Composer, performer, listener – responses to music

By Julia Hudson

On this blog, we talk a great deal about music and about performance (understandably, no?). What we like, our players, and our thoughts about concerts we’ve been to and been in. There is something else, though, which is as important as the performance. No, not the post-concert drinks… The 'Holy Trinity', according to Britten, is that of composer, performer, and listener – the three elements of the musical experience. Let’s face it, without an audience, a performance essentially becomes a mere rehearsal.

However, if we wanted to talk about the listeners’ response, we encounter difficulty. The composer writes notes, on a piece of paper, which we can praise or decry. The performer plays it, on an instrument which has been made out of wood or metal, and they either get the notes right or wrong. The response produced by combining these aspects? Infinitely harder to quantify. Take how much more subjective vocal music is, even, coming as it does from a “naturally produced” instrument not endorsed by the likes of Stradivarius or Steinway, and this only reaches a tiny part of the issue.

What feelings do you experience during a performance? Probably thousands, ranging from emotional transfixion through to cramp in your right leg. How can we possibly document these, in a quantifiable manner? History further complicates the issue; music wasn’t listened to in the reverential silence we award it today. It was background fodder, with a trip to the opera, ballet or theatre being a social occasion and opportunity for a gossip. In either event, can the music itself stand on its own? To expand - surely every audience member arrives at a concert with preconceptions, emotional states of mind and their own personal history, thus colouring the music with their own perceptions almost before they’ve heard it. I, for one, will never be able to hear the Chichester Psalms without remembering my amazing trip to the Last Night of the Proms.

Is that as it should be, though? A sacred piece of music, commissioned by the Southern Cathedrals Festival and often heard at Evensong, reminding me of a rather light-hearted, patriotic concert? Or perhaps one could argue that, unlike in worship, it is here receiving its due attention.

This “new” way of listening to music, then, gives us more obligation to truly understand it – we no longer have the security of knowing that, since we are at a ball, we can expect to hear a pretty waltz, or a funeral march at a funeral. We’ve talked on this blog before about interactive listening, or the importance of programme notes – as a child, before being taken to a concert, opera or ballet, I was handed with great solemnity an enormous and to-this-day mysterious tome containing plots, characters, instruments and explanations. Did it improve my understanding and, thus, my enjoyment? Undoubtedly.

The totality of these experiences must not be underestimated – Evan Mitchell, in a fascinating article, cited a study suggesting that “visual cues are in fact more important than aural ones in listeners’ evaluations of musical performances. Dr Chia-Jung Tsay, of University College London, found that out of three groups of participants – those shown silent videos, those shown videos with sound, and those played audio clips without video – only the viewers of silent video clips were able to correctly identify the winners of international music competitions. Even trained musicians who were subjects in the study conformed to this overall trend, yet many classical pianists still find themselves chastised for aspects of their stage deportment that are deemed to be excessive.” Why else, as he goes on to say, do seats in a concert hall face the stage? Expression, provided of course that it is complemented by musicianship, helps to convey meaning and emotion. Let’s face it, if you attended a concert played by a robot, you probably wouldn’t have much to write home about.

If you utterly disagree with this week’s thoughts, believing that comprehension of music matters little and it is solely about sound, or that you are able to hear the notes completely devoid of your own preconceptions – there is a project with which you should be getting involved: the Listening Experience Database. Their website elaborates:

“The Listening Experience Database (LED) project is a collaboration between the Open University and the Royal College of Music. It has been awarded a £0.75m grant over three years from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The main purpose of the project is to design and develop a database, freely searchable by the public, which will bring together a mass of data about people’s experiences of listening to music of all kinds, in any historical period and any culture. The project will involve the general public by using crowdsourcing as one of the ways in which data is collected.”

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