovisual culture, audience experience, audiovisual essays, fandom, and film music. His paper ‘Intense Affect, Feeling, and Emotions: Audience Experience in Film-with-Live-Orchestra Concerts’ was announced the runner-up for the Claudia Gorbman Graduate Student Writing Award 2023. Some of his peer-reviewed academic video essays—published in journals such as [in]Transition, Tecmerin, Alphaville, and Music, Sound and the Moving Image—have featured in the best video essays of the year list in the Sight and Sound magazine.