In my lifetime I have been exposed to many artists, many genres of music and lots of different live performances. I have always enjoyed going to concerts ever since I was 10 and my mother took me to the Hilary Duff concert. Some say I am insane since I like to attend at least 5 concerts a year, but there is something about the atmosphere at a concert that entices me to continue to return. This past month I attended the Ariana Grande concert with two of my closest friends and this is the concert that I am going to analyze. There are three distinct points that Hesmondhalgh outlines in his book Why Music Matters. He talks about music creating status, the function of music evoking emotion and the capacity of dance that music embodies and these …show more content…
Hesmondhalgh describes this type of togetherness as music having the ability to enhance interactions between people in one single place, regardless of status, class, personality, etc. As I looked around the Air Canada Centre, I noticed the amount of people that were completely different from one another. In that moment somehow we can all come together and the differences started to fade as we started to sing the lyrics as Ariana began to perform. The audience was made up of women between the ages of 16 to 35, with the exceptions of male fathers that escorted their young daughters to the concert.
Music can create a class status, it can make distinctions between people in terms of what types of clothing they wear or drinks they purchase at the concert. It was clear that the concert consisted of higher-class individuals due to the amount of name brand clothing the majority was wearing. Class was also distinguished through the price of the tickets that were quite expensive and the amount of people lining up for the concert merchandise that was also very expensive. As all of these distinctions were clear to me as I sat down and watched the mass amount of people get into their …show more content…
I personally have found Ariana to be a very talented singer throughout the years, as I grew up watching her on television and have seen her progression. As she played each song from her new album I saw the different effect that each song had on the audience. Hesmondhalgh says “Music can be seen to function as imitating and representing emotion, arousing emotion or expressing emotion” (page #). This was very much true for the different songs that were performed during the concert. At slower songs that were performed in minimal lighting some people had tears in their eyes, while others were texting on their phones out of boredom. Faced paced, mainstream songs were sung along by thousands of people who were screaming and dancing for joy. The emotions that the audience was feeling could have been what Ariana had the intention of the audience feeling or it could have been what she was emotionally feeling at the time that she wrote the song. It is clear that different song can evoke different meanings, and sometimes the emotions are intensified when are performed live. Personally, I get more emotional with songs when they are performed live, which I sometimes base off of the people that surround