The classical music industry is undergoing an emancipatory turn for spectators. As the solicitation of audience feedback and evaluation becomes an increasingly important metric for most of the UK's arts funding bodies, and data from streaming services and concert attendance regularly feeds back into the politicized systems of production and dissemination which tacitly govern musical taste and habits, discussions around the values, methods, and sustainability of audience engagement practices are becoming increasingly significant for cultural organisations. As Jacques Rancière notes, the desire for audiences to engage is fundamental for the epistemological work of performance to fully succeed:

Acknowledging the benefits of such a ‘drawing out’ affords an egalitarian approach towards audience building and engagement that has significant potential for expanding the meaningful impact of arts practices on communities. But these new affordances also offer considerable challenges for cultural organizations seeking to negotiate the shifting roles of audiences – such as the need to define new roles and expectations of audience members or managing the channels of communication of these new star–fan relationships in order to create perceived transparency despite the prospect of substantial mediation – and, in turn, these challenges have led to some crucial tensions forming at the centre of contemporary audience engagement practices. In the best instances, an increased connection with spectators afforded by such engagement is indicative of a sincere respect for audiences, and demonstrates an authentic concern for their identities and values to impact meaningfully on the cultural offerings that they consume. In the worst cases, however, these relationships are manipulated to act as a panacea for audiences seeking increased community in a fractured world, taking advantage of an honest desire to connect by offering spectators a hollow platform on which to perform their cultural participation, and carefully manipulating their expectations – predominantly by inciting the belief that their opinion matters – as a neoliberal tool of pacification. In order to survey the complex landscape of audience engagement, certain key questions need to be asked: In what spaces and under what conditions does engagement and participation happen? What is expected of these producer–consumer relationships, and how are these expectations and values negotiated? What are the tensions that underpin both applied and theoretical models for understanding (and indeed capitalizing on) such engagement?

These questions sit at the heart of both Nancy K. Baym's and David Grubbs’ books, albeit in completely different ways and across highly distinct musical cultures. The former's study is perhaps the most straightforward in its approach, examining the ways that social media has expanded the expected roles of both musician and fan (in the commercial music industry) towards an open and autonomous dialogue far removed from the traditional models of agent, publicist, or record label mediation. Conventional work in this field tends to consider the ways in which these dialogues and connections benefit the audience,Footnote ² but Baym begins her Playing to the Crowd by shifting the focus on to musicians, and the pressure for them to relate. The first section, for instance, considers what musicians find rewarding in this work of connection (unsurprisingly it is artistic validation and the communication of meaning, Baym finds, rather than monetization that provides the key motivating force), whilst the second shifts to a socio-historical approach as Baym considers the history of music as labour, arguing that technology's function is not as much a disruption of assumed norms, but a reconnection with an earlier pre-twentieth-century form of engagement where musicians were considered equal to audiences, rather than a professional class separated by the mass mediation of a burgeoning recording industry.

Whilst much here is well-trodden terrain, a central and defining point begins to emerge. Drawing on the work of Viviana Zelizer and others,Footnote ³ Baym marks a significant shift in the musician's labour from one of cultural work to a connecting work she terms ‘relational labour’. Baum defines this type of labour as ‘the ongoing, interactive, affective, material, and cognitive work of communicating with people over time to create structures that can support continued work’ (19) – in other words, performed as either part of an existing job or in hopes of securing a new one – and notes that it is distinct from the more established concept of emotional labourFootnote ⁴ (which tends to consider self-presentation and boundaries rather than connection) in that there is an implicit focus on the personal authenticity of relationships rather than the more or less unique creation of feeling effected by the performance of emotional connection. In doing so, Baym hints that the redefinition of star–fan relationships afforded by new media has instigated a shift from music as a commodity back to a pre-digital framework of music as communication.Footnote ⁵

The application of relational labour to fandom studies is indeed successful, but perhaps Baym's most pertinent contribution to the literature is investigating the critiques to common practice opined by this sociological concept, particularly around the personal ramifications of both getting to know an audience and letting an audience get to know them. As Baym observes, this labour involves a lot of ‘hidden costs’ for the musician, including not just the ongoing communication itself, but also developing new knowledge and communication strategies;Footnote ⁶ an intensive process for the musician, involving the (often unpaid) acquisition of the ‘communicative, self-presentational, entrepreneurial, and technological skills that music work had not previously demanded’ (6).Footnote ⁷ With these strategies also comes an interesting shift from exposed connection to boundaried intimacy (developed in Part III of the book) whereby in order to counter the perceived conditions of ‘distance, publicness, formality, and techno-capitalist alienation’ (82) that new media brings, audiences expect artists’ communication to reveal everyday intimacies that had previously been reserved for private spaces. As the terms of these new intimacies are negotiated, Baym argues that the commoditized musician becomes caught in the dialectic tension of privacy and connection, with the arduous maintenance requirements of social media (every action offering the potential of becoming a new Instagram story) becoming a central challenge to the life of a contemporary musician, echoing the discussions of emotional labour and alienation in the work of Arlie Hochschild and others.Footnote ⁸

With many prominent musicians’ social media pages actually being managed by agents and PR teams, these negotiations of privacy also raise difficult questions about the shifting landscape of authenticity and artistic ownership for both the musicians (addressed in the conclusion) and the audience (touched on in Part II). In opposition to Allan Moore's established audience-centred view of authenticity as something directed to them to be accepted or rejected,Footnote ⁹ Baym positions authenticity as a flexible tool of engagement. There is an implication of authenticity as a kind of capital here – designed to drive sales rather than make connections – which would be an intriguing idea. Read alongside Baym's problematic assumption that ‘the value of musical work has always resided in communication and connection’ (195),Footnote ¹⁰ however, the notion of an authentic artistic connection manipulated as part of a communication strategy makes uncomfortable reading for anyone who considers the musical object to hold any value in itself, and heavily resonates with Guy Debord's warning against letting social mediation of the public sphere become a distraction from the potential for deeper knowledge acquisition. To recall Jean Baudrillard:

As Baym's narrative of connection develops through the course of the book from one of benefit for the musician to one of inconvenience, a further spectre begins to loom. Baym is careful to reference the participants and agents responsible for the construction and maintenance of these communities and social networks, but rarely discusses the systems of power and influence that surreptitiously control them, instead opting for a reading where all parties play an equal part and have equal opportunity to contribute. It is perhaps inevitable in a study whose interviews are predominantly with musicians, though (especially when the majority of them are in traditional relationships with major labels),Footnote ¹² that a certain dissonance is created between the author's views of systemic egalitarianism and the artists whose struggles are voiced most comprehensively: the picture presented here, for instance, being a reversal of the traditional star–fan hierarchies, with the artist – through a need to monetize their audience – complying with the pressures and expectations of both audience and management, and clearly feeling subjugated by both. But the narrative of audience empowerment which underpins this is more complex and political than Baym suggests; for example, around issues such as the creation of taste from critics to the masses (e.g., with the commercial music industry feeding almost exclusively on a steady stream of consumption data, how much is taste reflected back to an audience rather than formed by them) or the tension between an audience's multiple identity and their values (with the public's perceived homogeneity blurring their concurrent functions as individuals with the need for personally tailored intimacy and collectivities with distinct and observable habits).

These questions are significant not only to form a valid critique of the emerging relationship between power and empowerment, but also to consider the challenge of responding to issues of audience engagement in multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, and multi-faith societies, which Baym on the whole ignores. Whilst the internet offers ‘networked interactivity, unbounded spatialization, and transcendence of place … [which] removes barriers to communicative and political participation … and political mobilization’,Footnote ¹³ the changing landscape of digital community building created by social media as it cuts through geopolitical boundaries has a tendency towards cultural or taste communities, which form the substance of Baym's assumed audience groupings. However, without considered analysis of the modes and materials of connection, there is a danger that broad notions of audience become exclusionary of marginalized voices through barriers of taste or divisions of technological platforms. It would be interesting, given Baym's conception of the engagement system as fundamentally equal, to see how her investigations might be developed to address these issues of cultural fluidity, tying in with the timely discussion around the challenges for leaders in arts organizations to better connect with communities outside their existing reach.

David Grubbs's Now the Audience is Assembled offers something completely different. Whilst describing itself as a study in improvisation, this long form poem is as much a reflection on the contemporary music audience and their responses to an unnamed musician's experimentation as it is a commentary on the act of spontaneous creation. On the outside, Grubbs's narrative tells the hallucinatory story of a musician confronted with an audience (but not instrument) and invited to perform both for and with them, initially from a verbal score accompanied by its composer that is eventually abandoned. Underneath this narrative, we are presented with a freeform reflection on improvisation, experimentation, indeterminacy, performance practice, and the audience; a commentary less concerned with the technical or aesthetic qualities of this event than the performance experience of engaging an audience in a musical interaction.

Grubbs’s writing style – ephemeral and esoteric, with patches of lucidity and remarkable wit – is highly engaging and entertaining, offering a thoughtful experiment in music writing that invites the reader in to participate themselves, performing as one of the assembled audience. Whilst this book is not a deeply theoretical one, Grubbs's unique background as a writer, singer, and artist enable him to contribute more significantly (and memorably) to the debates raised by Baym, expanding the aims and scope of her study in terms of the questions asked about both the function and goal of participatory narratives in the music community and the significance of these interactions. Whilst the imagined performance is nostalgically grounded in the world of late 1960s happenings, many of the questions Grubbs raises are equally relevant today: What are the expectations of an audience in an experimental or performance art context? How important is the feeding back of opinion in a genre of artistic creation seeking to disrupt (and even negate) traditional practical and aesthetic values? How can funding bodies justify spending in this area if collected ‘taste data’ is inadequate in expressing the potential for deep transformation at both personal and industry levels?

From the first line (a reiteration of the book's title), ontological questions are asked of the nature of an audience, and the ephemeral and highly political act of its forming. The nature of this assemblage and the implicit tension between collection and individual is given a literary metaphor; in order for the performance to unfold, the musician must first construct his instrument from the multiple unassembled parts of an imaginary instrument gathered in an indistinguishable heap in the middle of the crowd. Grubbs plays with density and claustrophobia. The heap grows and shrinks, blurring the boundaries between subject and object as an audience member joins in the sorting of fragments and enabling the heap to morph from audience to instrument and back again. There is an allusion to the sort of networked collectivism discussed by Baym – the neo-tribal gathering of different groups across multiple digital platforms – but Grubbs's claustrophobic image of dense crowds is far removed from the physical dislocation of networked audiences amassing on social media.

One of the most fertile threads of the book concerns itself with traversing the entire spectrum of audience engagement. With the digital tools offered in Baym's account, expression of personal will is enabled only within limited parameters, but Grubbs's audience is far more radical. At its passive end, the silent audience of classical music is painted as a sleeping mass, the seemingly utopic silence of the concert hall blurring the boundary between the quiet, disciplined silence of spectatorial participation and a soporific silence, producing ‘two shades of melismatic snore’ (12). These collective sleepers (perhaps allegorical of a society with impaired perceptual and political abilities) are still able to respond to the concert through their muffled gestures, offering a commentary on the sort of imaginative or even emotional workFootnote ¹⁴ undertaken by the audience in the heterotopic space of the concert hall. At its active end, we see the audience's cultural agency manifest as a commentary on the work concept. Grubbs frequently blurs the boundaries between performer and audience, the two bodies becoming entangled as ‘the musician breathes in and the audience breathes out, a mid-air meeting’ (9), eventually leading to some audience members joining in with the performance, whilst others sleepwalk around the space. At a central turning point in the book, the audience fully wakes and participates by establishing an accelerating rhythm, alluding to the rebellion and anarchism depicted in the accompanying artworks by John Sparagana, reproduced alongside Grubbs's text (both artists sharing a background in punk bands).

Without the barriers of real-life cultural events, this audience can do anything, and the artist is free to push this relationship to the limit. But in the real world, conditions for cultural participation are perhaps less open, and Grubbs alludes throughout the book to the ways in which the institutionally derived role of ‘spectator’ varies radically from genre to genre (ranging expectations of arrival timings, whether to stand or sit, when to make noise, whether to take videos, etc.). We are reminded that the artist has to negotiate these discrepancies in expectations as much as the cultural omnivore: whilst the popular music industry already has an infrastructure of engagement, classical music is still developing appropriate models. As Grubbs alludes to in the Afterword, sometimes the pressure to reach before these systems of engagement and evaluation are established leads to alienation rather than connection. Engagement (and, dare I say, impact) can occur in multiple situations, with its methods and outcomes being multiple, complex, and – at times – intangible. As extensive monitoring of cultural consumption becomes increasingly invasive, and the illusory veneer offered by some platforms of self-expression thinly veils a music industry where data are regularly manipulated by tastemakers, the tacit consideration of the conditions and methods of engagement presented here raises valuable questions of who an audience is (particularly pertinent in the new music community) and why they should engage.

In their own ways, both writers are highly innovative and engaging storytellers, whose thoughtful and timely studies both invite new – if perhaps slightly opposing – narratives of the benefits and dangers of engagement under the technological (or even technocratic) regime of modernity. Both books celebrate their respective audience's experiences, whilst, when read together, also offering fascinating (and unintended) intertexts, commentaries, and provocations of each other's views and industries. Where Baum is rightly polemical about the pressure for artists to engage (and the excess labour this provokes), she is perhaps not critical enough of the narratives of influence and power that Grubbs focuses on. Grubbs's study is more enigmatic than Baym's, but this enables him to begin his discussion where Baym reaches her limits. For musicians being told that their livelihood depends on this additional labour, in an attempt to combat the decrease in the monetization of music (in part due to the industry's shift towards streaming and sync-based financial models), this discussion is of course highly pertinent; for academics – as UK institutions begin to gear up towards REF 2021 with a renewed focus on public engagement – opening up discussions about the (unpaid) labour of audience building and engagement is more important than ever.