Spectacle and Audience Participation: An Intersensorial Analysis of Musicking in the Peace Proms Show

The use of spectacle in live music performance tends to be associated with the contemporary mainstream music industry and its wider context of consumer capitalism. This presentation explores the question of whether within such a cultural context, spectacle can ever be ethically utilised in identifying intersensorial strategies used during the performance that help audience members renegotiate their relationship to perceived barriers to musical participation.

Sinéad argues that when these strategies are effective, the audience members became active participants in the performance through dancing, clapping and various forms of vocalisation leading to an experience of communitas. music in peacebuilding. Using findings from 12 months of ethnographic research with the Cross Border Orchestra of Ireland and their Peace Proms tour, she uses multi-modal discourse analysis to explore how, under specific conditions, the use of spectacle in live musicking performance, can function as an important device for music in peacebuilding in post- conflict Northern Ireland.

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The Conference was organised as part of the AHRC/ESRC funded Partnership for Conflict, Crime and Security Research project Sounding Conflict: From Resistance to Reconciliation 2017-2021.