Category: AUDIENCE

Composers Putting Listeners In Headphones: Innovation? Or Control-Freakiness? (Or Both?)

Headphones can enable an intimate listening experience even in a busy venue such as a train station. They can make up for the acoustic inadequacies of a room (or the outdoors), so that there’s no bad seat in the house. And “live processing sound allows composers and sound designers control over everything from volume and blend to reverberation and saturation.” – San Francisco Classical Voice

People Who Attend Cultural Events Feel Better About Their Lives And Hometowns: Study

“A new study [commissioned by Arts Council England] has quantified just how much arts offerings influence people’s choice to relocate or stay in a particular city. And as it turns out, the presence of arts and culture overwhelmingly affected respondents’ sense of well-being and satisfaction, their attachment to a place, and their sense of community.” – Artnet

A First: Edinburgh Fringe Ticket Sales Pass Three Million Mark

“A record overall tally of 3,012,490 for Fringe events was announced as the international and book festivals also reported a surge in business at the box office. The combined audience for cultural events in the city has topped four million when the 217,000 attendees at the Tattoo and the 290,000 estimated attendees at visual art festival shows and exhibitions are taken into account.” – The Scotsman

Books Are Forever. Is Reading?

“It was never the books as objects that people worried would vanish with the advent of e-readers and other personal devices: it was reading itself. The same change was prophesied by Thomas Edison, at the dawn of the movie age. People fretted again with the advent of the radio, the TV, and home computers. Yet undistracted reading didn’t perish the moment any of these technologies were switched on.” – The New Yorker

London Is Getting More Theatres, But Why?

Well, here’s why – it’s a numbers thing. “The authoritative Theatres Trust reckons there are currently 263 theatres in London. It’s about the same number as Tokyo, whereas Paris has around 350. New York tops the list with well over 400. Producers believe more tickets could be sold in London. But first they need more places to originate shows in and to transfer existing shows to.” – BBC

Are We Reaching The Point Where Dancers Need Big Social Media Followings Just To Get Hired?

“New York City-based choreographer and director Jennifer Weber once worked on a project with a strict social media policy: ”Hire no one with less than 10K, period’ — and that was a few years ago,’ she says. ‘Ten thousand is a very small number now, especially on Instagram.’ … It’s unsurprising that profit-driven dance enterprises lead the pack when it comes to leveraging artists’ exposure; policies at nonprofit dance organizations are generally less defined or even in place. (Multiple major ballet companies declined to speak with us on the record for this story.)” – Dance Magazine

Audience Talks And Talkbacks, And Keeping Them On Track

Says the former director of public programming at Lincoln Center, who has moved on to a new arts center in Abu Dhabi, “I’m someone who dreaded talkbacks and Q&As. While I was in New York, a lot of the time it was just audience members trying to show off how smart they were.” Journalist Zachary Whittenburg talks with presenters and artists about how they direct the focus of audience engagement events. – Dance Magazine

L.A.’s Flagship Arts Complex Was Built As A Shining, And Remote, City-On-A-Hill. Will Its Redesigned Central Plaza Make It More Welcoming?

“We shouldn’t be a white castle on the hill. Our new vision is about deepening the cultural life of every resident in the county. That is a very outward vision,” says Los Angeles Music Center CEO Rachel Moore. Carolina Miranda looks at the Music Center plaza’s new redesign — “less a full-blown re-do than a careful surgical intervention” — and whether it will serve that vision. – Los Angeles Times

An Arts-Funded Online Survey Says 80% Of Australians Favor Publicly Funding Orchestras. Too Bad More Of Them Don’t Actually Go To Concerts …

A national online survey of 800 adults found that 83% of respondents believe that government funding of orchestras should be maintained or increased, 70% say orchestras are economically significant, and 48% consider classical music an important part of Australian culture. But 80% report not having attended a classical concert in the past 12 months. (Most said that cost is the primary reason for that.) – Limelight (Australia)