58: Building Your Audience
I'm guessing that you've actually never been - or not recently been - concerned with that traditional audience. Speak about who is your audience? What do you think is important in defining an audience?
I think for me it was never my business to try to win over a classical audience, because if they like me, they'll like me. But if they don't like me, that's none of my business, right? I have to like me, first of all.
So second of all when building an audience, it's important to think about them and what they need. Oftentimes in classical music, we get so pigeonholed into, "Man, my intonation at the beginning of the development was poor, my gestures were flat, my bow technique wasn't as vibrant, my dynamic range, ugh!" Right? That's what's going on in your head.
But when the audience is listening, they're like, "Wow, they can hold that instrument?!" You know? They're thinking about completely di-- "I like the way they close their eyes when they play." They think they care about way different things, right? So you also have to emancipate ourselves from this idea of perfection and do more of giving the music to other people because, I've played for audiences that black, white, brown, purple, green, everybody, dogs, turtles. Like it doesn't matter. Like if you play music and you do it with a way-- as an act of service, people that are open to it will resonate with it regardless of age, regardless of genre.
I've played so many Groupmuses-- this's a good tie in, right?
Kellogg:
Yeah.
Forde:
Where I would play in people's living rooms who've never listened to classical music before, ever. And I'll play like a Mendelssohn string quartet - definitely No. 6, F minor, Opus 80, the one for Fanny - that's crowd pleaser. That's a good one. Good story as well. You play that for people who've never listened to this stuff and they're crying at the end because it's not music for just a select few people, it's music for everybody. And the only way that you build an audience that will happily consume your art, is if you first communicate with them and connect with them on a human level.
Remember, people don't care what you know, until they know that you care. And when you're making content and when you're performing, you have to understand that their attention is the most valuable thing that they're giving you. And if you do not respect their attention, if you do not give them adequate context to understand what's about to happen, they're not going to give you their attention. It's just plain and simple.
So think about the audience first, and then, and give them what they can't get from themselves. And then you'll, you'll see naturally over time that your audience will grow because they get value from being with you.