For the tweetless masses

There’s been a heap of stuff written about how useful Twitter is, but a lot of it is aimed at businesses and while the fundamentals of content and rate of reply still stand, it doesn’t address the particular usefulness of Twitter for artists. In particular, its usefulness as a supportive artistic community.

I joined Twitter quite early in its life when it was still a bit of an unknown quantity, mostly because my ‘invisible’ (online) friends were all starting to use it and I was curious to see what the fuss was about. And for a long time it was just a tiny social window to my far-away friends, illustrating their lives 140 characters at a time.

Last year I noticed a change. I was beginning to find that composers and performers were starting to follow me, and where I found their streams interesting, I followed them back (I could write at immense length about auto follow-back, but it would get ranty and unpleasant and I’m sure neither of us wants to go there). I guess when I followed them back I expected that it would be kind of nice to have a little musiciany contact, to see what other people were up to in their more musically soaked lives (mine was more of a shallow stagnant pond at the time), but what I found was that my Twitter stream now contained a steady flow of comments about practicing and ‘off to work on that string quartet’. Every time I saw one of these, I’d get a little jolt – ‘I should be doing that too’. I felt more in touch with the music community than I have in years and I was getting regular reminders of what I should be focusing on.

It took a while but gradually, tweet by tweet, these snippets of people’s lives began to push me back to my manuscript. One composer who found me on Twitter even bought one of my scores – my first-ever US sale!

Now that I’m writing again, I find the music chatter keeps me encouraged and in touch. When I tweet about a piece I’m working on, I’ll sometimes get little pips of interest or support that just let me know that people out there are cheering for me. My tweeps fill a gap which my real-life friends (who mostly aren’t musicians) can’t cover – they understand how momentous it is when a simple key change makes everything fall into place, how frustrating it can be to find the right poem for a vocal piece. And they come from all sorts of musical backgrounds, with a broad set of ideas and opinions that I’d have real trouble finding offline.

Now I wouldn’t be without my musician-tweeps. I’m starting to build up tentative relationships, finding out what’s going on and really starting to feel involved in it all again, in a way I haven’t felt since uni. Twitter has become a key tool for motivation and productivity for me, and I’m looking forward to seeing relationships build and finding out what the next step is.

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