HS:  But how can you tell what the audience is like if you
          are not very directly interacting with them?  How can
          you tell what the range of intelligence is?  I was
          wondering all the time during the performance what kind
          of audience you were pitching it at.

     DA:  You don't know what it is but you feel it out--at the
          beginning of a piece I have a tendency to be fairly
          exploratory, it doesn't start taking shape right away.
          There is a kind of prelude, you run a few scales to see
          how they work for you but also whether people find them
          intelligible, which may not mean that you will abandon
          them.  But you get a sense from body language whether
          people are with you or not with you and there are ways
          of playing it that are so completely intuitive I don't
          even know how I do it.  That is I spend a fair amount
          of time circling the material before plunging in, to
          achieve a readiness of mind and also a kind of tuning
          relationship--it's like tuning an instrument as a
          prologue.  In other words in standard orchestral
          situations they tune because they have got to reach a
          particular pitch, but I have freedom of tuning because
          no one tells me whether I need just tempered or equal
          tuning.

--from an interview with david antin