There is constant debate on what relationship an artist needs to have with their audience, and whether there needs to be one at all! I mean who needs ticket sales, donations or any audience at all really? Oh yeah, ALL OF US, not to mention what does the audience need?… I need to get something off my chest….
One semester every year I teach the Audience Connections class at Drury University, an arts admin class that I created that follows and debates current events in the arts world and also delves into what I consider vital to the arts surviving (and hopefully thriving) and that is a true connection to the audience. You can link to everything about it on the lower left including a podcast of every class last semester.
Over on Amanda Ameer’s Life’s a Pitch blog she posted on this after an extended debate with a friend and Amanda comes down on the side of being an advocate for the audience connection (two excerpts):
How can she be a relevant artist if she doesn’t know what’s going on in the world around her?
….does it matter if artists have other stuff going on besides their music? Should they be able to completely relate to their audiences, or do they get a free pass because they are exceptional at one thing? Do we want our classical stars to be just like us, or do we like it when they’re on another plane? And if audiences do want to be able to relate to classical musicians, is it a publicist’s or manager’s job to force artists to read books, to watch the news, to get some hobbies? Can having outside interests – and being interesting – be taught?
I figured I would answer this directly so here goes:
The great artists whether creators or performers were not ahead of their time, but rather connected with their time with a vision of how they wanted that time, their society and the world’s humanity to move forward into the future. They didn’t live in the past or in the future but in the present moment, which was actually their true gift. Beethoven’s Eroica was not innovative because he was trying to develop the Symphonic form, it was innovative because he was forcefully reacting with his music to what was going on in the world at the time he wrote it. That was the driving force behind the innovation. To describe the Eroica as a revolutionary Symphony does not do it justice, it was a Symphony aimed at starting an actual revolution!
Although it helps, it is not so much that a performer needs to be specifically connected to what the audience is reading, watching or listening to, but to understand what is important to society and to be present in their world at the moment they are performing, that is vital. The more a performer is open, accessible, connected and relevant to an audience, the more exceptional their gift will be to that audience since it will then be the only thing that separates them. If a performer is always lost in themselves and in the music, and the audience is also lost in themselves and the music, it means everybody’s lost! I believe it’s what is found in music that relates to our time that gives music its true meaning, connection and relevance. If great music truly is timeless, then we need to do everything we can to prove it. To do this we need to stop making it a part of history and start making it a part of the present.
Being focused on the vision of the journey and not of the destination means that a great artist’s legacy will be what they leave ahead, not what they leave behind.
Finally, the only time we can ignore an audience is if there isn’t one, except this would actually mean it is they who are ignoring us!
The problem, I think, is that a great many people today would consider that being “open, accessible, connected and relevant” means being “specifically connected to what the audience is reading, watching or listening to”, i.e. the things you say are of lower priority, helpful but not necessary.
Beethoven is an interesting example to use, and not merely because he is known as a composer rather than a performer. As a creative personality he comes across as caring very little what anyone thought of him or his music, and as someone who didn’t necessarily choose to participate in the social norms. (It’s likely deafness affected the social “choice”, although he seems to have been so inclined even before he went deaf. His aristocratic patrons certainly encouraged him to disregard criticism and pursue a highly individual originality.)
Sure, Beethoven was aware of the world around him and responded in different ways to the events and dominant personalities of the time – among other things seeing himself as a kind of musical Napoleon. But in modern terms I suspect Beethoven would not have been considered especially open, accessible, connected or relevant. [“Relevance” in itself a can of worms, and a word that is being thrown around with abandon nowadays, often without really establishing what it really is or why it’s so desirable.] I doubt he would have seemed to be “just like us”, to use a phrase from Amanda’s post. Would he, again from her post, still have been a “fascinating” person if he hadn’t been the supremely gifted and visionary composer that he was? Perhaps not, he might have simply been dismissed as a curmudgeon. The other question to ask is, would he have written such powerful music if he’d had a different, more congenial, more “accessible” personality?
**
The “lost” catchphrase sounds very fine, and it’s the quote that brought me here to your post, but it begins to crack when you give it some thought. (For the record, I’m reading “lost in…” by the dictionary as meaning “deeply absorbed in something”, with no negative overtones.)
Is it possible to be lost in two contradictory things simultaneously? No. The performer is either lost in him or herself, absorbed in the effect he or she might be having, preoccupied with his or her own performance. Or the performer is lost in the music, absorbed in what it means, what makes it work, and in interpreting and expressing that meaning and effect. Most of us know what we’d prefer.
Similarly, speaking from a listener’s viewpoint, I’ve known what it’s like to be listening to music but, for whatever distracting reason, lost in myself, absorbed in my own thoughts and preoccupations. I’ve also known what it’s like to be lost in the music, when the composition and/or the performance is so compelling that the environment and unrelated thoughts/awareness just pale into the background and I’m deeply absorbed in the music. Again, I know which experience is the more vivid, memorable and satisfying. I also know that these two states (lost in myself/lost in the music) are incompatible.
The way I see it, if the musician is lost in the music and I am too, then yes, we’re both “lost”, but that is A Good Thing. (If we’re both lost in ourselves, heaven help our art form, because then the music itself becomes merely a vehicle for communal narcissism, and I suspect that’s not what Beethoven had in mind when he wrote the Eroica.)
Yvonne
Great counterpoint! One thing stuck out at me that you wrote:
“Relevance” in itself a can of worms, and a word that is being thrown around with abandon nowadays, often without really establishing what it really is or why it’s so desirable.
I agree. With everything you said I want to focus on “Relevance” and what it means to me. In my post I refer to being in the moment, and present. That is how I define something as relevant as it relates to performance and composition. Great art for me is something that makes me feel that time stands still (akin to being absorbed as you put it) but specifically that there is a sensory perception of everything going on i.e the art has broken through and is suddenly inhabiting my world. There are certain performers that have this gift by being absorbed but also present at the same time. Yo Yo Ma is who immediately springs to mind, someone who clearly is focused when he performs but is also aware that he is with the audience in that moment also. That gift makes the music he performs relevant and by that I don’t mean that it is understood, but that he captures everyone’s breath, so that performer, composer and audience are breathing together as a single entity. That is why I don’t think the what an audience reads or watches etc… is that important, because there are performers/painters/actors etc… from far away lands that can be relevant to us who don’t speak our language, watch TV or go online. They simply have that gift and want to share it. It is about capturing that moment, and the word “timeless” another bandied about word, means that time stands still, not that it hasn’t dated. When I say a performer needs to be accessible, I don’t mean that they need to have a twitter account or be fun at the party afterwards, I mean that they need to put themselves, their vulnerability and their experience on the line in a performance, so that there is no sense that anything is being held back. An audience (and I have sat in plenty) will sense if anything is being held back and they might hold back their emotional investment in the performance also, and then time simply goes by instead of it standing still. I am about to do my 4th stint as Assistant Conductor of the Van Cliburn Copmpetition, they are all great Pianists who can play anything, but I am hoping to hear and see one (or more) that breaks through the barrier of opinion and captures our hearts by letting us be a part of the performance as an active listener, not as a passive observer.
Ron
That’s an account of relevance that really resonates for me. And it rings true because it doesn’t exclude those musicians who might not – as you say in your examples – speak our language or participate in the surface aspects of contemporary culture, but who still reach us powerfully through their music-making.
I fear, though, that not enough people think about relevance in this way. In my experience, all too often “being relevant” refers to something quite superficial or is an idea that’s trotted out without much thought at all.