On live performance
A friend invited me to see “Amadeus Live”.
Amadeus is a 1984 historical fiction film about Mozart’s life, told through the eyes of Antonio Salieri, one of Mozart’s contemporaries. Amadeus is a film that is 100% human. It’s tragic, humorous, delightful, and compelling. We see parts of ourselves in both Mozart and Salieri.
“Amadeus Live” was that film, shown in an historic theatre, accompanied by the Columbus Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. My phone was on silent. The point is total immersion. Engage the senses. Be present in the room.
No scrolling, no screens, no algorithms, no LinkedIn, no generative AI.
I’m not much of a musician. I played guitar for a few weeks in elementary school. The clarinet from 4th grade through 7th grade. I was in high school choir for four years.
Musicians are impressive because they have to work at it. Few of us pick up an instrument and are immediately good. Music demands practice. And musicians find it within themselves to get back to their instruments every day because it’s their job, or they love it, or both.
I hold a special level of respect for professional musicians who perform in symphony orchestras. They are not famous. They do not have household names. We will not see them on The Voice. They don’t have “fans” in the same way sports teams do.
“Amadeus Live” is an experience that is 100% human. People with extraordinary levels of musical talent, using their bodies and brains and hearts as so many musicians did before them, playing the instruments they’ve dedicated their lives to mastering.
During my failed guitar lessons, my brief foray into the clarinet, and four years of high school chorus, a friend of mine was there with me. This friend is now a playwright. A few weeks ago, I went to see a production of one of his plays.
He always knew he wanted to write stories for live audiences. He studied his craft and became good—really good. The play was phenomenal. An indie theater, filled with people taking part in a greater shared understanding of what makes us human. A talented cast of performers, who had memorized 90 minutes of lines, with the goal of reflecting our shared experience back at us.
Seeing a live performance of any kind is 100% human.
To the audience, these performances feel like magic. But they require time, focus, and money. The joy of theatergoing doesn’t pay the rent. The arts survive on donations. We need to compensate the artists for their time, pay for the maintenance of the theatre, the printing fees for the programs.
When we think about what modern capital incentivizes and compare it to what’s human: a group of strangers, gathered in a dark room, focused on an artist’s vision, their craft, their passion—it becomes easy to see what we’re losing. We can’t automate or scale human friction.
Capital encourages us to stay away from each other. But live performance, where there’s no risk of seeing an AI deepfake, or wondering whether the playwright used an LLM to write their work, is one of the most important ways we can reclaim our shared humanity.
