Introduction


   Attending Classical music concerts today comes with a set of largely unspoken social customs from which any deviation, by either performer or audience, may cause discomfort. These conventions can come across as foreign and intimidating to individuals who have not been deeply immersed in the world of classical music in the 21st century. There are often many barriers inhibiting a relationship between audience and performer. Typically, the audience is placed in an area removed from the performers with the stage creating a separation of height and distance, as well as visual distinctions in lighting from stage to hall. This crosses over to the physical presence of the musicians, as it is not unusual, even among elite performers, to have very little audience acknowledgement until they take their bows.

 

   Much of the music I play was written between the 17th and the 19th centuries, and through thinking about this music, our present concert practices, and my own experience attending my mother’s folk music concerts as a child, lead me to ask the following questions: what were the conventions when this music was premiered? What was the nature of the performer-audience relationship at that time? What roles did audiences play? Because of the explosion of the public concert and its integral place in English society during the 18th century, I chose to narrow the scope of this research to this place and time. While investigating these questions, it is clear that the nature of this inquiry makes it impossible to have many hard, scientific facts. The information available to us about concert life at the time comes mostly from first-hand written accounts, which contain whatever the writer chose to describe, and in turn leave out anything they felt was unnecessary, for whatever reason. This means that this research necessarily includes educated guesses or deductions from what we do or do not see in the writings. However, I do not believe that this invalidates the research as it helps us to reflect on our current practices as 21st-century musicians and performers.

 

   How 18th-century English music was presented in secular, public concert settings would have been a very different experience from what we might now expect in a similar context today, and it therefore engendered a vastly different performer-audience relationship. The concert spaces, audience makeup, and concert etiquette each were contributing factors in creating a varied and highly social experience for concertgoers. The aim of this paper is to illuminate this experience and explore how something similar might be relevantly created in the 21st century.  I will begin with background information, followed by brief descriptions of various 18th-century concert formats, a discussion of each of the contributing factors of the experience listed above, and end with my own practical application of the research in a concert setting.