The Audience's Role in Performance

Since I was 13, I’ve spent most of my time around full-time musicians or students aspiring to be full-time musicians. While each musician is highly individual, I have noticed some common threads that tie us together, for good or ill. One of those threads is the weight of performance. Auditions, major performances, or even lower-stake moments will shape your perception of yourself as a musician, but there’s a critical element to remember in almost all of these circumstances: the audience. 

In the words of Walt Whitman:

“To have great poets, there must be great audiences.”

I believe this quote also applies to musicians or any other sort of artist–without the audience we lose our perspective. With the birth and growth of recording technology audiences can (and have) become more disconnected from performers, and performers have become more disconnected with their audiences as well, in at least one critical way that I’d term responsibility. 

If the performer isn’t firmly connected to their audience then they will have to bear the full pressure of performance. Another way of saying that is this: the audience doesn’t have any responsibility. Everything is up to the performer. I reject this idea, because it completely disregards listening and listening technique, turning listeners into objects to be influenced instead of collaborators with artists. 

Perhaps audiences don’t have as much responsibility as performers when it comes to music making, but the performer's role can’t be fulfilled without an audience, and that speaks to me of a shared responsibility between both performer and audience.

What then is the audience's role? To listen. To engage as fully and completely as they can with the performing artist, because if they don’t, then they won’t truly know what the artist is offering. Instead, they’ll be giving themselves up to be influenced without active choice, and that’s a poor strategy, short term or long term. 

This isn’t about audience members lifting the pressure of performance from a performing musician. It is about audiences learning to engage with the artist and their art as completely as possible by taking proper responsibility for their role: to listen. 

Fortunately, being a good listener isn't something you're either born with or you aren't. Through our research at Approaches to Listening, we have been able to break down the art of listening into easy to understand principles that anyone can apply to their music listening. To learn more about our listening framework visit this page, or check out our online courses. As either a performer or a listener, mastering the art of listening unlocks incredible potential for your musical experiences.