# Listening is as important as playing?



## Jaws (Jun 4, 2011)

I live in the UK, and in my area there are many community orchestras. All of them would like bigger audiences for their concerts but most of their players don't appear to want to listen to amateur music just play it. It has seemed to me for sometime that the solution to the audience problem could be solved very simply if playing members of community orchestras attended each others concerts as audience members. Does anyone have any ideas as to how this could be achieved? It is already well known that the audiences for most community orchestra concerts are made up of family and friends of players in the orchestra, and that advertising does not increase the audience sizes significantly. :lol:


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## Moira (Apr 1, 2012)

Dance Umbrella has a similar problem with the lesser known choreographers and dance troupes. What they do to counter this is to have Double Bills and Triple Bills so that the people who go for one choreographer or dance troupe form the audience for all, effectively doubling or tripling the number of people who attend. With orchestras that would include the other orchestras sitting in. All that is needed is some co-operation between the three orchestras as to which one does what and an undertaking that the conductor will instruct all the orchestras to stay to the end.


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