4.1

Throughout 2022 I gave a series of concerts which incorperated public participation in the performance. This chapter describes each of the performances in detail and outlines some audience responses, when they are specific to that individual concert. The works chosen for public participation are described in detail in chapter 3 of this study, as is the method of introducing them to the public. After the concerts, I received feedback from audience members through in-depth interviews and written responses from audience members and concert organizers. In the case of the concert on October 15^th, 2022 at the Koninklijk Conservatorium, I also received feedback from students who had joined me in the performance. Most of the audience responses are discussed in more detail in chapter 5 of this study.

4.2 Festival Dag in de Branding

My first attempt at a concert with audience participation in the context of this study was on February 26^th, 2022 at 15:00h at the Paleiskerk in The Hague, in collaboration with Ensemble Oerknal conducted by Hardy Li, for a full hall with the audience approaching 200 people. The program was:

James Tenney Swell Piece #2 (performed by myself and Ensemble Oerknal)

James Tenney Swell Piece #2 (performed for a second time with audience participation)

Richard Ayres Troedelmarkt (“Noncerto” for violin and small ensemble)

It is perhaps important to note that this concert was one of the first performances given in The Netherlands after a lockdown due to the COVID pandemic. The fact that we were all able to return to live music again, which had been forbidden for more than three months shaped the narrative I gave in my introduction, and almost certainly affected the feelings of every audience member.

James Tenney's Swell Piece #2 was performed twice in this concert. The first performance, given my myself and Ensemble Oerknal, began at 14:50h, 10 minutes before the official start time of the concert. At this time the doors opened and the audience entered the hall. We continued to play as the audience entered and got settled, for approximately 20 minutes, until 15:10.

As the audience entered, we kept a continual musical thread of the piece, but also tried to keep an informal atmosphere. Musicians took occasional breaks from playing and made contact with audience members by smiling, greeting them, even striking up a small conversation if possible.

After the first performance of Swell Piece, I formally welcomed the audience and introduced the concert. This took about 10 minutes, and in this welcome speech I shared some very personal thoughts I had at the time about the need for being together, expressing, and giving meaning to what we hear. In particular, a quote from W.H. Auden seemed to particularly fit my feelings about why we perform music, and was especially applicable to the current situation of experiencing live music again:

“We share our experiences not because we need to share them, but because we enjoy sharing them” [AUDEN]

In my brief introduction I also tried to draw the public's attention to their acts of choice while listening. I reminded them that it is up to them to give meaning to what they hear, and that this can change depending on how they interact with the sound. I highlighted that this way of thinking and listening is an important part of appreciating Swell Piece #2.

The audience was then invited to join in a second performance of the piece, which would last for 7 minutes. Since we had just come out of a Covid lockdown, the audience was asked to hum, but not to sing.

In the rehearsal process for this concert, I discussed with Ensemble Oerknal how we could best introduce this piece to the audience. We believed that giving a first performance ourselves would allow the audience to automatically learn most of the basic concepts of the piece by ear. When reading Tenney's instructions aloud, we realized that these might be too technical for some audience members. For example, the instruction to play the pitch “A-440”, or to maintain “as little change...of timbre” might be difficult concepts for a non-musician to understand, and might require further explanation, disrupting the flow of the concert.

We also discussed the benefits and drawbacks of requesting the audience to hum “A-440”. Requesting that the audience hum A-440 (in the octave Tenney prescribes) stays true to the score and intention of the composer. On the other hand, this octave is very restrictive to certain people, especially those who might, for example, have a natural bass voice. We thought that this request, which requires many to hum in falsetto, might make certain people feel uncomfortable.

Another option we discussed was to paraphrase Tenney's instructions. This could be done by playing an A-440 and asking the audience to “match this pitch”. We knew it was highly probable that the audience in this case would hum an A in any octave comfortable for their voice, and that the men would do this one or two octaves lower. This would be different from Tenney's original, which explores the overtones of one pitch, however, it would still create a similar texture of color and dynamic stemming from the idea of one pitch class (A).

In the end, we decided that having a spirit of inclusiveness and openness in the concert was more important than a technically correct performance of the piece, especially since we would perform the work ourselves in its “correct” version just before. We therefore decided to adapt our description of the piece to the situation. They were told to match the pitch we played, and to hum at their own pace in the following way:

“Begin as softly as possible, building up to maximum intensity, then fading away again into individual silence.”

The length of the second performance was decided to be 7 minutes and timed with a timer.

Before we began, I also told the audience that we were not searching for a technically perfect version of the piece in our performance with them, rather that we were interested in the search for sound and communication that we were creating together.

The fact that the audience had just heard the piece helped to make it very easy for them to understand the instructions. They didn't have any questions before we started.

The rate of participation was very high from the audience – based on the sound and texture created, I believe that most if not all of the audience participated very enthusiastically in the performance of Swell Piece. In the second, collective, performance, I was able to make eye contact with many of the audience members as well, at times leading and following them in various swells, reacting and responding to what they were doing. These audience members seemed happy to be participating in the collective effort we were creating together.

This enthusiasm from the audience was perhaps helped by the fact that this concert was one of the first ones possible after the last Covid lockdown in The Netherlands. Many people had not been able to experience live music since 19 December, 2021, a period of more than three months. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_the_Netherlands]. It is also possible that the audience had even more confidence to participate since they were humming, rather than singing, which can feel like a much more intimate form of communication.

Richard Ayres' Troedelmarkt, a highly virtuosic piece with electronics, is very contrasting in all ways to Tenney's Swell Piece #2. While I got some positive feedback about audience participation in the Tenney, I did not hear from anyone that this directly affected their own experience of Ayres' music, so I cannot say with certainty whether or not this helped people hear differently.

4.3 Lost Connections

The program which I have titled “Lost Connections”, is a main inspiration for this study. I first performed this program in the summer of 2020, and have played it many times since. Audience sizes have varied from around 10 to around 100 people It is for solo violin, lasts for approximately 1 hour, and involves audience participation in Pauline Oliveros' From Unknown Silences:

J.S. Bach Partita #2 in d minor

Pauline Oliveros From Unknown Silences

Kaija Saariaho Nocturne

Andrew Norman Sabina

In this concert I introduce each piece before playing it, to give a background of the music, composers, and create a motivic thread to the entire program. The program was created with the idea of the meaning we give to sound. In my introductions, the audience is invited to consider whether extra-musical ideas give more or different meanings to music. It reflects on all of the pieces in different ways:

• Before playing Bach's Partita, I speak of Helga Thoene's theory that the Ciaccona which closes the work was intended as a tombeau for Bach's first wife, Maria Barbara. [Oestreich] We are not sure whether or not this is the case, but if it were true, the piece would mean something very different to Bach himself than if it were not true. The audience is left to decide whether or not they want to believe the truth of this theory, however, they are asked whether or not its truth changes the meaning or value of the music for them. I always mention my own personal belief that the Ciaccona would still be a masterpiece and mean a lot for us as listeners regardless of the circumstances which caused its creation.

• While introducing From Unknown Silences, I talk about Oliveros' work, and invite the audience to give their own meaning and interpretation to the sounds they are about to create. Since Oliveros had no way of knowing what sounds would be created, she couldn't have possibly given meaning to the sounds themselves. Therefore, the “meaning” of the piece lies entirely with us, the listeners and performers.

• Before Nocturne, I mention its possible relation to Bach's Ciaccona in emotive content. Nocturne is itself a musical tombeau, dedicated to the memory of Witold Lutoslawski [Saariaho], who died shortly before the piece was written. Because of this, Kaija Saariaho has given an extra layer of meaning behind the notes.

• Finally, before Sabina, I mention that in addition to an extra layer of meaning, there is here even clear programmatic content to the piece, and invite the audience to think about this as they listen. Andrew Norman writes:

In October 2006 I visited the ancient church of Santa Sabina on Rome's Aventine Hill. I entered very early in the morning, while it was still dark, and as I listened to the morning mass I watched the sunrise from within the church. The light in Santa Sabina is breathtaking; the large clerestory windows are not made of glass but of translucent stone, and when light shines through these intricately patterned windows, luminous designs appear all over the church's marble and mosaic surfaces. As I watched the light grow and change that morning, I was struck by both its enveloping, golden warmth and the delicacy and complexity of its effects. I sketched the material for this piece soon after that unforgettable experience.[NORMAN]

The presentation of this concert has always been informal – I tried to speak in an everyday manner, wore informal clothing, and sometimes while performing Oliveros, sat down on the same level with the audience.

By beginning the program with a piece by Bach, the audience can question the meaning of sounds in a language they are familiar with. Audience members have confirmed to me that this is indeed helpful in their understanding and appreciation of the other works on the program, which are usually new to most, if not all audience members.

The free nature of Oliveros' From Unknown Silences has challenged the understanding of what music can be from many audience members. I have been asked during my introduction what Oliveros “meant” by writing this piece. Presumably, the idea that a composer doesn't know what sounds will be created can be very confusing for an audience which is used to interpreting the “meaning” of a work, in the same way that one might distill the “moral” from an Aesop fable. It is very possible that these performances of From Unknown Silences were the first time that some audience members have been so blatantly confronted with the possibility that music can consist of sounds which have no deeper meaning than what they are, and that these works can still have value in and of themselves.

Since From Unknown Silences has no narrative content, I try to encourage the audience to listen closely to all of the sounds and ask themselves how each sound makes them feel. While presenting From Unknown Silences, I always try to introduce sounds which the audience will hear later on in the works of Andrew Norman and Kaija Saariaho. This exposes the audience to some of the musical language they will hear later in the program and allow them to begin to consider how they will interpret the music.

Audience responses to the program have been generally very positive, although reactions to participation in Oliveros' work have varied. Perhaps this is best illustrated by reactions to a private concert I gave with this program to a few very experienced listeners and well established members of the visual art and performing arts community in The Netherlands. One person told me afterwards that Oliveros' work was very interesting and absolutely changed her appreciation and listening of the rest of the program. Another told me that he found nothing of value in the work at all.

Amerongen

One very interesting result of this program was at the last performance I gave, on 28 August, 2022 outdoors, in the garden of Kasteel Amerongen, Netherlands. After discussion with a non-musician friend, I re-wrote the text of From Unknown Silences, and read only my version of the text to the audience. This version is outlined HERE [link to Ch3] in chapter 3.

Quite surprisingly, this performance was one of the most “technically correct” versions of the piece which I have led, one which stayed the most true to Oliveros' own instructions. After that performance I received lots of detailed feedback from the organizers of the concert, these are discussed in depth in Chapter 5 of this study.

4.4 Bach/Oliveros Bach

On March 21, 2022 I gave a performance at 't Jagthuijs in Nederhorst den Berg, attended by 33 people.

The program of this concert was:

Bach Sonata #1 in g minor for solo violin BWV 1001

Pauline Oliveros The Tuning Meditation (with audience participation)

Bach Partita #2 in d minor for solo violin BWV 1004

The concert space of 't Jagthuijs can be best described as feeling like a large living room with folding chairs for the audience. This gave us the possibility of creating a very intimate and informal atmosphere for the concert. In order to enhance this atmosphere the following steps were taken:

• The lights were left on, so as not to create a feeling of separation between “musician” and “audience”

• The chairs, which were originally set up in rows, were rounded slightly into a half circle. This way members of the audience could see each other and be subtly reminded of each other's presence in addition to seeing me.

• I wore informal clothing for the concert

• As the audience was entering, I was already in the hall, greeting people who entered and warming up. I did not want to be backstage to create another barrier between myself and the audience.

In my introduction of Oliveros' The Tuning Meditation, I started by describing my own connection with the music, outlined the instructions for the piece, and then gave the audience a chance to “rehearse” the piece twice.

Our first “rehearsal”, which lasted about two minutes, was to give the audience a chance to try out the ideas “to get an idea of the piece”. After this, they were given the opportunity to ask questions, and were then asked to try again in a second “rehearsal”, this time bringing their attention to how we listen, and to the colors, emotions, and characters that the music inspired in their minds. I pointed out that we were creating chords and a harmonic progression with this music, “just like Bach does”. At this point we sang together for the second time, lasting about three minutes.

Finally, for our “performance”, I encouraged the audience to listen even more deeply, and challenged them to discover how the note they chose to sing changed the feeling, color, and mood of what we created together. I told them that “we are all composers right now”, and asked them what they want to say with their musical choices. After giving the audience one last opportunity to ask questions, we embarked on our “performance” of the piece, which lasted 7 minutes and 42 seconds in this concert.

I was told afterwards by the organizers that most of the people in the audience did sing for Oliveros' work. My own feeling about this program was very positive. The atmosphere created by the space and audience was very welcoming and intimate, I felt secure in the presentation and performance of all works, and the audience adhered well to Oliveros' performance instructions. I believe that a combination of the intimate atmosphere and “rehearsals” of the piece helped create an ideal setting for this type of communal work. Audience response was generally very positive, one audience member was moved enough by our performance of The Tuning Meditation to request a copy of the recording of our performance.

This performance led to some very interesting and varied feedback:

• After the collaborative performance of Oliveros, I played Bach's Allemande from the D minor partita. One audience member told me that her immediate response when I started the Allemande brought her back to our performance of Oliveros – she thought “We just did this! But how did he write it down?”

• The same person told me that she found the environment of the hall to be very important in a program like this – such a program would not have the same effect everywhere.

• One of the organizers told me that he felt bad for the people who didn't sing in the Oliveros, since they had not been forewarned that they would be invited to participate. He also said that the length of Oliveros, while lasting only 7'42”in our performance, felt long.

• Another audience member told me that there was a “big jump” in style for the repertoire and in what it asked from the audience. But she emphasized that the jump felt “wonderfully right”. Going back to Bach after Oliveros felt very nice, since she could just listen again instead of participate. Bach felt like “something we know”, but she could try to “hear it for the first time.”

• One couple found the Oliveros “great to do”, since they had never gotten a chance to do something like this before. They said it was “very touching and beautiful”. They found it very interesting to sing in ways that went with the general harmony being created in Oliveros, as well as to go against the harmonies and create dissonances.

• The version we did of Tuning Meditation began by everyone breathing in and out once, audibly. One audience member found this gave “safe feeling” to everyone, and helped give them more courage.

• One audience member said that the divide between the people who sang and those who did not could also subjectively create a feeling of divide between the people themselves.

4.5

On March 22, 2022, I gave a private performance with cellist Ors Koszeghy in The Hague, for 38 people, in a very small but tightly packed church. The program included the following works by James Tenney, which are described in detail in Chapter 3.

James Tenney
- Koan for solo violin LINK TO CH 3
- Swell Piece #1 (with audience participation) LINK TO CH3

I was told by the organizers after the concert that about 75-80% of the people participated in the performance of Tenney's Swell Piece #1.

There were two very notable things about this performance. The first was the different atmosphere from the concert I gave the day before in Nederhorst den Berg (see 4.4 Bach-Oliveros-Bach). In Nederhorst den Berg I was able to arrange the performance space to feel very informal, but because of the limitations of the church space in this concert, that was not possible here. The chairs were all in straight rows, lights were on only onstage, and because of this I felt a big emotional divide between myself and the audience. This made me feel uncomfortable when introducing Tenney's Swell Pieces #1, and I did not feel like I was able to connect personally with the audience in the same way that I did in other concerts. Since the audience came to the concert not knowing that they would be invited to sing, and because I didn't feel my ability to connect with them so strongly, I felt almost apologetic for putting them in that situation. This affected my introduction of the works, and might have influenced the audience's response as well.

The second interesting result of this performance was told to me by the organizers after the concert. The most talked about piece of the evening was James Tenney's Koan,[LINK TO KOAN] a piece which did not involve audience participation, but which does draw our attention to how we listen and experience sound. The audience's appreciation of this piece made me realize that there can be other equally effective ways of drawing our attention to how we listen which don't involve active participation in a piece of music.

Most audience left directly after the concert. However, the two people who organized the concert were very helpful in giving their written feedback to some questions – their responses are here below:

About the concert:

I loved it! ...

...the Koan: in the beginning I used my head figuring out what you were actually playing , after that (very short) time I went more and more into the actual feeling of the intervals and that brought me in a timeless space, a bit like the minimal music effect..I wouldn’t have mind if it would have been even longer. It reminded me of my early childhood, that I would sit behind the piano and endlessly played two notes and just listened and after minutes, changed one of them and listened….hours I have been doing that, just experiencing the interval. So that was great: koan brought me space, relaxation in focus.

The swelling was not my cup of tea…I studied in the seventies at the conservatory of The Hague and we had to do lots of those things…so not for me anymore..

...

I think it did bring some “school trip” excitement in the audience and I heard people discussing wether [sic] or not they should have taken a breath during the swell or not. I had the feeling that a substantial part of the people liked it to be kind of actively involved.

***

I did join the singing but not so loud, and around me I saw many mouths moving. My impression was that people generally did join in, but modestly. What I noticed about myself was that I tried to adjust to what I heard around me, while not doing the same.
...
The other thing worth mentioning is that I personally am not so fond of this active role "as a musician" in a concert.
I have no objections against singing together, but I prefer to do so among people of equal skills, on a party or the like. A concert by professionals is at a completely distinct level and somehow I cannot ignore that. I don't visit a concert to hear myself, so to speak.

Hopefully these answers will help you.

4.6 KonCon with deep listening

On October 15, 2022, I gave a performance with the conservatory's Ensemble Academy at the Koninklijk Conservatorium in The Hague, in the Conservatoriumzaal, for an audience of about 70 people. The program included:

James Tenney Koan (performed by conservatory student Ruth Mareen)

Pauline Oliveros The Tuning Meditation (sung by myself and Koninklijk Conservatorium Ensemble Academy, with audience participation)

James Tenney Having Never Written a note for percussion (performed on tam-tams by myself and the Koninklijk Conservatorium Ensemble Academy, with audience participation)

Cornelius Cardew Excerpt from Treatise (performed by Koninklijk Conservatorium Ensemble Academy)

The concert, which also included works by four student composers, John Luther Adams, Milton Babbitt, and John Cage, ended up being over three hours in total, and I received the feedback from a few people (which I agree with) that it was too long.

One danger of programming which became apparent to me in this concert was the type of music being performed. Many of the pieces on this program were chosen because they are focused or inspired by the act of listening. However, this also means that they often center around long sustained tones, which don't have an obvious rhythmic content. The result of this, combined with the length of the concert, made for a program which had a lot of similar atmospheric music, but no rhythmic or narrative excitement. I felt that this was the least successful 'experimental concert' I created from a purely programmatic perspective – other 'experimental concerts' which included contrasting works by Bach, Saariaho, Richard Ayres, Martinu, etc., were much more successful at keeping a dramatic tension as well as challenging the audience in different ways.

I also learned how much the acoustic can affect the participatory element of this concept. The Conservatoriumzaal, while suited to many different types of traditional performance, was not conducive to an atmosphere where participation among the audience could blend together into a textured whole. In the performance of Oliveros' The Tuning Meditation, although I saw people singing with us, I found it very hard to hear their contributions, and therefore felt very isolated in the music. In Tenney's Having Never Written a Note for Percussion, the audience was asked to participate with whatever percussive means they could. People shuffled and crumpled their program, stomped on the floor, hit the seats, and jiggled keychains to create percussive noises. However, these did not blend together, and the most interesting texture of the piece was created solely by the nine tam-tams spaced around the hall being played by myself and the Ensemble Academy.