Dispositions of Being-With: Articulations Within a Diverse Concert Audience
The concert setting as standardised by the prevalence of Western Classical music offers a unique condition in which audience members from diverse backgrounds coexist in the same time and space, where they act and interact, subtly but intensely, through attending and orienting themselves to a medium marked by its intangibility and ineffability. While many existing musical works aim to bring about different models of communion through departing from preexisting listening configurations, few fully exploit the aforementioned attributes, or constraints, of this richly evolved social practice of concerts to motivate new forms of togetherness. My artistic research seeks to create pieces that articulate unexposed relationships among the audience members, through acknowledging their differing preconditions and redistributing what can be sensed among them (Rancière, 2004). It primarily operates within the micro-sociality of the coexisting concert audience, while also reflecting on broader existing social relations such as class and race, corresponding to the first two planes of Born’s (2007) heuristic analytical framework of social mediation in art. Following an overview of some musical works in the literature employing closely-related approaches, including ‘und als wir’ (1993) by Spahlinger and ‘Quadraturen V’ (2000) by Ablinger, I outline my strategies for redistributing the sensible and for motivating intersubjective awareness, as exemplified by several of my own pieces, including ‘Brief Version of Seoljanggu’ (2021–) and ‘scitilop ytitnedi’ (2022), that deal with individual and cultural differences. The experiences derived from these musical works aim to foster a more fruitful understanding of the intricate realm of intersubjectivity in the act of listening, with the potential to contribute insights to a broader domain of human relations.