Musicians and their Audiences: Performance, Speech and Mediation

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. Focusing on a range of areas as diverse as Ireland, Greece, India, Malta, the US, and China, the contributors bring musicological, sociological, psychological, and anthropological approaches to the interaction between performers, fans, and the industry that mediates them. The four parts of the book each address 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. The musician/audience conceptual division is shown, throughout the book, to be as problematic as it is persistent.

Ioannis Tsioulakis is a Lecturer in Anthropology at Queen’s University Belfast. In the past he has lectured at University College Cork and University College Dublin on topics including ethnomusicology, popular music and politics, Mediterranean music, and ethnographic research methods. His research focuses on cosmopolitan aspirations among local music practitioners, the concept of music professionalism, and the impact of crisis on music and politics in Greece. Ioannis is currently Associate Editor of the Irish Journal of Anthropology. He is also a professional pianist, composer, and arranger who has performed and recorded extensively within the Greek popular music scene.

Elina Hytönen-Ng a cultural researcher and an ethnomusicologist, is a university researcher at the University of Eastern Finland. She has been studying the contemporary British jazz scene and musicians’ flow experiences. She received her PhD in 2010, and since then has been an academic visitor at the Faculty of Music, University of Oxford, and a visiting research fellow at King’s College London.