Public Privacy #1 Flute Cover

for flute solo and fixed media

Flute Cover is the first piece in the series Public Privacy for solo instrument and fixed media, in which a live performer enters into a dialogue with Youtube instrumentalists. The series explores the form I call Social Composing and the related question of the demarcation between the private and the public.

For Flute Cover, I contacted various Youtubers and made a visual collage out of their flute covers, which – in contrast to a concert situation – follows procedures and behaviors of a video presentation in social media. Flute covers (or other covers) are cover models in which amateur musicians or professionals replace the melody part of popular songs with a (in this case) flute part and upload the result to YouTube. What is exciting here is, on the one hand, how ideas of virtuosity and the use of classical instruments are dealt with in today’s everyday life. At the same time, the videos also shed light on how the concepts of the private and the public are defined, how much a player tells about him- or herself and their living space, about aesthetics, about the form of presentation and its repercussions on the music, and about the present and the absent in a musical performance.

For the performance, each performer receives his or her own feed video with recordings of the performer in a private environment. Little by little, the Youtube videos are thus displaced and instead fake Youtube videos of the performers are collaged.