This book responds to recent debates on cultural participation and the relevance of music composed today with the first large-scale audience experience study on contemporary classical music. Through analysing how existing audience members experience live contemporary classical music, this book seeks to make data-informed contributions to future discussions on audience diversity and accessibility. The author takes a multidimensional view of audience experience, looking at how sociodemographic factors and the frames of social context and concert format shape aesthetic responses and experiences in the concert hall. The book presents quantitative and qualitative audience data collected at twelve concerts in ten different European countries, analysing general trends alongside case studies. It also offers the first large-scale comparisons between the concert experiences and tastes of contemporary classical and classical music audiences. Contemporary classical music is critically discussed as a ‘high art subculture’ rife with contradictions and conflicts around its cultural value. This book sheds light on how audiences negotiate the tensions between experimentalism and accessibility that currently define this genre. It provides insights relevant to academics from audience research in the performing arts and from musicology, as well as to institutions, practitioners and artists.

This edited collection explores methods for conducting critical empirical research examining the potential impacts of theatrical events on audience members. Dani Snyder-Young and Matt Omasta present an overview of the burgeoning subfield of audience studies in theatre and performance studies, followed by an introduction to the wide range of ways scholars can study the experiences of spectators. Consisting of chapter-length case studies, the book addresses methodologies for examining spectatorship, including qualitative, quantitative, historical/historiographic, arts-based, participatory, and mixed methods approaches. This volume will be of great interest to theatre and performance studies scholars as well as industry professionals working in marketing, audience development, and community engagement.

By exploring the many different types and forms of contemporary musical instruments, this book contributes to a better understanding of the conditions of instrumentality in the 21st century. Providing insights from science, humanities and the arts, authors from a wide range of disciplines discuss the following questions: · What are the conditions under which an object is recognized as a musical instrument? · What are the actions and procedures typically associated with musical instruments? · What kind of (mental and physical) knowledge do we access in order to recognize or use something as a musical instrument? · How is this knowledge being shaped by cultural conventions and temporal conditions? · How do algorithmic processes 'change the game' of musical performance, and as a result, how do they affect notions of instrumentality? · How do we address the question of instrumental identity within an instrument's design process? · What properties can be used to differentiate successful and unsuccessful instruments? Do these properties also contribute to the instrumentality of an object in general? What does success mean within an artistic, commercial, technological, or scientific context?

"This volume advances understanding of the nature of current inequalities in the field of classical music production in the Global North, exploring why inequalities continue to exist, and asking what can be done to tackle ongoing exclusions. It constitutes an urgent intervention into these contemporary debates, drawing together ongoing and emergent analyses from scholars, activists and musicians in a variety of countries across Europe and North America to foreground both scholarly examination of these inequalities, alongside discussion of strategies and catalysts for change. Academic accounts investigate inequalities in higher education and the classical music industry, exploring racial, class and gender inequalities, 'authenticity', disability representation, changing the canon, and neoliberalism. The book also includes interviews with those working in the classical music industry where they reflect on issues of diversity and share insights and inspiration as well as good practice, putting into dialogue scholarly and industry-based accounts. Themes of the book include institutional legacies and possibilities for change; racial, gender and class inequalities and marginalised voices; and strategies for activism whether reflective practices, informal networks, or larger organisations leading change"--

The Routledge Companion to Audiences and the Performing Arts represents a truly multi-dimensional exploration of the inter-relationships between audiences and performance. This study considers audiences contextually and historically, through both qualitative and quantitative empirical research, and places them within appropriate philosophical and socio-cultural discourses. Ultimately, the collection marks the point where audiences have become central and essential not just to the act of performance itself but also to theatre, dance, opera, music and performance studies as academic disciplines. This Companion will be of great interest to academics, researchers and postgraduates, as well as to theatre, dance, opera and music practitioners and performing arts organisations and stakeholders involved in educational activities.

This book investigates audience experience through the lens of sensory engagement in immersive, one-to-one performance. It presents a distinct, practice-based research (PBR) framework – a performance research ‘laboratory’ – designed to evaluate the effects on diverse audience experiences of two ‘sense-specific manipulations’: eye masks and touch. Through a qualitative analysis of responses from seventy-four individual audience participants, this book offers insight into how these popular ‘immersing’ strategies might be experienced. What do these strategies achieve? How do audience participants make sense of them? Do audience responses align with artistic intentions? And how does the PBR framework designed to address these questions influence the outcomes? Through an analysis of three sets of one-to-one performance experiments generating comparative data about the experience of sense-specific manipulation, this book proposes the utility of merging methodologies in artistic research with empirical audience research in theatre and performance studies. This study offers a new perspective on the value of sensory-focused, immersive, one-to-one experience as a means of resensitizing audience participants through performance.

Classical Concert Studies: A Companion to Contemporary Research and Performance is a landmark publication that maps out a new interdisciplinary field of Concert Studies, offering fresh ways of understanding the classical music concert in the twenty-first century. It brings together essays, research articles, and case studies from scholars and music professionals including musicians, music managers, and concert designers. Gathering both historical and contemporary cases, the contributors draw on approaches from sociology, ethnology, musicology, cultural studies, and other disciplines to create a rich portrait of the classical concert’s past, present, and future. Based on two earlier volumes published in German under the title Das Konzert (The Concert), and with a selection of new chapters written for the English edition, this companion enables students, researchers, and practitioners in the classical and contemporary music fields to understand this emerging field of research, go beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries and methodologies, and spark a renaissance for the classical concert.