John Dante Prevedini, DMA, MBA (b. 1987) is a contemporary classical composer, educator, and public speaker. Drawing upon a variety of fields of knowledge, his overall work aims to examine unconventional facets of everyday life through a multidisciplinary lens.

In this interview, he talks about his recent social media experiments with a form of Augenmusik (“eye music”) as an alternate approach to presenting music on the largely visual platforms of social media.

Interview by Tyler Nesler

During the pandemic, you began experimenting with music compositions designed for the highly visual world of social media, by as you have put it, "incorporating visual art into the notated music itself to create pieces that are simultaneously both visual and sonic." This approach is rooted in Augenmusik ("eye music") which is an old practice of graphical notations of scores. How aware were you of this Augenmusik tradition pre-pandemic, and what gave you the idea to begin incorporating aspects of it into social media postings?

I had been aware of the centuries-old Augenmusik tradition for years, having first developed an interest in medieval music as a teenager. However, these historic examples of Augenmusik were not the sole contributing factor in the development of my COVID-era social media experiments. It was really a confluence of two different questions.

The first question — “how can the visual element in Augenmusik become structural instead of simply decorative?” — was something I already happened to be exploring in the months before the pandemic began. A lot of existing Augenmusik in the standard repertoire uses visible shapes really for decorative effect rather than as a structural framework for the music itself. For instance, the famous example from the fourteenth-century Chantilly Codex shows music notated on a staff that is bent into the shape of a heart, but when you unwind the staff out of that shape into a straight line the music on it actually looks and functions like much other music of the period. A similar example from the twentieth century can be seen by the composer George Crumb, only in this case he bends a musical staff into the shape of a peace sign. My question, in contrast, is how a composer can create pieces where the actual sonic structure of the music is based on the visible image, meaning that it can be seen in the score even when the musical staff is presented in normal straight-line orientation. I was experimenting with this idea in 2019 and early 2020 just before the pandemic hit.

That brings me to my second question, which was “now that performance venues are closing, how can composers reach new audiences?” Like almost all artists during COVID, I had to consider the capabilities of social media. Recognizing that social media culture is so overwhelmingly visual, I decided to experiment creating musical compositions where the score itself could serve as new audiences’ introduction to the piece without need for a sonic performance to occur first. That’s when I decided to try including my own reinterpretation of the old Augenmusik tradition as one potential solution to the problem of reaching new audiences on social media during lockdown.

Your composition “Selfie” for solo piano is a “visual transcription of [your] face into notes on sheet music.” How do you even begin to approach the writing of playable [non-discordant?] music which also must appear as a facsimile of your face in traditional sheet music notation? Does the process begin as a visual outline that you build the notes and chord structures around, or is there another technique?

That’s exactly the question I was contemplating during the composition process. “Selfie” and other similar pieces of mine, like “The Experiment Entrusted” and “Blue Spruce Etude,” really involve the combination of a visual framework together with standard music composition tools like counterpoint, voice leading, melodic development, and harmonic progressions. It is not enough to simply plug an image into an algorithm for this hybrid art form to work well. The music and the image have to be equal players if the composition is to function as both music and visual art. It is therefore up to the creator to use the tools of both a visual artist and a composer.

As for discordance, it can be an effective tool when used judiciously in music. Plus, what’s perceived as “discordant” is relative and contextual.

You posted “Selfie” on your Facebook page and it subsequently was shared widely on social media. In an interview with Classical Music Daily, you said that “I immediately saw a massive increase in engagement and reach, and my page's five-year follower base nearly doubled within a few short months.” You've said that this is essentially “music re-imagined for social media.” What do you think the importance and lasting positive implications are for composers utilizing the primarily visual medium of social media for the sharing and promotion of music?

I think the biggest lesson this research has taught me is the power of visual information to convey musical content to new audiences even when the music has not yet been heard.

By that I don’t just mean things like eye-catching album art or promotional materials. I mean an image that will communicate to a wide range of people in a split second what the composer is actually doing with sound, and perhaps also how and why. What I discovered was that this approach to communicating the essence of a piece is not only immune to performance venue shutdowns; it can also be much faster than the primarily sonic musical phenomenology that even the most avant-garde composers still tend to rely on. This has implications beyond the pandemic, because we are still living in an age of information overload, and quick visual communication has proven particularly effective at cutting through the fog of data that constantly bombards our attention. The challenge is that it requires us to turn the score-performance relationship upside down. Usually when we talk about music — whether pop, jazz, contemporary classical, or beyond — we are talking about performances, and people typically acquire the score in response to one or more performances they’ve already heard. In this new contrasting model, the score itself is the audience’s introduction to the piece.

Beyond “Selfie,” you also have produced an entire “Score Gallery,” which includes a “Social Media Opera,” a method to create a “melody for any day of the year” (using elements based on the “month, tens' digits of the day, and ones' digit of the day”), and even “Music Without Sound, No. 1,” using symbolic representations of tactile sensations to “play” in the mind of the reader. What kind of response have you gotten from these varied experiments (for example, have you seen Zoom recordings of your “Social Media Opera”?).

The response has been surprising and a bit overwhelming at times (particularly with “Selfie”), but remarkably positive overall. Many people have written to me to share stories and recordings of their experiments with parametric pieces like “Calendar Music” and open-form pieces like “The New Normal: A Social Media Opera.” It’s been a joy to see how different everyone’s interpretations are and to discover possibilities in my own music I hadn’t even considered before. It also goes to demonstrate the sources of value people can find in music beyond what is often predicted by commercial models.

Visual expressions of music in pop culture have been around for decades now in the form of music videos, which are often now made for contemporary classical compositions as well. Music videos have so far been the primary visual means of sharing music on social media, but in what unique ways do you think that your Augenmusik approach to sharing your work visually has advantages over the more traditional music video format?

It all comes down to the economics of attention. If we had to choose between spending three seconds looking at an image of unfamiliar visual art or spending three minutes listening to a recording of unfamiliar music, how many of us would choose the music? Music videos are visual, yes, but they still take at least as much time to experience as the underlying audio recordings would take by themselves. In contrast, the right still image can free the musical concept from the time requirements of hearing. In short, a picture is worth a thousand notes. Furthermore, if the score can convey these concepts visibly in a way that even non-musician audiences can understand, then it has the potential to bring entirely new communities into the dialogue.

That being said, I do experiment with making music videos as well, usually demonstrating a piece through score animations and/or performance footage. I also use original music in the production of educational videos on other topics, since I have backgrounds in the physical and social sciences and in business as well as music. Some of these, such as my beach erosion and urbanization time lapse videos, have together been seen by over a hundred thousand viewers and are used in school science curricula around the world. So there are a variety of ways that music and visuals can create synergy in a multimedia experience.

Has this endeavor gained traction over the last year? Have you seen other composers now attempting your visual transcription approach with their own work on their social media channels?

I’ve seen evidence that a lot of pieces out there have been composed by other people using similar techniques shortly after my initial wave of publicity this past year, though this may be coincidence. In any case, I have heard directly from performers, ensemble directors, and music teachers who specifically want to explore the potential of my techniques in their own specialty areas. I’ve also seen interest expressed by leaders in non-music fields like education, the natural sciences, and business. This is something I find particularly encouraging, because I have long maintained there is value in innovation that is omni-directional and not just limited to the questions of one’s own time, place, and field. Indeed, the past year has shown us how interdependent humanity is during global crises and that effective communication between different professional, generational, and sociopolitical cultures is vital for our survival as a species.

Even with lockdowns lifting in many parts of the world and things returning to a semblance of "normalcy," do you plan on continuing these visual composition experiments in any new forms moving forward?

I definitely plan to continue experimenting with the relationship between visual information and musical structure. As we return to in-person performance venues, I additionally look forward to incorporating elements of audience participation, multimedia installations, and other interactive experiences into this hybrid art form. In music, as with other fields, the knowledge and skills we’ve developed to survive the age of COVID can be a part of our toolbox for years to come if we keep them alive in our practice.

Of course I also still plan to continue writing music in the standard conservatory tradition, something which has always been a cornerstone of my output. That has not changed, even after such a transformational year.

Read more about John’s work and listen to his music on his site and YouTube channel.

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Tyler Nesler is a New York City-based freelance writer and the Founder and Managing Editor of INTERLOCUTOR Magazine.