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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 April 2022
This article proposes ways of reimagining how performers and audiences relate to one another during live performances. In contrast to forms of participation where audiences emulate well-known performer and/or composer models, the authors argue for sensitivity to audiences as they present themselves. Attending to, reciprocating and adopting audience behaviour in/as performance can lead to novel interactions, identities and formats for creative practice. The authors discuss pieces by Pauline Oliveros, David Helbich and Carolyn Chen, as well as their own practice research.
1 See Johannes Kreidler's lecture Against Applause (2018), in which he claims that restricting audience interaction to applause diminishes the power of musical performance significantly, www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiiD_FH4J8E (accessed 10 June 2021). See also Auslander, Philip, ‘Musical Personae’, TDR/The Drama Review, 50, no. 1 (2006), p. 107CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a broader discussion of socio-musical relations, see Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), pp. 39–49.
2 Born, Georgina, ‘After Relational Aesthetics: Improvised Music, the Social, and (Re)Theorizing the Aesthetic’, in Improvisation and Social Aesthetics, eds Born, Georgina, Lewis, Eric and Straw, Will (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017), p. 40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Nyman, Michael, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (New York: Schirmer Books, 1974), pp. 22–23Google Scholar.
4 Bishop, Claire, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London and New York: Verso, 2012), pp. 37–38Google Scholar; Bishop, Claire, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, October, 110 (2004), pp. 51–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Heim, Caroline, Audience as Performer: The Changing Role of Theatre Audiences in the Twenty-first Century (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), p. 2Google Scholar.
6 Donna Haraway after Marilyn Strathern. Haraway, Donna J., Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 34Google Scholar.
7 For readers wishing to explore further recent practice in a similar vein, see Ashley Fure's Interior Listening Protocol 01 (2020) and Aviva Endean's A Face Like Yours (2015), both video scores for performing audiences; Bill Dietz's L’École de la Claque (2017), a publication and series of performances dealing with audiences as an instrumentalised force in public events; David Dunn's Purposeful Listening in Complex States of Time (1998), a score for solo listener in outdoor environments, which details attention in terms of spatial orientation, proximity and time state; and Michael Baldwin's audio guides for audiences, Cues (2017) and Talking Music (2018). La Monte Young's Composition 1960 #6 may be considered a historical precursor of some of these efforts, as can real-time composition/improvisations such as Roscoe Mitchell's Nonaah (1976), where hostile audience behaviour is timbrally imitated, engaged and eventually won over. Paul Steinbeck, ‘Talking Back: Performer-Audience Interaction in Roscoe Mitchell's “Nonaah”’, Music Theory Online, 22, no. 3 (2016), https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.16.22.3/mto.16.22.3.steinbeck.html (accessed 10 June 2021). We will briefly touch on related practices in theatre and performance art later.
8 Auslander, ‘Musical Personae’; Philip Auslander, ‘“Musical Personae” Revisited’, in Investigating Musical Performance: Theoretical Models and Intersections, eds Gianmario Borio, Giovanni Giuriati, Alessandro Cecchi and Marco Lutzu (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), pp. 41–55.
9 Auslander, ‘Musical Personae’, p. 101.
10 Ibid., pp. 108–10. Here Auslander follows Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1959), pp. 22–26.
11 Ibid., pp. 105–106.
12 Born, ‘After Relational Aesthetics’, p. 40.
13 See, for example, Bishop, Artificial Hells and Machon, Josephine, Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, p. 61.
15 Related themes include recasting the artist as a ‘collaborator and producer of situations’ rather than a maker of objects, and prioritising open-ended projects over finite, commodifiable works. Bishop, Artificial Hells, p. 2; italics in original. These themes also apply to the other aforementioned movements, to varying degrees.
16 Nicholas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fonza Woods (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2002), p. 14; italics in original.
17 Ibid., p. 58.
18 Josephine Machon's definition of immersive theatre focuses on enhancing the audience's sense of presentness – or, her preferred term, praesence – in the event. Machon, Immersive Theatres, pp. 43–44. Machon equates the values of immersive theatre with those of relational art, quoting Bourriaud's idea of a ‘collective elaboration of meaning’ and emphasising the idea of the ‘encounter’, of a ‘being-together’ and of ‘shared experiences’ as central to the practice. Machon, Immersive Theatres, p. 121; see also Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, p. 15.
19 Bishop, Artificial Hells, p. 275.
20 ‘For many artists and curators on the left, Debord's critique strikes at the heart of why participation is important as a project: it rehumanises a society rendered numb and fragmented by the repressive instrumentality of capitalist production.’ Ibid., p. 11.
21 Ibid., pp. 279–80.
22 Ibid., p. 279.
23 Ibid., p. 37.
24 Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, p. 65.
25 Bishop, Artificial Hells, pp. 37–38.
26 Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2011), p. 17.
27 Ibid.
28 Oliveros, Pauline, Deep Listening: A Composer's Sound Practice (Bloomington: iUniverse, Inc., 2005)Google Scholar. Examples of exercises and scores are scattered throughout this book.
29 Oliveros, Deep Listening, p. xxiii.
30 Oliveros, Pauline, Software for People: Collected Writings 1963–80 (Baltimore: Smith Publications, 1984), p. 149Google Scholar; Oliveros, Deep Listening, p. 3.
31 Oliveros, Deep Listening, p. 2.
32 Pauline Oliveros, ‘Quantum Listening’, Musicworks, 76 (2000), p. 45.
33 There remain unresolved tensions between the project's espoused egalitarian values and its intractable alignment with Oliveros’ voice above all. For a discussion of cultural appropriation in Oliveros’ work, see Tara Browner ‘“They Could Have an Indian Soul”: Crow Two and the Processes of Cultural Appropriation’, Journal of Musicological Research, 19 (2000), pp. 243–63.
34 Pauline Oliveros, Sonic Meditations (Baltimore: Smith Publications, 1974); Oliveros, Software for People, pp. 132–33; Oliveros, Deep Listening, p. xv.
35 Oliveros, Deep Listening, p. xvii; Pauline Oliveros, ‘My “American Music”: Soundscape, Politics, Technology, Community’, American Music, 25, no. 4 (2007), p. 395.
36 https://davidhelbich.blogspot.com/2011/10/keine-pause-no-break-antwerp-brugge-den.html (accessed 10 June 2021).
37 Helbich, Audience Observations (2012), 00:55, www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOGukaG77ZE&feature=emb_title (accessed 10 June 2021).
38 Ibid., 03:34.
39 Helbich himself has written several of these. See, for example, his series NO MUSIC, for performing audience, http://davidhelbich.blogspot.com/2010/02/keine-musik-ohrstucke-earpieces-in.html (accessed 10 June 2021).
40 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, p. 13.
41 The recording is appropriated and deployed as an audio score. For further discussion of this, see Charlie Sdraulig and Chris Lortie, ‘Recent Audio Scores: Affordances and Limitations’, in Fifth International Conference on Technologies for Music Notation and Representation, eds Cat Hope, Nat Grant, and Lindsay Vickery (Melbourne: Monash University, 2019), pp. 38–45.
42 Carolyn Chen, Adagio (2009), pp. 3–4, https://walkingmango.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/adagio.pdf (accessed 10 May 2021). Though the title page hints at the sorts of facial expressions performed, see Example 1.
43 In the sense of Goffman, The Presentation of Self.
44 Auslander, ‘Musical Personae’, pp. 111–12.
45 Klaus Gehrke ‘A Magician and Tyrant at the Podium’, Deutsche Welle (2012), https://p.dw.com/p/15RbJ (accessed 10 May 2021).
46 Sergiu Celibidache, quoted in Chen, Adagio, p. 2.
47 Michael Baldwin, Better Know a Weisslich: Carolyn Chen's Adagio (2016), https://weisslich.com/2016/04/07/better-know-a-weisslich-carolyn-chen/ (accessed 10 May 2021).
48 Goffman, The Presentation of Self, pp. 22–24. See also Auslander, ‘Musical Personae’, p. 108.
49 Sdraulig and Lortie, ‘Recent Audio Scores: Affordances and Limitations’.
50 Goffman, The Presentation of Self, pp. 22–24.
51 Louis d'Heudières, Laughter Studies 7 (Darmstadt Trailer) (2018), https://vimeo.com/324153961 (accessed 10 June 2021).
52 Auslander, ‘Musical Personae’, p. 110.
53 Louis d'Heudières, ‘Colourful Interactions: Composers, Theatrical Scores, and Music as Performance’, in Collaborative and Distributed Processes in Contemporary Music-Making, eds Lauren Redhead and Richard Glover (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2018), pp. 12–26.
54 Tim Rutherford-Johnson, ‘Unsettling Scores’, The Wire, 403 (2017), p. 31.
55 Sandeep Bhagwati, ‘Elaborate Audio Scores: Concepts, Affordances and Tools’, Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Technologies for Music Notation and Representation, eds Sandeep Bhagwati and Jean Bresson (2018), p. 27, www.tenor-conference.org/proceedings/2018/04_Bhagwati_tenor18.pdf (accessed 10 June 2021).
56 See, for example, d'Heudières, Laughter Studies 7 (Darmstadt Trailer), 00:24.
57 Small, Musicking, pp. 64–65.
58 Rutherford-Johnson, ‘Unsettling Scores’, p. 31.
59 Heim, Audience as Performer, p. 21.
60 Ibid.
61 d'Heudières, Laughter Studies 7 (Darmstadt Trailer), 03:46. That the audience on the second night did not respond so overtly only confirms Heim's claim that there are qualitatively different audience performances; something performers and ushers, who witness multiple events, know only too well. Heim, Audience as Performer, p. 24.
62 Auslander, ‘Musical Personae’, p. 109; Miles L. Patterson, ‘Toward a Systems Approach to Nonverbal Interaction’, in Nonverbal Communication, eds Mark L. Knapp and Judith A. Hall (Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2013), pp. 528–29.
63 Scores and trailers for all the pieces are online at Charlie Sdraulig, Work (2021), www.charliesdraulig.com/work (accessed 11 May 2021). This section develops some material from Charlie Sdraulig, Composing Social Dynamics (Stanford: Stanford University, 2020). Thank you to Brian Ferneyhough, Jonathan Berger, Jaroslaw Kapuscinski and Erik Ulman, for their guidance and comments on this thesis.
64 Marco Fusi, personal communication with the authors, 14 April 2020.
65 Judith A. Hall, Terrence G. Horgan and Nora A. Murphy, ‘Nonverbal Communication’, Annual Review of Psychology, 70 (2019), pp. 280–81.
66 Patterson, Systems Approach, p. 531; Martin Clayton, ‘Entrainment, Ethnography and Musical Interaction’, in Experience and Meaning in Music Performance, eds Martin Clayton, Byron Dueck and Laura Leante (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 28, 38.
67 For further discussion of these overlapping areas of study, see Jinni A. Harrigan, ‘Methodology: Coding and Studying Nonverbal Behavior’, in Nonverbal Communication, eds Knapp and Hall, pp. 25–68.
68 Martin Clayton, Rebecca Sager and Udo Will, ‘In Time with the Music: the Concept of Entrainment and Its Significance for Ethnomusicology’, ESEM CounterPoint, 1 (2004), p. 3.
69 Peter E. Keller, Giacomo Novembre and Michael J. Hove, ‘Rhythm in Joint Action: Psychological and Neurophysiological Mechanisms for Real-time Interpersonal Coordination’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 369: 20130394 (2014), pp 7–8; Idil Kokal, Annerose Engel, Sebastian Kirschner and Christian Keysers, ‘Synchronized Drumming Enhances Activity in the Caudate and Facilitates Prosocial Commitment – If the Rhythm Comes Easily’, PLoS ONE, 6, no. 11 (2011), e27272; Jessica L. Lankin, ‘Behavioral Mimicry and Interpersonal Synchrony’, in Nonverbal Communication, eds Knapp and Hall, pp. 557–59.
70 Erwan Codrons, Nicolò F. Bernardi, Matteo Vandoni and Luciano Bernardi, ‘Spontaneous Group Synchronization of Movements and Respiratory Rhythms’, PLoS ONE, 9, no. 9 (2014), e107538; Mattia Gallotti, Merle T. Fairhurst and Chris Frith, ‘Alignment in Social Interactions’, Consciousness and Cognition, 48 (2016), pp. 255–56; Michael J. Hove and Jane L. Risen, ‘It's All in the Timing: Interpersonal Synchrony Increases Affiliation’, Social Cognition, 27, no. 6 (2009), p. 957.
71 Enara García and Ezequiel A. Di Paolo, ‘Embodied Coordination and Psychotherapeutic Outcome: beyond Direct Mappings’, Frontiers in Psychology, 9 (July 2018), p. 1257.
72 These pieces are discussed in greater detail in Sdraulig, Composing Social Dynamics. This work, enfold, was also the subject of a video presentation at the University of Leeds’ Vibrant Practices: Material Agency and Performative Ontologies symposium. Charlie Sdraulig, ‘enfold’: Tracing networks (2021), www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKm1xW5IXeg (accessed 10 May 2021).
73 Gallotti, Fairhurst and Frith, ‘Alignment in Social Interactions’, p. 257; Keller, Novembre and Hove, Rhythm in Joint Action, p. 7. For audience impressions of one to one (2018–20) collected via anonymous surveys, see Sdraulig, Composing Social Dynamics, pp. 64–68.
74 Judee K. Burgoon and Joseph B. Walther, ‘Media and Computer Mediation’, in Nonverbal Communication, eds Knapp and Hall, p. 735; Hall, Horgan and Murphy, Nonverbal Communication, p. 287.
75 Leslie A. Zebrowitz, Joann M. Montepare and Michael A. Strom, ‘Face and Body Physiognomy: Nonverbal Cues for Trait Impressions’, in Nonverbal Communication, eds Knapp and Hall, pp. 285–86.
76 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, p. 17.
77 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, p. 60.
78 It ‘falls short of corresponding to the complexity of artistic gestures’. Bishop, Artificial Hells, p. 279.
79 The authors sincerely thank and acknowledge Newton Armstrong, Julie Herndon and Matthew Shlomowitz for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this article.