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Involving Experiences: Audiencing and Co-reception in Pleasure Garden

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 August 2020

JOSEPH BROWNING
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Abstract

This article takes a site-specific, interactive sound installation called Pleasure Garden as a space for thinking about contemporary forms of musical experience. I develop a relational account of the ‘co-reception’ of Pleasure Garden, not centred on listening subjects, but distributed across audience members, artists, researchers and the more-than-human assemblage of the installation itself. I also discuss the effects of several overlapping cultures of ‘audiencing’ associated with Western art music, sound art and other forms of cultural experience – variously individualistic, distracted and participatory – characteristic of late capitalism. Tracing how Pleasure Garden both responded to and was interrupted by these wider forces, I take this case as suggestive of a deep ambivalence: that musical experience is at once powerfully conditioned and generatively uncertain. Throughout the article, problems of method, interpretation and representation intertwine, raising questions about how to study forms of musical experience that evade conventional ethnographic enquiry.

Type
Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 145 , Issue 1 , May 2020 , pp. 191 - 227
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Royal Musical Association

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Footnotes

Many thanks to the Pleasure Garden team for welcoming me so warmly into their project, and to the anonymous audience members who were patient with my questions and generous with their answers. For valuable feedback on this research at various stages in its development I am also grateful to Robert Adlington, Georgina Born, Jane W. Davidson, Samantha Dieckmann, Linda Kouvaras, Jenny McCallum, Kirsty Sedgman and audience members at the 2018 British Forum for Ethnomusicology Annual Conference. Warm thanks, too, to Anahid Kassabian, whose influence is present throughout. This work was supported in part by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions.

References

1 See <https://www.pleasuregarden.com.au> (accessed 4 November 2019).

2 Throughout this article, I deliberately use first names to refer to members of the creative team in order to signal my relatively long-term relationship with them and gesture towards this wider ethnographic context. My research into the creation of Pleasure Garden – from its conception and development to various installation, concert and album versions – is discussed in Joseph Browning, ‘Remaking Classical Music: Cultures of Creativity in Pleasure Garden’, Twentieth-Century Music, 17 (2020), 23–61, and ‘Meeting the Garden Halfway: Ethnographic Encounters with a Sound Installation Microculture’ (forthcoming in Ethnomusicology).

3 I conducted a total of 27 interviews with 35 people (20 individuals, six pairs, one group of three). Our recorded conversations range between 1' 52" and 16' 27", lasting 7' 03" on average, although our interactions often lasted somewhat longer.

4 Pitts, Stephanie E., ‘What Makes an Audience? Investigating the Roles and Experiences of Listeners at a Chamber Music Festival’, Music and Letters, 86 (2005), 257–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Georgina, Born, ‘Listening, Mediation, Event: Anthropological and Sociological Perspectives’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 135 (2010), 79–89 Google Scholar.

5 Browning, ‘Meeting the Garden Halfway’.

6 Important exceptions include Born, ‘Listening, Mediation, Event’, and Anahid, Kassabian, Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013)Google Scholar. On distributed creativity, see Sawyer, R. Keith, Group Creativity: Music, Theater, Collaboration (Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum, 2003)Google Scholar; Georgina, Born, ‘On Musical Mediation: Ontology, Technology and Creativity’, Twentieth-Century Music, 2 (2005), 7–36 Google Scholar; Pamela, Burnard, Musical Creativities in Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)Google Scholar; Clarke, Eric F., Mark, Doffman and Liza, Lim, ‘Distributed Creativity and Ecological Dynamics: A Case Study of Liza Lim’s “Tongue of the Invisible”’, Music and Letters, 94 (2013)Google Scholar, 628–63; and Distributed Creativity: Collaboration and Improvisation in Contemporary Music, ed. Clarke, Eric F. and Mark, Doffman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Several journal issues on networked performance further evidence the trend: see Margaret, Schedel and Young, John P., ‘Editorial’, Organised Sound, 10 (2005)Google Scholar, 181–3; Pedro, Rebelo, ‘Editorial’, Contemporary Music Review, 28 (2009)Google Scholar, 349–50; and Ian, Whalley and Ken, Fields, ‘Editorial’, Organised Sound, 17 (2012), 1–3 Google Scholar. Beyond music studies, the preoccupation with questions of agency in actor-network theory and new materialism has perhaps obscured the complementary issue of receptivity that concerns me here. One exception is Annemarie Mol, ‘Actor-Network Theory: Sensitive Terms and Enduring Tensions’, Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 50 (2010), 253–69 (pp. 256–7).

7 See Pitts, Stephanie E., ‘“Everybody wants to be Pavarotti”: The Experience of Music for Performers and Audience at a Gilbert and Sullivan Festival’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 129 (2004)Google Scholar, 143–60; Coughing and Clapping: Investigating Audience Experience, ed. Karen, Burland and Pitts, Stephanie E. (London: Routledge, 2016)Google Scholar; and Ioannis, Tsioulakis and Elina, Hytönen-Ng, ‘Introduction to Musicians and their Audiences’, Musicians and their Audiences: Performance, Speech and Mediation, ed. Tsioulakis, and Hytönen-Ng, (London: Routledge, 2017), 1–12 Google Scholar.

8 Born, ‘Listening, Mediation, Event’; Kassabian, Ubiquitous Listening; Born, ‘Imagining New Musical Democracies – Renewing Audiencing’, paper read at the Finding Democracy in Music Conference, Huddersfield, September 2017; Born, , ‘On Nonhuman Sound: Sound as Relation’, Sound Objects, ed. Steintrager, James A. and Rey, Chow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 185–210 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Carla, Hustak and Natasha, Myers, ‘Involutionary Momentum: Affective Ecologies and the Sciences of Plant/Insect Encounters’, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 23 (2012), 74–118 Google Scholar (pp. 77–8)

10 Ibid., 77.

11 Ibid., passim; see also Born, ‘Listening, Mediation, Event’, 88. For a theorization of musical subjectivity via the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead, closely aligned to my argument here, see Born, ‘On Nonhuman Sound’.

12 Daniel, Cavicchi, Listening and Longing: Music Lovers in the Age of Barnum (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011 Google Scholar); Born, ‘Imagining New Musical Democracies’. For a parallel argument about the cultures of creativity that shaped Pleasure Garden’s production, see Browning, ‘Remaking Classical Music’.

13 Born, ‘Listening, Mediation, Event’, 86–7; also Kassabian, Ubiquitous Listening.

14 See, on these various issues, Michael Taussig, ‘Tactility and Distraction’, Cultural Anthropology, 6 (1991), 147–53; Phil, Macnaghten and John, Urry, Contested Natures (London: Sage, 1998)Google Scholar, 104–33; Bodies of Nature, ed. Macnaghten, and Urry, (London: Sage, 2001)Google Scholar; Urry, , Consuming Places (London and New York: Routledge, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; George, Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Darin, Barney, Gabriella, Coleman, Christine, Ross, Jonathan, Sterne and Tamar, Tembeck, ‘The Participatory Condition: An Introduction’, The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age, ed. Barney, , Coleman, , Ross, , Sterne, and Tembeck, (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016)Google Scholar, vii–xxxix; and Morgan James, Luker, The Tango Machine: Musical Culture in the Age of Expediency (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016)Google Scholar.

15 In referring to ‘contemporary forms of musical experience’ my intention is not to posit a radical break between the historical and the contemporary, nor to generalize about all musical experience everywhere, but rather to suggest characteristics that are pertinent to multiple genres and cultural settings. The features I discuss have distinct histories, and are differently felt in different places today, but they are also widespread and, in several cases (for example, in relation to late capitalism), distinguished by their propensity for expansion and adaptation to new settings. The collision, overlay and mutual articulation of these characteristics (alongside, no doubt, others not identified here) represent, I suggest, a distinctive phase in historically shifting patterns of musical experience across the globe (alluded to in Born’s notion of ‘late liberal listening’; see Born, ‘Listening, Mediation, Event’, 87). My references to diverse musics (from tango to kwaito to Western art music) are intended to highlight some of these interconnections. The challenge is to talk about such widely circulating features without universalizing certain forms of musical experience (often those of the West or the Global North). Rather than seeing ‘contemporary musical experience’ as a uniform, generalizable field, we might imagine instead a heterogeneous tumult of positions and possibilities that are nonetheless interconnected and so necessitate more than ‘local’ theorization.

16 See, for example, Matthew, Reason, ‘ Participations on Participation: Researching the “Active” Theatre Audience’, Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, 12 (2015)Google Scholar, 271–80.

17 Stefan, Helmreich, ‘An Anthropologist Underwater: Immersive Soundscapes, Submarine Cyborgs, and Transductive Ethnography’, American Ethnologist, 34 (2007)Google Scholar, 621–41 (p. 622).

18 My interview questions were flexible and conversations sometimes began informally, but I usually began by asking ‘What brought you here today?’ and ‘How have you found the installation?’ My follow-up questions explored topics raised in audience members’ answers to these opening questions, often touching upon what they had been doing in the garden, how it made them feel, their experience of the interactivity and any other features of the experience that they found striking.

19 This is related to what Born calls ‘addressivity’; see her ‘Imagining New Musical Democracies’, 3–4, and cf. Mikhail, Mikhailovich Bakhtin, ‘The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis’, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Michael, Holquist and Caryl, Emerson (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986)Google Scholar, 103–31.

20 Critical discussions include Eleonora, Belfiore and Oliver, Bennett, ‘Rethinking the Social Impacts of the Arts’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 13 (2007)Google Scholar, 135–51; Susan, Galloway, ‘Theory-Based Evaluation and the Social Impact of the Arts’, Cultural Trends, 18 (2009)Google Scholar, 125–48; Belfiore, and Bennett, , ‘Beyond the “Toolkit Approach”: Arts Impact Evaluation Research and the Realities of Cultural Policy-Making’, Journal for Cultural Research, 14 (2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 121–42; and Katya, Johanson and Hilary, Glow, ‘A Virtuous Circle: The Positive Evaluation Phenomenon in Arts Audience Research’, Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, 12 (2015)Google Scholar, 254–70. With this context in mind, it is important to note that both my research and Pleasure Garden itself were funded, in part, by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, the installation as part of the centre’s education, outreach and public performance initiatives. Here, too, the increasingly widespread and institutionalized association between arts commissioning and arts research was a crucial factor, although the artistic production process was not guided by a research agenda and the research was conceived, as this article attests, as emergent and critical, in no way intended to evidence the ‘impact’ of, or otherwise to valorize, the installation. For a full discussion, see Browning, ‘Remaking Classical Music’.

21 One exception is Martin Stokes, ‘The Citizen in the Crowd’, Institute for Musical Research Distinguished Lecture Series, 25 May 2017, <http://www.the-imr.uk/media> (accessed 4 November 2019).

22 One prominent example is Brandon, LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015)Google Scholar. Despite its sophisticated attention to listening, LaBelle’s book is nonetheless replete with abstract references to ‘the/a listener’ and ‘the/an audience’, and statements of the form ‘I/we/one hear(s)’, all of which risk universalizing listening and listeners. On the implied listener assumed by much musicology and the essentializing focus on sound and individual subjectivity in some sound art literature, see Born, ‘Imagining New Musical Democracies’.

23 Exceptions include Lorraine, Plourde, ‘Disciplined Listening in Tokyo: Onkyō and Non-Intentional Sounds’, Ethnomusicology, 52 (2008)Google Scholar, 270–95, and Christabel, Stirling, ‘Sound Art/Street Life: Tracing the Social and Political Effects of Sound Installations in London’, Recomposing the City: New Directions in Urban Sound Art, ed. Gascia, Ouzounian and Sarah, Lappin, special issue, Journal of Sonic Studies, 11 (2016)Google Scholar, <https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/234018/234019> (accessed 4 November 2019).

24 For a more insistently nonlinear musicological text, see Anahid, Kassabian, ‘For New Musicology: A Farewell’, Critical Musicology, ed. Richard, Middleton, special issue, Radical Musicology, 5 (2010–11)Google Scholar, <http://www.radical-musicology.org.uk/special_critmus/kassabian.htm> (accessed 4 November 2019).

25 For a discussion of the latter, see Nicholas, Biddle, Siew-Ean, Khoo and John, Taylor, ‘Indigenous Australia, White Australia, Multicultural Australia: The Demography of Race and Ethnicity in Australia’, The International Handbook of the Demography of Race and Ethnicity, ed. Rogelio, Sáenz, David, Embrick and Néstor, Rodríguez (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015), 599–622 Google Scholar.

26 On the latter, see for example Peo, Hansen and Stefan, Jonsson, ‘Demographic Colonialism: EU–African Migration Management and the Legacy of Eurafrica’, Globalizations, 8 (2011)Google Scholar, 261–76. On the need for a more culturally sensitive demography of Australian indigenous peoples, see John, Taylor, ‘Indigenous Demography and Public Policy in Australia: Population or Peoples?’, Journal of Population Research, 26 (2009)Google Scholar, 115–30.

27 See Browning, ‘Remaking Classical Music’.

28 <http://genevievelacey.com/words/pleasure-garden/> (accessed 4 November 2019).

29 Gavin, Steingo, Kwaito’s Promise: Music and the Aesthetics of Freedom in South Africa (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 206 Google Scholar.

30 For a variety of scholarly perspectives, see The Pleasure Garden, from Vauxhall to Coney Island, ed. Jonathan, Conlin (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012)Google Scholar.

31 The literature on this topic is patchy, perhaps because such concerns are easily portrayed as apolitical. See, however, Andrew, Murphie, ‘Be Still, Be Good, Be Cool: The Ambivalent Powers of Stillness in an Overactive World’, M/C Journal, 12 (2009)Google Scholar, <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/133> (accessed 4 November 2019); Stillness in a Mobile World, ed. David, Bissell and Gillian, Fuller (London: Routledge, 2011)Google Scholar; Deborah Bird, Rose, ‘Slowly – Writing into the Anthropocene’, Text: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, 20 (2013)Google Scholar, 1–14; Michael, Taussig, The Corn Wolf (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015)Google Scholar, 138–52; and Thom van, Dooren, Eben, Kirksey and Ursula, Münster, ‘Multispecies Studies: Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness’, Environmental Humanities, 8 (2016)Google Scholar, 1–23.

32 Nigel, Thrift, Non-representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (London: Routledge, 2007), 56 Google Scholar.

33 Such comments chime with other research suggesting that audiences today experience classical music ‘as powerfully somatic, speaking of it repeatedly as a means of relaxation’; see Born, ‘Listening, Mediation, Event’, 85, and cf. Tony, Bennett, Mike, Savage, Silva, Elizabeth B., Alan, Warde, Modesto, Gayo-Cal and David, Wright, Culture, Class, Distinction (London: Routledge, 2009)Google Scholar.

34 Emphasis added. Unless otherwise attributed, all quotations of Genevieve Lacey come from my interviews with her in Melbourne on 18 December 2015 and 20 September 2017, and via Skype on 15 April 2016.

35 See Browning, ‘Meeting the Garden Halfway’.

36 Unless otherwise attributed, all quotations of Jan Bang come from my interviews with him in Sydney on 6 and 10 January 2016.

37 David, Clarke, ‘Musical Autonomy Revisited’, The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, ed. Martin, Clayton, Trevor, Herbert and Richard, Middleton (New York: Routledge, 2012)Google Scholar, 172–83 (pp. 173, 178); cf. Lydia, Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992; 2nd, rev. ednGoogle Scholar, Oxford University Press, 2007). See also David Clarke, ‘Speaking for Itself’, Musical Times, 137/1836 (February 1996), 14–18.

38 Anna, Tsing, ‘Sorting Out Commodities: How Capitalist Value is Made through Gifts’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 3 (2013), 21–43 Google Scholar (p. 24).

39 As yet rarely pursued, but see Steingo, Kwaito’s Promise; also Clarke, Eric F., Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)Google Scholar, 126–55, and Eric, Lewis, ‘What is “Great Black Music”? The Social Aesthetics of the AACM in Paris’, Improvisation and Social Aesthetics, ed. Georgina, Born, Eric, Lewis and Will, Straw (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017)Google Scholar, 135–59.

40 On autonomous music as a place or ‘virtual world’, see Clarke, Ways of Listening, 148, 154.

41 See Chloe Alaghband-Zadeh, ‘Experiments in Collaborative Analysis: Making Sense of Thumri with Expert Listeners’, paper read at Society for Ethnomusicology Conference, Austin, TX, 3 December 2015.

42 John, Blacking, How Musical Is Man? (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1973)Google Scholar; Eve Kosofsky, Sedgwick and Adam, Frank, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003)Google Scholar, 67–92; Eve Kosofsky, Sedgwick and Jonathan, Goldberg, The Weather in Proust (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011)Google Scholar, 55–7.

43 Steingo, Kwaito’s Promise, 59, 88.

44 Kirsty, Sedgman, ‘Audience Experience in an Anti-Expert Age: A Survey of Theatre Audience Research’, Theatre Research International, 42 (2017)Google Scholar, 307–22 (p. 315).

45 Georgina, Born, ‘Introduction’, Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience, ed. Born, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)Google Scholar, 1–69 (pp. 28–9); cf. Richard, Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977 Google Scholar; new edn, London: Penguin, 2002), and Johnson, James H., Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995)Google Scholar. See also Jonathan, Gross, ‘Concert-Going in Everyday Life: An Ethnography of Still and Silent Listening at the BBC Proms’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Birkbeck, University of London, 2013)Google Scholar.

46 The literature is scant, but empirical research into audiencing in such contexts includes Morris, Nina J., ‘Night Walking: Darkness and Sensory Perception in a Night-Time Landscape Installation’, Cultural Geographies, 18 (2011)Google Scholar, 315–42; Saskia, Warren, ‘Audiencing James Turrell’s Skyspace: Encounters between Art and Audience at Yorkshire Sculpture Park’, Cultural Geographies, 20 (2013)Google Scholar, 83–102; and Stirling, ‘Sound Art/Street Life’. For auto-ethnographic accounts, see Harriet, Hawkins, ‘“The Argument of the Eye”? The Cultural Geographies of Installation Art’, Cultural Geographies, 17 (2010)Google Scholar, 321–40, and Harriet, Hawkins and Straughan, Elizabeth R., ‘Nano-Art, Dynamic Matter and the Sight/Sound of Touch’, Geoforum, 51 (2014)Google Scholar, 130–9. For background on site-specific art (sonic and otherwise), see Miwon, Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004 Google Scholar); Nicolas De, Oliveira, Nicola, Oxley and Michael, Petry, Installation Art in the New Millennium: The Empire of the Senses (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004)Google Scholar; Claire, Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History (London: Tate, 2005)Google Scholar; Thornes, John E., ‘A Rough Guide to Environmental Art’, Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 33 (2008), 391–411 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Gascia Ouzounian, ‘Sound Installation Art: From Spatial Poetics to Politics, Aesthetics to Ethics’, Music, Sound and Space, ed. Born, 73–89.

47 See Stirling, ‘Sound Art/Street Life’.

48 Stirling, ‘Sound Art/Street Life’; see also Born, ‘Introduction’; Kassabian, Ubiquitous Listening; and Born, ‘Imagining New Musical Democracies’.

49 Stokes, ‘The Citizen in the Crowd’.

50 See, respectively, Vinciane Despret, ‘Responding Bodies and Partial Affinities in Human–Animal Worlds’, Theory, Culture and Society, 30/7–8 (December 2013), 51–76, and Hustak and Myers, ‘Involutionary Momentum’, 106; see also Russell, Hitchings, ‘People, Plants and Performance: On Actor Network Theory and the Material Pleasures of the Private Garden’, Social and Cultural Geography, 4 (2003), 99–114 Google Scholar, and Power, Emma R., ‘Human–Nature Relations in Suburban Gardens’, Australian Geographer, 36 (2005), 39–53 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51 See Recher, Harry F., ‘A Not So Natural History: The Vertebrate Fauna of Sydney’, The Natural History of Sydney, ed. Daniel, Lunney, Pat, Hutchings and Dieter, Hochuli (Mosman: Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales, 2009)Google Scholar, 125–42 (p. 132); Thom van, Dooren, ‘Invasive Species in Penguin Worlds: An Ethical Taxonomy of Killing for Conservation’, Conservation and Society, 9 (2011)Google Scholar, 286–98 (pp. 293, 296); and, for an account of the increasing presence of pied currawongs in Vaucluse in the 1940s, M. S. R. Sharland, ‘A Naturalist’s Notebook’, Sydney Morning Herald, 24 August 1940, 9 (<https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/27951448>, accessed 28 September 2019).

52 See Eva, Hayward, ‘FINGERYEYES: Impressions of Cup Corals’, Cultural Anthropology, 25 (2010)Google Scholar, 577–99.

53 Hustak and Myers, ‘Involutionary Momentum’, 97.

54 Ibid., 104.

55 Cooley, Timothy J. and Barz, Gregory F., ‘Casting Shadows in the Field: Introduction’, Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology, ed. Barz, and Cooley, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 3–24 Google Scholar (pp. 3, 15).

56 Cf. Helmreich, ‘An Anthropologist Underwater’, 630–3.

57 See Janelle, Reinelt, ‘What UK Spectators Know: Understanding How We Come to Value Theatre’, Theatre Journal, 66 (2014)Google Scholar, 337–61 (p. 338).

58 Pitts, ‘What Makes an Audience?’, 259; cf. Antoine Hennion, ‘Music Lovers: Taste as Performance’, Theory, Culture and Society, 18/5 (October 2001), 1–22.

59 Luker, The Tango Machine, 1; cf. Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture.

60 The Sydney Festival itself has been valued (although it is not obvious what this means) at A$57 million. See Jo, Banks, Hedge, Luke H., Caroline, Hoisington, Strain, Elizabeth M., Steinberg, Peter D. and Johnston, Emma L., ‘Sydney Harbour: Beautiful, Diverse, Valuable and Pressured’, Regional Studies in Marine Science, 8 (2016)Google Scholar, 353–61; also Andrew Taylor, ‘Sydney Festival Celebrates 40th Anniversary: Should the Party Continue?’, <https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/theatre/sydney-festival-celebrates-its-40th-anniversary--should-the-party-continue-20151223-gltsik.html> (accessed 28 September 2019).

61 Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture, 12.

62 Cf. Taussig, ‘Tactility and Distraction’.

63 Ibid., 148, 149.

64 My play on the title of Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ is meant to signal the question of whether a culture of interactivity, like mechanical reproduction, may be substantially reconfiguring our relationship with music and art more generally. Walter, Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah, Arendt, trans. Harry, Zohn (Boston and New York: Mariner Books, 2019)Google Scholar, 166–95.

65 See Browning, ‘Remaking Classical Music’ and ‘Meeting the Garden Halfway’.

66 For background, see Browning, ‘Remaking Classical Music’.

67 For details, see Browning, ‘Meeting the Garden Halfway’.

68 See Sydney Festival 2016 Programme (<https://issuu.com/sydneyfestival/docs/sydney_festival_2016_program>, accessed 4 November 2019), 33; Patrick Boyle, ‘A Garden of Earthly Delights’, Broadsheet, 8 January 2016 (<https://www.broadsheet.com.au/sydney/entertainment/article/garden-earthly-delights>, accessed 28 September 2019); and Peter McCallum, ‘Sydney Festival 2016 Review: Genevieve Lacey Reveals Sounds of Pleasure Garden’, Sydney Morning Herald, 11 January 2016 (<https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/sydney-festival-2016-review-genevieve-lacey-reveals-sounds-of-pleasure-garden-20160111-gm34u2.html>, accessed 28 September 2019).

69 Barney et al., ‘The Participatory Condition’, viii, vii.

70 Ibid., xxxi and passim, but esp. pp. viii, x–xviii, xxv–xxviii and xxxi–xxxii.

71 Adam, Alston, ‘Audience Participation and Neoliberal Value: Risk, Agency and Responsibility in Immersive Theatre’, Performance Research, 18 (2013)Google Scholar, 128–38.

72 Susie, Scott, Tamsin, Hinton-Smith, Vuokko, Härmä and Karl, Broome, ‘Goffman in the Gallery: Interactive Art and Visitor Shyness’, Symbolic Interaction, 36 (2013)Google Scholar, 417–38 (p. 417).

73 Kirsty, Sedgman, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen Follow Me, Please Put on Your Beards: Risk, Rules, and Audience Reception in National Theatre Wales’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 27 (2017), 158–76 (p. 175)Google Scholar.

74 Born, ‘Introduction’, 18, 19, 38; see also Born, ‘Listening, Mediation, Event’, 86–7. Related concerns preoccupy LaBelle, Background Noise, 257–63, 287.

75 For a recent discussion of key issues and literature, see Sedgman, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen Follow Me’; also Reason, ‘Participations on Participation’.

76 See also Browning, ‘Remaking Classical Music’.

77 Hustak, and Myers, , ‘Involutionary Momentum’, 97; cf. Isabelle, Stengers, Cosmopolitics I (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010 Google Scholar). See also Browning, ‘Meeting the Garden Halfway’.

78 For detailed discussion of issues of confirmation bias, self-selection and audience members’ varied levels of cultural confidence, see Kirsty, Sedgman, Locating the Audience: How People Found Value in National Theatre Wales (Bristol and Chicago, IL: Intellect, 2016)Google Scholar, esp. chapter 4, and Johanson and Glow, ‘A Virtuous Circle’.

79 Sedgman, ‘Audience Experience in an Anti-Expert Age’, 316.

80 Aboriginal culture and collaboration with Aboriginal communities are increasingly emphasized in the programmes of Sydney Living Museum properties, including Vaucluse House. See Sophie Lieberman, ‘Ancient Traditions, New Insights’, <https://sydneylivingmuseums.com.au/stories/ancient-traditions-new-insights> (accessed 28 September 2019), and ‘Whale Festival 2018’, <https://sydneylivingmuseums.com.au/events/whale-festival-2018> (accessed 28 September 2019).

81 Sedgman, ‘Audience Experience in an Anti-Expert Age’, 316–17.

82 See also Browning, ‘Remaking Classical Music’ and ‘Meeting the Garden Halfway’.

83 Georgina Born, ‘Music and the Materialization of Identities’, Materializing Identities, ed. Christopher Tilley, special issue, Journal of Material Culture, 16/4 (2011), 376–88 (p. 384).

84 See Linda, Kouvaras, Loading the Silence: Postmodern Sensibilities in Australian Sound Art in the Post-Digital Age (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013)Google Scholar.

85 As noted above, the fact that this woman’s self-identification as Aboriginal was felt to be somehow necessary, while no audience members self-identified as white Australian, suggests that whiteness was an important part of the unmarked, yet dominant, subject position occupied by most Pleasure Garden audience members.

86 Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s work on ‘the politics of conversational frames of uncertainty and hedges’ among Belyuen Australian Aboriginal women provides a valuable comparison here. See Povinelli, ‘“Might Be Something”: The Language of Indeterminacy in Australian Aboriginal Land Use’, Man, 28 (1993), 679–704 (p. 696). On complaint as ‘sick speech’, see Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), esp. pp. 39 and 203. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out the relevance of Ahmed’s work here.

87 Sedgwick and Frank, Touching Feeling, 67–92; Sedgwick and Goldberg, The Weather in Proust, 55–7. See also Lauren, Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

88 Byron, Dueck, Musical Intimacies and Indigenous Imaginaries: Aboriginal Music and Dance in Public Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013 Google Scholar), 221; cf. Berlant, The Female Complaint.

89 Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 39.

90 Deborah Bird, Rose, Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 91 Google Scholar.

91 Steingo, Kwaito’s Promise, 25.

92 Hustak and Myers, ‘Involutionary Momentum’, 95.

93 Ibid.