“Mahler am Tisch”: Experimenting with Imagined and Emergent Audiences.

Symphony orchestras face major challenges that question and impact their traditional ways of operating. This chapter explores how musicologists and orchestral personnel can think about and enact experiments in audience participation. It presents an empirical case study, “Mahler am Tisch”, to describe and examine such an experiment in practice, chronicle concerns as they emerge, and consider the insights such experiments can yield. Building on a situational and socio-materialist perspective on classical music practices that depart from a traditional musicological understanding, the chapter introduces an emerging body of work on experiments in participation from the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies-a field that can provide applied musicologists with relevant, reflexive concepts and methods for experimenting with audience participation. It argues that an exchange between social scientific research on participation and symphonic music practice can open up new ways for learning how audiences are, and can become, artistically relevant in classical music contexts.