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

Kelvin King Fung Ng

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.

6. Conclusion

My artistic research explores how musical works can serve as tools for driving redistributions of access among listeners (Rancière 2004), thereby surfacing their unexposed relations and creating new communal configurations within the concert setting (Nancy 2000). Framed by a pragmatic view of musical sense-making as performance–listener co-specification (e.g. Reybrouck 2017), the concepts of circumscribed and preferred affordances are introduced as compositional tools for engaging heterogeneous preconditions of listeners.

Ongoing research will advance through continued enquiry into the interplay among four dimensions: listeners’ differing preconditions, the established order of distributions, the redistributive and foregrounding strategies, and the musical materials at disposal. Ultimately, this research endeavours to shed light on the intricate realm of intersubjectivity in music, and to inform a broader spectrum of interpersonal dynamics—particularly the subtle, covert exchanges facilitated by the concert situation.

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Kelvin King Fung Ng - Dispositions of Being-With: Redistributing Heterogeneity among the Concert Audience - 2025

6. Conclusion