Audience.

Alfred Hitchcock said, "Always make your audiences suffer as much as possible."

I can happily confess to having made several audiences suffer.  Never intentionally though.  An audience is a funny thing, or should I say that there are always audience members who make me smile.  During most classical concert's I've played in there is always someone asleep.  They will always say that they were just closing their eyes to better appreciate the music but snoring is a dead give-away. Audiences who can't clap along in time drive my daughter mad.  Last Saturday, I went to see a local Am-Dram production of Blackadder which was very good but there was a man in the audience with the loudest, most peculiar laugh I've ever heard.  And I heard it alot.  We all did!

I have an audience for most of my music lessons.  I teach in the school hall, which is a typical 70's building with small windows all around the top of the room.  Every time I have a class singing a large black crow comes and sits at the window to listen - I think he's a fan.  The children tell me he often arrives for assemblies too.  Today was a performance of a brilliant class assembly (written by their incredibly talented teacher in rhyming couplets no less) and so the curtains were closed to help the atmosphere and improve visibility of the screen that was showing  backdrops.  The children started with a song, so the crow arrived but he couldn't see, so he spent the rest of the assembly squawking loudly.

Clapping is always an issue for audiences.  Do you clap every time you hear something you like?  Should you wait until the end?  What about clapping between movements of a sonata or a concerto?  The rules change for everything you see too.  I went to see a Gospel Choir recently and was stunned to find that you could clap and cheer half-way through and song.  In fact it was encouraged.  In Church it's considered quite bad form to clap at all, even if the choir has been particularly brilliant.  Playing any kind of background music barely gets noticed by the audience, who are encouraged to chat all the way through it and never listen.  Today's performance caused a slight clapping issue.  The children were reciting a Nick Tozer Dragon poem and the audience loved it so much they clapped at the end of the first verse.  Then they realised there was another verse and had to clap that one too.  They were great sports and managed to clap every single verse, even though you could almost hear some thinking, 'how many more?'

I made some cupcakes to take to school tomorrow.  I thought carefully about my audience.

Hope you like them Little Miss Pink.  Congratulations x