Luis Ramirez

This article provides a thorough comparison between two live performances of Jacob Collier's song "Don't You Know": his 2015 performance with the band Snarky Puppy, and his performance during his 2016 One-Man Show, a multimedia display of multi-instrumental virtuosity using custom equipment. These two performances are published on YouTube with similar popularity, and a concise analysis of the comments is supplied, providing useful insight into the audience's interests and behaviour. The parameters in each performance are similar enough to isolate the performer factor and answer key questions regarding differences when performing as an individual or a collective. The conclusions of this research highlight how the venue layout influences engagement, how the discourse within the virtual audience shifts between the different renditions, and how the Snarky Puppy collaboration stands out as a more impactful interpretation due to their effective manner of communication with the audience through controlled nuance of musical gestures.

There is a substantial amount of research on the creative process of the composer, and there has been an increasing interest in detailing the relationship between composer and performer. Yet, there is little research about the dynamics between the composer and listener, a subject which merits consideration. Thanks to the internet and online video-sharing platforms, composers can directly interact with their listeners and fans. This paper will focus specifically on Jacob Collier and Andrew Huang, two artists who make use of these online resources to collaborate with their audience by requesting compositional material from them. This crowd-sourced music is not a new phenomenon, but due to the popularity of these musicians it is now a recurrent dynamic online. Huang, a Toronto-based musician and YouTube personality, is known for his "Fan Mash” series, where he produces a song by processing fan-submitted short videos of random sounds. Collier, a Grammy-winning multi-instrumentalist based in London, England, became widely popular by producing complex reharmonizations from fan-submitted melodies and livestreaming the arranging process for his listeners. These two young artists have in common a platform for interacting and submitting content; they both share their compositional process as a video and are able to receive audience feedback before, during, and after the creative process. The result gives the audience a sense of participation and identity, ultimately leading to a stronger community. This paper provides a detailed description of their corresponding approaches to audience collaboration and studies the reception of the final product by reviewing user commentary.

The indie classical genre is generally used to describe the music that follows certain classical music practices but is produced and distributed through independent record labels. The term was brought into widespread circulation by New Amsterdam Records’ publicity apparatus, intended to represent composers whose “music slips through the cracks between genres.”