I will give 2 examples of activities, organized by Music Centre the Netherlands, which are relevant for the topic of today:
The Gaudeamus Music Week is an event for young composers and with a program of works by young composers; so the starting point is the music itself. The performance of these works make the activity an event for those who like to listen to what is new music today or want to be part of it for other reasons; so the audience comes second, but is not of less importance.
The MW consists of workshops, lectures, discussions, a competition, an offer of steps in the career of those young persons; all participating composers are also audience, as are several other professionals (musicians, artistic leaders). But in this symposium the focus of course is on the audience which attends the concerts.
The MW exists since 1949 and has had many different faces. Since some 15 years we focus on young composers and thus show the audience what the young generation of today worldwide is actually doing. That means in the concerts many different musicians/ensembles perform, varying from traditional instrumentations such as string quartet or orchestra, to more contemporary settings such as live-electronics or installations. That also means that not just any space suits these performances best and not just one way of publicity will reach the audience which may like to go there. So as organizers we have to be as flexible as the music itself demands of us.
In contrast to regular festivals or concert programs we cannot use the attraction of well known names of composers. On the other hand, the image of the festival meanwhile is exactly that: 100 unknown young composers from all around the world with all these different musics is our unique selling point. And there is an audience which is adventurous enough they want to go and discover the unknown.
Next to that since some years we set up an evening with a lot of different kinds of new musics, with short bits of impro, pop, multi media next to more traditional items but presented in a new way distributed in time and space in Paradiso. This “Night of the unexpected” attracts a new young audience, partly because you can walk (all seats are taken out), drink, be less silent than in other concert halls. Only part of that audience goes to the other concerts of the festival and vise versa. So, for such a way of presenting new music there is another audience which is more attracted by “the event” and the place where something is happening, the social context, whilst the other concerts attract an audience which is at first attracted by the music itself, the musicians, the other social context in a place which is made to enjoy that music in a totally different way.
And by the way, reaching that audience for the Night of the unexpected is realized in a different way than the other concerts, especially through electronic ways of community sites, emails, twitter etc.
Another example I want to give is the weekly series of concerts at the auditorium of the Stedelijk Museum, which was organized by us since the 60s (until recently the museum closed for restauration). Each Saturday afternoon at 3 o’clock there was a short concert with new music or improvised music. The series attracted 100-150 people each week, the majority being contemporary art lovers who more or less by coincidence came to this. For some it was their first experience of a new music concert, others were a bit more informed and others (especially the local people) knew more or less what to expect. For those who came first it was often a good experience and perhaps they would go to other new music concerts later on. Of those who knew this series existed many just came because “something of new music” would be there and they didn’t care if composer x or y would be performed by musicians a or b. In any case, the context of a contemporary art museum was essential and in all those years contributed to a gradual building of a new music audience. And today you see many such concerts taking place in De Pont, Van Abbe Museum, Museum van Bommel van Dam etc.
If you add up all those small scale new music concerts in such museums and other non official concert spaces there is a nice number of attendees. But the large scale venues hardly fill all their seats for new music; they often had the building itself as starting point and didn’t follow the requirements of the new music which kept developing itself. But there is also a problem because the big crowd doesn’t have that interest for the new and unknown as described, not because they know they don’t like it but because they have not experienced it yet and will not easily do so at their own initiative because of the bad image of new music which is wrongly but very easily thrown at them: plingplong, complex, elitist, you name it. But changing image is not easily done and cannot only be realized by the creators (composers, musicians). If the music is not heard during education at school, not at the radio or television, and is not easily accessible on the web, it will be a tough struggle. We at MCN have of course thought of trying to change that image, but we need a lot of partners for a long time to have effect. In the meantime there are still a lot of interested people at official and unofficial concert venues who we will keep attracting in ever changing ways to the music which also changes, but always taking the music as the starting point of our actions.
Henk Heuvelmans
Hans Abbing: Visual material from new music - new audience.
