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
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