Exposition

Dispositions of Being-With: Redistributing Heterogeneity among the Concert Audience (2025)

Kelvin King Fung Ng
no media files associated
open exposition

About this exposition

The concert setting, as standardised through the worldwide prevalence of Western Classical music, offers a unique condition in which audience members from various backgrounds coexist in the same time and space, and are prompted to act and interact, restrictedly yet often intensely, by attending and orienting themselves to a medium frequently marked by its intangibility and ineffability. Despite such a richly layered social practice, existing musical works that aim to bring about divergent models of communion tend to eschew this listening convention, rather than harnessing the aforementioned characteristics to unleash new forms of togetherness. My artistic research seeks to instigate such novel social configurations by creating musical works that articulate previously unexposed relationships among concert audience members. Through factoring in their differing preconditions relative to the performance, my works aim to redistribute what can be sensed by whom (Rancière 2004). Grounded in a pragmatist view of music-listener co-articulation, I introduce the concepts of circumscribed and preferred affordances. Their dynamics at work are examined through pieces that resonate with my approach, including und als wir (1993) by Mathias Spahlinger and Quadraturen V (2000) by Peter Ablinger. These help illuminate my strategies in redistributing the sensible while motivating intersubjective awareness, as exemplified in D!V£R#!M&NT! (2024) and Brief Version of Seoljanggu (2021–), which configure heterogeneous sets of affordances in relation to individual and cultural differences. Knowledge and experiences generated through this endeavour aim to deepen our understanding of the intricate intersubjectivities of listening, while also opening new routes for broader reflections on the social dimensions of human relations.
typeresearch exposition
keywordscomposition, audience, listeners, concert, redistribution of the sensible, dissensus, being-with, intersubjectivity, interculturality, affordance, social mediation, Beethoven, Cage, Spahlinger, Ablinger, Cantonese, Yoruba, Hindi, Gugak, Korean traditional music, janggu, Nancy, Rancière
date07/10/2025
published18/11/2025
last modified18/11/2025
statuspublished
affiliationUniversity of Huddersfield
copyrightKelvin King Fung Ng
licenseCC BY-NC-ND
languageEnglish
urlhttps://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/3919777/3919778
doihttps://doi.org/10.22501/rc.3919777
published inResearch Catalogue


Copyrights

nameFig. 1
copyrightKelvin King Fung Ng
licenseAll rights reserved
usagespicture
namefigure-2
copyrightKelvin King Fung Ng
licenseAll rights reserved
usagespicture
namefigure-3
copyrightKelvin King Fung Ng
licenseAll rights reserved
usagespicture
namefigure-4
copyrightKelvin King Fung Ng
licenseAll rights reserved
usagespicture
namefigure-5
copyrightKelvin King Fung Ng
licenseAll rights reserved
usagespicture
namefigure-6
copyrightKelvin King Fung Ng
licenseAll rights reserved
usagespicture
nameaudio-1
copyrightTAK Ensemble, Kelvin King Fung Ng
licenseAll rights reserved
usagesaudio
namefigure-7
copyrightKelvin King Fung Ng
licenseAll rights reserved
usagespicture
namefigure-9
copyrightKelvin King Fung Ng
licenseAll rights reserved
usagespicture
namevideo-1
copyrightKelvin King Fung Ng
licenseAll rights reserved
usagesvideo
namefigure-10-preview
copyrightKelvin King Fung Ng
licenseAll rights reserved
usagesimage

Comments are only available for registered users.