Ears Wired Shut

Most classical musicians listen to a narrow range of music, the Western classical canon of past centuries. The same music played the same way.

This doesn’t build an awareness, appetite or appreciation for difference and dissonance.

This trains us into a listening vacuum.

Photo by Petr Macháček on Unsplash

And this extends beyond the stage to our ability to listen to stories that disrupt our narrative.

The narrative that places the artist at the centre of our art, not the audience at the centre of our art.

I’m planning to write a separate piece which addresses this through the lens of the UK government’s ad campaign this week. Sidenote: There is nothing offensive or wrong about the campaign, let Fatima define her success!

What if we trained musicians to listen and prioritise the audience right from the very start?

What if we trained musicians to be responsive and responsible to their audience right from the very start?

Here are some simple, free ways this could be embedded across a range of classical music training and employment scenarios:

Examinations

• Prepare and prepare students to present a pre-performance introduction.
• Require the ‘stage presentation’ in the rubric, which requires students to address and acknowledge the audience through their spoken introduction and body language.
• Hold examinations in aged care homes with a REAL audience.

Performances

• Teach musicians how to enter the performance space and acknowledge the audience. Stop pretending the audience isn’t there!
• Stop the practice of minutes worth of ‘warming up’/’practicing’ on stage before the tuning note. It’s unnecessary. Only break the silence of the space with something beautiful.
• Teach musicians how to stand or turn after the conclusion of the piece and acknowledge the audience before they shuffle their music to the next piece.
• Hold performance examinations in aged care homes with a REAL audience.

We listen to composers and heroes.

We are very good at copying the voice of the composer and the hero.

We listen to ourselves and (some) others.

We are very good at observing and mastering our craft, listening to our teachers and colleagues.

We are not listening to our audience.

We are not very good at hearing and seeing our audience in the moment of performance.

Our audience comes to be transformed. The intimacy required to do that cannot happen if we ignore them.

The tweaks I’ve suggested (or maybe they’re a fundamental rethink for you) might go some way to create experiences for the audience of today.

Experiences where the audience matters, so they come back again.