ABSTRACT
Throughout music history there have been principally two “stages” for music, the podium and spaces for participatory music be it the street, a concert area or wherever. Western art music has rarely been known to be interested in the latter category, being an art in which (almost) all participants are in front of their audiences, in a concert hall or in a church. (Exceptions are organists and responsorial choirs – the most spatial music-makers until the mid-20th century.) Spatial breakthroughs through serial, indeterminate, multi-media thinking as well as through the performance, fluxus and happenings movements not to mention electroacoustic performance (and installation) environments have changed that picture radically. How radically? We are no longer shocked by concerts or performances being given on a beach, around a lake, or just anywhere. But how influential has the expansion of potential performance spaces been?
