Waking up (Motivation)
I fall asleep in concerts. Sometimes. Sometimes, when the lights go off and it is already late, I just cannot help but doze off, and it does not matter at all whether a full symphonic orchestra with one of the world's best pianists is playing beautiful and invigorating music a mere few meters in front of me. As a person coming from a non-musical family, and from visiting enough classical concert halls, I have observed that this phenomenon is quite wide-spread. There could be many answers as to why this happens, but for me this experience has been the catalyst for a long, personal search. This search has sent me looking for ways of communicating more with the audience, making concerts that are more inviting, that involve them more than the musical material can just by itself, that incorporate them as more than just listeners.
In the past I have tried more traditional approaches to create what I considered more appealing concerts. For example, performing a concert consisting mostly of short pieces – the length of pop songs, which is much easier on the listeners and can really hold their attention for longer, without losing it in the middle of a ten-minute movement. That concept indeed works better with vocal music, but could also work well enough with piano solo pieces. I have also combined verbal explanations and context during a concert – treating the performance as a learning experience for the audience by speaking to them and weaving a thread through the program. That indeed achieves more contact, but still to my feeling in both cases, the musical part remains… still, stale, like an obstacle I need to overcome in order to reach my audience, instead of it serving me.
I figured the missing link had to be related to the "live" element of the performance. Audience members are not static, they are not removed from the stage; watching a live performance is not like watching it on TV – there is contact between the performers and the audience. The influence between the parties is not one sided, and I want to lean into that aspect, to make that contact clear and use it to have more impact – that is really the point of a performance, and one should use all the tools in their disposal to achieve that goal, including the actual people in front of them. And if the presence and actions of the audience are to be really involved and having an effect on the performance, the performative part has to be more open, more direct, more vulnerable. While, of course, in every good musical performance there is high vulnerability (usually mostly of the performers) and the audience does have an influence – those qualities and relationships are usually not only subdued, but they are seen as they should be almost invisible. As an audience, we might want to see the performer expressing their emotions visibly, but we probably would not think about wanting them to be completely shaken, or wanting to see direct communication between them and an audience member – that would be considered a blatant interruption at a classical performance. I wanted to find ways for my performances – coming from a classical background but open to more – to establish more connection with the audience, in a manner that feels more like two-sided communication, or even more than that – because an audience can also be seen not as just one big entity, but as many individuals. Making individual connections with each of them is a much more demanding task but it could be enormously rewarding.
Therefore, I turned to improvisation. Free improvisation has been a side-passion of mine for some years, and it seemed I found a brilliant combination – a convergence of two paths I have been wanting to explore deeper for some time – free improvisation live-performance and concerts with high level of audience engagement. Improvisation is all about what happens "on the spot", highly dependent on the "now", critically susceptible to the environment. However, I discovered that even in an environment of trying to achieve audience involvement through the art of "spontaneous composition", there could be very different approaches as to the ways and formalities of connections (or lack thereof) between the performers and the audiences. So improvisation does not guarantee my goal, but it could be used as one of my tools.
The rest of this journey will be shared henceforth as my theoretical and practical artistic research thesis. The main point, the conclusion of this introduction, and the basic starting point for our path here, is the following:
For me, musical performance is not about music; it is about humans. Art is a tool, not a goal.
I felt it was crucial to describe at length, because even though many artists might agree with these statements after reading this, I personally feel I am not seeing enough awareness or externalization of this in artistic practices around me. To answer some early questions – no, this is not going to be a try to turn classical concerts into pop concerts. I want to discover and explore innovative ways to highlight and amplify specific social interactions related to consuming, participating in, and analyzing musical performance, hoping those would shine a light on and strengthen the social connections, relationships, and openness to each other between people also outside a performance setting.
Then and now (What is a musical performance?)
While fully answering the question above is out of the scope of this paper, I will be referring, more specifically, to music that is close to my own practices and experiences – along the lines of western classical-artistic music, with specific attention to piano, through more contemporary, popular, or experimental styles as well. Importantly, music that was mainly created to serve as music and not another "higher" purpose, to be played and heard with audience coming to a music-centered event.
I assume most readers have had the chance of going to some kinds of musical performances; I encourage you to think – what is the nature of this experience? I imagine most would say some combination on a spectrum of artistic and social engagement. I would say it is decisively a social experience because one would usually have to go out of their regular places and into a less frequented public space which includes being around friends and strangers, and sharing the performance. It is of course also an artistic experience because those people are consumers of content that is aesthetic in nature.
Not all would agree that a musical performance includes both of these parts, namely – that it has any social aspect. Ezra Pound, American poet, musician and critic, wrote in 1918 that music exists on itself and for itself, and should live completely separate from the audience – who is only allowed to gaze at it from a safe distance and try to be moved by contemplating its beauty. Moreover, according to him, the ultimate goal of the performer is to not exist. He argues that music is not a performance that is meant for the audience, but it is a "presentation", like of a painting, and that "it is a malversion [sic] of art for the performer to beseech the audience (via the instrument) to sympathise with his or her temperament".1
As strange and radical Pound's opinion seems to me, it reflects well an attitude towards concert-music that spread through Europe since the middle of the nineteenth century. As Leon Botstein describes, "The access to musical culture on a broad scale, after 1830, coincided with the elevation of some forms of music into a "separate" high art, making them more prized and more mysterious".2 He continues to explain how this schism between the "higher-classical" genres and the more "popular-entertainment" ones shifted and shaped the ways we behave when we listen to either genre.
This shift, Botstein demonstrates clearly, created some problems for the "classical" audience – there were now higher expectations of these mid-nineteenth century listeners to notice all details and to be moved by the profundity of the music (on top of all as a way to showcase their high intellect and stature) but they were also not to interrupt its sanctity in any way. This is also a part of the reason that darkening the concert hall became custom – separation between audience and performance, compared to what would be more natural in the "inferior" styles of music performance. Apart from creating some absurd situations and rules and for the behavior of the audience until today, on which I will elaborate later, these elements of distancing the audience minimized the social aspect of the concert experience, in what I would call a very unnatural way. While an element of social dynamics was still extant, mostly as a façade of high-society people sitting in darkness and trying to keep face, it became more about "concealment" than connection.
Now, before moving forward we must go backwards. What was the situation before this transition? "A musician cannot move others unless he too is moved" – a directly opposing approach, described by no other than Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach in 1753.3 The contradiction comes from the unequivocal embedded assumption that the goal of the performers is to move others – a simple, straightforward but critically important message. Furthermore, we have many testimonials referring to the high social atmosphere of concerts before the nineteenth century. There were, naturally, differences between places within Europe. But this example, taken from music historian Charles Burney's first journey to France and Italy, vividly represents the common behavior of audiences in Turin: "…and the Italians themselves hold these performances in no very high estimation: they talk the whole time, and seldom attend to any thing but one or two favourite airs, during the whole piece [...] I shall have frequent occasion to mention the noise and inattention at the musical exhibitions in Italy".4 He quickly mentions how the situation is somewhat different in England, where on one hand the performers seek the applause and appreciation (thus "all illusion is destroyed"), but on the other hand there is less interruption because concerts are much more costly and not nearly as common – already the drift towards the "profound" classical music.
Burney's description of noisy audiences in Italy may show an extreme opposite, a lack of listening to the music, but I would argue that this is more closely related to the inherent qualities of a musical performance. Whether they were being quiet in England or noisy in Italy, the behaviour of the audience mattered. Since the dawn of music, it was a thing meant to be explored and experienced intensely. In his research on the acoustics of World Heritage sites, Rupert Till shows how visual art in prehistoric caves, some older than forty-thousand years old, serves as evidence of humans noticing and using the acoustics of the spaces – meaning, it is evidence that music, or the use of sound as art, was already starting to develop then, along with physical art.5 Experts suggest that after discovering new, other-worldly sounds and effects in these caves, people took advantage of them using speech and musical instruments as part of sacred or mystical activities.6 We can draw a direct line from these primal activities to the hubbub of Italian "accademias", all the way to pop concerts nowadays. It is all about human connection and experience. Perhaps in a museum our way of interacting with a cold presentation of art is usually more internal and subdued (I would argue it is also highly social, or at least should be, while it is also missing the mark in ways similar to the restrained and frozen classical concert hall), but humans decidedly innately seek and use these environments as a combination of aesthetic and social pleasure, which are arguably mutually beneficial, otherwise they wouldn't be so tightly entwined.
Some readers might wonder now, remembering my initial definition of "music meant to serve as music, for music-seeking audience, or in a music-centered event" – why, then, it seems that the examples above are about performance in relation to society alone, and almost not at all about music or artistic content? I do believe the "classical" bias is so strong within myself, that it infiltrated my thought process entirely, so I decided to keep it as it is in this text. Frankly, what I described, though in a more agreeable manner, comes unfortunately straight from Pound's agenda. What I was trying to refer to is an event where the audience is there for the music, not for a dance show or a religious ceremony or something else, and where the music is serving that more main element. The issue, though, is that many musicians are taught, much like Pound's idea, to think that their music should serve itself. Consequently, that is also exactly the reason my definition was faulty. Music does serve something other than itself (or should), and that's us – the people gathered for it. My goal is to bring into my practice, and ideally to more and more musicians and artists, elements inspired from the social core of musical performance that enhance it and take it further than we are used to allow ourselves to imagine. Importantly, I want to see and show how this can be achieved not with some new and complicated methods, but through the skills and training that I already have; those skills that, like many other classically trained musicians, I appreciate so much, but that can be so burdening and restricting.
You and I (The social lens)
If we are looking at musical performances through the lens of social interaction, it means we cross into the field of interpersonal communication. I will use the book Communicating (Roy Berko et al., 2016) as a central referencing point in order to analyze elements within musical performance in this context, to achieve a clearer understanding of what is happening during the performance and how I can use this knowledge to influence my performances and the methods of communication within them. As this research concerns the human environment, alongside the musical one, I will delve into forms of communication in different contexts of musical performance – periods, genres, cultures – and try to gather insights in order to use them for practical research. Having said that, my goal is not to depart and leave behind my current approaches and training, but to acquire ideas and perspectives that are related and constructive to my existing skills and knowledge, hence western culture and classical piano will take a central place. I will reflect on my findings, and bring my ideas to the test in the "laboratory" – my performances.
My main focus will be non-verbal communication, and specifically eye contact and gaze. Other means of communications will be discussed, as separating between them completely is practically impossible. I chose this focus because of personal interest, and because I think it's very relevant and practical for musicians – who are usually already using most of their body in their performance, but the eyes might still be free; and especially as a classical pianist, who always faces to the side of the stage, I felt it would be an intriguing major transformation for my practice.
What and how (questions and methods)
How can musicians use eye contact, and understanding of interpersonal communication in general, to enhance the social aspect of their performances?
- How can I utilize communication theory knowledge for improving my relationship with the audience, and for creating an environment that allows openness and connection?
- How can I create performances where audience members feel more equal to the performer?
- How can my performances be used as a tool for bonding, between performer and audience, and between audience members?
- What relationships can I create between music and real-life that can help people reflect and reach new understandings about themselves?
After reviewing the literature I have gathered for this project (on the topics of musical performance, improvisation, audience, communication, eye contact, entitativity), I will describe varied audience-performer behavior and expectations across certain times and cultures; I will continue with relevant findings regarding communication between people; and then try to analyze and reflect about the connections between these – how to view and talk about the musical content through the social-communication lenses. This will constitute the theoretical part of this research and act as the basic framework for the practical part.
In the practical part, I will share experiments and performances I have conducted using tools and ideas inspired by the theory I have discussed. Analysis and reflection of the outcomes are used to improve following experiments, when possible. Data collection methods progress – in the first experiments, feedback is based mostly on my self-reflection. On later ones, there is added feedback I gathered by conversation with the audience after the performance; and later on I used a triangulation method – combining feedback from three sources – self-feedback, feedback from the participating audience, and observations from a recruited observer who watches from the side and is aware in advance of the content of the show, so they can see a different angle than the participants. After briefing the chief points from each source of feedback, I will analyze and reflect on them, based on the theoretical framework and in relation to my goals and questions. A broader summary including conclusions and reflections for the future will follow.