Connecting Us Up #3 A: Market Intersections
Posted by Judith Lang Zaimont in UncategorizedAugust 27, 2008
We’ll get to $$ matters in a future post. Today: Pitfalls of paying too much attention to what you think listeners want to hear.
In today’s NY Times David Brooks writes about the ‘airlessness’ of designing anything — in his case, a presidential campaign – by adhering too closely to focus group feedback. Brooks warns Obama to “ avoid the focus group over-managing that killed the passion out of men [like] Gore and Kerry.â€
~ Do you tailor your work according to audience expectation? To what extent?
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In the arts we see this : Two Russians  made an ironic  career of designing their pictures according to majority wishes expressed by municipal focus groups, coming together to state what they’d  like to see in a picture: Abraham Lincoln/George Washington; a dog; some water; trees; etc.    The point wasn’t the pictures; they were lame. The point was the emptiness of trying to be “all things to all peopleâ€. Â
In music, over and over,  I see  composers looking to erase the personal in their work.  Is it still too painful  to express directly, without any kind of protective,Â
dis-avowing filter?      Or are these composers looking specifically to give back to listeners what the new-fashioned habits of listening seem to crave?
Perhaps guided by attention spans of slightly greater than a gnat’s length, a revised habit of listening has developed over the last 10 years.  It partakes of the music, dipping into a piece, then letting attention wander for a bit , then dipping into it at some later point, etc.; and it  tends to connect better with single-affect material, and — even more – with music which does not  narrate, journey, progress or even develop .
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Quite different from the previous,  former-age pattern of intense connection in listening — tracking the music’s progress closely, pretty much attentive throughout.  Do   today’s audiences expect  some additional  visual/performance  complement, some stimulus to another sense along with hearing?Â
They seem nervous without that (manifesting ADD on a monumental scale).
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[ In 2003 a photographer, snapping me for a photo to go with a newspaper profile, remarked that his four-year-old daughter got very nervous whenever there was silence in their home. She just expected a bed of noise, or some background music to be present as  underscore -- not to be  focussed on -- but just there; and she was  tremendously uneasy when that underscore was gone. ]
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“Do you tailor your work according to audience expectation?”
Well, maybe a little. Considering I’m sometimes an audience member, I write music I’d like to hear.
I do tailor my work to performer expectation some of the time.
— Mark Winges