The audience is the third part of Britten’s ‘holy triangle’; John Sloboda, having in the past researched extensively into the psychology of music, talks to Peter Wiegold about his recent focus on facilitating better communication and exchange between the composer and the audience.

JS: There have been two parallel themes in my research: first the response of the listener to music at every level – cognitive, emotional, aesthetic – and second what goes on in the creative musician’s head, principally on the cognitive level, in terms of how the music gets produced by composers and performers. What I hadn’t done until coming to work at the Guildhall School was put those two together: what happens in a live musical situation between those who are creating music and those who are receiving it. That’s where my current interest is positioned, and for me it’s completely new.

PW: When did you become interested in audiences?

JS: It was when Guildhall recruited me, in 2009. They wanted something added to the research portfolio, which was around deepening musicians’ connection with and understanding of their audiences in ways that would enrich their practice.

Audiences are not an explicit focus of conservatoire curricula. The issue comes up at various junctures, but no one who is designing a curriculum will necessarily ask, ‘Where’s our audience module? Where does that appear in our curriculum?’ There is, however, an explicit focus on communication as a required and assessed skill at Guildhall and other conservatoires. Performances are assessed on a range of criteria, one of which is communication. My colleague Helen Reid has recently undertaken some research into how musicians conceptualise communication and how they believe it is taught and assessed. She found a similar vagueness. Her student and staff respondents had definite views on what communication is, but when it came to identifying how exactly it is taught, and what criteria are used to assess it, they gave less clear or confident answers.

Her research findings are shortly to be published, but they should not be seen as a specific criticism of the institution in which the data was collected. I think it’s a systemic problem. I don’t think anywhere in the profession you’ll find much explicit or well articulated discourse around this.