Did They Throw Tomatoes?  The Performer-Audience Relationship in 18th-century England

Chloe Prendergast

Student Number 3111644 Supervisor(s) Stefan Petrovic and Jed Wentz Title Did They Throw Tomatoes? The Performer-Audience Relationship in 18-century England Research Question What was the nature of the performer-audience relationship in 18th-century England and how can this influence our relationship with audiences today? Summary With the explosion of the public concert in 18th-century England and the ensuing so called “rage for music”, it is clear that concerts were a vital part of the social life of England’s elite and burgeoning middle class. What created this experience? What roles did both audience and performers play? How did it differ from the ways in which we encounter classical music concerts in the 21st century? This research explores how 18th-century English music was publicly experienced in paid, secular concert settings. It was quite different from what we might now expect in the same setting, and therefore it engendered a vastly different performer-audience relationship than what we often have today. 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 research paper is to illuminate this experience and explore how something similar might be relevantly created in the 21st century. Short Bio Chloe Prendergast is a violinist originally from Denver, Colorado. She is the artistic director of the Beethoven Festival of the Hague, a member of Holland Baroque and the Butter Quartet, and has performed with groups including the Handel and Haydn Society, Pacific Musicworks, Henry Purcell Society of Boston, Baroque Chamber Orchestra of Colorado, Luthers Bach Ensemble, Collegium Ad Mosam, and Arcadia Players. Chloe currently studies at the Royal Conservatory of the Hague with Kati Debretzeni and Walter Reiter. She holds a degree from Willamette University, where she was a Phil Hanni scholar and studied principally with Anthea Kreston and Daniel Rouslin.

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 21^st 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 17^th and the 19^th 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 18^th 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 21^st-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 21^st 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.

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