I assume that my audience speaks English although for one, I've
assumed they're speaking French. How much do I assume that my audience
"gets" my references, I tend to fit the structure first, then worry
about whether people people will "get" it.
I don't simplify for oral delivery; I tend to hope I can fill in the
gaps with the performance. I've seen performances of the yellow pages
made intelligible so I usually assume some elasticity on the part of
the reader in a read-out-loud situation.
In any event, people will make of the content what they will,
regardless how you shape the content for a certain aim. Mine you, when
I've interrogated the audience after, and they've come up with a
wildly differing impression from the one I intended to give -
interpretations might differ as to individual words, but the overall
mood should be delivered. I talk here of an immediate audience; there
are circles of audiences, other poets, critics, longer term audiences
whose dissection of the work proceeds more like a surgeon.
Some pieces I've done take *nothing* from the oral tradition; they are
purely words on a field; other's quite a lot is played into the oral
tradition, and plays against the historical tradition (re-writing the
past).
For a large part of my writing history, I faced inwards
psychologically myself talking to myself. I've helped myself by facing
outwards, towards an audience; maybe not communicating directly with
them, but now I have a vague idea of an audience, just not sure who
they are.
I was thinking the other day about why I joined an Art School, because
it seemed important to me to go to an Art School. Being part of
something seems important to me now, maybe I want to be part of a
tradition, or it maybe that I'm ready to join the conversation.
"the audience for music" exploded with electronic means of
reproduction; as I understand it, pre-LP, musical tastes went back a
generation for each generation. Now, taste can extend back to the
beginning of written music. Mechanical means of reproduction pretty
much expands the potential pool of art for an audience, although it
can act as a drag anchor on the present production. Don't forget, this
happened a lot later for art genres outside writing.
Roger
On 10/30/07, Peter Cudmore <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> OK then, what do we mean by an audience? How much of an inheritance from the
> oral tradition do we assume to be a contextualizing presence at the making
> stage of the creative process? There, the making and presenting were fused,
> and the really-witnessing audience members contributed materially to the
> transaction simply by witnessing. Communication, in the oral sense, means a
> transaction by which mutual understanding is reached -- it requires
> interpretative skills on both/all sides.
>
> When you separate the making from the presenting, then the anticipation of
> response -- either presumed, desired, deprecated or whatever -- becomes a
> potential issue. The question is, though, how much of an *actual* issue? How
> does one evaluate this?
>
> I remember a while back hearing a student composer talking about why he'd
> taken some particular approach, giving his reason in terms of how he
> expected "the audience" to respond, and I remember thinking to myself:
> 'that's very kind of you...' -- meaning, it wasn't for him to determine the
> audience's response.
>
> "The audience" for music, though, is relatively formalized, insofar as it is
> easily identified with the contents of a concert hall; though a painting may
> hang in a gallery (a meta-frame), its "audience" would appear to be more
> serial. For a poem, and for poetry, maybe we'd think of a series of small
> audiences rather than just the singular?
>
> P
>
--
My Stuff: http://www.badstep.net/
"In peace, sons bury their fathers. In war, fathers bury their sons."
Roman Proverb
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