Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses collaborative digital performances of classical music memes in terms of joint memeings, focusing how social media users collectively elaborate memes through associations, discussions and introducing new memes, thus demonstrating both performative and subject competence.

Paper long abstract:

How may one think of performance in the context of internet memes? From the trajectories of meme templates across platforms, groups and accounts, to an individual user’s uncommented sharing, performance 2.0 – as folklorist Anthony Bak Buccitelli phrases it – is a complex collectively creative process (Buccitelli 2012). This paper focuses on classical music memes on Reddit, Facebook and Instagram and suggests that the performance of internet memes can be understood as joint memeings, elaborating on Young’s notion of “joint storytelling” in her analysis of oral storytelling (Young 1987). The concept highlights how users collectively can elaborate the ‘point’ of the meme, associate, suggest variations, add new memes and trace memetic lineages. I approach classical music memes as playful ways of shaping, negotiating and sometimes questioning classical music as canon and everyday experience (Hyltén-Cavallius 2020; 2021a & 2021b). In joint memeings users demonstrate both performative competence (from crafting memes and memescape knowledge to adjusting response to context, cf Briggs 1988, Wiggins & Bowers 2014) and a historical and technical subject competence (for example knowledge of repertoire, classical canon and musical literacy, Hyltén-Cavallius 2021a). Theoretically, this paper connects modern classics on performance from folklore studies (Briggs 1988, Young 1987) with more recent work within digital folklore and media studies (Buccitelli 2012, Denisova 2019, Evans 2018, Milner 2016, Shifman 2014).