Questions about curiosity

Anyone who has tried to get funding for a music project in the UK will know that grant-givers are obsessed with one particular interpretation of audience development: ‘impact’ is measured through ‘reach’. A project will be assessed on the size of the anticipated audience, and the primary metric for proving career development is that audiences are continuing to grow, in size and territory. Bigger is better, and growth is measured in numbers.

For several decades now, the dominant narrative is that audiences for classical music are dwindling. Everybody — venues, festivals, ensembles, orchestras etc. — tries desperately to come up with clever plans to attract a bigger, younger, sexier public. Everybody dreads an empty hall. Buckling under the pressure to prove our commercial viability and cultural relevance, we are locked in a defensive crouch, perpetuating the image of an embattled sector.

I can’t say that the battle isn’t real. But is this narrative and are these strategies actually working?! What if audience development meant cultivating an audience’s capacity for curiosity?

If we treat our audiences as gummy infants who need everything pre-chewed and carefully tailored to their needs, who benefits? I’m not even sure why we think we can anticipate an audience’s needs or desires... I don’t necessarily know what I’m looking for when I go to hear a gig, beyond being transported, somehow, by a performer who knows what they’re doing and cares about what they’re doing. I don’t want a programme note to tell me when I’m going to hear G major, nor how the project explores the performer’s own personal journey towards yadayadayada. Similarly, in a gallery I find it more fun not to have everything explained. I’m happy to come as a tabula rasa (or more likely a head clamouring with petty preoccupations) and be surprised.

Abstraction: Kazimir Malevich’s Black Quadrilateral, doing its work.

Having spent twenty-odd years specialising in what is often perceived to be very intellectual music, I’ve grown used to the despairing objection that the barrier to this music is that one has to ‘understand’ it. I’d love for us to do a better job of legitimising an emotional response; to frame a form of engagement that requires only that a listener comes with curiosity, and that acknowledges the inevitable inadequacy of language to describe music’s impact upon any individual. Come, feel the vibrations! Listen with your body, not your brain!

Perhaps I’m still clinging to the idea that, as a musician, I could just crack on with the task of making music — I’m pretty good at putting body, mind and soul to work turning hieroglyphs into sound; I’m much less well equipped to second-guess what an audience wants. Do big audiences equate to good art or a happy artist? My instinct is to resist the assumption that meaningful growth for me means performing to bigger audiences, to resist the myth of popular appeal (which anyway is somewhat contradictory for someone drawn to the experimental). And yet, to my surprise, at the moment I’m trying to make something popular — a show that my friends and family might actually enjoy. This is a first. It will still require something of a leap of faith from the audience, though, to enter fully into a ritual in which we attempt to prioritise simplicity over virtuosity and authenticity over ‘art’. I’m certainly curious to see what unfolds.

Maija Hirvanen and Eva Neklyaeva, in their book Practical Performance Magic, offer this ‘Recipe’ for ‘Talking about Performances that Do Not Talk about Anything in Particular’:

Sometimes, when presenting performances, curators seek to give audiences tools to understand them; at other times, curators intend to help spectators forget that they need to understand anything at all.

A concept of understanding is a violent one. It comes from the line of thought that assumes that the world can be understood in its entirety; it abandons and ridicules all the parts of it that cannot be understood.

Understanding is applied to otherness as both a way to diminish or exoticize difference, or in a well-meaning attempt to prevent violence: If we only would understand each other better. However, there is a right [to] staying opaque, in Édouard Glissant’s words, for not subjecting yourself to the gaze of understanding, to remaining mysterious.

Unlearning understanding, or better, staying with the otherness that does not need your understanding, can be practised in a performative space, where often you leave without having understood anything, but having experienced a lot.

We need an abundance of strategies when presenting performances. To offer an alternative to the passive listening encouraged by algorithmic spoon-feeding and to foster an active, engaged listening requires some imagination. But this is going on: I encounter spaces (such as Cafe OTO) and initiatives (such as LCMF) in London that have clearly built an audience of curious listeners, and this is precisely what I’ve been trying to do with my own festival, eavesdropping. Experimentalism is flourishing in so many corners of the industry here. And, if one takes an international perspective, it’s so clear that contemporary classical music bust out of its intellectual cul-de-sac a long time ago: we’ve been dealing with a pretty joyful aesthetic pluralism for at least a decade now, it’s just that the narrative hasn’t been updated. I don’t see evidence that our audiences are dwindling. They may be shifting, but we’re not witnessing the death throes.

Perhaps it’s all about risk. If we want artists to take creative risks, promoters and audiences need to be courageous too. A good curator offers a diet that includes some roughage. This is what I mean about the defensive crouch: if we’re stuck in a narrative that perpetuates caution and fear, how can we possibly inspire new listeners? We all need to contribute to a positive upward spiral of risk-taking, curiosity and adventure. Isn’t that what live performance is all about?