Thou Shalt Know Your Audience, and Your Audience Shall Set You Free.
The Performer’s Guide to Successful Concert Streams from Home
Part 2: Program Content
Are you drowning in your Online Concert Stream? Here’s your life line.
Know Thine Audience.
Know the audience you wish to reach, serve, entertain, inspire and bring comfort.
Your audience: it all starts there.
The audience helps determine the repertoire.
The audience determines what the host and performers talk about, and what the host and performers don’t talk about.
Are your streaming events concerts?
Or, are they just a group of musicians hanging out, having fun, chatting and playing around?
Regardless, each requires a certain amount of form (not necessarily formality), structure, planning and preparation.
The audience helps determine the structure. You take care of the planning and preparation.
Hosting is hard – and rightly so. It takes years to become a good host, but you can do it and make it work in the online streaming world in which we all now live.
It takes practice and preparation before the Zoom Mic is clicked on and you are live.
“Winging it” rarely works.” I take it back: “Winging it never works.” I take it back: you and your audience are better than that.
What happened that time you needed to “wing it” in a performance? Maybe you got away with it a few times. But…you practice for your performances…
85 per cent of successful ad libs are 100% prepared. (repeat) (Ask any successful comedian.)
Programming a compelling and entertaining evening of music is also hard – and rightly so. Think about everything that goes in to choosing repertoire for a recital, and especially the order in which each piece is performed. Those same details apply here.
The current reality makes it necessary to include solo pieces (in addition to piano). With Bach and a few others being the exception, a little solo anything goes a long way. Can you create a short set from within a 15-minute or longer piece?
Again, thinking about the audience you want to reach: is it an audience interested and eager to hear a recently composed 20+ minute work for solo instrument…one that might involve extended techniques, and one that some might call Avant-garde or Experimental?
That’s your audience’s call, and based on their call, you can make the right plan of musical action.
Start and end with your audience in mind, and you will be fine, memorable and stand tall in the stream.
