Engaging Your Audience

Catalog description

As classical music performers, we are taught to play and sing to the best of our ability, displaying impeccable artistry as we deliver faithful and insightful interpretations of a composer?s work. But is that enough for our audiences to care? In a world where classical music is competing for attention with so many other cultural offerings and hasn?t fully shaken its reputation as an irrelevant and inaccessible art form, what else can we do as musicians to help audiences become personally invested in our performances? In this course, we will assess the state of classical music today as a point of departure for developing our skills at effectively engaging concert audiences, thinking of a concert as a holistic experience that encompasses much more than just ?the music.? We will write program notes, prepare and give pre-performance talks, and design and mount a fully-realized unconventional concert experience in collaboration with a community partner in Pittsburgh, all informed by reliable research and with the goal of making the performance as valuable and meaningful as possible for a given audience. We will work on these projects over the course of the semester with many opportunities for feedback, reflection, and revision. We will study other examples of audience engagement materials and activities in order to assess their virtues and inspire our own creativity. Ultimately, we will be better able to operate as concertizing classical music professionals with purpose and conviction, producing concerts that really matter to our audiences as well as ourselves.