Reinventing audiences

This chapter addresses speculatively how live music audiences might become a crucible for experiments in radical democracy. It criticizes the tendency to conflate the properties of the musical object or event with the nature of its reception; citing Bakhtin’s addressivity, it highlights the gap between two states of audience – projected, and actualized. With reference to the feminist social theories of Marilyn Strathern, Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd and the political theories of Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Rancière, the chapter probes in new ways the relations between composer, performer and audience. Taking as a central problem the common reduction of musical experience to individuated listening, it pursues music’s political potential to activate emergent collectives. It does this by asking: what would it mean to allow live music audiences a certain equality and liberty, for audience members to become experimentally conscious of audiences as heterogeneous, possibly agonistic musico-social formations with the potential for the elaboration or elimination of difference, rather than as aggregates of mass individuation? Such questions, the chapter proposes, potentialize change: away from dominant liberal-aggregate models of audiencing, and away too from assumptions of the audience as occupying an identitarian relation to music’s addressivity, and to itself

Computer Science · Media Studies and Communication

• Composing Dissent

  R Adlington•Composing Dissent Avantgarde…•2013

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