talk in English

reservation advised

Sarah Price is Research Associate on the AHRC-funded Understanding Audiences for the Contemporary Arts study, as part of the Sheffield Performer and Audience Research Centre (SPARC). Sarah is also Teaching Associate in Music Management at the Department of Music, University of Sheffield. As both an academic and freelance audience researcher, Sarah has conducted audience research projects collaboratively with numerous arts organisations, including a Collaborative Doctoral Award with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Her research interests are in the value of arts engagement, understanding audience behaviour and patterns of attendance, and the role of academic research within the arts industry.

Gina Emerson is a Ph.D. candidate in Musicology at the Institute for Cultural Innovation Research at Hamburg University of Music and Drama. She has been working with the Ulysses Network since November 2016 and is writing her doctoral thesis, Between the ‘Experimental’ and the ‘Accessible’: Investigating the Audience Experience of Contemporary Classical Music, as part of the Network’s Audience Research project. For this, she has conducted audience surveys at twelve contemporary classical music concerts from a range of institutions across Europe, including IRCAM, the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music, Snape Maltings and the Ultima Festival. Prior to this, she was a Research Associate with the 3DMIN (Design, Development, and Dissemination of New Musical Instruments) project at the Technical University of Berlin. She holds an MA in Musicology from the Humboldt University of Berlin and a BA in Music from the University of Oxford. Her research interests include 20th/21st-century art music, the audience experience of contemporary music and the reception of new music technologies.

What do audiences value about engaging with contemporary classical music? What are their experiences with the challenges newly composed works can pose? How does this compare to other contemporary arts? And how can it reach a larger, more diverse public? In this presentation, researchers working to answer these questions and more in two large-scale audience research projects will be sharing their findings.

Gina Emerson, PhD candidate at the Hamburg University of Music and Drama, presents insights from her doctoral project, Between the 'Experimental' and the 'Accessible' : Investigating the Audience Experience of Contemporary Classical Music. Working in collaboration with Creative Europe’s ULYSSES Network for contemporary music, she reports on audience data collected at twelve concerts across ten European countries, the first study of its kind on a European level. She is joined by Dr. Sarah Price, Research Associate from the University of Sheffield, to share findings from the Understanding Audiences for the Contemporary Arts project. This large qualitative study of contemporary arts audiences reveals insights into how audiences engage with contemporary classical music as part of a varied cultural diet, compared with contemporary visual art, dance and theatre.

As well as presentations and discussion between the researchers, there will be the opportunity to ask questions and join in the debate!

Flagey, ULYSSES Network, with the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union

The Audience Experience of New Music

In the context of

Flagey New Music Days