on the performance

[acroyear]

Robert Fripp's Diary for Friday, 1st August 2008:

Music so wishes to be heard that sometimes it calls on unlikely characters to give it voice, and ears. This wishing-to-be heard calls into existence the performance event; where music, musician & audience may come together, in communion.

This communion has six different forms (and an invisible seventh). These six principles of the Performance Event are simultaneously present:

Something happens when we get together with other people & Music that would not otherwise happen.

Then, strangely, things go better than they should, or deserve to.

Each performance takes on a life & identity of its own.

Each performance contains a multiplicity of performances within it.

The possible is possible.

The Impossible is possible.

This assumes a common aim, good will & a willingness to participate-in & contribute-to the event.

In a sense, these six forms are simultaneously present & available when the higher in us becomes active; that part of us that knows, essentially, we are all the same person.

When the lower takes charge, that part of us governed by expectation & concern for its rights, reacting when these appear to be challenged, the performance event downgrades. What is possible becomes increasingly restricted; and the impossible becomes impossible. The best is then, that the possible remains possible; otherwise, the possible also becomes impossible. This is the Null Performance, when even the possible-and-available is cancelled out.

A Null Performance has the characteristic that it has no life span, no persistence, no present moment of its own. The Performance disappears, as if it never was; and, really, it wasn’t. The Null Event is a waste of time & energy; and something is lost.

But, it doesn’t have to be like that.