My first regular gig was at a small cafe. Every Sunday night I came in and played for three hours. I had no stage, no special lighting, and very little performing experience. My only compensation was a meal at the end of the night, and the experience. Often I would spend most or all of that time improvising. When I was deeply immersed in the music, playing without thinking about what I was going to play, letting the music guide me, things happened that changed forever the way I approached my relation to my listeners.
I began to notice a high degree of correlation between changes in what I was playing and changes in the personnel of my audience. Often when a new person would enter the room, the music would change as well, sometimes taking a completely unexpected direction. Sometimes the person coming in would distract people who had been listening intently. Often this distraction derailed the music. I realized that in those cases, the audience was participating in the creation of the music, that their attention was part of the energy I was drawing on for my improvisation. I had never before realized how deeply it was possible for a musician to connect with his audience. Since then I have been keenly aware of my audience and their role in the music whenever I perform.
The audience is a fundamental part of music. Although some musicians create and play when there is nobody to hear, eventually the music must find listeners. This is an essential fact of the creative process.(1) Surprisingly, I have rarely heard anyone give practical advice on how to go about relating to that faceless mass of non-musicians to whom it is our avocation to play.
If you play music professionally, your career stands or falls on whether the audience accepts you. If they like you, you sell records and concert tickets. If they don't, no amount of public relations can fill that void.
If you play only because you love to play, the people you play to will make the difference between feeling good about yourself and not. Without acceptance, it is hard to continue to feel good about playing.
The gain this acceptance, many people try to second-guess their listeners, try to feed them what they want and expect to hear. This breeds repetition and lack of originality. Sacrificing creativity and originality for audience acceptance kills the spirit of music. By learning to communicate and create relationship with your audience, you can keep the freedom and creativity without losing the audience acceptance that is so essential.
This is not to say that it is easy in any case. Finding and pleasing your audience is one of the hardest tasks you as a musician will ever face. Audiences are cruel. They don't know you, never seen you before, have no reason to like you or sympathize with you. You can't ignore them and they won't go away. There they are: What can you do for them?
Who constitutes your audience? Your audience is not only the people in the concert hall who came to hear you play. Your audience is everyone around you when you play, anybody in the room or down the hall, or who can hear something you recorded once coming out of a tiny speaker near their desk at work.
Your audience is anybody at all who is affected by you as a musician. When your music is a part of their environment, they are changed by what they hear. Your music has a say in what they're thinking and how they feel. You are becoming a part of that person's life for a brief moment, and you have the opportunity to help define who they are for that moment, and possible for a lifetime.
It is impossible to predict what form this effect will take. Everybody reacts differently to a given performance. What you think you are saying in a particular piece of music might not be what your listeners are hearing. There is a very good reason for this, and it is good to realize before you go trying to convert people to your point of view.
As a musician, you have a very personal relationship with the music you play. It means something very definite to you. This has to do with how you were introduced to the particular piece, or the factors that caused you to write it. It is conditioned by your music education, what you were taught, and your overall world-view. When you get up on stage, you have a set of assumptions about the music based on who you are.
The listener doesn't share these assumptions. If he is familiar with the music at all, it is due to different circumstances. His associations to the music are different, and his world-view is entirely his own. If he is a non-musician, there is a whole spectrum of experience that you have of the music that he doesn't. Naturally, his response to the music will be different.
There is another factor involved that is even more fundamental.
When we are producing a piece of music, we don't hear it the way
someone does who is not involved in its creation. Paying attention
to your instrument takes up a lot of brainpower and colors how
you hear the music. If you think you made a mistake, it ruins
the entire piece in your mind, but the audience may hear nothing
unusual, or if they do it may be forgotten an instant later. You
could execute a technically flawless performance only to have
a friend tell you that the performance lacked feeling and depth
Your sense of hearing may seem absolutely unequivocal and objective
to you, but experience shows that what you think you played and
what you actually played can be two entirely different things.
The most important piece of your stage presence is your self-confidence. When you feel good about yourself and your music, you are in the best possible position to make a favorable impression on your audience. If you are insecure about your ability, your audience will be insecure. They take whatever you give them at face value. If you apologize onstage for real or imagined faults, you instantly put yourself at a disadvantage. Why should they listen to you if even you do not consider yourself ,worth listening to? Remember that they are hearing the music without the same assumptions that you have. what are grievous flaws to your ear may pass them by, unnoticed.
Being self-confident does not mean ignoring the audience or putting yourself above them. To have a meaningful relationship with the audience, you have to lot them be equal to you. You can explain, tell stories, but never talk down to them. This is an ego problem again. The ego is a small part of your psyche, and has little to do with your talent as a musician. If you let the ego take credit for your playing, you run the risk of inflation, a state where the ego's self-importance exceeds its actual accomplishments.(2) When you can give yourself credit for your Performance without letting it "go to your head," without getting "puffed up," you are showing true self-confidence, as opposed to self-importance or conceit.
Part of your stage presence has to do with creating a unified body out of a diverse group of people. The people who come to a musical performance bring with them all sorts of mental baggage from. their outside lives. Everything that has happened to them in their lives up to this point has a role in determining who they are, and it's all there then they walk into the concert hall. They are in a particular mood, they are thinking about something other than music. They're talking among friends. When you begin to play, you are playing to a diverse group of people whose minds are scattered across the spectrum of human experience. The first five minutes of your performance have the potential of focusing all those minds on one thing.
Once you have them, performing is easy. If the audience is with you, you can feel it. It is a focused feeling that makes it easier to talk and play. The performance is new - a shared experience, something that they are participating in as much as you are.
Once you have achieved this connection with the audience, you and they have a reciprocal responsibility. Yours is to take them along on .whatever musical journey you choose to take. Theirs is to listen, to try to follow, to give you the benefit of the doubt when you play something that challenges them. Once the bond is created, it doesn't take much to keep it, but it does take something. They need to know that you're still with them, just as much as you need to know they're with you. Audiences are on some level much like a cornered animal: they are just as scared as you are. If you uphold your responsibility, they will do their best to uphold theirs, and the more you give them that they enjoy, the more they will forgive your excesses.
I once attended a performance by Los Angeles composer Will Salmon. Will has an unusual performance style that fuses contemporary flute playing with dance and movement based on traditional Japanese drama. In his performance, he sings and plays and dances simultaneously in ways that must be extremely challenging for ordinary Americans raised on Mozart and Bob Dylan.
Will opened his otherwise unconventional show with an unaccompanied Bach flute sonata, a piece that bore little resemblance to anything he played during the rest of the concert. When I spoke with him later, I was curious to know why he had chosen an opener that was so divergent from the rest of his material.
He explained that with the Bach he hoped to prove to conservative listeners that he had a solid background in classical theory and technique, and could perform the classics and perform them well. Once this was established, he felt, the audience was more likely to take his less conventional compositions seriously, knowing that they came from someone who participated in the tradition that they were used. to. The reactions of the audience seemed to bear this belief out. By making a link with his audience through a shared tradition, Will paved the way for them trust him to lead them into what were, for them, uncharted waters.
My own practice on the concert stage is somewhat different. As a largely improvisatory player, I like to make a connection deep enough that the focus of the audience flows through me and provides part of the material from which I am creating. This helps to keep the music fresh and different at each performance, which in turn helps provide ideas for new compositions.
I get the audience into the picture at the very start by asking them to join in a shared experience. Usually this takes the form of a group meditation. Beginning with a short speech about my belief, that music proceeds from silence, I ask the audience to share silence with me. When I feel it is right, I begin to play.
The first time I did this, I was giving a presentation of three piano sonatas, beginning with the most nearly classical, and thus most technical and precise. I gave the speech and joined hands with some of the audience members. The focus and energy that built was extremely powerful. Speaking with others who were there made it clear that most people in the room felt a deep sense of joining. When I put my hands to the keyboard, they nearly refused to play the piece I had chosen. The strictly composed piece didn't give me enough freedom to give form to the energy that was coursing through me, and consequently it spilled out all over, in the form of mistakes. Since that day, I have always begun my concerts with an improvisation.
Not all musical performances are in an auditorium ,with an attentive audience. Much of my musical career has consisted of playing in restaurants and bars, and there are few musicians who never encounter this situation.
For the musician who is used to the quiet and undivided attention of a concert audience, it can be suite a shock to play what is essentially background music to a room full of people who are carrying on conversations and don't appear to be listening at all. On the contrary, in a background music situation you have just as much effect on your audience as you do in the concert hall, perhaps even more since for those in the room it is largely subliminal. The music you play sets the mood and atmosphere of the whole room. The music suggests emotion, locale, and activity. If you are open to subtle feedback, an apparently unreceptive. restaurant crowd can be extremely responsive.
Keep in mind that the music you play is creating and reflecting
a relationship between you and the listener. No matter how small
the number of people that you effect, it is the quality of relationship
that you are striving for. If I touch one person's soul in an
evening of playing, it makes the whole evening worth the effort
of trying to make that connection.
Playing in bars is another situation entirely. If you're not playing music for dancing (and sometimes even if you are), audience response can be maddeningly heterogeneous. The couple way back in the corner are hanging on every note you play. Most of the other people in the bar aren't listening at all except for one guy at the bar right next to where you're sitting who is alternately singing along and being an abusive know-it-all who knows more about what your act should be like than you do.
Hecklers, aside from being one of the worst nightmares of any performer, can provide some of the best opportunities for creativity and connection that you will ever come across as a musician. A heckler is a good test of just how confident you are, how honest, and how good you are at making connections. A challenge or abusive statement from an overtipsy barfly has often sparked an off-the-cuff song, or an adaptation of a well-known one. Hecklers have taught me that I can fake a lot more songs than I thought I could, and they have helped me learn to communicate simply and directly in ways that don't offend but that communicate a lot of information.
Drunks are a lot like children. When their lips are loosened by the fermentation of sugars, they no longer feel the compulsion to be tactful or dishonest. They say what they feel and they won't take bullshit. If you are dishonest or patronizing to them, they know it and will call you on it.
A musician cannot afford to be a poor communicator. Good communication skills and a willingness to respect what your temporary nemesis has to say will usually be enough to quiet them down. In the meantime, you have often gained the sympathy of the rest of the audience, who will nor be more willing to listen to what you have to give, even if they didn't care beforehand.
The recording artist has an advantage in terms of creating audience cohesiveness. At a concert, presumably many people will be familiar with his recordings, and thus will already have a shared experience that focuses them all towards him in a similar way. To make that deeper connection, all he has to do is play something that the audience is familiar with to recall and reimmerse them in that shared feeling.
Once you have made the initial connection with your audience, you need to keep them with you. There are many things you can do to make them feel a part of the experience. As you progress as a performer, you will find the combination of skills that works best for you. The following are some basic ideas and techniques that work for me. As an exercise, you can try these out on some sample audiences, and discuss how well each one worked.
First and foremost, be honest. Anytime you lie to someone, you separate yourself from them. You don't need to seem perfect to get their respect. Go ahead and tell them if you're nervous, if you've had a cold. What you should not do is offer excuses or apologies. Engaging an audience's pity will not bring them closer to you, and it is almost impossible to get an audience to sympathize with you for something you lack. They need to accept you for who and what you are, no matter how hard that is for you.
Being honest doesn't mean you can't spin stories or imaginary anecdotes, but let the audience in on the joke. Something about your manner should let them know you're entertaining, not giving information.
Talk to your audience, make eye contact, tell jokes. This is appropriate to any situation. Even the most staid classical performer can afford to give his listeners something of his personality.
At the other end of the spectrum, many performers can communicate and connect without speaking at all. Gestures, facial expressions, nonverbal sounds can all be used to include the audience in what you're doing.
Tell something about the music you're playing. If you know something about the composer, why, how, and when he wrote the piece, this is something that will make your listeners more receptive to the music. Tell them why you chose to play it, what it means to you.
When you're playing, remove your attention at times from the playing and focus on the sound of the music itself. Make yourself one of the listeners, hearing the music as it comes from your instrument.
One of the things that makes an impression on the audience before you begin to play is your image. This is something that major artists' PR companies are very concerned with. Your image has something to do with how easily you can be sold. to a large number of people.
Let's forget about the mass market for a moment. Your image is
important, but it needs to be honest. Your image should reflect
what you do and who you are. This is something you should think
about. If what you look like prepares your audience for one thing,
and you give them another, you could be in for an uphill battle.
I am not of the opinion that a musician should manipulate his
appearance for the sake of attracting an audience, but I do think
that your image deserves a fair amount of objective consideration
in terms of how it might affect your relationship with the audience.
Do you want to look conservative, or shocking? Clean-cut, or nasty?
The way you look should reflect who you are and how you play.