Musicians and their Audiences

Abstract

How do musicians play and talk to audiences? Why do audiences listen and what happens when they talk back? How do new (and old) technologies affect this interplay? This book presents a long overdue examination of the turbulent relationship between musicians and audiences. Key contributions of this book are its global focus and its interdisciplinarity. Focusing on areas as diverse as Ireland, Greece, India, Malta, the US and China, the contributors bring musicological, sociological, psychological and anthropological approaches into an interdisciplinary approach to the interaction between performers, fans, and the industry that mediates them. Articles in this volume are divided into four parts: I. ‘Conceptualising the audience-performer engagement’, II. ‘Live relationships: negotiations of performance’, III. ‘Technological mediations: the virtual and the material’, and IV. ‘Off-stage discourses and the power of fandom’. Each of the four parts addresses a different stage of the relationship between musicians and audiences, showing its processual nature: from conceptualisation to performance, and through mediation to off-stage discourses. Through a study of its historical foundations and its present challenges, this collection of articles illustrates why the musician/audience conceptual division is as problematic as it is persistent.

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