The Audience Chimera: On Platforms, Publics, and Power

Abstract A central question in recent scholarship on public music theory has been understanding its purpose and its relationship to traditional academic theory. However, one recurring weakness of these sorts of analyses is a tendency to view public music theory as a monolithic entity with a coherent identity and a singular purpose. In this paper, I argue that public music theory is better viewed as a decentralized collection of individual actors and communities whose actions must be understood in reference to the specific audiences they serve and the specific platforms through which they distribute their work, rather than to each other or to the academic world. I explore the power structures that shape the goals (and membership) of these various communities as they relate to their various publics, and I develop a framework to describe the flow of consumptive power in order to explain the observable differences between most forms of public music theory and the academic discipline they represent.