Introduction - work in progress

1.1 Introduction

The inspiration for this research began with an attempt to question and revisit traditional concert formats. The aim was to highlight how people listen in order for audiences to better connect to music and musicians. Through choice of repertoire and active audience participation in concert settings, the goal was to challenge audiences to question how they give meaning to sound, what they listen for, and their expectations when listening to a piece of music.

The traditional concert format was often restructured in this research through active audience participation, in order to highlight how we hear and experience music together in a different way. Throughout 2022, I gave concerts which included one piece of music in which the audience was invited to perform with me. Pieces were chosen which could be executed on the spot by untrained musicians, without any rehearsal. The goal was to help the audience challenge their own expectations of the meanings we give to sound and harmony, and to shed light on how their expectations affect what they hear. By challenging the repertoire and setting of a traditional concert, I hoped the audience could broaden expectations and open new pathways to their own listening.

When choosing the repertoire for this study, I was inspired by the work of Pauline Oliveros, mainly her text scores. Many of Oliveros' text scores were either influenced by, or intended for, her Deep Listening Practice. Although Deep Listening is a very different activity than a concert, many of the themes and questions which inspired my research are also explored in Deep Listening. Just as this study explores how we experience and appreciate sound together, one might even say that Oliveros' Deep Listening practice was developed for that same reason – to use our listening to better appreciate the sounds and people around us.

It was therefore a natural step to include a brief study of Deep Listening together in this research. This was done by having six Deep Listening workshop sessions led by Sharon Stewart, who knew and worked with Pauline Oliveros. By exploring Oliveros' methods in a hands-on way, I could reflect on how her work relates to our experience as musicians while simultaneously learning the correct performance practice of her music.

My experience with Deep Listening is outlined in Chapter 2 of this study. Chapter 3 describes the participatory works chosen which are meant to challenge the audience in new ways, and Chapter 4 is devoted to “Case Studies” - 5 different experimental programs which used this repertoire to “break” the traditional concert format.

1.2 My story – Covid, etc. Inspired by models developed by Oliveros

“We speak as persons because we desire to disclose ourselves to each other and to share our experiences, not because we need to share them, but because we enjoy sharing them” - W.H. Auden, Secondary Worlds

My own inspiration for this study started to bear fruit during the first COVID lockdown in 2020. Although my exploration of Oliveros' work began at that time, my own interest in finding new ways to reach out began much earlier. The seeds of this interest were planted long before in my own frustrations with the music industry and our struggle to find meaningful connections with a contemporary audience. I have long been aware of a widening gap between the way musicians relate to music, and its place among our audience, which increasingly consists of people who have little to no musical training.

Although musicians spend years training our own listening skills, most of us put relatively little effort into understanding how an audience member might listen to a piece. Two instances stemming from my own concert experience serve to remind me just how big this difference of approach can be:

• While still a student in 2008, I had the opportunity to present a recital of three solo Bach works in New York, the city where I grew up. Some of my family, who do not listen even occasionally to classical music, very kindly chose to come and support me anyway. After the concert, one of my uncles congratulated me, and asked me an honest question: were the squeaks that he heard a part of the music? He was referring to certain chords I had played, which didn't speak properly on the instrument, and in which the E string let out a squeak instead of a tone. I sheepishly told him that no, those were mistakes I had made. This would have been a wonderful opportunity to start talking about how we listen. Unfortunately though, this didn't spark any further conversation on the topic between us, but I did go back home to work on my bow technique!

• Some years later I gave a violin and piano recital in a town in Maine (USA) which has a rich concert-going tradition. The audience in this town is very experienced, having been exposed over decades to masterpieces of the chamber music repertoire, played by very high level students and world renowned professionals on a yearly basis. One friend and listener in her 70s, who I knew to be a regular concert-goer for most of her life, spoke with me after the concert. She asked me if she was correct in hearing that there were times in which I chose to play softer than the piano, and wondered why I might want to do this. I explained that, yes, she heard correctly. I explained that in a violin and piano sonata, the piano is very often the leading melodic voice, and in those instances I was trying not to overpower the melody. The realization that a violinist might want to accompany the pianist was new information for her. I suspect this has a lot to do with the fact that violinists stand in sonata performances, and pianists (who are often referred to as “accompanists”) sit down, behind the violinist, partially blocked out of view. This purely visual effect helped unconsciously shape the way that she listened for her whole life.

I often think of these stories to remind myself that although we can work for years on our craft, the way that our musical messages are processed by a listener is at least as important as how we perform them. The role of the audience in how they listen is at least as important as the playing itself.

1.3 The Role of the Audience

While looking for new ways to connect with audiences, I stumbled upon the music and work of Pauline Oliveros. In her own words, Oliveros “abandoned composition/performance practice as it is usually established today for Sonic Explorations which include everyone who wants to participate...returning to ancient forms which preclude spectators” [Sonic Meditations, Introduction II]. Her work comprises many text scores which can be performed by musicians and non-musicians alike. Many of her pieces highlight certain basic musical concepts such as

• Harmonic development: e.g., “The Tuning Meditation” [Four Meditations] , which allows participants to explore and develop a harmonic landscape by singing/playing reacting to the notes they hear.

• Rhythm: e.g., “Rock Piece” [Anthology] , which invites participants to hit two rocks together in their own regular rhythm, creating a complex rhythmic texture.

• Communication: “Antiphonal Meditation” [Anthology] is centered around the idea of how musicians respond to each other.

Oliveros' work also led to her founding a meditative practice called “Deep Listening”. Deep Listening incorporates many of her compositions into a purely meditative context. It explores how we hear and interpret sound, and explores how the act of listening can help bring people together, highlighting what Oliveros called the “healing power of Sonic Energy and its transmission within groups.” [Sonic Meditations, Introduction II]

When speaking with Deep Listening practitioners about my inclusion of Oliveros' listening meditations in concerts, I was met with a mix of enthusiasm and suspicion. Enthusiasm that Oliveros' work was being studied, and suspicion that my ideas would not stay true to the spirit of her work. Two practitioners who knew her personally, Sharon Stewart and Kristin Norderval, both spoke of the many different elements which make up a Deep Listening session, which are untranslatable to a traditional concert. They encouraged me to study Deep Listening in its original context, telling me that through this process I would be more aware of the difficulties of translating this practice to a concert setting.

The scope of my research then began to take shape around two core ideas:

• Studying Oliveros' Deep Listening practice through a musician's lens, and considering how this practice might relate to our normal concert experience. How do we listen? How do we listen with others? How do our expectations affect what we hear?

• Finding and documenting ways to highlight the audience's role in concerts, through active participation of the audience in works by Oliveros and others. How can the concert format be restructured to highlight how people listen, so that we can help educate audiences, and help them connect to music(ians)?

1.4 Why Active Audience Participation?

We interpret what we hear according to the way we listen.

Through accessing many forms of listening we grow and change whether we listen to the sounds of our daily lives, the environment of music.

Pauline Oliveros in “Quantum Listening” 2000

Involving the audience in the performance of a musical work invites the audience to reassess their responsibility as listeners. By participating actively in a piece, people are asked to listen in ways which require their input, and because of this may be challenged to listen more closely (or at least differently) than they would as passive listeners. Active participation helps draw a parallel that listening is in itself an active process, one that requires attention and work. And precisely because of this work and attention, listening becomes a more rewarding experience.

Active participation also highlights the communal element of a concert. After a collective performance of Oliveros' “From Unknown Silences”, one audience member confirmed to me that, in their experience, the “social element played a role in the piece”. People are not only aware of their own input, but also of others around them, and have the opportunity to reflect on the variety of ways in which different people contribute to the piece. The act of making music together connects people in a different way than a traditional concert, where the audience has a purely passive consumption of music from a distance.

Active participation encourages the audience to think like a composer. When invited to make musical choices, such as selecting a pitch to sing, individuals can begin to question why they might want to choose a particular pitch, based on what they hear around them. They can also assess afterwards whether their choice was pleasing to them, what their motivation was for choosing that particular sound, and what effect it had on the musical structures they heard.

Active participation temporarily makes an audience member a performer. Through the interpretation of a text score, audience members can understand more about how performers make musical choices. Explaining and exploring text scores together gives the audience an opportunity to see how the composer's instructions in a piece can give a form to a work and still leave space for variety of interpretation.

Of course, when requesting that audiences participate in a concert, one cannot assume any level of musical training from the audience. Pieces chosen for audience participation had to therefore be as simple as possible, text- or graphic-based (as opposed to written-out musical notation), and with an open instrumentation, so that the audience could participate in whatever way they felt comfortable. They also had to deliver an interesting result. The repertoire I studied for these occasions therefore tended to center around three composers: Pauline Oliveros, James Tenney, and Cornelius Cardew, each of whom found his or her own way to highlight listening, perception, and meaning in music.