Building Musical Culture in Nineteenth-Century Amsterdam: The Concertgebouw 9789048528462

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Building Musical Culture in Nineteenth-Century Amsterdam

Building Musical Culture in Nineteenth-Century Amsterdam The Concertgebouw

Darryl Cressman

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Preliminary sketch of a new concert hall for Amsterdam by P.J.H. Cuypers, 1882 Credit: Collection Het Nieuwe Instituut, archive CUBA, no.t192 Cover design: Kok Korpershoek, Amsterdam Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by the University of Chicago Press. isbn 978 90 8964 948 5 e-isbn 978 90 4852 846 2 doi 10.5117/9789089649485 nur 665 © D. Cressman / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2016 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.



Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

7

Acknowledgements 9 1. The Concert Hall as a Medium of Musical Culture

13

2. Listening, Attentive Listening, and Musical Meaning

29

3. Patronage, Class, and Buildings for Music: Aristocratic Opera Houses and Bourgeois Concert Halls

49

4. Acoustic Architecture before Science: Designing the Sound of the Concertgebouw

79

5. Frisia Non Cantat: The Unmusicality of the Dutch

105

6. Listening to Media History

141

Works Cited

159

Index of Names

171

Index of Subjects

173



List of Illustrations

Cover Image: Preliminary sketch of a new concert hall for Amsterdam by P.J.H. Cuypers, 1882 Credit: Collection Het Nieuwe Instituut, archive CUBA, no.t192 Figure 1: The Concertgebouw, c. 1886 Credit: Gemeente Amsterdam Stadsarchief (Amsterdam City Archives) Figure 2: Interior of the Paleis voor Volksvlijt Credit: Gemeente Amsterdam Stadsarchief (Amsterdam City Archives) Figure 3: A print of De Parkzaal showing a concert that took place on 2 Februart 1866 Credit: Gemeente Amsterdam Stadsarchief (Amsterdam City Archives) Figure 4: Interior of the of the Music Hall of the Felix Meritis, c. 1791 Credit: Gemeente Amsterdam Stadsarchief (Amsterdam City Archives) Figure 5: The façade of the Neues Gewandhaus with the slogan Res Serva est Verum Gaudium placed above the columns, c. 1886 Credit: Collection Het Nieuwe Instituut, archive GEND 239, no.t301 Figure 6: Preliminary sketch of a new concert hall for Amsterdam by P.J.H. Cuypers, c. 1882 Credit: Collection Het Nieuwe Instituut, archive CUBA, no.t192 Figure 7: Drawing of the Concertgebouw with floor plan by A.L. van Gendt Credit: Collection Het Nieuwe Instituut, archive GEND 201, no.t408 Figure 8: The main concert hall of the Neues Gewandhaus, from a book on the Gewandhaus owned by A.L. van Gendt, 1886 Credit: Collection Het Nieuwe Instituut, archive GEND 239, no.t301

Acknowledgements A colleague once told me that it takes about eight years to produce a book. She was right. The following people have made the past eight years very enjoyable and without them I would not have been able to complete this book. My friends Norm Friesen, Ted Hamilton, Roy Bendor, Rob Prey, and Neal Thomas contributed more to this book than they can imagine. Andrew Feenberg’s encouragement and careful reading of my work was very beneficial, and his attention to what Heidegger called ‘the question concerning technology’ continues to be an inspiration for my own work. Koos Bosma organized a visiting research fellowship at the VU University Amsterdam in 2009 and since that time his generosity and friendship has been greatly appreciated. Myles Ruggles provided many needed conversations to sort through the questions and ideas that inspired this book. Hans-Joachim Braun, Barry Truax, and Alejandra Bronfman helped open up the field of sound studies for me and I am grateful for their friendship and encouragement. At the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University I benefited from the conversations that I had with Gary McCarron and Shane Gunster. Martin Laba gave me the opportunity to design and teach a course on the topic of musical culture that allowed me to develop some of the material in this book. Lucie Menkveld and Jason Congdon provided important assistance at key moments. I had many interesting discussions about sound and musical culture with Vincent Andrisani, Jenni Schine, Nathan Clarkson, and Nawal Motut. I am a better writer because of the feedback that I received from Ben Woo, Scott Timcke, and Heather Morrison. I am lucky to work in the Philosophy Department at the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences at Maastricht University where I have benefited from the kindness and encouragement of Tsjalling Swierstra, Tamar Sharon, Ruud Hendricks, Ike Kamphof, Rene Gabriels, Maarten Doorman, Sarah Weingartz, Guus Dix, Ties van der Werff, Sjaak Koenis, Joke Spruyt, and Wiebe Nauta. In particular, Peter Peters has been a good friend and a wonderful colleague who has made sure that I feel at home in the Netherlands. I am also very lucky to work in a faculty that contains so many like-minded colleagues and friends. In particular I would like to acknowledge the Maastricht University Science, Technology, & Society Studies Research Group and the Sounders Research Group (Karin Bijsterveld, Joeri Bruniyckx, Alexandra Supper, Anna Harris, Annelies Jacobs). Special thanks to Stefan

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Building Musical Culture in Nineteenth- Century Amsterdam

Krebs and Melissa Van Drie, both of whom organized events where I was able to present my ideas on architectural acoustics to different audiences of experts. Thanks also to Hans Fidom and the Orgelpark in Amsterdam; Emile Wennekes at Utrecht University; the archivists and librarians at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam and the Stadsarchief in Amsterdam; Jeroen Sondervan and Amsterdam University Press; Wouter Mensink; Ed Slack; Kevin Konarzewski; and my sisters Charlene, Abbey, and Molly. For assistance with translations, I would like to thank Silvie van der Zee, Peter Peters, Koos Bosma, and Loes Meijer. Most importantly, I would like to acknowledge the support I received from my wife Deanne. She has read many versions of this book and her patience, humour, and companionship kept me in good spirits while I was writing and so it is with gratitude and love that I dedicate this book to her. Portions of this book have appeared in the following publications and appear here (partially revised) with permission from the original publishers. Portions of Chapters 3 and Chapter 5 appeared in ‘Innis in the Concertgebouw: Media & Musical Culture in Nineteenth-Century Amsterdam’, in Media Transatlantic: Media Theory between North America and GermanSpeaking Europe ed. Norm Friesen (Dordecht: Springer, 2015). Portions of Chapter 4 will appear in ‘Acoustic Architecture before Science: The Case of Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw’, SoundEffects: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Sound and Sound Experience.



For Deanne

The Concertgebouw, c. 1886

1.

The Concert Hall as a Medium of Musical Culture

The Concertgebouw: ‘A Temple of Art’ or a Bar? Opened in April 1888 and still in use today, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw (literally translated as ‘Concert Building’) is considered to be one of the three best concert halls in the world.1 It has excellent acoustics and is home to the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, which has been similarly lauded, receiving the title of best orchestra in the world in a poll of classical music critics conducted by the British magazine Gramophone in 2008.2 These accolades are commendable for any city, but for Amsterdam they are especially remarkable. Throughout most of the nineteenth century Amsterdam was widely considered to be a second-rate musical city and despite the civilizing efforts of critics and patrons to remedy the city’s musical shortcomings, it was difficult to convince Amsterdammers to take so-called serious music very seriously. Orchestras were undisciplined, and although many were proud of their city’s musicians, this pride was more chauvinistic than based on actual musical merit. This was especially pronounced when foreign musicians would perform with the city’s orchestras. Visiting in 1879 to direct his Third Symphony, Johannes Brahms politely complained that the musicians who made up the orchestra that he was charged with directing were ‘good people, but bad musicians’, and as he left he swore that he would return to Amsterdam only to eat and drink well.3 If Amsterdam’s orchestras were mediocre, it could be argued that they were simply responding to their audiences. Amsterdammers were not very demanding and expected orchestral concerts to be gezellig, which loosely translates to ‘a pleasurable time being social with other people

1 The other two are Vienna’s Grosser Musikvereinssaal (opened in 1870) and Boston Symphony Hall (opened in 1900). See: Beranek, Music, Acoustics & Architecture; Jaffe, The Acoustics of Performance Halls; Newhouse, Site and Sound; Winckel, ‘Space, Music, and Architecture’. 2 See ‘The World’s Greatest Orchestras’, Grammaphone: The World’s Best Classical Music Reviews http://www.gramophone.co.uk/editorial/the-world%E2%80%99s-greatest-orchestras (accessed 19 October 2015). 3 Giskes, ‘Opbouw (1881–1888)’, p. 14; Lansink, ‘De akoestiek van het Concertgebouw historisch bezien’, p. 35.

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Building Musical Culture in Nineteenth- Century Amsterdam

in a comfortable environment’. 4 As such, talking, eating, drinking, and smoking with an orchestra playing in the background would be a desirable gezelligheid for many nineteenth-century Amsterdammers. Given all of this, the notion that Amsterdam would one day be a capital of classical music culture was something only a few of the city’s more ambitious patrons could imagine. For these patrons, the Concertgebouw was to be a valuable asset for elevating orchestras, audiences, and repertoires to the level of late nineteenth-century European musical capitals like Leipzig and Vienna. But this aspirational mission was not without its opponents. There were some who felt that Amsterdam’s own musical traditions should prevail against the paternalistic and somewhat joyless traditions of classical music culture. This opinion became well known in November 1888 when a letter was published in an Amsterdam newspaper concerning the Concertgebouw’s first Sunday matinee concert.5 The concert was described as a ‘séance’, and although the orchestra was excellent, the writer complained that the audience ‘wasn’t cheerful […] there was a certain contagious unsociability and stiffness which led to boredom’.6 The writer looks back to Sunday matinees at the long-departed Parkzaal (Park Hall), calling these concerts some of the most loved musical events in recent history. From the memory of these concerts this writer offers suggestions that would enliven the Concertgebouw matinees and bring back the convivial spirit of Amsterdam’s concert tradition: remove the ban on smoking; provide waiters with noiseless shoes, so they can take food and drink orders during the performance; don’t allow the orchestra director to bother guests with angry looks when they cross the room during a performance or have a loud conversation; and let the first half of the program consist of classical music and the second consist of light and cheerful music.7 To this last point, 4 Lansink, ‘De akoestiek van het Concertgebouw historisch bezien’, p. 35; see also Bank and van Buuren, Dutch Culture in a European Perspective; Taat, Amsterdam Heeft Het Concertgebouw. 5 ‘Ingezonden Stukken: Het Concertgebouw’, Algemeen Handelsblad (9 November 1888). 6 ‘Maar het publiek was niet opgewekt; er heerschte in de zaal eene zekere ongezelligheid en stijfheid die aanstekelijk werkten en verveling deden onstaan’; ‘Ingezonden Stukken: Het Concertgebouw’, Algemeen Handelsblad (9 November 1888). 7 ‘In te trekken het verbod van te rooken. Geen enkele dame zal daarom minder komen, terwijl de rook in de hooge zaal niemand kan hinderen […]. Toe te staan aan de bedienden, na ze eerst van een niet-geruisch makend schoeisel te hebben voorzien, van ook gedurende de muziekuitvoeringen te circuleeren, bestellingen van ververschingen aan te nemen en die uit te voeren; de bezoekers niet te laten lastig vallen, ook niet door den verontwaardigden blik van den orkestdirecteur, wanneer ze gedurende de muziekuitvoeringen de zaal doorgaan of op gewonen toon een gesprek voeren en dit vooral niet gedurende het 2de deel van het programma; Het eerste deel van het programma te laten bestaan uit klassieke muziek en het tweede deel

The Concert Hall as a Medium of Musical Culture

15

the author argues that these matinees are intended to provide a pleasant and sociable Sunday afternoon and because of this ‘music shouldn’t be considered a main thing, nor be treated like it, so visitors won’t be forced to listen to it with full attention’.8 The letter was signed Een Muziekliefhebber Tevens Aandeelhouder (A Music Lover and Shareholder), a notice that this particular music lover was one of Amsterdam’s cultural elite who could afford the cost of a share in the Concertgebouw. A response was printed in the same newspaper a few weeks later.9 In this letter Een Muziekliefhebber Tevens Aandeelhouder is described as someone who ‘desires that people should be able to walk, smoke, talk […] in short, he wants to tolerate everything but good, respectable concerts’. This writer discovered that on one occasion, Sunday, 11 November 1888, ‘the hall was quiet, the music was excellent, and the audience was silent.’ However, the following Sunday, ‘it was noisy, people entered the room talking loudly […] people’s shoes creaked, they moved their seats […] and successfully spoiled the performance for music lovers’.10 The author feels that this change in behaviour is the result of the board of the Concertgebouw giving in to the demands of people whose opinions were similar to Een Muziekliefhebber Teven Aandeelhouder.11 To this, the following questions are posed: shouldn’t the Concertgebouw, which was expensive enough, be used for anything better than socializing? Can a well-bred audience let the Concertgebouw be downgraded to the level of noisy promenade concerts like the matinees that were performed at the Parkzaal and other Amsterdam venues? And finally, can those who are so amused by noise not find a more suitable place than a uit niet klassieke muziek. In dit tweede deel moet minstens een nummer van eenigszins licht en opwekkend gehalte voorkomen’; ‘Ingezonden Stukken: Het Concertgebouw’, Algemeen Handelsblad (9 November 1888). 8 ‘De muziek, die daartoe noodig is, dient in elk opzicht uitstekend te zijn, maar moet toch niet als hoofdzaak beschouwd, noch aldus behandeld worden, zoodat men dan ook de bezoekers niet moet dwingen van er met alle aandacht naar te luisteren’; ‘Ingezonden Stukken: Het Concertgebouw’, Algemeen Handelsblad (9 November 1888). 9 ‘Ingezonden Stukken: Het Concertgebouw’, Algemeen Handelsblad (22 November 1888). 10 ‘Den 11 was het stil in de zaal, de muziek was uitstekend en het publiek zweeg. Den 18 daarentegen was het er rumoerig, onder de mooiste passages kwam men luid sprekende binnen, kraakte met de laarzen, schoof met stoelen of voetbankjes en slaagde er dan ook vrij wel in het genot voor de muziekliefhebbers te bederven’; ‘Ingezonden Stukken: Het Concertgebouw’, Algemeen Handelsblad (22 November 1888). 11 The Board of the Concertgebouw discussed the letter by Een Muziekliefhebber Tevens Aandeelhouder on 16 November 1888. The only record of this in the minutes of the Board is a note that they voted unanimously to keep the ban on smoking. Giskes, ‘Opbouw (1881–1888)’, p. 44.

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Building Musical Culture in Nineteenth- Century Amsterdam

concert hall?12 The problem is clear: the board of the Concertgebouw must choose what kind of musical culture this building is to become associated with—respectable concerts, ‘which suit the monumental building and the high membership fee’, or the social events preferred by Een Muziekliefhebber Tevens Aandeelhouder. If the latter is the case then the board should ‘lower the entrance fee, alienate itself from art lovers and turn the Concertgebouw into a bar’.13 In a nod to the egalitarian nature of the public concert, and to demonstrate that the meaning of this building should be guided by musical ideals and not economic influence, the letter was simply signed Een Muziekliefhebber (A Music Lover). What is interesting about this debate is that although it is ostensibly about music there is no mention of music. Nor is there reference to composers, canonical works, or other themes typically associated with classical music culture. Rather, it is a debate about the Concertgebouw and the type of behaviour and aesthetic expectations that this building presupposes. Concert halls are often thought of as buildings that confer cultural prestige on cities throughout the world. These buildings come to be known as architectural monuments or as examples of an architect’s oeuvre. Recent examples include Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall (2003) in Los Angeles and Rem Koolhaas’s Casa de Musica (2005) in Porto, both of which have garnered significant attention because of their unique designs and the fame of the architect. However, as the preceding debate highlights, the cultural and material significance of a concert hall extends beyond questions concerning either the building or the builder. Concert halls are media of the classical music tradition, and in particular these buildings mediate ideas about what music means (it is a serious art form) and how it is to be listened to (in attentive silence). The second letter writer, Een Muziekliefhebber, recognizes that the Concertgebouw is a purpose-built concert hall and as such is culturally and materially biased towards attentive listening. Prior to a single note being 12 ‘Moet het Concertgebouw, dat geld genoeg gekost heeft, niet voor iets beters gebruikt worden dan voor societeit? Kan een welopgevoed publiek lijdelijk aan zien dat een Concertzaal, waarop Amsterdam trotsch zou kunnen zijn, verlaagd worde tot het niveau van de rumoerige promenade concerten, die vroeger in het Park en Paleis voor Volksvlijt gegeven werden? Kunnen zij, die zich zoo gaarne met rumoer amuseeren niet eene meer geschikte plaats daartoe uitkiezen dan juist een Concertzaal’? ‘Ingezonden Stukken: Het Concertgebouw’, Algemeen Handelsblad (22 November 1888). 13 ‘Het moet of aan zijne concerten het cachet van degelijkheid geven dat in overeenstemming is met den monumentalen bouw der zaal en met het hooge bedrag der contributie; of het meet de contributie belangrijk verlagen, de kunstliefhebbers van zich vervreemden en van het Concertgebouw een uitspanningsoord maken’. ‘Ingezonden Stukken: Het Concertgebouw’, Algemeen Handelsblad (22 November 1888).

The Concert Hall as a Medium of Musical Culture

17

performed this musical medium is designed for audiences to demonstrate a reverence for music through silent attentive listening. Writing about the public concert, Rob C. Wegman notes that this particular organization of music’s performance and reception ‘puts a frame around the musics for which it serves as a medium—a frame whose immediate effect is to enforce the identification of context as a dimension extrinsic to the “music itself”’.14 I would argue that it is the concert hall, and not the public concerts that take place within these buildings, that better fits Wegman’s description. The concert hall is the materialization of a context that is simultaneously extrinsic to the music itself yet impossible to separate from the experience of the music. Just as a museum bestows particular meanings upon the pictures that are exhibited on its walls, concerts that take place within a concert hall should adhere to particular standards and expectations, regardless of existing musical traditions. This analogy between concert halls and museums has been used by other writers to describe the unique function and meaning of concert halls. Peter Kivy notes that the museum, as an institution for the propagation of the fine arts, came into being at about the same time as the concert hall, leading to his remark that concert halls are ‘sonic museums’.15 Similarly, Lydia Goehr’s The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, although very much a book about the philosophy of music, draws connections between concert halls and museums. And Richard Taruskin, in his monumental Oxford History of Western Music, writes, ‘Great works of music, like great paintings, were displayed in specially designed public spaces. The concert hall, like the museum, became a “temple of art” where people went not to be entertained, but to be uplifted’.16 These analogies are useful for helping make sense of the way we understand the meaning of the works being performed in concert halls but they overlook the listening experience presupposed by these buildings. From an aural perspective, perhaps the best analogy can be drawn from the work of the art historian Svetlana Alpers who developed the notion of what she calls ‘the museum effect’, which is ‘the tendency to isolate something from its world, to offer it up for attentive looking and thus to transform it into art like our own’.17 The museum effect, then, is simultaneously a way of seeing and a way of organizing what is to be looked at. Following Alpers, 14 Wegman, ‘“Das musikalische Hören”’, p. 444. 15 Kivy, Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance. 16 Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, Vol. 2: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, p. 650. 17 Alpers, ‘The Museum as a Way of Seeing’, p. 27.

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Building Musical Culture in Nineteenth- Century Amsterdam

the concert hall isolates music and offers it up for attentive listening, thus transforming it into something familiar. This contributes to what can be called ‘the concert hall effect’, which is both a way of listening and a way of organizing what is to be listened to. The Concertgebouw is what architectural historians call a ‘shoebox’ concert hall. Stylistically, these buildings are the descendants of palace ballrooms, which were usually square or rectangular with a stage designed for orchestras.18 However, the experience engendered by the shoebox concert hall is significantly different than that found in palace ballrooms. Aristocratic musical culture was convivial; in concert halls, there is an aura, or a feeling, that envelops listeners and is certainly not conducive to socializing. The attempt to achieve an unequivocally ‘pure’ and sacred musical experience is what qualifies concert halls as ‘purpose-built’, a term that distinguishes these venues from multifunctional venues, like churches, theatres, taverns, and arenas. ‘Purpose-built’ is also meant to distinguish concert halls from opera houses and other venues where what the audience sees is as important as what they listen to. A purpose-built concert hall connotes a building where the eye is subservient to the ear, and it was attentive listening and the aesthetic meanings that this disposition legitimates that provided the horizon of expectations within which the Concertgebouw was imagined and designed. Given this history, if the house is a machine for living in (Le Corbusier), then the Concertgebouw is a machine for listening. The following history of the Concertgebouw will not be undertaken from the perspective of musicology or music history, nor will I be writing as an expert on classical music. I came to study the Concertgebouw because I was interested in the phenomenon of attentive listening. This led me to think about the objects that mediated this particular aural disposition, which led me to think about the concert hall as a musical medium on par with other media such as LPs, iPods, and radio. I am interested in using the Concertgebouw as a case study to better understand the relationship between listening to music and the objects and technologies that mediate listening. To better explore how ideas about listening are materialized, I draw conceptual and methodological inspiration from a variety of social 18 Michael Barron identifies Vienna’s Redoutensaal (a ballroom in the Hapsburg Royal Palace built in 1752 where Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony premiered in 1814) as the direct predecessor of Vienna’s famous shoebox concert hall, the Grosser Musikvereinssaal (opened in 1870). Barron, Auditorium Acoustic and Architectural Design, p. 80. For more on the architectural and social history of shoebox concert halls, see: Blanning, The Triumph of Music, chap. 3; Forsyth, Buildings for Music, chap. 6; Schwarzer, ‘The Social Genesis of the Public Theatre in Germany’.

The Concert Hall as a Medium of Musical Culture

19

theories of technology, including the philosophy of technology, science and technology studies (STS), and media theory. In this way, the following study of the Concertgebouw falls a bit outside of what could be considered a conventional work of Dutch musicology or a history of Dutch musical culture. My approach is very much a ‘stranger’s account’ of classical music culture as opposed to a ‘member’s account’.19 The designations ‘stranger’ and ‘member’ come from the history and sociology of science and are used to distinguish between the interests of scientists (the member’s accounts) and the interests of the sociologists and historians who study scientists and the development of scientific knowledge (the stranger’s accounts). Adopting the perspective of the stranger has one important advantage: the stranger is in a position to know that there are alternatives to those beliefs and practices that are taken to be self-evident by members. Within classical music culture examples of self-evident beliefs and practices include the idea that one should listen in attentive silence or the idea that secular instrumental music is a serious art form or, specific to this project, the idea that concert halls are to be designed for attentive listening as opposed to other types of engagements with music, like dancing or socializing.20 Approaching the concert hall from the perspective of media theory means recognizing that media form (book, radio, LP, television) precedes and shapes media content. Drawing out the technological-medial a priori of different cultural formations, media theorists recognize that different media have a tremendous influence on ways of thinking and how information is organized. Marshall McLuhan, for example, argues that post-Gutenberg print culture relegated auditory experience to the periphery of sense perception and promoted vision as the dominant sense. This fixed point of view was the necessary precondition for scientific objectivity, linear thinking, individuality, and abstract thought.21 As media theorists are fond of pointing out, media are overshadowed to the point of invisibility by the content being mediated. McLuhan was fond of writing that just as a fish does not know it is wet, we are unaware of the media that envelop our understanding of the world. Or, to put it differently, media ‘enables perception by removing itself from perception’.22 Within musical culture this 19 Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, pp. 4–7. See also Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life. 20 For an example of ‘playing the stranger’ in studies of classical music culture, see Small, Musicking. 21 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy; see also Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. 22 Winthrop-Young, ‘Cultural Techniques: Preliminary Remarks’, p. 14.

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insight seems especially apt. As John Corbett points out, students educated in music are taught to ‘develop a historico-theoretical interpretation [of music] as if the technical means through which music is accessed […] were of no significance whatsoever’.23 Even for everyday listeners, the ephemeral pleasures of listening to music render the medium invisible, such that posing the question ‘what are you listening to’ always implies an artist or work, not the medium being listened to. If we take as a starting point the idea that media are the a priori of the composition, storage, distribution, consumption, and sound of music, an interesting picture of musical culture can be drawn. Instead of a history of composers, genres, and styles, the history of Western musical culture becomes a history of notation, printed scores, configurations of recorded music, and venues. Robert Albrecht, one of the few media theorists who has studied musical culture, describes a media theoretical approach to musical culture as one oriented towards recognizing how media ‘shift patterns of perception, expressions of feelings, and habits of interaction that extend well beyond the superficial content of music’.24 Applied to the concert hall, this means that this building organizes a musical experience independent of the music being performed and listened to.

An Overview of the Following Work I am not the first person to consider the concert hall a medium of musical culture. Composer and writer R. Murray Schafer notes how these buildings draw together and make possible the knowledge, behaviour, and music that characterizes classical music culture: Each piece is affectionately placed in a container of silence to make detailed investigation possible. Thus, the concert hall makes concentrated listening possible, just as the art gallery encouraged focused and selective viewing. It was a unique period in the history of listening and it produced the most intellectual music ever created.25

More critically, and in a nod to the subtle power relations that both Foucault and the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies identify and 23 Corbett, ‘Free Single and Disengaged’, p. 83. 24 Albrecht, Mediating the Muse, p. 49. 25 Schafer, The Tuning of the World, p. 117.

The Concert Hall as a Medium of Musical Culture

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critique, sociologists and cultural theorists draw attention to how the spatial design of concert halls reproduce asymmetrical power relationships by materializing the idea that audiences should consist of passive listeners. The spatial biases of the concert hall mediate interactions with music where listeners are not part of an engaged collective but isolated individuals who listen in attentive silence. This listener-centric approach equates concert halls with forms of social control that normalize the idea of a submissive mass audience — a sort of architectural disciplining of musical participation.26 This spatial and corporeal critique parallels a stylistic one developed by musicologists and philosophers for whom the concert hall is a musical medium biased towards the nineteenth-century Romantic symphony. For these writers, the concert hall casts a curatorial and historicist gaze over all orchestral music. J. Peter Burkholder argues that the museum-culture of the concert hall influences compositional creativity and that the creation of new orchestral music is stymied by the expectation that it must be like the musical works that are already displayed and revered in the concert hall museum.27 New orchestral works cannot hope to replace these old works, only join them. This analysis also extends to the acoustics of these buildings. Concert halls are purpose built to mediate a distinct musical sound. This sound, measured in terms of reverberation time, must fall between 1.5 and 2.2 seconds (measured at mid-frequency in a full hall) if the hall is to be considered an acoustic success (as a point of reference, the Concertgebouw’s reverberation time is 2 seconds).28 This acoustic standard, as acousticians and architectural historians note, is well suited to the Classical-Romantic canon, ranging from Haydn to Mahler, lending greater authority to Burkholder’s claim that the concert hall is designed to replicate the sound and style of music composed between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. These interpretations invite a kind of ‘media theory’ for the concert hall that describes how these buildings frame a total musical experience that includes the music we listen to, the meanings we ascribe to it, the sound 26 Kaye, ‘The Silenced Listener’; Small, Musicking, pp. 19–29. 27 Burkholder, ‘Museum Pieces’; see also Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works. 28 Here is a list of famous concert halls, their dates of construction, and their reverberation times:Musikvereinssaal (Vienna/1870): 2.0 seconds; Concertgebouw (Amsterdam/1888): 2.0 seconds; Symphony Hall (Boston/1900): 1.9 seconds; Philharmonie (Berlin/1963): 1.9 seconds; Sydney Opera House (Sydney/1973): 2.1 seconds; Tokyo Opera City Concert Hall (1997): 1.96 seconds; Culture and Congress Centre Concert Hall (Lucerne 1999): 1.9-2.1 seconds; Disney Hall (Los Angeles/2003): 1.85 seconds. Beranek, ‘Concert Hall Acoustics’.

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of music, how we listen, and how we interact with the people around us.29 Specific to the case of the Concertgebouw, I am interested in exploring how ideas about attentive listening and musical meaning were materialized in this concert hall. I will methodologically address this question through an empirical mode of inquiry familiar from the interdisciplinary field of technology studies. The field of technology studies, as I use the term, accounts for the loosely woven collective of sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers, and historians of technology who began combining trends from the history of technology and the radicalized sociology of scientific knowledge that emerged in the wake of Thomas Kuhn. Familiar from the many different variations of Science, Technology, and Society (STS), the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT), and Actor-Network Theory (ANT), the term ‘technology studies’ refers to common themes found across these approaches.30 Technology studies is characterized by empirical studies of innovation and design, what could be called ‘ethnographies of innovation’. Tracing the origins of technology means turning away from what Bruno Latour calls ‘ready-made technology’ and instead looking at ‘technology in the making’.31 The aim of this method is to return to a point in time when the form, function, and meaning of a technological object is not yet known. What this entails are micro-level studies of the places where technologies come into being: labs, institutes, government departments, boardrooms, and funding agencies. Once here, researchers set out to ‘follow the actors’; a confusing dictum if only because there are so many actors within any given case study, including some who may emerge and disappear long before a recognizable technological artifact is finalized. By following the actors through technology in the making, researchers are able to trace the complex associations of people, knowledge, and materials that shape the form and function of any material object. The professed aim of this method

29 For similar approaches to other musical venues, Friedrich Kittler and Jonathan Crary examine Wagner’s Bayreuth as a musical medium, Georgina Born’s study of IRCAM recognizes the role of this venue in mediating ideas of the musical avant-garde, and James H. Johnson’s history of music listening in pre- and post-revolutionary Paris identifies how the behavioural and aesthetic pre-suppositions of the aristocracy were built into Parisian opera houses. Kittler, ‘World-Breath’; Crary, Suspensions of Perception; Born, Rationalizing Culture; Johnson, Listening in Paris. 30 Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch, The Social Construction of Technological Systems; Bijker and Law, Shaping Technology/Building Society; MacKenzie and Wajcman, The Social Shaping of Technology; Oudshoorn and Pinch, How Users Matter. 31 Latour, Science in Action.

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is to ‘open the black box of technology’.32 Adapted for technology studies, a black box is a technical artifact that appears self evident and obvious to the observer, like a concert hall. However, by moving backwards in time, what is an unproblematic device or object becomes a heterogeneous network of disparate entities. Thus, ‘opening the black box of technology’ means exploring the processes by which objects draw together institutions, techniques, materials, epistemologies, and behaviours into one seemingly mundane artifact. Working from the insights developed out of this methodology, many in technology studies openly challenge the idea of a clear divide between the social and the technical, arguing that it is unrealistic to neatly delineate one set of activities as social and another set as technical. Technical content and social context are intertwined and co-constitutive of each other. As such, many in technology studies use the term ‘sociotechnical’ to clarify their position against those that assume an unproblematic distinction between humans and the human-built world. Adhering to the methodological dictum of ‘following the actors’, in Chapter 3 I describe how the idea to build a concert hall originated from a distinctly sociotechnical perspective towards Amsterdam’s musical culture. This perspective altered how Amsterdammers thought about their city’s musical culture. What was a culture defined and judged against musical issues became one that was intertwined with buildings for music. I trace the origin of this material perspective to members of Amsterdam’s bourgeois cultural elite and from this social group examine how these patrons organized and funded the construction of the Concertgebouw. This sociotechnical process is compelling because it was not simply a matter of proposing a new building; rather, what was required was the construction of a worldview in which this building was the solution to many of the problems that plagued Amsterdam’s musical culture. In Chapter 4 I move closer to the micro-level of design by examining the acoustic design of the Concertgebouw. What is interesting when considering acoustic design is that prior to 1900 there was no mathematical formula that could accurately predict how a building would sound (the Concertgebouw was opened in 1888). I examine how, in lieu of a scientific theory of acoustics, the patrons of the Concertgebouw sought acoustic advice from architects, musicians, and music lovers whose ideas about acoustics were intertwined with ideas about how music should sound. Because the patrons of the Concertgebouw sought to design a building through which a 32 See Callon and Latour, ‘Unscrewing the Big Leviathan’; Pinch and Bijker, ‘The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts’.

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serious music culture could become established, comparing different design proposals, and the responses to these designs, reveals in more detail how an expectation of attentive listening was articulated through ideas about good acoustics and architectural designs. In Chapter 5 I change methodological registers. I continue to follow the actors but I do so within a framework influenced by the philosophy of technology. As noted, Amsterdam was not an especially musical city in the nineteenth century, and so in this chapter I examine the ‘fit’ between the Concertgebouw and Amsterdam’s musical culture by examining how Amsterdammers were, to borrow an idea from Lewis Mumford, culturally prepared for the cultural and aesthetic presuppositions that were designed into the concert hall. This requires examining how ideas about listening and musical meaning emerged and circulated prior to the construction of a building that was designed to ensure that these ideas would endure. This inquiry leads to Dutch music critics who introduced the ideals of classical music culture in the early nineteenth century through reviews and essays that sought to establish a higher standard of audience behaviour and musicianship at symphony concerts. This took place in the pages of music journals that aimed to inform Dutch music lovers both how to listen and what to listen to. Examining how these ideas and opinions were disseminated reveals the context through which the Concertgebouw was able to make sense for Amsterdammers. By moving backwards in time and opening the black box of the Concertgebouw we end up tracing ideas about musical culture that preceded the Concertgebouw by many decades. With this methodological and conceptual framework in place, this history of the Concertgebouw points to potential connections between two interdisciplinary fields of study: sound studies and the cultural history of music. For the latter, this book fills in the material, or technical, gap that exists in many historical studies of nineteenth-century musical culture. Beginning in the 1980s, cultural historians and critical musicologists convincingly demythologized assumptions of classical music’s aesthetic autonomy by drawing attention to the economic, social, aesthetic, and political contexts through which the music of the nineteenth-century was composed, produced, and consumed.33 The ideology of aesthetic autonomy is a conceit typically associated with musicology and music theory that effectively removes music from the contexts that shape composition, performance, and reception. A contextual approach that locates music as a product of social, aesthetic, and economic factors reveals that these 33 Leppert and McClary, Music and Society; Weber, ‘Beyond Zeitgeist’.

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contexts are as essential as the notes being played, such that without them nineteenth-century musical culture as we know it today would be impossible. Despite moves towards a contextual history of nineteenth-century classical music, the materiality of this musical culture has largely been overlooked. The following history of the Concertgebouw and nineteenthcentury musical culture in Amsterdam can be read as a contribution to filling in this historical-material gap by suggesting that the concert hall was an important medium through which classical musical culture was produced, sustained, and experienced in the nineteenth century. The material, or technical, perspective that I am proposing is a hallmark of the field of sound studies.34 An attention to sound forms the contours of a field that includes ornithology, hospitals, research labs, surveillance, and automobile design. Applied to the subfield of musical culture, sound studies is oriented towards ‘the material production and consumption of music’.35 By highlighting the objects and technologies that make musical culture possible, sound studies marks what can be called a material turn in the study of musical culture. However, this material turn rarely ventures outside of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Studies of electric guitars, configurations of recorded music, playback devices, and recording studios are important for understanding the sociotechnical complexity of musical culture, but by ignoring those musical cultures that existed prior to the twentieth century, sound studies unwittingly contributes to the idea that nineteenth-century musical culture was one of purely ephemeral musical experiences. The ideology of aesthetic autonomy persists by ignoring the materiality of nineteenth-century musical culture. Paraphrasing the sociologist of technology John Law who writes that technology does not appear to be productively integrated into large parts of the sociological imagination, it is equally true that the materiality of musical culture has not been productively integrated into large parts of the musical imagination before 1900.36 The following is an attempt to extend the historical scope of the more musically inclined subfields of sound studies by examining the concert hall as a medium of nineteenth-century musical culture. Perhaps one reason why nineteenth-century concert halls are overlooked as musical media is that the invention and popularization of recorded music and other electro-acoustic and digital media serve as a sort of 34 Pinch and Bijsterveld, The Oxford Handbook of of Sound Studies; Sterne, The Sound Studies Reader. 35 Pinch and Bijsterveld, ‘Sound Studies’, p. 636. 36 Law, ‘Introduction’, p. 8.

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historiographical dividing line between, on the one hand, a technologically mediated musical culture, and on the other a more authentic and immediate musical culture unencumbered by technology. One of the consequences of this historical perspective is that nineteenth-century musical culture appears as an era in which aesthetics trumps materiality and the greatness of works and composers takes precedence over the materialization of these works. The nineteenth century is presented as one of unmediated musical experiences in which everyone was both a listener and performer, before a nefarious music industry monopolized musical performance and turned the masses into docile listeners and complacent consumers. In the conclusion of this work I reflect upon this historical incongruence by looking at issues of sociotechnical continuity and discontinuity within the history of musical culture. Drawing upon the history of the Concertgebouw I propose a framework to balance the relationship between media history, listening, and musical culture that emphasizes continuity across different musical media and historical periods. I argue that the ideas about listening and musical meaning that influenced the design of the Concertgebouw were neither co-original with this building nor are they dependent upon this building; rather, they can be identified in aesthetic philosophy and music criticism decades prior to their realization in the design of any particular concert hall. This narrative suggests, then, an approach to musical media that is oriented towards the mode of listening being materialized and not the medium that makes listening a material phenomenon. I develop this by tracing attentive listening as it has been materialized across media ranging from the concert hall to LPs to compact discs (CDs). This listening-centric approach to media history is premised on the recognition that listening is an activity with its own cultural history that is distinct from the objects that mediate it; cultural and historical imperatives concerning how and why we listen precede and shape the technologies that mediate listening. This approach allows a sense of historical continuity to be cultivated that can offset the view that the history of media and musical culture is a history of abrupt technical breaks. Moving beyond the empirical rigour of technology studies and the in-depth study of one particular object (the Concertgebouw), a history is revealed whereby it is possible to identify how similar ideas about attentive listening and musical meaning are materialized across different media forms. Before undertaking the case study of the Concertgebouw, in the following chapter I examine in more detail what it means to study listening to music. In his essay ‘The Task of the Translator’, Walter Benjamin provides

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the following warning: ‘In the appreciation of a work of art or an art form, consideration of the receiver never proves fruitful […]. No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.’37 In what follows I suggest that consideration of the listener within musical culture can be achieved by focusing on the objects and technologies designed and used for listening. By considering listening as a sociotechnical phenomenon it is possible to overcome the difficulties that have pushed listening, and the listener, to the periphery of musical culture. Following this attempt to recover the listener from the peripheries of musical culture I examine in detail the connection between attentive listening and the aesthetic philosophy of Musical Romanticism. Starting with Theodor Adorno’s remarks on listening to music I will review how writers have approached attentive listening as a historical problem that is intertwined with aesthetic philosophy, highlighting how modes of listening and musical meaning are co-constitutive of each other.

37 Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, p. 69. Alternatively, Mark Evan Bonds argues that the symphony, more so than any other musical style, is written for the listener: ‘Why the symphony? It was a listener’s repertory par excellence: more than any other form of instrumental music, it demanded an audience. Sonatas, trios, and quartets could be played in public as well, of course, but these and similar genres were just as often performed privately, without any listeners other than the musicians themselves. The old adage about the string quartet being a conversation among four rational individuals lasted for as long as it did in part because it captured the essence of the genre so well: one can listen in on a conversation, but the conversation is not conducted for the eavesdropper. With or without listeners, the string quartet and other similarly intimate genres could sustain themselves quite nicely. The symphony, on the other hand, was never performed without an audience, and certainly not for the pleasure of the musicians (as any orchestral musician will be quick to attest) […] even before it emerged into the public concert house in the nineteenth century, the symphony demanded a listening audience’. Bonds, Music as Thought, p. xx.

2.

Listening, Attentive Listening, and Musical Meaning

In Search of the Listener The canons of Western musical culture, from classical to jazz to rock, consist of composers, their works, and the musicians who perform these works; the listener is assumed but is of no real importance. Listening is unlike any other moment of the musical experience. Composing, performing, promoting, dancing, selling, distributing, and buying music do not necessarily require the ear. Perhaps it is this defiance of modernity’s visual bias that makes listening a problematic object of study. ‘I look desperately, in the forensic history of music, for any place where there is a question of me, the listener. I know in advance this quest is doomed to failure.’1 Peter Szendy’s fatalism is a bit overindulgent; nevertheless, his lament is a symptom of the difficulty that comes from trying to conceptualize the listener in studies of musical culture. The cultural study of music seems well equipped to detail what we do with music, but it lacks consistent concepts and terms to articulate the listening experience. Listening is either overlooked in favour of composers, musicians, and works, or it is assumed to be passive, an oppressive disposition forced upon us by a nefarious culture industry.2 Listening is often contrasted with composition and performance, which are lauded as active engagements with music. That the viewer makes the painting, as Marcel Duchamp claimed, has gone from iconoclastic slogan to an important part of art history. Film and television theorists convincingly argue that mass audiences are not passive but engaged in the interpretation of polysemic texts. In literary theory the reader is considered an active

1 Szendy, Listen: A History of our Ears, p. 4. 2 There are some recent studies of musical culture that have attempted to rehabilitate the assumed passivity of listening by grouping it together with acquisition, distribution, and storage under the inclusive category ‘consumption of music’: see Taylor, Strange Sounds; O’Hara and Brown, Consuming Music Together. Consumption can be a useful category to account for engagements with music that are neither compositional nor performative. Yet it seems too easy to reduce the cultural and historical complexity of listening to music as a consequence of consumerism. In these instances, Theodor Adorno’s warning that the culture industry desires to convert the listener along the line of least resistance into an ‘acquiescent purchaser’ is worth remembering: Adorno, ‘On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening’, p. 32.

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participant in the literary experience.3 So why is the listener so rarely considered an active part of musical culture? It could be, as novelist E.M. Forster put it, that ‘listening to music is such a muddle that one scarcely knows how to describe it’. 4 If only it was a problem of words! It is an interesting fact of intellectual history that ‘listening does not figure in the encyclopedias of the past, it belongs to no acknowledged discipline’.5 Even in those disciplines that take musical culture as its object of study, listening falls between conventional lines of inquiry. Musicologists tend to privilege composition while social scientists, cultural theorists, and media scholars focus on performance and other means of dissemination.6 But it is not a problem of disciplinary exclusion that pushes listening to the periphery of musical culture. To take listening as the focus for any type of study is a reminder that our knowledge of the world is visual, not aural: We feel happier when it is visible; then it’s oriented in a way we understand. For, in our workaday world, space is conceived in terms of that which separates visible objects. ‘Empty space’ suggests a field in which there is nothing to see. We refer to a gasoline drum filled with pungent fumes or to a tundra swept by howling winds as ‘empty’ because nothing is visible in either case […]. In our society, to be real, a thing must be visible, and preferably constant. We trust the eye, not the ear.7

Historians, philosophers, and media theorists trace modernity’s visual bias to the ancient Greeks and the development of philosophy or the phonetic alphabet.8 After Gutenberg, this visual bias became normalized through the first mass-produced uniform commodity—the book. Marshall McLuhan theorizes that the printing press altered the sense ratio of Western culture away from aural ways of knowing towards visual forms of knowledge and ‘the gradual substitution of visual for auditory methods for communicating and 3 For a theory of the viewer in art history, see Crary, Techniques of the Observer; for a theory of the active viewer, see Morley, ‘Active Audience Theory’; for a review of theories of the reader in literary theory, see Holub, Reception Theory. 4 Forster, ‘On Not Listening to Music’, p. 133. 5 Barthes and Havas, ‘Listening’, p. 260. 6 Hamm, ‘Privileging the Moment of Reception’. 7 Carpenter and McLuhan, ‘Acoustic Space’, p. 65. 8 Historian Martin Jay locates the emergence of a visual bias with ‘that remarkable Greek invention called philosophy’; Jay, Downcast Eyes, p. 24. See also Jonas, ‘The Nobility of Sight’. On the development of the phonetic alphabet in Ancient Greece, see Havelock, Preface to Plato; Innis, Empire and Communications.

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receiving ideas’.9 It should come as little surprise, then, that the intellectual and political building blocks of modernity, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, were visual movements, unthinkable without the advent of print. Given its privileged position amongst the senses, vision tends to be the metaphor most commonly used to describe the relationship between knowledge, thought, and action. If we know something, we have insight; if we plan something, we exercise foresight; our way of knowing the world is our worldview; we look for answers that appear to us; we see things through.10 One consequence of using terms and concepts that derive from vision to describe agency and thought is the instinct to use visual references and metaphors to define activities that are aural. This is especially pronounced in studies of musical culture. There is a dissonance between how the performance and composition of music is conceptualized and how listening to music is conceptualized. The former are intentional or active engagements with music while the latter is qualified pejoratively as ‘mere’ or ‘passive’ listening. A few examples can illustrate this. Philosopher Don Ihde writes that the transformation of recorded music (LPs) into performative technologies (instruments) exemplifies how a technology that ‘produced a music for “passive” listening, is changed into a transformed music’.11 Timothy Taylor presents a similar analysis of the turntable that contrasts agency/performance with passivity/listening. In his history, the turntable and the LP turned potential producers of music ‘into consumers of music’, and it was not until DJs transformed the meaning of the turntable from passive listening into active performance that ‘agency struck back’.12 These examples imply that the performance and composition of music is superior to listening because listening is not an active engagement with music.13 To 9 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, p. 87. 10 See also Martin Jay, who intentionally uses 21 visual metaphors in his introductory paragraph to point out the ubiquity of these colloquialisms in language; Jay, Downcast Eyes, p. 1. Barry Truax points to the abundance of visual metaphors in everyday speech and writing to argue that the dominance of visual metaphors and clichés is evidence of our preconditioned ignorance of the aural environment: Truax, The World Soundscape Project’s Handbook, p. v. 11 Ihde, ‘Technologies-Musics-Embodiments’, p. 21. 12 Taylor, Strange Sounds, p. 204. 13 I am aware of the growing literature on the reconfiguration of recorded music into performative or compositional media. Thinking about recordings in this way is interesting, but the assumption that DJs are performers on par with other musicians seems a bit artificial. In this regard, I follow Peter Szendy, who writes: ‘For if the DJs are essentially doing nothing different from what I do in my listening room, that is because they are simply listeners appearing in concert […] it was a musician who recently said, speaking of them, that their art “implies less a knowledge of how to play than of a knowledge of how to listen”.’ Szendy, Listen: A History of our Ears, p. 71.

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overcome the passivity of listening, one needs to transform technologies that mediate listening into performative media. It is as if there is a normative imperative to transform all musical media into performative media. Given the numerous opportunities that media provide to ‘actively’ engage with music, to passively listen seems disingenuous to the spirit of music. It is interesting to note that while contemporary writers like Ihde and Taylor marginalize listening as passive, listening to recorded music was considered socially beneficial by even the most ardent critics of modern technological society. Herbert Marcuse writes, ‘as far as they go […] long playing records are truly a blessing’.14 Equally generous in his analysis of recorded music is Marcuse’s contemporary Theodor Adorno, who, against the temporal limitations of 78s, saw within the LP the possibility to ‘capture the extended musical durations without interrupting them and thereby threatening the coherency of their meaning’.15 Edward Bellamy’s utopian account of the year 2000 in his 1888 novel Looking Backward presents a similar view of the joys of ‘merely’ listening. Bellamy’s protagonist is asked if he would like to listen to music. He settles in to hear his hostess sing and perform at the piano, only to be surprised when he finds out that music is neither performed nor listened to in this way. Instead, a schedule of performances occurs each day, performed live by musicians throughout the city and broadcast into the home via the telephone. Bellamy’s protagonist is astounded: If we could have devised an arrangement for providing everybody with music in their homes, perfect in quality, unlimited in quantity, suited to every mood, and beginning and ceasing at will, we should have considered the limit of human felicity already attained, and ceased to strive for further improvements.16

Bellamy’s phone concerts were meant to alleviate the burden of performing music in the home, what many contemporary writers would valorize as an active engagement with music. One would think that if Bellamy truly wrote from the perspective of the 21st century he would be less enthusiastic about such a passive undertaking as merely listening to music. Returning to those critics who are quick to denounce listening as ‘passive’, what appears to be a clear distinction between active and passive 14 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, p. 65. 15 Adorno, ‘The Curves of the Needle’, p. 63. 16 Bellamy, Looking Backward, p. 87.

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engagements with music is, upon closer examination, more complex. To equate agency with performance or composition and passivity with listening is to invoke an interpretation of engagement that is analogous with vision. Sight’s nobility, as philosopher Hans Jonas argues, is realized in its difference from the other senses. What is unique to vision is the freedom for selective attention and detached perception. Hearing, in contrast to sight, is entirely dependent on something outside of human control; sound comes to the ear, the eye goes to the object: For the sensation of hearing to come about the percipient is entirely dependent on something happening outside his control. All he can contribute to the situation is a state of attentive readiness for sounds to occur. He cannot let his ears wander, as his eyes do, over a field of possible percepts, already present as a material for his attention, and focus them on the object chosen, but he has simply to wait for a sound to strike them: he has no choice in the matter […] the sense of hearing […] is related to event and not to existence, to becoming and not to being. Thus hearing, bound to succession and unable to present a simultaneous co-ordinated manifold of objects, falls short of sight in respect of the freedom which it confers upon its possessor.17

Jonas’s description of vision equates agency with the act of choosing to look at something. This agency is impossible through the ear because we do not exercise choice: sound comes to us, not the other way around. From this, composition and performance are similar to the type of agency and intent that corresponds with vision. Just as the eye selectively chooses what to engage with, the composer and performer make conscious choices concerning the creation of music. Listening is difficult to reconcile with this analogy and so almost by default the listener becomes passive.18 Recovering the listener begins by recognizing the intentionality of listening and making a distinction between hearing and listening. As Roland 17 Jonas, ‘The Nobility of Sight’, p. 509. 18 As a counter to Jonas, Donald Lowe suggests that the nobility of hearing surpasses vision because it is ‘most pervasive and penetrating […] sound comes to one, surrounds one for the time being with an acoustic space, full of timbre and nuances. It is more proximate and suggestive than sight. Sight is always the perception of a surface, from a particular angle. But sound is that perception able to penetrate beneath the surface. For example, sound can test the solidity of matter; and speech is a communication connecting one person with another. Therefore, the quality of sound is fundamentally more vital and moving than that of sight’: Lowe, History of Bourgeois Perception, p. 6.

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Barthes and Richard Havas write, ‘Hearing is a physiological phenomenon; listening is a psychological act.’19 We always hear (we cannot shut our ears like we do our eyes), but we choose to listen. I hear the low level hum of the city while I write this, but I am oblivious to it: it means nothing to me. If I choose to, though, I can listen to these sounds, distinguishing between different vehicles or interpreting how the intensity of traffic noise changes at different times of day.20 Distinguishing listening from hearing returns to the much-maligned listener a sense of importance by situating the moment of aural reception as the moment at which sound acquires meaning. In other words, if no one hears it, sound still exists—it just doesn’t have any meaning. We listen like we read, Barthes and Havas argue, with focused intent, recognizing meanings that make sense within a definite cultural context. These authors pursue this analogy by suggesting that the basic characteristics of listening—intention, interpretation, and meaning—are incompatible with the science of hearing: Listening is henceforth linked (in a thousand varied, indirect forms) to a hermeneutics: to listen is to adopt an attitude of decoding what is obscure, blurred, or mute, in order to make available to consciousness the ‘underside’ of meaning (what is experienced, postulated, intentionalized as hidden).21

A visual bias is a bias towards the empirical facts of musical culture—biography, notation, discographies, lists of musical works, and sales figures. The ear is more closely aligned with the lifeworld of experience and as such requires unconventional methods: ‘If you close your eyes, you lose the power of abstraction.’22 Developments in musicology and cultural history have attempted to reintegrate the listener into studies of nineteenth-century musical culture 19 Barthes and Havas, ‘Listening’, p. 245. 20 This contrast between hearing and listening is widely recognized by sound studies scholars and tends to bring out elegantly concise descriptions of this seemingly inherent practice of aural differentiation. Jonathan Sterne writes: ‘Listening is a directed, learned activity: it is a definite cultural practice. Listening requires hearing but is not simply reducible to hearing’; Sterne, The Audible Past, p. 19. Barry Truax reiterates this sentiment: ‘hearing can be regarded as a somewhat passive ability that seems to work with or without conscious effort, listening implies an active role involving differing levels of attention’: Truax, Acoustic Communication, p. 18. 21 Barthes and Havas, ‘Listening’, p. 249. 22 Michel Serres, quoted in Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, p. 6.

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by examining, through archives and documents, how individual listeners described their listening experiences.23 This attention to listening, as described by listeners, contrasts conventional accounts of listening that, until recently, reproduced the ideology of aesthetic autonomy by subsuming the listener’s perspective within thinly disguised compositional histories. Seeking an implied listener in musical works, writers attempted to locate the listener by explaining how the meaning of the work determines the mode of listening appropriate to it. The problem with this approach is that ‘such an assumption makes it easy to write the history of listening: as soon as the composer’s intentions have been identified, the history of listening can be extrapolated from the history of musical styles’.24 Against finding the listener in the composition, the turn to the listener through studying archival documents represents a genuine conceptual and methodological breakthrough within the study of nineteenth-century musical culture.25 The archival, or documentary, method is particularly useful for overcoming some of the methodological problems of studying the listener and the listening experience that I have described thus far. The empirical facts of music (notation, biography), although certain in their own right, are relatively useless when trying to articulate the listening experience because the only listening experience we can ever be certain of is our own. One of the more famous anecdotal descriptions of listening that reflects its individual and interpretive nature is found in E.M. Forster’s novel, Howards End: It will generally be admitted that Beethoven’s Fifth symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man. All sorts and conditions are satisfied by it. Whether you are like Mrs. Munt, and tap surreptitiously when the tunes come—of course, not so as to disturb the others; or like Helen, who can see heroes and shipwrecks in the music’s flood; or like Margaret, who can see only the music; or like Tibby, who is profoundly versed in counterpoint and holds the full score open on his knee; or like their cousin, Fräulein Mosebach, who remembers all the time that Beethoven is ‘echt Deutsch’; or like Fräulein Mosebach’s young man, who can remember nothing but Fräulein Mosebach.26

23 Botstein, ‘Listening through Reading’; Johnson, Listening in Paris; Obelkevich, ‘In Search of the Listener’. 24 Bacht, ‘Introduction’, p. 2. 25 Wegman, ‘“Das musikalische Hören”’, p. 434. 26 Forster, Howards End, p. 25.

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Mark Evan Bonds notes that Forster’s passage is a reminder that ‘Listeners […] have their own methods and motivations […] ranging from those who listened with rapt attention to those who used the occasion primarily to socialize, giving only passing attention (if any at all) to the music being played’.27 That Forster is able to provide such a vivid description of the listening experience suggests that researchers should look towards anecdotal descriptions, music criticism, and literature when searching for an engaged and active listener whose aural experience is both compelling and accurate. In this way, listening to music is closer in kind to a literary genre than it is to traditional social science. An example of this can be found in Thomas Pynchon’s novel V. At a New York jazz club called the V-Note, Pynchon introduces the character of McClintic Sphere, a potential heir to Charlie Parker’s creative legacy. Sphere is playing alto sax to a crowd whose aural interpretations range from boredom to contemplation to understanding: Collegians did not dig, and left after an average of 1½ sets. Personnel from other groups, either with a night off or taking a break from somewhere crosstown or uptown, listened hard, trying to dig. ‘I am still thinking,’ they would say if you asked. People at the bar all looked as if they did dig in the sense of understand, approve of, empathize with.28

The listeners that Pynchon describes (collegians, other musicians, bar patrons) are not composing or performing music—they are listening to music. Pynchon recreates an experience music fans recognize: listening, and trying to understand, music that may not be easily accessible. Some get it while others don’t, but there is no indication that this activity is passive. Free from the emancipatory pretensions of populist cultural studies, Pynchon has no reason to perform the conceptual gymnastics that would turn listening into performance or some other ‘active’ engagement with music. In literature, listening is already assumed to be an active engagement with music, related to, but completely different from, performance and composition. Despite the appeal of a documentary or archival approach to listening, I am wary of relying on a method that identifies listening with the individual listener. I am more interested in listening as a cultural and historical phenomenon that can be generalized in the expectations and behaviours of large groups of people. The fact that a mode of listening, like attentive listening, has been normalized on a global scale is far more interesting than 27 Bonds, Music as Thought, pp. 5–6; see also Kivy, Music Alone. 28 Pynchon, V, p. 59.

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any one particular individual’s listening experience. Certainly, differences in listening experiences occur, even in a concert hall full of attentive listeners, but these differences are less important than the similarities that unite the experiences shared by large numbers of listeners. Not being interested in the listening experience of any one person in particular but rather in the idea of a listening experience that can be generalized across undifferentiated audiences of music lovers requires moving beyond phenomenological or ethnographic approaches that identify listening at the level of a purely subjective experience. Against an individualizing approach to listening to music, I suggest that the best way to account for the listener and the listening experience is by studying the objects and technologies that mediate listening. Listening to music is simultaneously ephemeral and material, both subjective and deeply meaningful and also mediated by any number of objects and technologies. Indeed, it is difficult to think of an example of listening that is not mediated by some sort of material object: from buildings to headphones to speakers and amplifiers, the history of listening to music is a history of how different objects mediate listening to music. Turning away from subjective descriptions of listening to music, the cultural history of listening to music becomes a history that is intertwined with those objects and technologies that mediate listening. The history of the Concertgebouw as a musical medium, then, is also a history of listening to music. This approach to listening as a technologically mediated phenomenon is similar to the one developed by media historian Jonathan Sterne.29 Sterne introduces what he calls an ‘audile technique’, or a technique of listening, that can be traced historically to how listening was functionalized through medicine and telegraphy. From these practices, listening became something that could be rationalized, turned into an instrumental skill, and applied across different aural tasks: ‘Audile technique articulated listening and the ear to logic, analytic thought, industry, professionalism, capitalism, individualism, and mastery.’30 This audile technique was the necessary context within which the invention of the telephone, the phonograph, and the radio occurred: ‘The cultural history of sound’s reproduction begins long before the invention of sound reproduction technologies.’31 Both Sterne and I begin with, or look backwards to, ideas about listening to explain objects 29 Sterne, ‘A Machine to Hear for Them’; Sterne, The Audible Past. 30 Sterne, The Audible Past, p. 95. 31 Sterne, ‘A Machine to Hear for Them’, p. 265. Friedrich Kittler makes a similar point, noting that the phonograph, although technically possible centuries before Edison, ‘could not be invented until the soul fell prey to science’: Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, p. 28.

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that mediate listening. Where we differ is the scope of our studies. Sterne’s aims are Foucauldian. As he explains it, his work should be thought of as a genealogy of a regime of listening practices.32 My aim is more limited: I am only interested in the relationship between listening, musical culture, and media. And it is here, in our approach towards music and listening, that a difference can be identified. The genealogy of listening practices that Sterne traces is rooted in science and engineering, and his audile technique emerges first in medicine and telecommunications and then colonizes other forms of listening, including music. However, applying Sterne’s audile technique to music devalues this unique listening experience. Listening to music is not the same as listening for information. It is an aesthetic disposition. Music is different from other sounds we listen to and the attitudes we bring to listening to music are different than those of, for example, a telegraph operator listening to Morse code or a doctor listening to a patient through a stethoscope. Although there are obvious connections between Sterne’s audile technique and types of music listening—Adorno’s concept of structural listening comes to mind—I am not convinced that the attitudes listeners bring to music can be entirely subsumed within Sterne’s audile technique. As a history of aural media, Sterne’s work has few equals. Taken as a history of musical media, though, Sterne is not sufficiently attuned to musical culture.

Adorno on Listening to Music Theodor Adorno is one of the most prolific social theorists of Western musical culture and as such his work on listening deserves special attention. What is often overlooked when considering his contributions to the cultural study of music is that he was one of the first theorists to take listening seriously. Because of this, his critique of musical culture has more to offer than the hopelessness routinely associated with the Culture Industry essay. As Richard Leppert argues, ‘At the very heart of his sustained and bitter critique of modernity there lies fundamental hopefulness, if not precisely optimism, conceived within the context of art’s role—music especially—in providing the wherewithal to imagine social utopia’.33 This optimism comes from Adorno’s belief that music contains within it the potential for subversion and critique that can never be completely absorbed by ideological 32 Sterne, The Audible Past, 91. 33 Leppert, ‘Music Pushed to the Edge of Existence’, p. 93.

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interests. Plato knew this, and this is why music, like poetry, needed to be controlled in his Republic. Jacques Attali develops this idea in more detail in his book Noise: The Political Economy of Music, arguing that because of its immateriality, music can point to unrealized socio-economic potentials and so if not controlled poses a very real threat to the interests of the ruling class. The subversive nature of music can only be realized through music that confronts the listener’s expectations. Music must challenge the listener by containing within it a dynamic tension between the new and the familiar.34 The basis of radical social critique is the recognition of the difference between what is and what can be, shattering the illusion of inevitability that tells us that things can’t be any other way. The listener must be attentive, must ‘come to the aid’ of that which ‘cannot be traced back and subsumed under the configuration of the known’.35 Only then does the listener learn to recognize the dialectic between what is and what is possible. In a short section on Beethoven, Adorno explicates this idea, arguing that for those who are willing to listen, Beethoven’s music is the sound of revolution and progressive social change: If we listen to Beethoven and do not hear anything of the revolutionary bourgeoisie—not the echo of its slogans, the need to realize them, the cry for that totality in which reason and freedom are to have their warrant—we understand Beethoven no better than does one who cannot 34 Adorno’s critique of musical culture parallels the insights of the novelist David Foster Wallace who expressed the very same ideas about culture that Adorno had written decades earlier: ‘TV and popular film and most kinds of ‘low’ art—which just means art whose primary aim is to make money—is lucrative precisely because it recognizes that audiences prefer 100% pleasure […]. Whereas ‘serious’ art, which is not primarily about getting money out of you, is more apt to make you feel uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort. So it’s hard for an art audience, especially a young one that’s been raised to expect art to be 100% pleasurable and to make that pleasure effortless, to read and appreciate serious fiction. That’s not good. The problem isn’t that today’s readership is ‘dumb,’ I don’t think. Just that TV and the commercial-art culture has trained it to be sort of lazy and childish in its expectations.’ Quoted in Smith, ‘Brief Interviews with Hideous Men’, p. 255. 35 Adorno, ‘On Popular Music’, p. 453. See also Richard Leppert, who writes: ‘Within a work, the recognized and the new function in a state of productive tension, each informing the other, the result of which is expression, which serves as the intersubjective link between composer, performer, and listener. The new constitutes difference and spontaneity, in essence: agency. But the new ultimately both means and matters only in relation to the old. It builds from what is already known and by that means transforms the old, thereby providing the subject with an insight at once personal, historical, historically critical, and of the present: an engagement with the here and now’. Leppert, ‘Commentary: Music and Mass Culture’, p. 343.

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follow the purely musical content of his pieces, the inner history that happens to their themes. If so many dismiss that specif ically social element as a mere additive of sociological interpretation, if they see the thing itself in the actual notes alone, this is not due to the music but to a neutralized consciousness.36

Under capitalism, the dynamic between the new and the familiar is rarely audible. Most contemporary music does not challenge listeners. Instead, it delivers what they already know, ‘recognition becomes an end instead of a means’.37 Fed a diet of predictable music, listeners become unable, and unwilling, to listen to anything other than what they already know and recognize. Adorno’s critique of listening and musical culture is persuasively argued in the essays ‘On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening’ and ‘On Popular Music’, but his most thorough summary of listening is found in the introductory chapter of Introduction to the Sociology of Music. Here he sets out his typology of listeners, which begins with the expert listener and ends with the anti-musical or musically indifferent. The expert listener ‘hears past, present, and future moments together so that they crystallize into a meaningful context’.38 In the same passage, Adorno refers to this type of listening as structural, a mode of listening he had described in an earlier essay using similar terms: ‘One hears the first bar of a Beethoven symphonic movement only at the very moment when one hears the last bar.’39 Adorno’s typology of listeners is less an idealization of structural listening as it is a condemnation of inattentive listening (it is worth considering that all of Adorno’s insights on listening can be read as a condemnation of inattentive listening). It is only when we reach the listener for whom music is entertainment that we recognize a split between attentive and inattentive listening. Entertainment listening is the listening practice synonymous with the culture industry. 40 The descent from the 36 Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, p. 62. 37 Adorno, ‘On Popular Music’, p. 453. See also Adorno, ‘On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening’; DeNora, After Adorno. 38 Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, p. 4. 39 Adorno, ‘The Radio Symphony’, p. 255. 40 In an essay on Schoenberg, Adorno invokes this idea of deconcentrated, or inattentive, listening by arguing that Schoenberg’s music ‘demands the opposite of […] easy listening.’ He continues: ‘But the habit of listening that is dominant, and that is perhaps growing even stronger thanks to the culture industry, the business of music that is wholly of complete entertainment, is calibrated to perceive music in a more or less de-concentrated way, as a sequence of isolated sensual stimuli’; Adorno, ‘Toward an Understanding of Schoenberg’, p. 632.

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expert listener to good listener to culture consumer to emotional listener is marked by declining levels of attentiveness. However, it is only when we reach the entertainment listener that listening is so obviously inattentive or, as Adorno describes it, ‘unconcentrated’ and ‘fiercely opposed to the effort by which a work of art demands’, characterized by ‘distraction and deconcentration’. 41 Rose Rosengard Subotnik contextualizes structural listening and gives it a history that is undeveloped in Adorno’s writings. She expands on Adorno’s definition, writing that structural listening is ‘a process wherein the listener follows and comprehends the unfolding realization, with all of its detailed inner relationships, of a generating musical conception’. 42 It would be easy to point to structural listening as cultural elitism. Indeed, Subotnik argues that structural listening rarely occurs naturally, thus necessitating advanced training in music. 43 Yet, with or without musical training, the basic disposition required for structural listening—namely, attention—is assumed and adopted by listeners at classical music performances around the world. The culture of classical music encourages listeners to aspire toward structural listening, which means, at the very least, listeners need to engage in (or pretend to engage in) attentive listening. The expectation of attentive listening governs the behaviour of classical music audiences to a degree that cannot be found in any other genre of music. An example of this is the ‘Ten Commandments of Audience Behaviour’ that was inserted into the programs of classical music concerts at Lincoln Center in New York: 1. THOU SHALT NOT TALK: The first and greatest commandment. Stay home if you aren’t in the mood to give full attention to what is being performed on stage. 2. THOU SHALT NOT HUM, SING OR TAP FINGERS OR FEET: The musicians don’t need your help, and your neighbours need silence. Learn to tap toes quietly within shoes. It saves a lot of annoyance to others, and is excellent exercise to boot. 3. THOU SHALT NOT RUSTLE THY PROGRAM: Restless readers and page skimmers aren’t good listeners and greatly distract those around them. 4. THOU SHALT NOT CRACK THY GUM IN THY NEIGHBOUR’S EARS: The noise is completely inexcusable and usually unconscious. The sight 41 Adorno, Introduction the Sociology of Music, p. 16. 42 Subotnik, Deconstructive Variations, p. 150. 43 Subotnik, Deconstructing Variations, pp. 277–278.

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of otherwise elegant ladies and gentlemen chewing their cud is one of today’s most revolting and anti-aesthetic experiences. 5. THOU SHALT NOT WEAR LOUD-TICKING WATCHES OR JANGLE THY JEWELRY: Owners are usually immune, but the added percussion is disturbing to all. 6. THOU SHALT NOT OPEN CELLOPHANE-WRAPPED CANDIES: Next to talking, this is the most general serious offense to auditorium peace. If you have a bad throat, unwrap your throat-soothers between acts or musical selections. If caught off guard, open the sweet quickly. Trying to be quiet by opening wrappers slowly only prolongs the torture for everyone around you. 7. THOU SHALT NOT SNAP OPEN AND CLOSE THY PURSE: This problem used to apply only to women. But today, men often are equal offenders. Leave any purse, glasses case or what-have-you unlatched during the performance. 8. THOU SHALT NOT SIGH WITH BOREDOM: If you are in agony, keep it to yourself. Your neighbour may be in ecstasy—which also should be kept under quiet control. 9. THOU SHALT NOT READ: This is a less antisocial sin than personal deprivation. In ballet or drama, it is usually too dark to read, but in concerts it is typical for auditors to read program notes, skim ads and whatever. Don’t! To listen means just that. Notes should be digested before or after the performance. It may, however, be better for those around you to read instead of sleeping and snoring. 10. THOU SHALT NOT ARRIVE LATE OR LEAVE EARLY: It is unfair to artists and the public to demand seating when one is late or to fuss, apply make-up and depart early. Most performances have scheduled times; try to abide by them. 44

As these commandments attest, to attend to a symphony concert as we would a rock concert seems culturally dishonest, heresy to the widely accepted idea that classical music is aesthetically superior to other types of music. These prejudices reveal themselves, historian William Weber points out, when we discover that audiences did not listen to J.S. Bach (1685–1750) and W.A. Mozart (1756–1791) with the quiet reverence found in today’s concert halls.

44 I found this list at: http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19930912 &slug=1720717 (accessed 8 November 2015).

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Because so much is involved for us in the etiquette of classical-music life, any notion that people did not listen in times past carries powerful pejorative implications. We are horrified by the famous Parisian engraving, representing a scene in 1766, where people seem to chat while Mozart begins to play; we see them demeaning one of our loftiest cultural icons and abridging one of our most basic aesthetic principles. When that happens, we perceive the picture in global cultural and ethical terms, seeing it not only as a matter of social etiquette but also of the most fundamental artistic values. We then reject the listeners of Mozart’s time as cultural barbarians. 45

For all of Adorno’s brilliant insights concerning listening and musical culture he fails to explore the historical and cultural contingency of attentive listening. Adorno’s teleological aims may have rendered this question superfluous, but his emphasis on the listener and modes of listening inspires the question: why did audiences begin listening to secular music in attentive silence? Subotnik raises a point regarding structural listening that points to this question: ‘It is all too easy for us to assume its value as self-evident and universal and to overlook its birth out of particular historical circumstances and ideological conflicts.’46 Adorno fails to explore these historical circumstances; for him, attentive listening is not a historical problem, but an ideological problem.

Musical Romanticism and Attentive Listening In relation to secular music, historians, philosophers, and musicologists who study attentive listening overwhelmingly identify the origin of this disposition around the year 1800. 47 This relatively recent point of origin leads to a simple question that guides many cultural histories of attentive listening: why did audiences begin listening to music in attentive silence?48 45 Weber, ‘Did People Listen in the 18th Century’, p. 679. 46 Subotnik, Deconstructing Variations, p. 148. 47 See Bonds, Music as Thought; Gay, The Naked Heart; Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works; Johnson, Listening in Paris; Weber, ‘Wagner, Wagnerism, and Musical Idealism’, pp. 28–71. 48 The most important historian of attentive listening prior to the 1980s was the German musicologist Heinrich Besseler (1900–1969). In the 1920s, Besseler published two essays that caused a brief stir in Germany: ‘Grundfragen des musikalischen Hörens’ (Fundamental Issues of Musical Listening [1925]) and ‘Grundfragen der Musikästhetik’ (Fundamental Issues of Music

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Answering this question, some writers have suggested that the act of listening to music is a historical phenomenon that occurs within a ‘horizon of expectations’. 49 The literary scholar Hans Robert Jauss introduced the concept ‘horizon of expectations’ as part of a program to develop a history of literary reception.50 Jauss argued that readers come to a text with an interpretive framework, or a horizon of expectations, within which the text makes sense and is considered meaningful. James H. Johnson uses this concept to explain Parisian listeners who in the early 1800s ‘found Beethoven musically inapproachable.’ For these listeners, Beethoven’s symphonies ‘had no meaning […] they fell into none of the categories of aesthetic understanding that French listeners of the time possessed to make sense of the music’.51 Yet, by 1828 Beethoven’s symphonies had conquered Paris as they had many other cities in Europe. Johnson exchanges listeners for readers and musical works for literary texts to explain how the changing nature of Beethoven’s reception was evidence of a transformed horizon of expectation amongst Parisian listeners. A French critic who decried the performance of a Beethoven symphony in 1807 as ‘German barbarism’ was writing within a horizon of expectations that he shared with his readers.52 In 1834, the same could be said for the critic who described the experience of listening to a Beethoven symphony as follows: ‘I am the toy of a thousand romantic dreams, I see stars of gold encircling my breast with a sparkling Aesthetics [1927]). Besseler’s essays attempted to break free of the Classical-Romantic tradition by critiquing the rituals and assumptions of the symphony concert. Seeking examples of musical activities that were neither shaped by, nor aspired towards, this institution of German music, Besseler argues that types of music other than instrumental, and modes of listening other than attentive, deserved serious musicological attention. The response to Besseler’s work was not encouraging. Rob Wegman writes that some of the more reactionary conservative musicologists in Germany ‘hinted at possible Bolshevik sympathies behind the young scholar’s critique of the modern concert, taking it to spell the death sentence for German symphonic art’: Wegman, ‘“Das musikalische Hören”’, p. 440. Besseler sought alternatives to Classical-Romantic German music in what he called Gebrauchsmusik (functional music), a music that is premised on the idea that performance is determined by social interaction, not the other way around. Inspired by his teacher, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, Besseler saw in jazz and other non-classical genres moments of what he called Kollektivdasein, what Wegman describes as ‘a state of being in which the boundaries of self/other and music/audience dissolve’: Wegman, ‘“Das musikalische Hören”’, p. 439. By focusing on the totality of the musical event as a social event, Besseler argues that attentive listening was a contingent element of serious music, not the inevitable aesthetic disposition of serious music. 49 Bonds, Music as Thought, p. 6; Johnson, Listening in Paris, p. 3; Burstyn, ’In Quest of the Period Ear’, p. 695. 50 Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. 51 Johnson, Listening in Paris, p. 276. 52 Johnson, Listening in Paris, p. 258.

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halo.’53 This enthusiasm was a common sentiment amongst Parisians in the 1830s who, unlike the listeners and critics of 20 years prior, came to listen to Beethoven’s instrumental music within a horizon of expectations shaped by the aesthetic philosophy of Musical Romanticism. Romanticism emerged in the mid-eighteenth century, first in poetry and literature, then painting and sculpture, and by the early nineteenth century, music. In the fields of poetry and literature, Romanticism was a rejection of Classicism and the sober rationalism of eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideals. This aesthetic philosophy manifested itself in the pursuit of originality and individuality, emotion over reason, and passionate inspiration over traditional rules. By the time it had begun to be conceptualized through music, Romanticism was less an oppositional aesthetic as it was a horizon of expectations that informed all of musical culture. In the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, romantic philosophers endowed secular instrumental music with meanings that transformed it from pleasant entertainment into an art-religion. The basis of this transformation was instrumental music’s non-representational nature: ‘If the eighteenth century suspected instrumental music of being empty if agreeable noise, the romantics saw in it a sublime language of sounds whose obscure ciphers were richer, not poorer, than the precise concepts of verbal language.’54 Of all the art forms of the early nineteenth century, only instrumental music was of itself, autonomous from the bounds of external reality that limited the expressive power of the mimetic arts like painting or sculpture. Thus, for nineteenth-century romantics, instrumental music is the only art capable of expressing the inexpressible: it is a language above language. The adjective ‘Romantic’ and the noun ‘Romanticism’ are ambivalent and require clarification. Musical Romanticism, as a horizon of expectations, is realized through ideas, norms, and behaviours that were unique to Western musical culture in the nineteenth century. Besides attentive listening, this includes the aesthetic privileging of instrumental music, and in particular the symphony; a distinction between serious music and popular music; a canon of fixed musical works; the deification of the composer; and fidelity to the written score. Stylistically, romantic music can be considered distinct from the style of classical composers like Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. But, as the musicologist Friedrich Blume argues, even this stylistic distinction should not be taken too seriously, and the

53 Johnson, Listening in Paris, p. 273. 54 Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, p. 18.

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period between the mid-eighteenth century and the early twentieth century should be considered the Classical-Romantic period. Classicism and Romanticism are just two aspects of the one and the same musical phenomenon and of one and the same historical period. In terms of chronology, the two labels signify one self-contained age of the history of music; in terms of style, they mark the two facets of this age, the two trends operating within the one fundamental idea of form and expression. There is neither a ‘Classical’ nor a ‘Romantic’ style in music. Both aspects and both trends are continually merging into one. And as there are no discernable styles, there can neither be a clearly definable borderline between Classicism and Romanticism nor a distinct chronology of when the one or the other begins and ends.55

Dahlhaus goes further than Blume and argues that within musical culture Classicism is a product of Romanticism: ‘In music, unlike literature, Classicism was not challenged by Romanticism; indeed, not until Romanticism did Classicism come into existence in the first place.’56 What Lydia Goehr calls the ‘Beethoven Paradigm’ is an example of how the romantics rewrote the history of composition through standards and expectations that would not have made sense prior to 1800. The romantics believed that the purpose of composition was one in which the composer is tasked with the job of realizing divinely inspired musical works. This interpretation of composition was projected backwards by nineteenth-century romantics who plucked eighteenth-century composers from history and gave them a posthumous fame that could not have been imagined while they were alive: ‘the canonization of dead composers and the formation of a musical repertoire of transcendent masterpieces was the result both sought and achieved.’57 To alleviate any confusion, for the purpose of this work, the words ‘Romantic’ or ‘Romanticism’ will refer to Blume’s definition of the noun ‘Romanticism’, as ‘a general artistic point of view, an intellectual attitude’.58 This accounts not only for particular musical forms (symphony, sonata) and composers, but also behaviours, expectations, and epistemologies associated with the classical music tradition and the concert hall.

55 Blume, Classic and Romantic Music, p. viii. 56 Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, p. 22. 57 Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, p. 247. 58 Blume, Classic and Romantic Music, p. 95.

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The changes inaugurated by Romanticism in regards to secular instrumental music—what it is, what it means, how it is understood—contrasted ideas that had shaped music for millennia. Since the ancient Greeks music had been guided by extra-musical imperatives. Its function and meaning was subservient to goals that were not purely musical but religious, political, ceremonial, or educational. Even in the eighteenth century, as music slowly began to emancipate itself from social and religious authority, it was still guided by a mimetic aesthetic that viewed ‘pure’ or ‘absolute’ music with suspicion.59 This was not an example of fleeting aristocratic fashion: it was an aesthetic truth espoused by the leading writers of period. In 1751, Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s Discours Préliminaire to Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie placed music behind painting, sculpture, and poetry as the lowest of the imitative arts.60 This was an era where Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle’s (1657–1757) frustrated request, ‘Sonata, what do you want from me?’ (Sonate, que me veux-tu?) could be quoted with approval as a ‘kind of shorthand dismissal of the art of instrumental music on the grounds of vagueness and imprecision’.61 In the nineteenth century these ideas about music were no longer fashionable. What was a pleasurable form of frivolous entertainment became transformed into a secular religion. Audiences that had formerly attended concerts as social events were now expected to listen in devout silence as a means of realizing the aesthetic transcendence that purely instrumental music allows for. This relationship between attentive listening and musical meaning appears, at first glance, to move from the music itself to an aural disposition worthy of this music—if instrumental music was not expected to be sublime, audiences would not be expected to listen attentively. However, this model has been challenged by writers who contend that it is attentive listening that bestows meanings upon instrumental music and not the other way around. Attentive listening ties together classical music culture: aesthetic autonomy, the cult of the genius composer, the ritual of the public concert, the superiority of instrumental music—all of these dimensions of musical culture are legitimated by attentive listening. ‘To defend its own autonomy,’ Subotnik notes, classical music requires ‘a particular mode of listening that reinforces its isolation from society’.62 It is not the sacralization of instrumen59 Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, pp. 139–147. 60 Gay, The Naked Heart, p. 15. 61 Bonds, Music as Thought, p. 7; see also Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Musical Culture, Volume 2: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, p. 642. 62 Subotnik, Developing Variations, p. 277.

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tal music that led to devout listening; instead, the transference of devotion from Christian liturgy to secular music sacralized instrumental music. The claim that it would be appropriate to hear a piece of absolute music with ‘devotion’, rather than allowing oneself to be stimulated to conversation through the pleasant yet empty sounds […] was in no way taken for granted in 1800; instead, it was rather alienating. However, the transportation of ‘devotion’ from ‘holy’ music to absolute music was not […] mere enthusiasm, but represented nothing less than the discovery, fundamental to the musical culture of the nineteenth century, that great instrumental music, in order to be comprehended as ‘musical logic’ and ‘language above language’, required a certain attitude of esthetic contemplation […] an attitude through which it constituted itself in one’s awareness in the first place.63

Dahlhaus not only places the listener at the centre of the musical experience: he argues that the entire aesthetic of Musical Romanticism is dependent upon attentive listening. Modes of listening produce musical meaning. Attentive listening legitimates the abstract aesthetic principles of Musical Romanticism such that without attentive listening, classical music would not be taken as the serious art form that we know it as today. We have certainly come a long way from a model of musical culture where listening is peripheral to composition and performance! Following John Neubauer, who writes that a unified manifestation of Musical Romanticism is nothing more than ‘a figment of the historian’s imagination’,64 in the following chapter I move away from the monolithic version of Romantic aesthetics and attentive listening presented in this chapter and examine the processes through which Musical Romanticism was materialized in the Concertgebouw. Moving away from abstract discussions, I describe how different people took up ideas about listening and musical meaning and translated them into plans and actions that led to the construction of the Concertgebouw. Following the philosopher of technology Andrew Feenberg who writes that ‘one learns a great deal about a vision from attempts to realize it’,65 the following will hopefully reveal a great deal about attentive listening and the classical music tradition by focusing on one particular attempt to realize it in the design and construction of a building for music. 63 Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, p. 80. 64 Neubauer, The Emancipation of Music from Language, p. 194. 65 Feenberg, Alternative Modernity, p. 144.

3.

Patronage, Class, and Buildings for Music: Aristocratic Opera Houses and Bourgeois Concert Halls

The custom of decking out concert halls with temple facades became a matter of course in the nineteenth century, so that ultimately the claims advanced by this architectural symbolism on behalf of the symphony and the bourgeois concert no longer appeared as strange and haughty as they in fact were. In an architectonic system that allowed museums to be Egyptianesque, theatres Greek, and churches Gothic […] concert-house architecture expressed a ‘religion of art’ in which Christian images shaded into imitations of antiquity.1

The Concertgebouw in the Making Approaching the Concertgebouw through the lens of technology studies means empirically tracing how it is that this building came into being. From the mid-nineteenth century onward, a musical public sphere was growing in Amsterdam. Discussions and debates about orchestral music, both in print and in conversations, were framed around a set of norms concerning audience behaviour, recognition of the Classic-Romantic canon, and the performance of these canonic works. Musical Romanticism was certainly ‘in the air’, but to endure and have efficacy, the ideas that had influenced criticism, conversations, and concert programming had to be translated into something more durable—a new concert hall. To convince Amsterdammers that a new concert hall was needed for their city it was necessary to develop a sociotechnical, or material, perspective towards the city’s musical culture. The benefit of this perspective was that it enabled cultural reformers to focus their aspirational efforts towards the media of music’s performance and reception, marking a material turn in the history of Amsterdam’s musical culture that was the beginning of a serious musical culture that endures to this day. In this chapter I trace how the desire to establish a classical music tradition in Amsterdam was articulated through a perspective that sought to convince Amsterdammers that musical culture is intertwined with 1 Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, p. 44.

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buildings for music. My starting point will be an article that appeared in an Amsterdam newspaper in 1881 that proposed an architectural solution to the city’s classical musical shortcomings. The significance of this article was that it redefined the problems that had plagued Amsterdam’s musical culture into problems with a material solution: namely, the construction of a new concert hall. Using a document as the starting point for tracing the history of the Concertgebouw follows the lead of technology studies researchers who turn to policy documents, funding applications, journals, and newspapers as their point of departure for identifying the actors to follow in order to explore the origins of science and technology.2 These inauspicious pieces of paper hold the key to understanding how early outlines, descriptions, and scenarios can potentially end up as complex sociotechnical systems: ‘Instead of using large scale entities to explain science and technology as most sociologists of science do, we should start from the inscriptions and their mobilization and see how they help small entities become large ones.’3 Latour’s methodological instructions point to a particular attitude towards method and social theory: namely, that the social is nothing more than an arrangement of heterogeneous elements and so to understand why the social world is as it is, we should work backwards to identify how large entities are, in fact, complex networks of very small entities, like documents and inscriptions. This methodological perspective is valuable for empirically tracing the emergence of technological devices and other objects, but on their own documents and inscriptions do very little. Translating inscriptions into objects and sociotechnical systems requires intermediaries—individuals, social groups, and institutions that, in various ways, take up these ideas and turn them into a concrete reality. In the case of the Concertgebouw Amsterdam’s bourgeois cultural elite played this intermediary role, translating ideas about improving their city’s musical culture into a building that would accomplish this.

2 For examples of this approach, see: Callon, Law, and Rip, Mapping the Dynamics of Science and Technology; Latour, Science in Action; Latour, ‘Drawing Things Together’; Law, ‘The Anatomy of a Socio-Technical Struggle’. 3 Latour, ‘Drawing Things Together’, p. 56; see also Callon and Latour, ‘Unscrewing the Big Leviathan’.

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Het Concertgebouw N.V. The document that inaugurated this material turn was published in the newspaper De Amsterdammer in June 1881. 4 The author of this article, G.C.C.W. Hayward, encourages readers to look past audience behaviour and poor musicianship and instead think about the venues that mediate the city’s musical culture. From this perspective, the greatest impediment to Amsterdam’s serious musical culture was the lack of a proper concert hall. The city’s many musical shortcomings, Hayward argues, could be solved through ‘a serious attempt to build a temple dedicated to musical performances’. The motivation for Hayward’s article was the upcoming demolition of the Parkzaal (Park Hall), which was to occur in October 1881 and would leave Amsterdam without an adequate venue for symphony concerts. Opened in 1851, the Parkzaal was the center of the city’s classical musical life in the 1860s and 1870s. It had hosted performances by Liszt and Brahms and was home to one of the city’s better orchestras, the Parkorkest. The Parkzaal was rectangular and could hold an audience of approximately 1000 people. Its demolition, to make room for a theatre, was a cause for concern amongst Amsterdam’s music lovers because there was no obvious replacement for this building or the concerts that it housed. Hayward finds it remarkable that in only a few months there would be no proper concert hall in the Dutch capital: ‘Imagine Berlin, Vienna, or Paris without a concert hall!’ To the reader of De Amsterdammer in 1881, this comparison probably seemed a bit ambitious. These cities had the resources, tradition, and population to maintain musical cultures that surpassed what could be expected in Amsterdam. This was not lost on Hayward. But as he points out, there are other comparable cities where one can find proper concert halls and, unsurprisingly, superb musical cultures: Düsseldorf has its Tonhalle, Cologne its Gürzenich, Frankfurt has its Saalbau, and Munich its Odeon. The loss of these buildings and the depreciation of musical culture that would inevitably follow would be impossible because, Hayward argues, local authorities would not allow it to happen.5

4 G.C.C.W. Hayward, ‘Concertzaal’, De Amsterdammer: Weekblad voor Nederland (26 June 1881), 4. For reproductions and commentary on this article, see Bottenheim, Geschiedenis van het Concertgebouw, pp. 11–14; Lansink and Taat, Van Dolf van Gendt naar Bernard Haitink, p. 8; Taat, Amsterdam Heeft Het Concertgebouw, pp. 8–12. 5 ‘Men denke zich eens Berlijn, Weenen, Parijs zonder concertzaal! […] Het is waar, ik noem hier juist drie plaatsen van hoogeren rang dan Amsterdam; doch ook Dusseldorf heeft zijn stads Tonhalle; Keulen zijn stads Gursenich; Frankfurt a.M. zijn stads Saalbau; Munchen zijn

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Interior of the Paleis voor Volksvlijt

Hayward presents an overview of Amsterdam’s musical culture in which he subjects the city’s musical venues against his own architectural/musical biases. Surveying the existing venues that could possibly replace the Parkzaal, Hayward writes that the Felix Meritis building and the Odeon theatre are good venues for chamber music and smaller ensembles but are much too small to accommodate either the orchestras or the audiences typical of public concerts found in the musical capitals of late nineteenth-century Europe. The other potential replacement for the Parkzaal was the Paleis voor Volksvlijt (Palace for Industry). Opened in 1864, this large building was built in the style of London’s Crystal Palace—a multi-purpose venue that could host everything from exhibitions to theatre to symphony concerts. For Hayward, the notion that this building could replace the Parkzaal was ‘too preposterous to consider’, as it is ‘totally unsuitable for music.’ The problem, to be specific, was its size: its cavernous dimensions were both an acoustic and socio-spatial nightmare, the latter realized in a Dionysian stade Odeon. Hoewel het zielenaantal dezer steden bij het onze ten achter blijft’: Hayward, ‘Concertzaal’, p. 4.

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A print of De Parkzaal showing a concert that took place on 2 February 1866

atmosphere of pleasure and party where many musical performances took on the atmosphere of ‘beer concerts’.6 These critiques of other venues should not be mistaken as a lament or some sort of premature nostalgia for the Parkzaal. It was an open secret amongst Amsterdam music lovers that the Parkzaal was also inadequate for the musical culture that Hayward imagined. Although it was the heart of Amsterdam’s classical music culture, the Parkzaal contained a litany of shortcomings that Hayward spelled out in his article: there was no proper entranceway and so people had to enter through a maze of narrow corridors; there was no cloakroom for coats; and the hall was too small to include the whole audience, and so many people’s experiences were spoiled because they were ‘packed like sardines in a tin’. More pressing, though, was the design and the acoustics of the hall. The stage was not large enough to properly contain all the musicians and so the strings were unusually positioned, leading to a weakened sound when compared to the brass, percussion, and

6 Bank and van Buuren, Dutch Culture in a European Perspective, p. 471; see also Wennekes, ‘Het Paleisorkest en de professionalisering van het orkestwezen’.

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wind instruments.7 Hayward’s opinion of the Parkzaal was reiterated in 1883 when this building was remembered in De Amsterdammer as being ‘too small for big ensembles and too big for small ensembles’.8 Given these deficiencies, Hayward certainly did not harbour any regrets for the fate of the Parkzaal and encouraged music-loving Amsterdammers to adopt the same attitude: ‘The Parkzaal’s glory as Amsterdam’s concert hall is over, and her disappearance is in a way a happy occasion.’9 Opinions about buildings for music are opinions about musical taste. It must have come as a surprise to the thousands who found the Paleis voor Volksvlijt enjoyable that this venue was, from a certain perspective, ‘unsuitable for music’. Given Hayward’s biases on the matter of buildings for music it would have been evident to readers what kind of material/musical culture he envisioned: a shoebox-style concert hall, designed for an audience of about 2000 people and an orchestra of about 100 to 150 musicians who, it would be expected, performed works of the Classic-Romantic canon. This was confirmed when he suggested Düsseldorf’s Tonhalle as an ideal model for Amsterdam’s architectural/musical ambitions. The Tonhalle was a large structure that contained within it a well-known concert hall, the Kaisersaal, which opened in 1865 and was destroyed in 1942. The Kaisersaal was designed to hold 2820 people and followed the shoebox model, measuring 42.48 m by 24.2 m, with two large balconies.10 This building, Hayward 7 ‘Niettemin alle dingen hebben hun goede zijde. Zoo ook deze afbraak van de Parkzaal. Het zal immers door niemand worden betwist, dat dit lokaal groote gebreken bezat. Zonder vestibule vond men den toegang door eenige nauwe, hoekige gangetjes, een doolhof, waarin slechts de trouwe bezoeker den weg kende. Vreemdelingen zijn stellig dikwijls in de keuken terecht gekomen, die, evenals de plaatsen, die men niet openlijk noemen kan, links en rechts in het oog vielen. Een behoorlijke ingerichte garderobe ontbrak, zoodat daarin de zoogenaamde wintertuin moest voorzien. De concertzaal zelf was in de minst buitengewone gevallen steeds te klein om alle toehoorders te bevatten. Wie heeft zich niet jaren lang een groot gedeelte van zijn genot voelen vergallen, wanneer hij de uitvoeringen der Maatschappij tot Bevordering ter Toonkunst in het park bijwoonde, en in de bekende positie der getonde haringen verkeeren moest, die het nog in zoover beter hebben, dat zij daarbij geen tropische hitte behoeven te verduren […]. Eindelijk het voornaamste van iedere concertzaal: de orkestruimte. Hoeveel liet die te wenschen over. De nis kon slechts de blaas- en slaginstrumenten en contrabassen herbergen, zoodat het strijkkwartet to veel naar voren in de zaal sprong, waarvan te zwakke kracht in verhouding tot de nis-massa het natuurlijk gevolg was’: Hayward, ‘Concertzaal’, p. 4. 8 ‘Reeds lang was er gesproken over het onvoldoende van de Parkzaal, dat ze te klein was voor groote, te groot voor kleine muziekuitvoeringen’: De Amsterdammer (19 January 1883), cited in Giskes, ‘Opbouw (1881–1888)’, p. 14. 9 ‘De Parkzaal had als de concertzaal van Amsterdam reeds lang haar tijd gehad, en haar verdwijnen is dus in zeker opzicht gelukkig’: Hayward, ‘Concertzaal’, p. 4. 10 Clement, ‘The Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, in its Early Years’, p. 72; Lansink, ‘De akoestiek van het Concertgebouw historisch bezien’, p. 36.

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wrote, is perfect in its simplicity and austerity and without excessive luxury contains a spacious concert hall with an organ alongside necessary nonmusical requirements, like a cloakroom and restaurant. These are mere details though. In terms that imply attentive listening and a Romantic spirit of musical transcendence, the Tonhalle is described by Hayward as a building ‘in which you can’t set foot without feeling solemn, even though there’s a lack of all color and gold, and everything is very simple […] when one enters, one’s mind comes to ease, which is necessary to experience the true enjoyment of the arts’.11 In 1881, it is doubtful that any musical venue in Amsterdam could inspire such remarks, including the Parkzaal. Hayward not only outlined an architectural solution for Amsterdam’s musical ambitions, he also outlined a strategy to organize and pay for it. It was clear that neither the state nor the municipal government could be expected to fund this project, a fact that Hayward was sure to emphasize in his article: ‘Whereas in other countries the officials of all self-respecting cities provide good concert halls, our government boasts the fateful motto: art is not a matter for the government.’12 In lieu of the organizational and administrative expertise that would come with government patronage, Hayward nominated the Maatschappij tot Bevordering der Toonkunst (The Society for the Promotion of Music [MBT]), a national organization that had branches in many Dutch cities, to organize this initiative. The funding would come, Hayward hoped, from the increasingly prosperous Amsterdam bourgeoisie. Amsterdam had undergone an economic resurgence in the second half of the nineteenth century, and it was about time, he wrote, that money be spent on music: The reborn spirit of enterprise has led to financial profits for many, and history can prove that where people make money, there is money for the arts […]. If one thinks about how much money is annually spent by the

11 ‘Men stelle zich b.v. tot voorbeeld de Tonhalle te Dusseldorf, een ideaal concertgebouw. Daar vindt men goede nevenlokalen, dienende tot garderobe, restaurant en stemkamer; een met gallerij en orgel voorziene ruime concertzaal, waarin men den voet niet zetten kan, zonder een plechtigen indruk te gevoelen, ofschoon alle kleuren en goud ontbreken, en alles hoogst eenvoudig en toch voor het oog weldadig zich voordoet. Er daalt daar bij het binnentreden een rust in het gemoed, die onontbeerlijk is voor het smaken van waarachtig kunstgenot’: Hayward, ‘Concertzaal’, p. 4 12 ‘Waar overal in Europa zichzelf respecterende gemeenten zich van overheidszijde voorzien van goede concertzalen, voert onze overheid echter het noodlottige woord “kunst is geen regeeringszaak”’: Hayward, ‘Concertzaal’, p. 4.

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rich on buying paintings, then it wouldn’t be that hard or impossible to ask them for help in the name of a ‘sister art’.13

If this were to happen, if a proper concert hall could be financed and built, the inevitable destruction of the Parkzaal ‘will have been a blessing for our city’, and ‘Amsterdammers will be able to show that they are not only able to satisfy their material and practical interests, but also their interest in a higher ideal of living’.14 Of all the ways that Amsterdam’s musical culture could be studied, analyzed, and critiqued—undisciplined orchestras, inattentive audiences, unsophisticated musical taste, a dearth of compositional talent—Hayward proposed an architectural interpretation of music (or a musical interpretation of architecture). Hayward made visible the inherent materiality of music’s performance and reception and encouraged readers to see (and hear) that the Felix Meritis, Parkzaal, and Paleis voor Volksvlijt were not simply neutral conduits for the performance and reception of music. By virtue of their material attributes these venues mediated distinct musical experiences. A symphony performed in the Paleis, for example, engendered different expectations and experiences than the same symphony performed in the Felix Meritis. To aspire to the disciplined orchestras and attentive audiences found in European musical capitals Hayward convincingly argued that it was important to have a proper purpose-built concert hall through which these standards and expectations could be realized. What was a culture defined through issues like audience behaviour, musicianship, and a musical canon became redefined as a culture that was intertwined with buildings for music and design features, like the shape of the hall, the size of the stage, ornamentation, and the organization of the audience. What is interesting about tracing the process of moving from the idea to build a concert hall to its concrete reality is that intermediaries like Hayward blend together what are typically taken to be distinct spheres of activity. In the case of the Concertgebouw, ideas about architecture, 13 ‘De herboren ondernemingsgeest heeft voor velen geldelijk winsten gebaard, en de geschiedenis kan bewijzen, dat daar waar geld verdiend wordt, ook geld over is voor de kunst… Als men bedenkt, hoeveel kapitaal jaarlijks door onze rijken besteed wordt tot aankoop van schilderijen, dan zal het toch zeker niet te moeielijk of onmogelijk zijn bij hen aan te kloppen uit naam eener zustermuze’: Hayward, ‘Concertzaal’, p. 4. 14 ‘Amsterdam weldra bewijze, dat naast praktischen zin en materieele belangen, ook nog een drang tot hooger leven bij zijn gegoede burgers wordt gevoeld en bevredigd. Dan zal de verdwijning der Parkzaal, trots de veele goede herinneringen aan haar bestaan verbonden, een zegen voor onze stad zijn geweest’: Hayward, ‘Concertzaal’, p. 4.

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aesthetics, and patronage came together in the planning of this building such that it became difficult to distinguish between attentive listening, musical meaning, the design of buildings for music, and the economic and civic interests of the Concertgebouw’s patrons.15 An interesting parallel can be drawn between the case of the Concertgebouw and Michel Callon’s study of the electric car (VEL) in 1970s France.16 In his study, Callon identifies a new actor, the engineer-sociologist, a juxtaposition of vocations that accounts for the heterogeneous activities of the intermediaries involved in building the material world.17 The engineer-sociologists that Callon studied were addressing both social and technical problems through their proposal, which was simultaneously a proposal for a new technological object and a social world in which it had a place.18 What makes this case study so intriguing is the way that Callon is able to conceptualize the sociotechnical world building that occurs whenever a new technological object is proposed. Engineer-sociologists define who the important social groups are and what their interests are going to be while also bounding the influence of other social groups and their interests. Drawing upon musical culture, the sociologist Antoine Hennion provides 15 On this point, see the work of historian Thomas Hughes, who studies how modern technological development involves the coordination of the technical, the economic, the political, the cultural, and the scientific into a coherent system or, in Hughes’s words, into a ‘seamless web’. Following systems builders like Thomas Edison, Hughes finds that they ‘were no respecters of knowledge categories or professional boundaries […] Edison so thoroughly mixed matters commonly labeled “economic”, “technical” and “scientific” that his thoughts composed a seamless web’: Hughes, ‘The Seamless Web’, p. 13. Or, as he puts it in another study of Edison: ‘Edison’s method of invention and development in the case of the electric light system was a blend of economics, technology and science […]. In his notebooks pages of economic calculations are mixed with pages reporting experimental data, and among these one encounters reasoned explications and hypothesis formulation based on science – the web is seamless’: Hughes, ‘The Electrification of America, p. 135. 16 Callon, ‘Society in the Making’. 17 John Law’s concept of heterogeneous engineering is similar to Callon’s engineer-sociologist. See Law, ‘Technology and Heterogeneous Engineering’. 18 The VEL failed because the entities that made up the original proposal either failed to materialize or were successfully challenged by other engineer-sociologists. Renault was not happy with their role within the original proposal, so they enrolled their own engineer-sociologists to counter the claims made by the proponents of the electric car. Similarly, the process of translation required to define the consumer base for the VEL came undone. French consumers, it was discovered, valued performance, conspicuous consumption, and speed as much as they, at one time, valued environmental responsibility. Finally, certain technical elements betrayed the EDF by becoming contaminated. In short, the VEL failed because the connections that made up the sociotechnical world that the EDF proposed failed to materialize: Callon, ‘Society in the Making’; see also Law and Mol, ‘Notes on Materiality and Sociality’.

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a complementary case to Callon’s that emphasizes the world-building role of the music producer. Identifying contemporary music producers as intermediaries who come between performers, technologies, listeners, corporations, and markets, Hennion argues that these actors are not passive administrators; rather, ‘they produce the worlds that they want to make work for them’.19 Intermediaries, in other words, do not simply propose technologies and objects, they also construct the worlds in which these objects and technologies fit. If we consider Hayward an intermediary, his most valuable contribution to building a new concert hall was the construction of a world in which musical culture is indelibly connected with buildings designed to mediate the performance and reception of music. Once people accepted this iteration of the world the solution to Amsterdam’s musical problems seemed to fall in line with Hayward’s proposed solution—a new concert hall. Perhaps the term ‘engineer-sociologist’ does not apply to the case of the Concertgebouw as well as it does to the case of the electric car, but this does not mean that the intermediaries who were involved in organizing the construction of a concert hall were not also designing a world within which this building made sense. A little less then three months after Hayward’s article appeared, the first steps were taken toward fulfilling his sociotechnical scenario. On 15 September 1881, a group of prominent Amsterdammers came together to form what they called the ‘Temporary Committee for the Building of a Concert Hall’. The individuals who formed this committee came from the class of merchants, bankers, stockbrokers, lawyers, government officials, and professors who made up the Amsterdam bourgeoisie: J.A. Sillem (1860–1912) and A.F.K. Hartogh (1844–1901) were lawyers, H.J. de Marez Oijens (1843–1911) and P.A.L. van Ogtrop (1835–1903) were stockbrokers, W. Cnoop Koopmans (1837–1895) was a professor of theology, and D.H. Joosten (1840–1930) was a realtor.20 The members of the committee knew each other through their involvement in cultural groups, including the Vereeniging tot het Vormen van een Openbare Verzameling van Hedendaagsche Kunst (the Society for the Creation of a Public Collection of Contemporary Art), the Rembrandt Society, and, most importantly, the Maatschappij tot Bevordering der Toonkunst (the Society for the Promotion of Music). Distancing themselves from the stereotype of Multatuli’s crass philistine 19 Hennion, ‘An Intermediary between Production and Consumption’, p. 402. 20 Bank, ‘Music and Patronage in Amsterdam’, pp. 8–11; Lansink and Taat, Van Dolf van Gendt naar Bernard Haitink, p. 8.

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Droogstoppel,21 the Amsterdam bourgeoisie of the late nineteenth century took it upon themselves to organize and fund, often at personal expense, a variety of cultural enterprises including the Rijksmuseum, the Stedelijk Museum (Museum of Modern Art), and the Stadsschouwburg (Performing Arts Theatre). At the first meeting of the ‘Temporary Committee’ the details of the plan were worked out. The committee’s first task was to select and purchase a plot of land upon which to build a concert hall. The prolific Dutch architect P.J.H. Cuypers (1827–1921), whose buildings include Amsterdam’s Centraal Station (1879) and the Rijksmuseum (1885), worked closely with the committee on this decision, consulting on the location and the potential design of the new concert hall. Cuypers suggested a plot of land where a concert hall could be built and a fair price could be negotiated. This land lay outside of the city limits, in the region known as Nieuwer-Amstel. Although fields surrounded part of it, and it was difficult to access from Amsterdam proper, it was no more than 100 meters from the proposed location of the Rijksmuseum and was in close proximity to the Vondelpark and the Manege (stables). By the end of the century, the Concertgebouw would also be in close proximity to the Stedelijk Museum, the Vondel Church (also designed by Cuypers), a post office, fire station, and Cuyper’s house. In an urban planning decision that was similar to the layout of Vienna’s Ringstrasse, the patrons of the Concertgebouw decided to erect their concert hall in close proximity to that other great Amsterdam monument to art, the Rijksmuseum. The construction of these two buildings seemed symbolic of a new era. Both buildings were on the outskirts of Amsterdam, signaling an urban expansion that would be equal to the expansion that led to the construction of Amsterdam’s exclusive canal belt during the seventeenth century. Amsterdam’s urban expansion in the nineteenth century, and the construction of massive new public monuments to painting and music, were material indications that a profound cultural shift was occurring. The committee planned to pay for their new concert hall through the sale of shares in a limited public company: Naamlooze Vennootschap (NV). This NV would oversee the construction and design of the building and upon its completion they would take on all management and administrative duties. The cost of this project was estimated to be 400,000 guilders, which was to be raised through the sale of 400 shares valued at 1000 guilders each.22 21 Batavus Droogstoppel is a character in Multatuli’s novel Max Havelaar (1860). 22 At that time, a well-paid labourer would have earned about 7 guilders a week, or about 350 guilders a year; Mehos, Science and Culture for Members Only, p. 26. As a further point of

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Added to the demonstrative exclusivity that would come from purchasing a share in the Concertgebouw, each share purchased would also guarantee the bearer two seats for every performance as well as an undetermined percentage of any profit. The ‘Temporary Committee’ announced a public meeting for anyone interested in discussing this project for 7 March 1882 at the Odeon Theatre. The list of those who attended this meeting reveals a cross-section of Amsterdam’s cultural and social elite. In addition to the committee members and the architect Cuypers, amongst the almost 50 attendees were economics professor and future minister of finance N.G. Pierson (who chaired the meeting), Willem Stumpff (former director of the Park Orchestra), and the composer and critic Daniël de Lange.23 The result of this meeting was positive. Everyone in attendance agreed upon the plan that was conceived by the committee and promises of financial commitments were made. In a report written by Pierson that appeared in the Algemeen Handelsblad the next day, Amsterdammers read that ‘a decision was made that will be approved of by everyone who loves our capital. Amsterdam will get […] a concert hall that will hold about 2200 people and 600 to 700 performers, an institution so desperately needed in present circumstances to do justice to the works of the great masters’.24 Given the overwhelming goodwill that resulted from this meeting the journalist for De Amsterdammer couldn’t resist inserting musical metaphors in his report: ‘The meeting was a perfect example of harmony […] very seldom has there been such a tempting voice calling to all citizens of Amsterdam’.25 Turning bourgeois cultural consumers into investors and then asking them to finance the construction of a concert hall in which they would make comparison, in 1885 the most expensive ticket for the Amsterdam concerts performed by the Meininger Hofkapelle, one of the most celebrated orchestras in Europe, was five guilders for one concert or twelve guilders for all three concerts. 23 The attendees of this meeting signed a ‘Presentie Lijst’: Gemeente Stadsarchief Amsterdam (Amsterdam City Archives), Archive 1089, no. 10. Of note, G.C.C.W. Hayward was invited to attend this meeting but could not. He wrote to the committee that due to changed circumstances he was not able to attend, but that he would continue to support the initiative. Unfortunately, he died in Paris on 7 July 1882. Lansink, ‘Het Concertgebouw’, p. 69. 24 ‘Amsterdam verkrijgt […] een muziekzaal, ruimte biedende voor ongeveer 2200 personen en 600 à 700 uitvoerenden, een inrichting dus in de tegenwoordige omstandigheden hoog nodig, wil men recht doen wedervaren aan de werken der groote meesters’: Algemeen Handelsblad (8 March 1882). 25 ‘Haar voorstellen werden schier zonder debat goedgekeurd. De meeting was een voorbeeld van harmonie […]. Zelden kwam er een zoo verlokkende roepstem tot de gezeten Amstellaren’: De Amsterdammer (12 March 1882).

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up the audience required convincing these potential patrons that the city’s musical culture would be significantly improved through architecture. This social group had to be convinced that an investment in the infrastructure of the classical musical tradition would be the best way for this tradition to take hold. To do this, the committee distributed a circular to potential patrons that laid out their plan.26 These circulars appealed to the taste and the civic duty of potential investors. Foregoing the economic challenge of building a new concert hall, this circular was addressed ‘to the true friends of music’, for whom ‘this art is not just a diversion or entertainment, but a means of elevation and refinement’.27 This was not to be a strictly financial investment: ‘The driving power […] cannot be self-interest. What we predict is not the assurance that good dividends will be enjoyed, but that by promoting this useful work the glory and prestige of our city will increase.’28 The circular followed the points that Hayward had made in De Amsterdammer three months earlier: the Parkzaal no longer exists, the Paleis voor Volksvlijt is too big, and all other venues are too small. The consequence of this situation was dire: ‘So long as the Parkzaal is not properly replaced, Amsterdam will miss out on an institution that for a city as big as ours is not a luxury, but a necessity of life.’29 The situation was drastic and the solution was obvious—a new concert hall should be built, ‘a building that will equal the famous Music Hall in Düsseldorf in size and interior. There will be space for 600 performers and 2200 people in the audience’.30 This first circular, like Hayward’s article, is an example of how the ‘Temporary Committee to Build a Concert Hall’, in their role as intermediaries, proposed both an artifact and a world within which this artifact played a prominent role. 26 Gemeente Stadsarchief Amsterdam, Archive 1089, no. 73. 27 ‘Voor wie deze kunst niet enkel een verstrooiing, een uitspanning is, maar een middel tot verheffing en veredeling’: Circular no. 1, Gemeente Stadsarchief Amsterdam, Archive 1089, no. 73 28 ‘Intusschen, dienaangaande is geen zekerheid te geven, en wij willen de mogelijkheid niet verheelen, dat onze gunstige verwachtingen worden beschaamd. De hefboom, dien wij in beweging moeten brengen ter verkrijging der benoodigde f. 400.000, kan niet enkel die van het eigenbelang zijn. Wat wij U voorspiegelen is niet de zekerheid van een goed dividend te zullen genieten, maar die van een nuttig werk te bevorderen, een werk, dat den roem en het aanzien onzer stad in geen geringe mate zal verhoogen’: Circular no. 1, Gemeente Stadsarchief Amsterdam, Archive 1089, no. 73. 29 ‘Zoolang het Park niet behoorlijk is vervangen zal Amsterdam een inrichting missen, die voor een groote stad als de onze, geen weelde, maar levensbehoefte is’: Circular no. 1, Gemeente Stadsarchief Amsterdam, Archive 1089, no. 73. 30 ‘Wij wenschen daar een gebouw te doen verrijzen, welks afmetingen en inrichting de beroemde Muziekzaal te Dusseldorf evenaren. Er zal plaats zijn voor ruim 600 executanten en 2200 toehoorders’: Circular no. 1, Gemeente Stadsarchief Amsterdam, Archive 1089, no. 73.

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Shortly after the committee had gathered the responses from the first circular, a second circular was distributed that described in detail the economic progress that had been made. Unfortunately, this document reported that the committee had sold only 250 of the 400 shares (250,000 guilders). To achieve the remaining 150,000 guilders it was suggested that perhaps the committee could pursue a loan. This step, though, would considerably lessen the chance that shareholders would receive any dividends. The other option would be for the existing shareholders to put up the remaining money. Another meeting was called for 25 April 1888 to discuss these options.31 The result of this meeting was much more promising. It was decided that although the committee had sold only 250 of a possible 400 shares, it would pursue formal incorporation as a limited company (NV). As an NV, the committee was entitled to legal protection while also enabling it to pursue bank loans. On 8 July 1882, Het Concertgebouw NV was formally incorporated under the auspices of public notary J.C.G. Pollones. Pollones, it should be noted, was a member of the Amsterdam branch of the Maatschappij tot Bevordering der Toonkunst (the Society for the Promotion of Music), as were the founding members of Het Concertgebouw NV, and of course it was Hayward who nominated this group to take on the administrative and organizational tasks of building a concert hall. Reviewing the list of shareholders printed in the Nederlandsche Staatscourant (Netherlands Gazette) on 28 August 1882, the original members of the committee (who would make up the board of Het Concertgebouw NV) each bought a number of shares. H.J. de Marez Oijens, P.A.L. van Ogtrop, D.H. Joosten, and W. Cnoop Koopmans each bought three shares, and J.A. Sillem bought six shares. Besides the board members, other names stand out: P.J.H. Cuypers bought five shares (he also authorized his brother-in-law to buy five shares); the philanthropist and tobacco magnate Peter Wilhelm Janssen also bought five shares; N.G. Pierson, who chaired the first public meeting of the ‘Committee to Build a Concert Hall’, bought three shares; and the mayor of Amsterdam and future prime minister of the Netherlands, Gijsbert van Tienhoven, bought two shares. Besides these individuals, the list of people who bought shares in the Concertgebouw fits the vocational stereotype of late nineteenth-century European bourgeoisie. Other than fifteen individuals listed as ‘private’ and the twelve who were zonder beroep (without a job), the occupations of the individuals that made up Het Concertgebouw NV were consistent with the stereotype of late nineteenth-century European bourgeoisie. As Jürgen Habermas points out in his history of the bourgeois 31 Circular no. 2, Gemeente Stadsarchief Amsterdam, Archive 1089, no. 73.

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public sphere, this class was made up of ‘merchants, bankers, entrepreneurs, professors, doctors, pastors, officers, manufacturers’.32 In the case of the Concertgebouw’s patrons, the largest group of shareholders was stock and commodity brokers, followed by merchants, bankers, lawyers, corporate directors and administrators, politicians, professors, and physicians.

Patronage & Buildings for Music The relationship between bourgeois patronage and the concert hall that occurred in late nineteenth-century Amsterdam was in line with cultural developments that had been occurring in European cities since the late eighteenth century. In the aftermath of the French and Industrial Revolutions, the balance of European cultural power shifted and the bourgeois began to assume the rights and privileges formerly held by the aristocracy. Aristocratic patronage, which had shaped European musical culture since the fourteenth century, was no longer tenable in this changing social world. This transformation had its material corollary in the venues where music was performed; the concert halls of the bourgeoisie supplanted the courts, churches, and opera houses of the aristocracy and became the centres of European musical culture. Aristocratic patronage emerged when the itinerant musicians (jongleurs, minstrels, troubadours) who populated medieval Europe were domesticated into churches and courts. This, according to Jacques Attali, was the first great transformation of Western musical culture: The musician had been a free craftsman at one with the people and worked indifferently at popular festivals or at the court of the lord. Afterward, he would have to sell himself entirely and exclusively to a single social class […]. The musician, then, was from that day forward economically bound to a machine of power, political or commercial, which paid him a salary for creating what it needed to affirm its legitimacy.33

Attali’s history invokes a contrast between the idyllic life of a medieval itinerant musician and the oppression of forced domesticity that, although slightly exaggerated, highlights the intertwined relationship between 32 Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, p. 23; see also Weber, Music and the Middle Class. 33 Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, pp. 16–17.

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patronage and musical culture. Reliant upon aristocratic patronage, the musician was a domestic servant, ‘an unproductive worker like the cook or the huntsman of the prince, reserved for his pleasure, lacking a market outside of the court that employed him, even though he sometimes had a sizeable audience’.34 Freedom over one’s labour was dependent on the goodwill of one’s patron. All compositions were property of the patron, as was the composer. J.S. Bach (1685–1750), for example, was imprisoned for one month when he demanded his release from the duke of Weimar in 1717 to take up an offer from the prince of Anhalt-Cöthen.35 It would be a mistake, though, to believe that the relationship between aristocratic patron and musician was always one of servitude and rebellion. Patrons who dedicated themselves to the promotion of music include the Palatinate Elector of Mannheim, whose court was renowned throughout the eighteenth century for having one of the finest orchestra in Europe. Other notable patrons include Baron Gottfried van Swieten (1733–1803), who had a sincere interest in promoting serious music in Vienna by lending crucial support to Mozart and Beethoven. Haydn’s patron, Prince Esterhazy, built him a theatre and provided him with an orchestra that allowed him to compose without the necessity of having to compete in an unpredictable marketplace. Within this particular world of musical patronage the purpose of music was the exaltation of either God or the Sovereign and the buildings in which music was performed and listened to confirmed its subservience to these masters. Although the church was a musical venue, it was not purpose built for music and so it is difficult to claim that musical culture influenced architectural design. Inversely, church architecture did have an influence on music. Another example drawn from the musical career of J.S. Bach can demonstrate this. After leaving Anhalt-Cöthen in 1723, Bach took up the appointment of Cantor of the Thomaskirche (Thomas Church) in Leipzig in 1723, a position he held until his death in 1750. Acousticians have argued that many of Bach’s compositions, including the St. Matthew Passion, were written for the acoustics of the Thomaskirche. Leo Beranek writes: ‘Bach knew the difference between the live acoustics of the St. Jacobi Kirche in Lubeck and the relatively dry acoustics of the Thomaskirche in Leipzig. His compositions for organ, written for churches like the St. Jacobi, differ markedly in style from his St. Matthew Passion, written for the Thomaskirche.’36 Filled to its capacity (1800 people), the Thomaskirche 34 Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, p. 47. 35 Blanning, The Triumph of Music, p. 14; Raynor, A Social History of Music, p. 291. 36 Beranek, Music, Acoustics & Architecture, p. 31.

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had an estimated reverberation time of between 1.6 and 2.5 seconds.37 This is unique for a fifteenth-century gothic church. An English gothic church of the same size and of the same era would typically have a reverberation time of between 4 and 5 seconds. Alternatively, a shoebox-style concert hall built any time between the mid-point of the nineteenth century and today would, ideally, have a reverberation time of about 1.5 to 2 seconds. This is an interesting acoustic similarity; Bach’s musical works, at least the ones composed for the Thomaskirche, are acoustically purpose built for contemporary concert halls, despite the fact that the acoustic standards found in contemporary concert halls were uncommon in Europe during Bach’s lifetime. In the case of secular music, opera house design is a better reflection of the relationship between patronage and music. The Margrave of Bayreuth built an opera house in 1748 (Margravial Opera House) that resembled a palatial court and was designed so that the eyes of the attendees (including the performers) were directed towards his luxurious box. In his description of pre-Revolutionary Parisian musical culture, James H. Johnson draws attention to the Palais Royal, which contained a hall that was home to the French Opéra (officially known as the Académie Royale de Musique), which was established by Louis XIV in 1669. By 1750 the Opéra was the refuge of the French aristocracy and the hall in the Palais Royal was designed to meet the social and musical demands of this class: Like most eighteenth-century Parisian theaters, the hall in the Palais Royal was in the form of a rectangle with rounded corners. Three levels of boxes lined the walls of the auditorium, so that the spectators on either side faced one another and had to turn their chairs to one side to view the stage. Unlike most other European theaters, the partitions between the boxes pointed not toward the stage, but toward the center of the hall, a construction that gave a clear line of sight to virtually every other box but made seeing the stage all the more difficult.38

Another design feature unique to this musical culture was the placing of boxes on the stage. Again, as Johnson describes it, this design feature was 37 Acoustician Hope Bagenal writes that the reverberation time of the Thomaskirche during Bach’s time (it has undergone significant reconstruction since the eighteenth century) works out to be 2.5 seconds: Bagenal, ‘Bach’s Music and Church Acoustics’, p. 149. Leo Beranek estimates the reverberation time to be about 1.6 seconds: Beranek, Music, Acoustics & Architecture, p. 46. 38 Johnson, Listening in Paris, p. 13.

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certainly not intended to enhance what contemporary audiences would consider an ideal musical experience: The six boxes on the stage were the most prestigious in the theater. They were the most expensive but provided a terrible view of the spectacle, as the lamps on the stage shone directly into the spectator’s eyes and much of the action took place farther upstage. Princes of the blood, foreign diplomats or the king’s inner circle of advisors typically sat here […]. Of course, being blinded by the oil lamps had its advantages for these spectators: their dress, their behavior, and their reactions to the performance were every bit as visible to the rest of the audience as were the singers and dancers.39

Unlike Paris or Bayreuth, Amsterdam contained neither a royal court nor was it administered by the Church. Instead, its aristocracy was firmly rooted in the city’s tradition of trade and commerce. The lack of medieval institutions like a bishopric or a powerful monarchy can be explained by the fact that Amsterdam is relatively young city, dating back to the twelfth century. Unlike Dutch and Flemish cities that date back to the Roman period, Amsterdam was largely exempt from the institutions of the Middle Ages. 40 It seems fitting, then, that during the city’s seventeenth-century golden age it was an elite class of bankers, stockbrokers, and merchants who established themselves as the archetypes of the city’s aristocracy. They demonstrated their distinction by sequestering themselves away from the rest of the city and from their luxurious canal homes, which could be considered Amsterdam’s equivalent to the medieval cathedrals found in older European cities, this ruling class established themselves as the city’s cultural patrons and tastemakers. The musical home of Amsterdam’s eighteenth-century ruling classes was the Felix Meritis (Happiness through Merit), which was a private society founded in 1777 to advance the Enlightenment ideals of reason and education. The society was divided into five departments: physics, commerce, drawing, literature, and music. In 1788, the society moved into a new building on the Keizersgracht, one of the canals that make up Amsterdam’s exclusive canal belt. This building, which still stands today, contained a concert

39 Johnson, Listening in Paris, p. 16. 40 Mak, Amsterdam: A Brief Life of the City.

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Interior of the Music Hall of the Felix Meritis, c. 1791

room, the first purpose-built music room in Amsterdam. 41 The hall was oval-shaped and held an audience of 600 and an orchestra of 80 musicians.42 The acoustics of the room were excellent, and throughout the latter part of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, the Felix Meritis housed the best orchestral musical culture in Amsterdam. 43 It seems somewhat fitting that the building that housed Amsterdam’s elite musical culture was not garishly ostentatious like opera houses in Paris, Dresden, or Bayreuth: its design reflected the sensibilities of a city whose ruling class was made up of traders, bankers, merchants, and brokers. Yet this did not stop the Felix Meritis from being the most exclusive social organization in Amsterdam. Musical performances were restricted to 41 Although the building still stands today, the Felix Meritis society was dissolved in 1888 and with it the original intentions of the building. Throughout the twentieth century the building housed various publishing enterprises, it was the home of the Dutch Communist Party, and is now used as a cultural centre and its rooms are used for conferences and other events. 42 Brants, ‘Felix Meritis, voorloper van het Concertgebouw’. 43 Brugmans, Geschiedenis van Amsterdam, p. 230; Mehos, Science and Culture for Members Only, p. 31; Metzelaar, From Private to Public Spheres, pp. 53–59.

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members, and the high cost of membership meant that only the wealthiest Amsterdammers could be considered for membership. After the mid-nineteenth century, the Felix Meritis, although still the most economically prestigious musical venue in the city, was no longer the most important musical society for either audiences or performers. Changing tastes and expectations were reflected in the growing concert scene in Amsterdam and by the 1840s secular musical culture was more lively than at any other point in the city’s history. Like the concerts held at the Felix Meritis, these concerts were private affairs organized by societies of varying degrees of exclusivity. During the 1840/1841 concert season, these societies put on more than 80 concerts, an impressive number given that Amsterdam was home to barely 200,000 inhabitants.44 Corresponding with this increase in concerts, new buildings for music were constructed that challenged the privileged status of the Felix Meritis. Memberships at the Parkzaal (opened in 1851) and Het Paleis voor Volksvlijt (opened in 1864) were significantly cheaper and more inclusive than the Felix Meritis. 45 These buildings were also much bigger than the Felix Meritis, attracting larger audiences than what the Felix Meritis could attract, which in turn generated more money to pay musicians. As such, many musicians who would have performed at Felix Meritis, like Brahms and Liszt, were now performing at the Parkzaal. If one tells the history of Amsterdam’s musical culture through a history of the city’s buildings for music, it would be evident that by the late nineteenth century the patrician elite who had ensconced themselves in their canal homes found that they were presiding over an increasingly anachronistic musical culture whose home was the Felix Meritis. By the mid-nineteenth century, the aristocratic expectations of exclusivity and conviviality would play a decreasing role in Amsterdam’s musical culture, and by 1889 (the year after the Concertgebouw opened), the Felix Meritis no longer hosted musical performances. Although aristocratic patronage in Europe endured until well into the nineteenth century (when the Meininger Hofkapelle performed in Amsterdam in 1885, it was still a court orchestra), the seeds of its destruction 44 As reported in the Nederlandsch Muzikaal Tijdschrift (Dutch Music Journal), during the 1840/41 season, Blaas- en Strijklust (Wind and String Delight) put on 28 concerts; van Vriendschap en Toonkunst (Friendship and Music) organized 24 concerts; Felix Meritis had 20 concerts; Harmonie Concerten had seven; different Quartet Associations were attributed with four concerts; and there were 24 recitals, or benefit concerts. Reeser, Een eeuw Nederlandse Muziek, p. 18. 45 In the 1850s, shortly after the opening of Het Park, membership was 60 guilders for Felix Meritis and 20 guilders for Het Park: Mehos, Science and Culture for Members Only, p. 31.

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were planted in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries when musicians began selling their services to paying customers. It was here, Attali writes, that Western musical culture underwent its second great transformation: ‘the musician no longer sold himself without reserve to a lord; he would sell his labor to a number of clients, who were rich enough to pay for the entertainment, but not rich enough to have it to themselves’. 46 The clients that Attali refers to were part of the increasingly prosperous European bourgeoisie. The spirit and style of the bourgeois found its musical manifestation in the public concert. Unlike concerts at the court or the opera house, public concerts are open to anyone who can afford a ticket. The bourgeois democratized musical culture by ensuring that everyone, in theory, had the opportunity to buy a listening experience. The potential crassness of commodification, though, was obscured by the lofty aesthetic ideals of Musical Romanticism. Jürgen Habermas’s description of the public concert makes this connection: ‘Admission for a payment turned the musical performance into a commodity; simultaneously, however, there arose something like music not tied to a purpose. For the first time an audience gathered to listen to music as such.’47 It was only once music was freed from ecclesiastic and aristocratic subservience and turned into a commodity that the bourgeois-romantic notion of l’art pour l’art could flourish. The concert hall and the public concert are reminders of the paradox that constitutes the enduring cultural legacy of the bourgeois—only that which is for sale can transcend the bounds of the material world. Or, as Attali cynically notes, ‘the artist was born, at the same time as his work went on sale’. 48 The first public concert of secular instrumental music took place in London in 1672 at the home of John Banister (1630–1679). Banister, a violinist, was appointed to a prominent place in King Charles II’s court orchestra in 1662. His enviable responsibility was organizing and paying an ensemble of twelve string players. There is some debate regarding the reason for his removal from this position in 1667. Nationalists argued that Banister had the audacity to claim that English music and English musicians were better than French, thus raising the ire of the King, who held French music in the highest regard. It is more likely, though, that Bannister was fired because he kept most of the £600 payroll for himself. 49

46 Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, p. 47. 47 Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, p. 39. 48 Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, p. 47. 49 Young, The Concert Tradition, p. 31.

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Little is known about Banister’s activities after his dismissal from the court orchestra until the following advertisement appeared in the London Gazette on 30 December 1672: There are to give notice, that at Mr. John Banister’s house (now called the music school) over against the George Tavern, in White Friars, near the back of the Temple, this Monday, will be music performed by excellent masters, beginning precisely at 4 of the clock in the afternoon, and every afternoon for the future, precisely at the same hour.50

The audience for these concerts consisted of shopkeepers who sat around tables and who, for a shilling, were entitled to as much ale and tobacco as they required and could call for any music they pleased.51 Banister was on to something and in 1673 he moved his concerts to a larger room close to his house and until his death in 1679 he changed venues, from taverns to inns to houses, every couple of years.52 Banister’s initiative marked the first time that people came together to pay to listen to secular instrumental music, which was a unique twist on the relatively recent phenomenon of buying and selling music. In 1501, a little less than 200 years prior to Banister’s concerts and fifty years after Gutenberg, the Venetian printer Ottaviano dei Petrucci began printing and selling sheet music to a market of amateur performers.53 Up to that point buying music was largely restricted to buying the services of a musician, and so Petrucci’s decision to publish and sell sheet music marked an important point for music’s entry into a capitalist marketplace—music became a distinct thing that was separate from the musician. What Banister offered for sale in his London home, though, was different than what Petrucci was selling to Venice’s amateur musicians; Petrucci sold specialized instructions to make music and Banister sold an individual listening experience, music as an event in and of itself. Banister’s success encouraged other impresarios to hold concerts in taverns and inns and in 1675 the first concert room was opened in what was known as the York Buildings.54 The concert room at the York Buildings was quite small: it was 14.5 m long and 9.75 m wide and could hold 300 people. 50 Young, The Concert Tradition, p. 34. 51 Loesser, Men, Women and Pianos, pp. 204–205. 52 Scott, ‘London’s Earliest Public Concerts’. 53 On printing and music, see: Albrecht, Mediating the Muse, p. 109; Chanan, Music Practica, p. 55; Garofalo, ‘From Music Publishing to MP3’, p. 320. 54 Forsyth, Buildings for Music, p. 27; Scott, ‘London’s First Concert Room’.

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Following the York Buildings (which stopped hosting public concerts in 1732), other venues in London were used for public concerts, including the Vendu, which opened in 1690; Hickford’s Room, which opened in 1697; and Hickford’s Great Room, which opened 1738. Shortly after the centennial of Banister’s first public concert, the first purpose-built hall for public concerts was erected in London: the Hanover Square Rooms (preceding venues were used for music, but not built for music). The Hanover Square Rooms was opened in 1775 through the initiative of two enterprising German musicians and impresarios: Carl Friedrich Abel (1723–1787) and the eighteenth child of J.S. Bach, Johann (John) Christian Bach (1735–1782). In the late eighteenth century, the Hanover Square Rooms was considered the greatest concert hall in London. It was larger than any previous building used for concerts, designed to hold 800 people (although there are reports that as many 1500 attended a Haydn performance held in 1792), it measured 24 m long and 9.75 m wide, with a ceiling that is estimated to be between 6 m and 8 m high.55 For music lovers, this building has been immortalized through its association with Haydn. Not only did his concerts set attendance records (if we are to believe some reports), but he also wrote his London Symphonies (nos. 93–101) specifically for this hall and conducted them there during the 1791/1792 and 1793/1794 seasons. If music was to truly free itself from subservience to God and Crown, musical culture had to find a building in which it could be worshipped in its own right.56 The Hanover Square Rooms was an early model of a building type designed for this purpose. It ‘gave architectural expression to the growing and powerful sacralization of music’.57 It was not long after the initiatives by Banister, Abel, and Bach in London that similar developments began to occur in German-speaking cities in Europe. However, there was a marked difference between the development of the public concert in London and its development in continental Europe. London’s first concert halls were purpose built in response to the entrepreneurial spirit of the public concert and an emerging public of music consumers. In German-speaking Europe, this commercial function did not solely determine the meanings that have come to be attributed to these buildings. Certainly economics were important in this history of the concert hall, but concert halls were 55 Forsyth, Buildings for Music, p. 38. 56 Raynor makes an interesting point on the role of the concert hall in this regard, writing that the construction of Munich’s Odeon Concert Hall in 1828 marked not only the emancipation of the orchestra from the opera house, but also of the city from the court: Raynor, A Social History of Music, p. 319. 57 Blanning, The Triumph of Music, p. 135.

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also designed to mediate the idea that music is a secular religion. Within this musical culture, concert halls are purpose built to be both museum and temple: a building in which musical works of art are put on display in order to be worshipped. In German-speaking Europe, the development of the public concert was more closely associated with the aesthetic idealization of instrumental music. Here, the public concert originated in 1712 when the collegia musica (amateur music society) of Frankfurt began performing concerts to an audience of subscribers. This was followed a few years later by similar developments in Hamburg.58 Frankfurt and Hamburg may have been the first German cities to hold public concerts, but Leipzig was the city where the public concert and the concert hall became firmly established as the musical institutions we know them as today. It is not entirely surprising that the concert hall, as an institution of bourgeois musical culture, became associated with Leipzig. Compared to larger cities like Berlin or Dresden, which were home to many aristocratic institutions, Leipzig’s status as a trading city was beneficial for the growth of bourgeois musical culture and its institutions. Its leading people were less concerned with passive administration routines and courtly precedents than with the needs of a growing trade and the potentialities of new enterprise. The town harbored few privileged aristocrats or court functionaries who could perpetually remind the citizen of his social inferiority […]. Commercial and cultural development went hand in hand and encouraged each other. More people made more money and came into a position to demand more cultural goods; whereupon this demand spurred businessmen to new enterprise toward supplying it, and toward better methods of distributing the supply.59

The origin of Leipzig’s concert culture began with the formation of two collegia musica in 1702 and 1708. These organizations were made up of amateur musicians who would rehearse and perform once or twice a week at coffeehouses.60 Arthur Loesser’s description of these coffeehouse 58 Chanan, Music Practica, p. 134; Raynor, A Social History of Music, p. 314. 59 Loesser, Men, Women and Pianos, p. 67. 60 Of note, J.S. Bach served as director of one of the collegia musica between 1729 and 1737, a position he used to develop and refine his secular compositions. Blume, ‘Outlines of a New Picture of Bach’, p. 225; Pieper, Music and the Making of Middle-Class Culture, p. 31; Young, The Concert Tradition, pp. 69–72.

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performances points to the rudimentary patronage of a market economy at work in this early iteration of the public concert. One such group met at Enoch Richter’s coffeehouse, another at Zimmermann’s hostelry, the ordinary customers sipping beer and puffing their long pipes while they listened […] the young men played for fun and for the good of their souls, but apparently also for emolument or the hope thereof. The collegia were an advantage to the taverns, for during the times of the fairs many strangers as well as residents were attracted by them. Undoubtedly, Richter and Zimmermann assured the permanence of their interesting house-feature by giving the young men free meals and, possible, a small honorarium.61

This arrangement—the two collegia musica performing concerts at coffeehouses—continued until 1743, when sixteen Leipzig businessmen created an orchestra from the two collegia musica and founded what they called the Grosses Konzert (Grand Concerts, also popularly known as the Kaufmannskonzerte [merchant concerts]). These sixteen businessmen set up a board of twelve directors, made up of local merchants and headed by Leipzig’s mayor, who would take charge of the Grand Concerts. To finance these concerts, potential patrons were asked to purchase subscriptions that would entitle them to a season’s worth of concerts. The Grand Concerts were held once a week in winter and once every two weeks in the summer. These concerts were held at the Three Swans Inn until 1756 when the Seven Years War forced their suspension. They were revived at the same venue in 1762 under the leadership of Johann Adam Hiller, who established a program of 24 concerts per year, financed by the sale of annual subscriptions. This continued until 1778 when, due to an uninvolved administration and poor ticket sales, the Grand Concerts ceased operation. Hiller carried on his concert activities as best he could, and in 1780 the city of Leipzig intervened with a proposal to build a purpose-built concert hall in the Gewandhaus.62 The Gewandhaus (Cloth Hall) was built in 1587 and was used as a trading hall for cloth merchants. It was gutted, redesigned, and refurbished by the architect Johann Friedrich Carl Dauthe and opened as a concert hall in 1781. The design of the Gewandhaus contained many unique features that contributed to an ideal acoustic and aesthetic experience that ‘has come to stand at the head of a recognizable tradition in concert hall design that 61 Loesser, Men, Women, and Pianos, p. 90. 62 Hennenberg, The Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra.

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has continued to this day’.63 The hall itself was rectangular with curved ends and measured 23 m long by 11.5 m wide and 7.3 m high. It was designed to hold an orchestra of 50 to 60 musicians and an audience of 400 (increased to 570 in 1842). Architecturally, the Gewandhaus was quite resonant due to Dauthe’s decision to build the concert hall within the stone walls of the existing structure—sort of a box within a box. The walls and the floor of the concert hall were lined with wood, and as described by acoustician Hope Bagenal, the weight of the roof was partially transferred from the old stone walls to the new wooden walls, meaning that the whole structure was tense and resonant, capable of delivering a rich sound.64 The wood walls and floor contributed to a short reverberation time (about 1.3 seconds, measured at mid-frequency in a full hall) that allowed the orchestra to be heard with great clarity and volume.65 The opening of the Gewandhaus corresponded with a transformation of listening habits in Leipzig. The Grand Concerts that occurred between 1743 and 1778 were social occasions with musical accompaniment. Antje Pieper quotes a review of these concerts that highlights the behaviour of the audience: I have attended the Grand concert several times and have always regarded the choice and performance of music worthy of everyone’s attention. However, I saw that only the tiniest part of the audience pays attention. A man peers at the young ladies, a woman inspects the finery of her female neighbours and even during the most touching pieces, people are whispering and I began to wonder whether these ladies and gentlemen were subscribing merely in order to appear to be pillars of the Grand Concerts.66

The design of the Gewandhaus encouraged a different experience by materializing ideals of ‘noble simplicity and serene greatness’, an aesthetic that appealed to the sensibilities of the hall’s patrons: ‘to the aristocrat, culture was a means of entertainment, to the bourgeoisie it was a means of spiritual elevation; bourgeois public space was thus designed accordingly’.67 This ideal of secular transcendence was mirrored in the lack of visual decorations 63 Forsyth, Buildlings for Music, p. 64; see also Bagenal, ‘The Leipzig Tradition in Concert Hall Design’. 64 Bagenal, ‘The Leipzig Tradition in Concert Hall Design’, pp. 757–59. 65 Forsyth, Buildings for Music, p. 64. 66 Quoted in Pieper, Music and the Making of Middle-Class Culture, p. 107 ff. 94. 67 Pieper, Music and the Making of Middle-Class Culture, p. 102.

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The façade of the Neues Gewandhaus with the slogan Res Serva est Verum Gaudium placed above the columns, c. 1886

and adornments, features that could distract the audience from solemn aesthetic contemplation. Upon the opening of the Gewandhaus, any doubt as to the proper behaviour of the audience was removed upon glancing towards the orchestra platform. There, affixed in bold letters for everyone to see, was the maxim Res Serva est Verum Gaudium—True Joy is a Serious Matter.

Social Class, Listening to Music, and Architectural Design In his description of bourgeois musical culture, Attali points out that this culture is devoid of the sociality that was known in musical cultures prior: ‘There was a gulf between the musician and the audience; the most perfect silence reigned in the concerts of the bourgeoisie.’68 What is the nature of this relationship between the bourgeois and silent attentive listening? What could inspire the patrons of the Gewandhaus to prominently erect such a joyless slogan as ‘true joy is a serious matter’ on a building designed 68 Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, p. 47.

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for music’s performance and reception? Addressing this question requires a better understanding of the relationship between social class, listening, and aesthetic philosophy. For some, attentive listening demonstrates an educated appreciation of music that distinguishes the bourgeois from both the aristocracy and the lower classes, both of whom listened to music as if it were mere entertainment. This was part of the project of bildung projected onto music appreciation: Music was meant not to merely be ‘enjoyed’ but to be ‘understood.’ And in order to fulf ill its educative function it forced audiences to listen silently, a mode of behaviour which only after a long and tedious process gained ascendancy over the earlier habit of using music as a stimulus to conversation.69

More critically, sociologist Richard Sennett argues that the silence found in concert halls was a demonstration of anxiety and self-doubt. The mid-19th Century audience, at both concert and theater, worried about embarrassment, about begin ashamed, about ‘making fools of themselves’ on terms and to a degree that would have been incomprehensible to the audiences of Voltaire’s time […]. To not show any reaction, to cover up your feelings, means you are invulnerable, immune to being gauche.70

Sennett’s indictment of the subtle social pathologies of class and modernity, although insightful, is a bit disconnected from musical culture. A more precise explanation can be crafted by addressing the connection between musical meaning and bourgeois listening habits, and in particular the idea that patronage and aesthetics are intertwined. The aesthetic sensibilities of the bourgeois were informed by the philosophy of Musical Romanticism and as members of this class became the patrons of musical culture, the meanings attributed to music became bourgeois as well. In a social context in which the significance of musical performance was no longer reliably established by aristocratic patronage, the inherent value of art could replace the patronage of the highest classes as a

69 Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, p. 50. 70 Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, p. 210.

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guarantor of value […] the prestige of music itself […] had effectively replaced the prestige of the patrons it had once signaled.71

Under the influence of bourgeois patronage, secular instrumental music, especially the symphony, became sacralized, and with this came an expectation that this music should be listened in devout silence. These considerations were not limited to slogans mounted on prosceniums; they were also designed into the concert hall itself. The spatial design of these buildings materializes socio-aesthetic relations and an aural disposition that reinforced the idea that music should be taken seriously as art: ‘Design not only discourages communication among members of the audience but also tells them that they are there to listen and not talk back. The performance is a spectacle for them to contemplate, and they have nothing to contribute to its course.’72 As Lydia Goehr points out, concert hall design parallels assumptions of aesthetic autonomy that correspond with the concept of a ‘musical work’: ‘Performances had not only to become foreground affairs, but they also had to be cut off completely from all extra-musical activities. It was with these sorts of ideas in mind that concert halls started to be erected as monuments and establishments devoted to the performance of musical works.’73 Michael Chanan identifies the socio-political biases of concert hall design by drawing attention to the difference between aristocratic and bourgeois patronage and how this difference is materialized in the design of buildings for their respective musical cultures: The concert-hall is more democratic than the opera house—at any rate, more bourgeois. The opera-house horseshoe had a triple function: to project the musical sound forwards; to allow the members of the audience themselves to be on visual display; and to minimize the diffusion of their chatter. The concert-hall works differently […] the seating arrangement, with the audience now mostly facing the orchestra directly, suppresses individual display in the auditorium and displaces it to corridors, bars and salons […] above all, they are halls to embody the ideals of bourgeois democracy; it is true that the size of the audience is limited, but inside they share a uniformly warm and responsive acoustical state of being.74

71 Gramit, Cultivating Music, p. 145. 72 Small, Musicking, p. 26; see also Kaye, ‘The Silenced Listener’. 73 Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, p. 236. 74 Chanan, From Handel to Hendrix, p. 282.

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These design features are certainly unique to the concert hall, but they do not exhaust the relationship between patronage, design, and musical meaning. In this chapter I examined how the history of the Concertgebouw can be traced back to the publication of an article that constructed a world in which the Concertgebouw was a material solution to the city’s lackluster orchestral music culture. Taking up this idea, members of Amsterdam’s bourgeois cultural elite played the role of intermediary, ensuring that the idea to build a concert hall led to the building of a concert hall. In the following chapter, I examine how patronage and aesthetics were translated into acoustic design. In 1938 Rudolf Mengelberg wrote the first commemorative history of the Concertgebouw in honour of the building’s fiftieth anniversary. In it, he wrote: ‘The concert hall is a product of the bourgeois culture of the nineteenth century. The whole of the symphonic art and the style of its execution mirrors the spirit of a society that evolved from the spirit of the French Revolution.’75 In what follows, I trace how the spirit of the bourgeois was translated into the acoustic design of this concert hall, ensuring that patronage and aesthetics could be realized in a particular sound of music.

75 Mengelberg, 50 Jaar Concertgebouw 1888–1938, p. 33.

4. Acoustic Architecture before Science: Designing the Sound of the Concertgebouw It is not my fault that acoustics and I can never come to an understanding. I gave myself great pains to master this bizarre science, but after fifteen years labour, I found myself hardly in advance of where I stood on the first day […] I had read diligently in my books, and conferred industriously with philosophers— nowhere did I find a positive rule of action to guide me; on the contrary nothing but contradictory statements.1

The Science of the Sound of Music The success of any concert hall is its sound. A beautiful building with horrible acoustics can never be redeemed. In the lead up to the opening of Montreal’s La Maison Symphonique in 2011, a newspaper headline read: ‘It looks good. But how will it sound?’ The article went on to claim that ‘the promise of better acoustics is the whole raison d’être for this building’.2 Similarly, the motivation for Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (opened in 2003) was the ‘dreadful acoustics’ of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra since 1964. For Gehry, good acoustics would be the defining quality of his concert hall: ‘no aspect of the scheme obsessed him so much’.3 In the case of New York’s Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center, which opened in 1962, New York Times music critic Harold C. Schonberg encouraged readers to think about this building for music through acoustic terms like reverberation and reverberation time, writing ‘it is upon these factors that the fate of Philharmonic Hall will really rest’. 4 Unlike La Maison Symphonique and the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Philharmonic Hall was considered an acoustic disaster and its design was continually revised and renovated in 1 Charles Garnier, architect of the Opéra Garnier, Paris (1880). Quoted in Barron, Auditorium Acoustics an Acoustic Design, p. 5 2 Everett-Green, ‘It Looks Good. But How Will it Sound?’, p. R5. 3 Filler, ‘Victory at Bunker Hill’, p. 55 4 Schonberg, ‘Acoustic Factor’. P. x13.

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consultation with acousticians until finally its interior was completely rebuilt and it was reopened as Avery Fischer Hall in 1976.5 For the board of Het Concertgebouw NV the days leading up to opening night (11 April 1888) must have been tense. There were constant worries about money, and more importantly they had no idea how the hall would sound. A rehearsal to test the sound of the Concertgebouw was logistically difficult because a full concert hall sounds different than an empty one. Plus, if a rehearsal revealed poor acoustics, what could be done? This uncertainty was compounded by the fact that prior to 1900 there was no reliable mathematical theory that could be used to accurately predict building acoustics. Given these circumstances, it must have been a great relief that the acoustics of the Concertgebouw were well received. After the inaugural concert, the critic from the music journal Caecilia wrote, ‘the hall has excellent acoustics’;6 the Algemeen Handelsblad reported that ‘several people who sat in different places in the hall praised the acoustics’;7 and in the Haarlemsche Courant (Haarlem), ‘good acoustics […] the sound spreads evenly in the new hall without the annoying echoes that can be heard in other halls […] not only does the massive choir and orchestra sound good, the soloists are clearly audible to everyone’.8 Because the success of a concert hall is so dependent on its sound, many find it surprising that prior to 1900 there was no reliable mathematical formula that could be used to predict how a building would sound. Before 1900 architectural acoustics was largely left to chance, guided by knowledge and practices that would not be considered out of place in the sixteenth century. Prior to the twentieth century, concert hall designers learned about what nineteenth-century French architect Charles Garnier called the ‘bizarre science’ of acoustics by observation and speculation. Without a mathematical formula to predict how a building would sound, architects relied on imitation, intuition, and luck to ensure good acoustics. One of the first theories of acoustic architecture comes from Vitruvius’s De architectura 5 Jaffe, The Acoustics of Performance Halls, p. 26. 6 ‘De zaal is, voor zoo verre ik er over heb kunnen oordeelen, uitmuntend van acoustieke eigenschappen, tochtvrij, ruim, licht en stil’: Hageman, ‘Amsterdam’, Caecilia 45, no. 10 (15 April 1888), 94. 7 ‘Door personen, die op onderscheidene punten der zaal waren gezeten, hoorden wij de acoustiek roemen’. ‘Kunst en Lettern: Eindelijk!’, Algemeen Handelsblad (12 April 1888). 8 ‘Goede acoustiek […] in de nieuwe zaal het geluid der massa’s zich gelijkmatig kan verbreiden, zonder de hinderlijke weerkaatsing in andere gebouwen van dien aard te vinden […] en niet alleen de massa klinkt goed, ook de solo’s worden door ieder duidelijk verstaan’: ‘Kunsten en Wetenschappen: Het Nieuwe Concertgebouw geopend’, Haarlemsche Courant (13 April 1888).

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(15 BC). Vitruvius encourages architects to embed bronze ‘sounding vessels’ in theatres as an aid to good acoustics: ‘The voice, uttered from the stage as from a centre, and spreading and striking against the cavities of the different vessels, as it comes in contact with them, will be increased in clearness of sound, and will wake a harmonious note in unison with itself.’9 These vessels, or vases, were resonant, but whether or not they enhanced audibility, muddled the sound, or did absolutely nothing depends on other variables, including the volume of the room, the angle of the walls, and the sonic absorbency of these walls. Yet throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages, Vitruvius’s suggestions were taken by some architects to be acoustic facts, demonstrated by acoustic vases found embedded in the naves and choirs of Medieval European churches.10 Sonic analogy was also a trusted method for acoustic success. Emily Thompson writes that some architects assumed that because a bell was a sonorous object, a bell-shaped hall would be equally sonorous.11 In a similar vein, the acoustician Leo Beranek mentions that some architects believed that a concert hall should be lined with thin wood, the rationale being that because wood acts as a resonator to enhance a violin’s sound, the sound inside a concert hall would be enhanced by a layer of thin wood.12 Of all the myths and superstitions surrounding architectural acoustics, none seems more outrageous than the one passed on to Beranek by the conductor Herbert von Karajan who had once asked him: ‘I don’t suppose you subscribe to the theory that broken wine bottles beneath the stage are good for the acoustics of a hall?’ Beranek responded that he did not believe this, countering that any broken wine bottles found when refurbishing older European halls were probably the result of workers 9 Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, p. 143. 10 Baumann, ‘Musical Acoustics in the Middle Ages’. On Vitruvius’s influence on the design of churches in Venice, see Howard and Moretti, Sound and Space in Renaissance Venice, pp. 6–9. 11 Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity, p. 20. 12 Beranek explains the fallacy of this assumption: ‘The sound of a violin as we hear it is produced by the vibration of its strings, which transmit energy into the belly and back of the instrument. These surfaces radiate sound in much the same way as does the lightweight paper cone of a loudspeaker; thus they must be thin, of light weight, and highly responsive to vibration. Thick heavy surfaces could not easily be set into motion by the delicate vibrating strings, and thus a loud, clear tone would not emanate from a thick-walled violin. In a concert hall, we do not want to radiate sounds beyond the walls of the hall, but rather we want to conserve the energy by keeping it inside. This required that the walls be hard and heavy, made of plaster or masonry or thick wood. Contrary to popular impression, the great concert halls and opera houses of the world contain very little, if any, thin wood on the walls and ceilings—the very best of them are lined almost entirely with heavy plaster or thick, heavy wood—materials that keep the sound inside for the enjoyment of the listener’: Beranek, Music, Acoustics & Architecture, pp. 8–9.

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who, during the original construction, ‘flung the remnants of innumerable déjeuners into the most convenient and most hidden places’.13 The validity of acoustic vases, bell-shaped rooms, or broken bottles was put to an end after Harvard physicist Wallace Sabine (1868–1919) developed the first predictive theory of acoustic architecture in 1898. Sabine identified the connection between acoustic quality and reverberation time, which is the time that it takes for sound to decay and disappear completely in an enclosed space. Sabine figured out that reverberation time is directly related to the room’s cubic volume (if the room is twice as big, it is twice as reverberant) and inversely related to the amount of sound absorbing material in the room (increase the absorption and the reverberation declines).14 Following this, Sabine was able to provide a table of absorbent materials commonly found in concert halls. As Thompson explains, Sabine registered the absorption coefficient of, for example, plaster on tile as .025, meaning every time sound energy encounters a surface of plaster on tile, 2.5 per cent of this energy was absorbed and 97.5 per cent of the energy was reflected back into the room. According to Sabine’s table, an open window measured 100 per cent absorbency because an open window absorbs all sonic energy without any reverberation.15 Sabine applied his theory, which he called the ‘reverberation equation’, to the design of Boston Symphony Hall, which opened in 1900 and was the first concert hall designed in line with a quantitative theory of acoustics. A century’s worth of acoustic research has demonstrated that there is more to acoustic success than reverberation. Reflection, which refers to the angle of the walls in relation to the sound source (typically the stage), has been identified by acousticians as equally important to acoustic success.16 But this should not diminish Sabine’s accomplishment. The reverberation equation marked the first time that architects had a quantitative theory that 13 Beranek, Music, Acoustics & Architecture, p. 5. 14 Beranek, Concert Halls and Opera Houses, p. 92. For a more detailed description of Sabine’s formula, see Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity, pp. 35–41. 15 Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity, pp. 40–41; see also Forsyth, Buildings for Music, pp. 247–250. 16 Beginning in the 1960s, acousticians began working from the starting point that the sound of a concert hall is directly related to the reflecting patterns of sound waves, not the sonic absorbency of materials found within the concert hall. This means that if you can duplicate the reflection pattern of traditional halls, regardless of geometry, you can duplicate the acoustic standard of traditional concert halls. This has led to the design of concert halls that are visually striking yet retain a familiar acoustic standard, including the first wrap-around hall, Berlin’s Philharmonie (1963), which has a reverberation time of 1.9 seconds: Jaffe, The Acoustics of Performance Halls, pp. 9, 19; see also Barron, Auditorium Acoustic and Architectural Design.

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could be used to predict how a building would sound. What distinguished Sabine’s theory from previous attempts to develop a predictive theory of architectural acoustics was, as Thompson points out, Sabine’s idea to measure sound as an aural phenomenon: ‘Scientists had approached this problem [acoustic measurement] primarily by attempting to render visible acoustical phenomena […] Sabine thus abandoned all attempts to look at sound, and instead chose the seemingly obvious, but long neglected, alternative of listening to it.’17 Measuring how long sound reverberates in an enclosed space may seem like the obvious measure for room acoustics, but up to that point physicists were working within a paradigm whereby they believed that a theory of architectural acoustics required a visible representation of sound, another example of Western culture’s visual bias—for something to exist, even sound, it must first be visible! Ignoring the long-standing tradition amongst his colleagues of privileging the eye over the ear, it was only once Sabine began to measure and record sound as an aural phenomenon that a predictive theory of architectural acoustics could be developed.18 The process by which Sabine developed his reverberation equation began in 1895 when the president of Harvard University, Charles Eliot, asked him to improve the acoustics of a lecture room in the recently built Fogg Art Museum. This lecture room had a reverberation time of about 5.6 seconds, leading to what could only be imagined as a horrible listening experience— imagine a lecture where each word reverberated for five seconds, muddling each subsequent word and turning an otherwise simple lecture into an exercise of almost impossible decipherment. To correct this problem and to ensure that it would not happen again, Eliot suggested that Sabine develop a formula that could be used to explain why acoustic quality differed from room to room. Sabine’s experiments consisted of using compressed air to activate a steady sound from an organ pipe. He would then shut the air off and measure how long it took for the sound to fade away. He did this in many rooms at Harvard, paying attention to any variables that may effect reverberation. What he discovered was that reverberation time was 17 Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity, p. 35. 18 Despite Sabine’s accomplishments, the tendency to identify visual representations of sound as sound itself persists in acoustic research: ‘Books on acoustics, following the general development of the discipline, have come to rely more and more heavily on visual representations of their subject matter. One almost comes to think that the two-dimensional wave diagrams that populate these books, showing undulating lines moving around a horizontal one, must actually correspond to what’s happening in the air (or “medium,” as it is always generalized), instead of being simply a convenient representation of a three-dimensional phenomenon in only two’: Truax, Acoustic Communication, p. 3.

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dependent on the size of the room and could be manipulated through the addition of sonically absorbent materials. For his tests, he used seat cushions to manipulate reverberation time. In fact, at this early stage, seat cushions were used as a standard unit of measurement for explaining variations in reverberation time. For example, he figured out that by adding 1000 square feet of seat cushions to the lecture room in the Fogg Art Museum, he was able to reduce the reverberation time to 2.2 seconds.19 Sabine undertook these experiments for two years, collecting hundreds of pages of data before Eliot demanded a solution to the reverberation problem. Unable to provide a concise scientific solution, Sabine suggested hanging sound-absorbing material on the walls of the lecture hall to lower the reverberation time. This made it better, but not ideal (in time, the room was repurposed). In 1898, Boston arts patron Henry Lee Higginson contacted Eliot for any advice he may have for the design of his new concert hall and Eliot put him in contact with Sabine. Sabine was reluctant to work with Higginson because he had yet to come up with a scientific formula that could accurately predict reverberation. Contemplating Higginson’s offer to consult on the design of a new concert hall, Sabine went home to review his copious notes and in one of those eureka moments that punctuate the history of science he figured out that reverberation time is related to the volume of the space and inversely related to the amount of sound absorbing materials in the space. Once he had formulated his reverberation theory, Sabine could confidently assist Higginson in the design of his new concert hall. Higginson wanted a rectangular concert hall and looked to Boston’s old Music Hall and Leipzig’s Neues Gewandhaus (opened in 1884) as models to copy. Higginson chose these buildings because, according to experts and his own experience, music sounded best in these halls. However, there were to be significant differences between the proposed design of Symphony Hall and these other halls. First, Symphony Hall was to hold an audience of 2600, 70 per cent greater than the Gewandhaus’s capacity of 1560. Second, the new hall was going to be 12.2 m longer than Boston Music Hall. To guarantee that the new hall would have acoustics similar to the Gewandhaus and the Music Hall, while maintaining Higginson’s specifications concerning the size and capacity of the building, Sabine acquired scaled drawings and other images of the Gewandhaus and Boston’s Music Hall and from these calculated the reverberation time of each hall (2.3 for the old Music Hall and 2.44 for the Gewandhaus).20 Turning to the plans for Symphony Hall, he 19 Forsyth, Buildings for Music, p. 247; Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity, pp. 34–37. 20 Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity, p. 42.

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calculated the overall volume and the surface area of the different materials from which it was to be constructed (including the sonic absorbency of the audience and the orchestra) and calculated that the acoustics would not correspond with Higginson’s preferred acoustic models. Sabine thought the hall was too long and suggested reducing the overall volume of the hall (thus reducing its reverberation) by adding a second gallery/balcony to maintain the desired seating capacity. The architects adopted these suggestions and upon studying the revised plan Sabine reported that the hall would have a reverberation time of 2.31 seconds, which was close enough to the acoustics of the old Music Hall and the Gewandhaus to be considered acceptable.21 Although Sabine’s measurements were off by a little less than a second (with a full audience the old Boston Music Hall had a reverberation time of 1.8 seconds and the Gewandhaus had a reverberation time of 1.9 seconds, while Symphony Hall ended up with a reverberation time of 1.9 seconds),22 the reverberation equation marked a major event in the history of architectural acoustics—the beginning of a distinctly modern era of acoustic design premised on accuracy, precision, and consistency.

The Musical Context of the Science of the Sound of Music Sabine’s reverberation equation and its application to the design of Boston Symphony Hall has been well documented by historians and acousticians.23 A history of concert hall acoustics that prioritizes Sabine’s accomplishments has the benefit of revealing precise details about how sound and music are quantified and translated into design, enabling these histories to have a practical utility for acousticians and architects concerned with contemporary and future acoustic designs. But however useful Sabine’s reverberation equation is, on its own it cannot guarantee good musical acoustics. Measuring sound is one thing; deciding what constitutes good or bad musical acoustics is something completely different. In any building designed for music, both before and after Sabine, aesthetic considerations (how music should sound) take precedence over acoustics (how sound behaves in enclosed spaces). Sabine’s reverberation equation transformed our understanding of how music behaves in enclosed spaces but it did not 21 Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity, p. 44. 22 Bagenal, ‘The Leipzig Tradition in Concert Hall Design’. 23 Beranek, Music, Acoustics, & Architecture; Forsyth, Buildings for Music; Jaffe, The Acoustics of Performance Halls; Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity.

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change how music should sound in these enclosed spaces. In the case of Boston Symphony Hall, a reverberation time between 2 and 2.5 seconds was desirable because the repertoire of concert halls and orchestras in the decades leading up to the opening of Symphony Hall sound best in halls with this reverberation time. In this case, the standard against which acoustic architecture is measured is an aesthetic expectation concerning how music should sound, which is then quantified into reverberation time. Beranek argues that symphonies written during the Romantic period (from about 1820 to Mahler’s death in 1911) sound best in an acoustic environment with a long reverberation time, usually 1.9 to 2.2 seconds. In what he terms the Classical period (1750–1820), a shorter reverberation time, about 1.5 to 1.7 seconds, was desirable. In this period, listening became more attuned to non-notational elements, like tone and feeling, but it was still predominantly oriented towards identifying the parts that make up the whole, reflecting a style of music where independent musical ideas can be identified as they come together, as in the symphonies of Mozart and Haydn. This shorter reverberation time was a continuation of listening expectations and a style of music developed during the Baroque period (1600–1750). During this period, Beranek writes that each musical detail was important and no portion of the sound should mask any other portion of the sound. As reverberation time increases, as in the Romantic period, it was not necessary to separate out each musical detail. As composers like Berlioz and Brahms experimented with increasingly larger orchestras, the musical details were not as important as the overall impression of the sound. In buildings designed for the performance and reception of nineteenth-century symphonies, acoustic success is achieved by maximizing the fullness of tone and not a clear definition of each musical idea.24 Complementing Beranek, architectural historian Michael Forsyth draws from visual art to explain how the aural expectations of listeners are both material and sonic. 24 Beranek, Music, Acoustics & Architecture, pp. 43–49; Beranek, Concert Halls and Opera Houses, pp. 8–13. It is interesting that the transformation of acoustic expectations paralleled changes in music criticism. As will be discussed in the following chapter, nineteenth-century music criticism was written for the general listener. Prior to this, music criticism was written for musicians and composers and largely consisted of precise details of compositional techniques. In the Romantic era, music criticism went from detailed treatises on the arrangement of musical notes and other compositional themes to discussing music through the language of Musical Romanticism. ‘Romantic’ criticism was characterized by metaphysical insights, poetic ambiguity, and imprecise musical terms that conveyed the emotional experience of listening; music criticism and acoustic expectations work in parallel.

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Music of the Romantic period is best heard in a relatively reverberant hall […]. The blending effects of reverberance is like the brush strokes of an impressionist painting, which obscures the subject so that the onlooker is induced to project his senses and emotions into the work in order to perceive the image […] the formally structured music of the Classical period, unlike music of the Romantic era, which predominantly expresses emotion, has reason and clarity as its basis. The detail (such as ornamentation, which embroiders the basic melody and provides ‘luster’) and the subtler emotional characteristics of eighteenth-century music were revealed to advantage in small, often overcrowded concert rooms of the time, such as the Holywell music room and the Hanover Square Rooms […] [and] the Altes Gewandhaus, Leipzig, where acoustic clarity was gained by a short reverberation time and extreme acoustic intimacy.25

The acoustic design of Boston Symphony Hall may have been new and modern, but the actual sound of this building was not. Applied to the design of this hall, Sabine’s formula was used to replicate the reverberation time of Leipzig’s Neues Gewandhaus because the patron of Symphony Hall decided that music, and in particular the symphonies of Beethoven, sounded best in this hall.26 Interestingly, the sound of the Neues Gewandhaus was meant to replicate the sound of its predecessor, commonly referred to as the Altes (old) Gewandhaus, which opened in 1781. Taking this history into account, the advent of modern concert hall acoustics is a more precise and effective form of aural imitation; it is the invention of an acoustic measurement to replicate an acoustic standard that had endured for centuries. By using the Neues Gewandhaus as an acoustic model for Boston Symphony Hall, Sabine’s genius was his ability to quantify and successfully predict an ideal sound of music that to that point had been judged against a horizon of musical expectations and sought through architectural imitation. The history of architectural acoustics is not the triumph of science over myth, as hinted at in the more hagiographical or triumphant accounts of Sabine’s accomplishment, but rather a history of the transition from humanistic theories of acoustics to empirical and predictive theories of acoustics: ‘The aural success of Boston Symphony Hall was, in part, the result of three centuries of accumulated knowledge about sound as a physical phenomenon. 25 Forsyth, Buildings for Music, p. 17. 26 Bagenal, ‘The Leipzig Tradition in Concert Hall Design’, p. 756; Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity, p. 15.

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At the beginning of the twentieth century, Sabine transformed the basis of acoustics—from philosophy to science and engineering.’27 Subjected to the rigour of physics, acoustic architecture became a visual science, a set of numbers divorced from any musical context. In the case of concert halls, acoustic standards are dependent upon musical culture while acoustic measurements are dependent upon a mathematical formula. The history of concert hall acoustics is one in which the former are quantified by the latter. This is a sort of McLuhan-esque substitution of the eye for the ear; acoustic standards were made visual and translated into acoustic measurements: ‘The drive towards science was, from the ancient world to the time of Bacon, a drive to extricate the visual from other senses.’28 The shift from the ear to the eye enabled acousticians to effectively isolate sound from the context of musical meaning. It is no longer necessary to ask why a concert hall needs to have a 2 second reverberation time. The tools and techniques that enable this sound to be imitated ad infinitum have transformed this culturally contingent standard into an objective measure for ‘good’ sound. If we consider the concert hall an aural medium—that is, as a medium of musical sound—then the shift from acoustic/aural standards to acoustic/visual measurements has had the effect of successfully fixing a subjective acoustic standard (1.9 to 2.2 second reverberation time) into an objective acoustic measure of what ‘good’ sound is. Musical Romanticism, in this sense, is realized through the aesthetic privileging of a style of music (the symphony), a mode of listening (attentive), and a reverberation time. This brings us back to the Concertgebouw. With a reverberation time of 2 seconds, the Concertgebouw is considered to be one of the best concert halls in the world for symphonies of the late Romantic period (1850–1900). With neither Sabine’s reverberation theory nor Leipzig’s musical heritage to draw upon, was it simply luck that the Concertgebouw sounded like it did? Like all successful concert hall designs luck did play a part, but the design and acoustic success of the Concertgebouw also results from the influence of the intermediaries who imagined and developed the plans to organize, fund, and build it. When music-loving members of Amsterdam’s bourgeoisie proposed building a new concert hall they were translating what was becoming an increasingly fixed idea of serious musical culture into something more durable than an aesthetic philosophy. It was this aspirational idea of a musical culture that provided the background against which particular design decisions were made: Would acoustics be important? What about 27 Blesser and Salter, Spaces Speak, Are you Listening?, p. 79. 28 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, p. 184.

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sightlines? Would the hall be shaped like a shoebox or a horseshoe? Would there be boxes for Royal guests? Would there be chairs for the audience or would people be encouraged to stand and move about? Would the stage be big enough for an orchestra? Answering these questions about design requires drawing upon distinct ideas about how audiences should listen, what type of music should be performed and listened to, and the meaning of this music. These ideas, in turn, would be realized in seemingly neutral design decisions such as the size and shape of the concert hall and the materials used to build it. In what follows I describe the process by which the design of the Concertgebouw was selected by a jury of architectural experts and members of Het Concertgebouw NV. What is interesting about this process is the emphasis that the jury placed on acoustics. A concern with acoustics is a concern with listening, and predictions of what will ensure good acoustics, albeit scientifically suspect from contemporary knowledge of acoustics, were a reminder to jury members and architects that an expectation of attentive listening (and all that this implies about musical meaning) was, if not prioritized, at least assumed by all involved.

Eyes or Ears? Düsseldorf’s Tonhalle, Leipzig’s Gewandhaus, and Amsterdam’s Felix Meritis as Models for the Concertgebouw Prior to Sabine, acoustic success was guided by listening expectations and achieved by architectural imitation. The design of Leipzig’s Neues Gewandhaus is an example of how good acoustics were accomplished before Sabine’s reverberation equation. Without a predictive theory of acoustics, the Gewandhaus’s architects were dependent on a tradition of concert hall design that had shaped Leipzig’s musical venues for centuries. What acoustician Hope Bagenal calls ‘the Leipzig tradition’ in concert hall design is a combination of aesthetic standards in regards to how music should sound and architectural imitation of buildings designed for music. This culminated in the design of the Neues Gewandhaus. The only way that this building could be considered a success was if it satisfied what Bagenal describes as ‘the discriminations and requirements of an unusually sensitive society’.29 This was accomplished by slavishly imitating design specifications of the musical venues that had preceded the Neues Gewandhaus and were considered to be acoustic successes, specifically 29 Bagenal, ‘The Leipzig Tradition in Concert Hall Design’, p. 756.

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the Altes Gewandhaus. These features included a rectangular hall with rounded corners and hallways surrounding the hall to protect the walls of the concert hall from coming into contact with the elements. As Bagenal explains, the Leipzig tradition of concert hall design dates back to at least the inns and coffee houses which were home to the Grand Concerts of the eighteenth century. Several old coffee houses survive in Leipzig, and in one I found a room having a dais with a low balustrade at one end, such as may have served the musicians at the ‘Three Swans’, and as certainly can be seen in the section of the old Gewandhaus. The low balustrade to the platform is a feature to this day of Leipzig concert halls, even those of recent date, and suggests an ancient tradition.30

As Bagenal’s remark hints at, Leipzig’s concert hall tradition dates back to venues that preceded the construction of the first (Altes) Gewandhaus in 1781, and his suggestion that Leipzig’s concert hall tradition is ‘ancient’ points towards a musical history in which venues for secular music were influenced and inspired by the architecture and acoustics of buildings for music like the Thomaskirche, which dates back to the thirteenth century. From this, one could suggest that Leipzig’s renown as a musical city is intertwined with buildings for music such that any reference to Leipzig as a great musical city should also include consideration of the venues that mediated the city’s musical culture. Like the Neues Gewandhaus and all other concert halls built before 1900 (and many built afterwards), the starting point for building the Concertgebouw was selecting a concert hall to imitate. The idea and the organizational plan for building a new concert hall began with G.C.C.W. Hayward’s 1881 article from De Amsterdammer and so it is not surprising that the ‘Temporary Committee for the Construction of a Concert Hall’ took up Hayward’s suggestion that they should model their concert hall on Düsseldorf’s Tonhalle. At the first meeting of the Committee (15 September 1881), it was decided that Cuypers’s suggested plot of land in Nieuwe Amstel would be purchased, and on 18 September 1881 the committee confidently announced that on this piece of land ‘a new concert hall will rise, entirely in the spirit of the hall in Düsseldorf’.31 The next step was coming up with a 30 Bagenal, ‘The Leipzig Tradition in Concert Hall Design’, p. 757; Beranek, Music, Acoustics & Architecture, pp. 273–277. 31 Hoogewoud, Kuyt, and Oxenaar, P.J.H. Cuypers en Amsterdam, p. 119.

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Preliminary sketch of a new concert hall for Amsterdam by P.J.H. Cuypers, c. 1882

preliminary design for the new concert hall. This would be Cuypers’s task and to help guide him he borrowed a copy of the blueprint of the Tonhalle from the Committee.32 In late 1881, working from this blueprint, Cuypers sent the committee some preliminary sketches of a concert hall and in early 1882 he produced a more detailed blueprint of the concert hall.33 He suggested a building measuring 30 m by 60 m. In the hall itself, the parterre was designed to hold 1600 seats, and the galleries on the second floor were to seat 800 people. The stage would hold an orchestra of 130 musicians and a choir of up to 700 singers. Besides the concert hall, the building also included lavatories, coffee rooms for intermissions, a billiard room, and a reading

32 Lansink, ‘Het Concertgebouw’, p. 70. A copy of this blueprint can be found in the P.J.H. Cuypers archive held at Het Nieuwe Instituut (formerly the Netherlands Architectural Institute (NAi)], Archive CUBA, t192. 33 Het Nieuwe Instituut, Archive CUBA, t192.

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room.34 Shortly after completing his first sketch Cuypers submitted a second design that, like his first sketch, took the Tonhalle as its starting point.35 Unlike the first design, however, this new design included a restaurant and a smaller concert hall intended for chamber music.36 This too follows the model of the Tonhalle, which contained a restaurant and smaller hall for chamber music (The Rittersaal). Upon seeing these proposed designs, the members of the Committee must have been impressed with the significance of their initiative. The proposed building was unlike anything that existed in Amsterdam. Although it was only a sketch, the proposed concert hall was singularly monumental and drew attention to the deficiencies of other venues in Amsterdam that the Committee would have known intimately, including the Odeon and the Felix Meritis (too small), the Paleis voor Volksvlijt (too big, not designed for music), and the Parkzaal (too small for big orchestras, too big for chamber music). With a preliminary design in hand, the plan to build a concert hall was made public in early March 1882. At this stage, the Committee again used the example of the Tonhalle to convey an idea of their plans to Amsterdammers. In the first circular sent to potential investors (discussed in the previous chapter), the Committee announced it would build a concert hall ‘equal to the famous music hall in Düsseldorf’, a message repeated in the Algemeen Handelsblad after the first public meeting of the Committee.37 Examining the process of imitation that guided the design of the Concertgebouw reveals that it was not simply the dimensions, design, or materials of the Tonhalle that the committee were intent on imitating. Rather, they believed that by imitating the design of the Tonhalle it would be possible to imitate Düsseldorf’s classical music culture. Hayward’s description of the Tonhalle as a temple dedicated to music conveys the impression that the Tonhalle was the materialization of a tradition that, Hayward and the committee hoped, could be imitated: ‘even though there’s a lack of all colour and gold, and everything is very simple […]. When one enters, one’s mind comes to ease, which is necessary to experience true enjoyment of the art.’ This can be discerned from the fact that other than the details contained in Hayward’s letter, in all of the references to the Tonhalle found in the Committee’s communications it is not described as a specific building that

34 35 36 37

Hoogewoud, Kuyt, and Oxenaar, P.J.H. Cuypers en Amsterdam, p. 119. Het Nieuwe Instituut, Archive CUBA, t192. Hoogewoud, Kuyt, and Oxenaar, P.J.H. Cuypers en Amsterdam, p. 120. Algemeen Handelsblad (8 March 1882).

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had characteristics that made it distinct from other concert halls; rather, it was a symbol of the best qualities of a musical culture. The selection of the Tonhalle as the model for Amsterdam’s concert hall seems, in retrospect, to have been a hasty decision. After all, the committee had not considered any other halls. On 28 March 1882 a letter appeared in the Algemeen Handelsblad that forced the Committee, and Cuypers, to reconsider using Düsseldorf’s hall as the model for their own. The author of the letter was W.F. Thooft (1829–1900), a well-known Dutch composer and former editor of the Dutch music journal Caecilia. Thooft writes that he was surprised to read that the Committee would model Amsterdam’s new concert hall on the Tonhalle because having lived in Düsseldorf for five years he was quite familiar with this hall and reported that it would be an unfortunate model because it contains ‘an enormous flaw that cannot be repaired […] poor sound’.38 This letter drew attention to a fact the Committee had overlooked in championing Hayward’s suggestion of the Tonhalle: his recommendation was not based on acoustics. Rather, Hayward was impressed by the Tonhalle’s simplicity, practicality, and the overall prettiness of the interior.39 To put it differently, Hayward used his eyes to judge the Tonhalle and Thooft used his ears. Thooft’s letter made an impression on the Committee by reminding them that if they were serious about building a new concert hall to the standards of the musical culture that they desired then they would need to prioritize acoustics. For this, they needed to consider concert halls other than the Tonhalle. Thooft took this as an opportunity to provide the Committee with advice for design considerations that would lead to good acoustics. In light of the scientific advances in acoustic architecture that began with Sabine, it is interesting to read Thooft’s ideas and suggestions on this matter. First, he reminds the Committee of what, in 1883, was certainly one of the more widely accepted theories of acoustic architecture: ‘Experience has shown that the concert halls which have the best acoustics are the ones with walls that are not in immediate contact with the outside air, but have a hollow space around them.’40 To this point, Thooft points out that both the Felix Meritis and Leipzig’s Altes Gewandhaus—buildings known for having good 38 ‘[…] dat de genoemde zaal een enorm en zoo goed als onherstelbaar gebrek heeft, t.w. een slechten klank’: ‘Ingezonden Stukken: De Nieuwe Concertzaal’, Algemeen Handelsblad (28 March 1882). 39 Lansink, ‘De akoestiek van het Concertgebouw historisch bezien’, p. 36. 40 ‘De ondervinding heeft geleerd, dat die concertzalen het best klinken, wier muren niet onmiddellijk met de buitenlucht in aanraking komen, maar geheel en al omsloten zijn door een holle ruimte’: Algemeen Handelsblad (28 March 1882).

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acoustics—have hallways that surround the hall itself. He writes that the biggest concern should be the shape of the hall. Square and rectangular rooms are fine for smaller audiences (600 people), but larger audiences require either a very long hall (which would result in a depreciation of sound quality) or the addition of galleries, which, Thooft believed, would be a dangerous acoustic experiment in square-shaped concert halls. Thooft’s ideas here seem in line with the science of acoustic architecture, as he recognized that increasing the volume of the hall through either length or height (the addition of balconies) will result in poor sound. Besides these potential acoustic problems, Thooft does not like the way sound behaves in square and rectangular rooms: The science of acoustics is still far too uncertain to be able to point out with certainty what the causes of poor sound quality are, but one can easily assume, as in the case before us, that whether or not the architects tread with care, there are nooks and crannies in the space in front of the orchestra in which the sound gets stuck. 41

For Thooft, the solution to these problems is to do away with all square and rectangular designs and concentrate on oval or circular halls: In the case of very large concert halls (like the one that is going to be built in Amsterdam), I think the round shape is the preferable option. Only this shape can solve the problem of combining space and quality of sound in a satisfactory way. A round room has the great advantage that even when it is big, the distance the sound has to travel remains reasonably short. 42

41 ‘De acoustiek is nog een veel te onzekere wetenschap, om alle oorzaken van slechten klank met juistheid te kunnen aangeven doch men mag gereedelijk veronderstellen, dat is het onderhavige geval, ook al is de bouwmeester voorzichtig, tegenover het orkest hoeken en gaten ontstaan, waarin het geluid blijft steken’: Algemeen Handelsblad (28 March 1882). 42 ‘De heeren bouwmeesters zullen dus voortaan bij het bouwen van concertzalen al wat hoekig is vaarwel moeten zeggen en een keuze moeten doen tusschen den ovalen en den cirkelronden vorm. Voor zeer groote zalen, zooals die aan de Van Baerlestraat zal moeten worden gebouwd, komt mij de laatstgenoemde vorm, de cirkelronde, het verkieslijkst voor. Deze vorm is de eenig geschikte, om het zoo moelijke vraagstuk, vereeniging van groote ruimte met goeden klank, bevredigend te kunnen oplossen. Al dadelijk springt het belangrijke voordeel in het oog, dat in eene ronde zaal, ook al is die groot, de geluidslijn van het orkestfront af gemeten, altijd betrekkelijk kort blijft, terwijl het aanbrengen van galerijen hier geen bijzonder gevaar voor den klank oplevert’: Algemeen Handelsblad (28 March 1882).

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Because Amsterdam already has an excellent oval concert hall in the Felix Meritis building, the architect of Amsterdam’s new concert hall should simply multiply the diameter of this hall until it meets the design requirements. The problem with this solution would be clear for an acoustician—enlarging a circular hall from a capacity of 600 to 2000 would significantly increase the volume of the room, leading to a reverberation of about 3.5 to 4.5 seconds, which would be disastrous. Although Thooft recognized the dangers of increasing the size of rectangular or square halls, he failed to recognize that increasing the size of a circular hall would have the same effect. Thooft’s prioritization of an aural perspective was a useful reminder that the musical culture the proposed Concertgebouw was to imitate and aspire toward must also include a consideration of acoustics. Thooft was neither an architect nor a scientist, but he was a well-known musician and critic and for the Committee this expertise and experience had a great deal of influence on the prospective design of the Concertgebouw. This was evident in the first program for the design contest, which was sent to the participating architects on 9 June 1882. Unique to this program was, following Thooft’s suggestion, the request that the large concert hall be oval shaped. 43 Prior to Thooft’s letter, Cuypers’s proposed designs contained a square or rectangular hall. The requirement for a round hall was short lived, though. Shortly after coming up with this program a meeting was called by the jury’s architectural experts to reconsider the program’s requirements. It was decided that another program would be drawn up. This final program, dated 20 July 1882, did not specify what shape the large hall should take. This key design decision would be left to the architect’s imagination. The only requirement, other than adhering to the size of the land, was that there should be space for 2000 seats and the stage should hold 120 musicians and 500 singers. Thooft’s influence was still present, though, as the measurements and shape of the small hall was to be based on the hall in the Felix Meritis. Other than these requirements, this final program is notable for its limited demands. Thooft’s acoustic concerns, and the response to these concerns, highlight the importance of the aural experience that this building would mediate. To privilege acoustics in the design process is to bias design towards the idea that music should be listened to in attentive silence. What if Thooft had complained that the number of seats would not be financially lucrative, or 43 Het Nieuwe Instituut, Archive CUBA, g192. See also Lansink, ‘De akoestiek van het Concertgebouw historisch bezien’, p. 37; Lansink, ‘Het Concertgebouw: Een drang tot hooger leven’, p. 74.

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that there would not be enough private boxes for important guests, or that seats discouraged socializing and dancing? These suggestions would seem unusual to the patrons of the Concertgebouw because they were attempting to build a medium for a musical culture that prioritized attentive listening. After all, if audiences were not expected to listen attentively there would be no compelling reason to prioritize acoustics over other design features like capacity, shape, or ornamentation. Achieving acoustic success in the era before Sabine meant relying on individuals whose expertise was both aural and musical. In her history of Boston Symphony Hall, Emily Thompson writes that this building’s patron routinely consulted with musicians for advice on architectural acoustics but in the end ‘preferred the counsel of scientists to that of musicians’. 44 In the case of the Concertgebouw, the patrons and architectural consultants who were tasked with selecting a design took advice from a number of selfappointed experts, including critics, musicians, and music lovers—experts who considered acoustics to be a musical problem and so had to rely on their ears to make decisions. The strategy of these experts for the design of the Concertgebouw was to imitate those halls in which music sounded best. Whereas Hayward associated the classical music ideal with the way a concert hall looks, Thooft recognized the importance of aural imitation for this particular building type. Although Thooft’s ideas about acoustics were incorrect, his ideas about aural imitation were not, and the jury that was tasked with selecting the design of the Concertgebouw made sure to emphasize acoustic design in their decision. Returning to the debate from the beginning of this book between the two music lovers who argued about what type of musical culture the Concertgebouw was to mediate, it seems even more clear now that the mu­ ziekliefhebber’s assumptions were correct. The Concertgebouw is a medium of classical music culture and as such certain behavioural expectations should be met. Although it could be argued that the function and meaning of the Concertgebouw was malleable and could potentially ‘fit’ any number of musical cultures and listening behaviours, the acoustic design of the building reveals a different perspective. The emphasis that was placed on acoustics implicates the design of the Concertgebouw as biased towards attentive listening and all that this entails in regards to musical meaning.

44 Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity, p. 14.

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The Design Contest The opportunity to design and build a concert hall in the Dutch capital was highly desired, and many famous Dutch architects jumped at the chance to take on this prestigious commission: J.H. van Sluijters, whose oeuvre included the Dutch and Swedish embassies in Paris, offered an existing design to the committee that he had on file; A.C. Bleijs, a well-known architect of churches, was willing to receive his wages in shares of Het Concertgebouw NV if he was given the commission to design the Concertgebouw. 45 The committee turned down these offers and announced that the design would be decided by a private contest between five Amsterdam architects: A.L. van Gendt, G.B. Salm, Th. G. Schill, C. Muysken, and Th. Sanders. 46 Van Gendt’s design eventually prevailed, but not without a degree of controversy. In June 1882 the jury for the contest was officially named: Sillem, von Ogtrop, Koopmans, and Joosten would represent the board of Het Concertgebouw NV, and three architects would serve as outside experts: J.L. Springer, I. Gosschalk, and P.J.H. Cuypers (none of whom had any experience designing or building a concert hall). Another architect, De Kruijff, was asked to be part of the jury but he declined because three of his friends (Muysken, Schill, and Sanders) were participants and he was familiar with their style. In a letter to the board of Het Concertgebouw NV, Muysken and Sanders wrote that what applied to De Kruijff should also be applied to Cuypers, Springer, and Gosschalk because in the small circle of Amsterdam architects, objectivity would be an illusion. Sanders and Muysken suggested adding two more members to the jury who would be appointed by the contestants themselves. This suggestion was not entirely unreasonable, as van Gendt (the eventual winner) had worked closely with Cuypers during the construction of Centraal Station and some believed that Cuypers would be able to recognize his style. 47 The architects were required to submit their designs by 1 October 1882, at which time each jury member would keep the designs for five days before

45 Lansink, ‘Het Concertgebouw’, p. 75 46 This was not the first time that van Gendt and Salm were involved in the design contest for a musical venue in Amsterdam. Both were invited to participate in the design contest for Amsterdam’s Vrije Gemeente (Free Congregation Hall) in 1879, which Salm won. Although the hall was commissioned and used for a religious group, in 1965 it became a music venue known as Paradiso, a popular rock music venue in Amsterdam: Lansink, ‘Het Concertgebouw’, p. 75. 47 Lansink, ‘Het Concertgebouw’, p. 74; Taat, Amsterdam Heeft het Concertgebouw, p. 35.

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compiling a report. 48 It was also arranged that in January 1883, before a decision was announced, the designs would be exhibited to the public in the Maatschappij Arti et Amicitiae (The Society for Art and Friendship) building in Amsterdam. Overall, the jury was unimpressed by all of the designs and concluded that none of the architects had met their expectations. Van Gendt designed a rectangular hall with rounded corners that the jury felt was too wide (35 m) in relation to its length (42 m). As well, the flat ceiling of the large hall was rejected because it would lead to poor acoustics. Salm’s large hall was rectangular, and like van Gendt’s was rejected for being too wide (33 m by 42 m). As well, the jury noted that the galleries/balconies extended too far (11 m), a feature that would lead to poor acoustics. Salm’s design for the small hall was rejected because it had a glass ceiling, which the jury dismissed for acoustic reasons. Muysken’s design was perhaps the most unique of the five: the large hall was oval with a glass ceiling, encircled by 21 real doors and two fake doors. Acoustically and stylistically, the jury felt that Muysken’s design was quite limited. Sanders proposed an almost square hall with rounded corners. The dimensions of this hall (33 m by 32 m) was approved by the jury. However, the rest of Sanders’s design (façade, interior, the design of the small hall) fell far below expectations. Schill also designed a square hall but with balconies that were too large and a ceiling that was not conducive to good acoustics. 49 Reviewing the comments that these designs generated, the Committee’s preference seemed to be for a rectangular hall with rounded corners, a design that followed the Leipzig tradition of concert hall design. As well, the Committee was clear in their belief that a completely flat ceiling was acoustically unacceptable. The architectural critics who attended the exhibition at the Arti et Amicitiae were also critical of the proposed designs. In De Opmerker (The Observer), the designs were described as ‘uninspired’.50 Salm’s design was ‘unarguably the best plan’, Muysken’s ‘peculiar’ oval hall was considered the worst, and van Gendt’s was the most economical in regards to the available budget. However, the review concluded that this private contest had not 48 This was also announced in the architectural journal Bouwkundig Weekblad 2 no. 42 (19 October 1882), 419. See also Lansink, ‘Het Concertgebouw’, p. 74. 49 Gemeente Amsterdam Stadsarchief, Archive 1089, no. 990. See also: Lansink, ‘De akoestiek van het Concertgebouw historisch bezien’, p. 38; Lansink, ‘Het Concertgebouw’, pp. 76–79; Lansink and Taat, Van Dolf van Gendt naar Bernard Haitink, pp. 22–23; Taat, Amsterdam Heeft het Concertgebouw, pp. 34–38. 50 ‘Bij eene aandachtige beschouwing der ontwerpen trok het onze aandacht, dat geen der vijf geachte inzenders bijzonder geinspireerd scheen geweest te zijn’: ‘Het Concertgebouw te Amsterdam’, De Opmerker, 18 no. 3 (20 January 1883), 23.

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provided the expected results and perhaps an open contest would have attracted better designs. The Bouwkundig Weekblad (Architectural Weekly) identified Schill’s design as the best because it met the requirements stipulated in the contest program better than the other submissions.51 Faced with five inadequate designs, the jury decided that the architects of what they considered to be the two best designs—van Gendt’s and Salm’s—would be invited to submit revised designs. The three other architects protested this decision in a letter that was published in De Opmerker and Bouwkundig Weekblad.52 Salm, Schill, and Muysken wrote that they would like all of the designs re-evaluated by five expert arbiters: two selected by Salm, Schill, and Muysken, two selected by the Committee, and one agreed upon by all parties. In response, the Committee argued that the designs were examined thoroughly and precisely by the architectural experts on the jury and that the jury’s decision was final.53 On 6 April 1883, A.L. van Gendt’s revised design was declared the winner of the contest. His design responded to the jury’s comments regarding his first submission. He made the large hall narrower, longer, and higher, and replaced the flat ceiling with one that was made up of ornately detailed stucco arches and other protruding lines and cylinders that would give the ceiling an acoustic quality the judges felt was desirable.54 As well, van Gendt designed the main hall to be surrounded by hallways, which in the pre-Sabine era of architectural acoustics was the closest thing to a reliable scientific law there was for acoustic design. The other finalist, Salm, presented a revised plan that confused the jury. Instead of revising his original design, he submitted an entirely new design that was an exact replica of van Gendt’s first design.55 Although it was clear to the jury that van Gendt was the winner, declaring his design the winner was suspicious. To ensure that the jury members did not know whose design was whose, they were signed with mottos, not names; van Gendt’s motto was Apollo and Salm’s was a treble clef. After the revised designs were submitted, the jury was given two wax-sealed envelopes that had a motto on the outside and inside a slip of paper with the name of the architect. The plan was to select the best design, either Apollo or treble clef, and then open the envelope of 51 ‘Prijsvraag Concertzaal’, Bouwkundig Weekblad 3 no. 3 (18 January 1883), 14–16. 52 Bouwkundig Weekblad 3 no. 5 (1 February 1883), 30; De Opmerker 18 no. 5 (3 February 1883), 51. These responses are also collected in Gemeente Amsterdam Stadsarchief, Archive 1089, no. 989. 53 De Opmerker 18 no. 6 (10 February 1883), 61. 54 van Gendt’s blueprints are kept in Het Nieuwe Instituut, Archive ACON, pf1 and pf2. 55 Taat, Amsterdam Heeft het Concertgebouw, p. 36.

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van Gendt’s drawing of the Concertgebouw with floorplan in top right corner

the winner to discover which architect’s design had won. This, however, was not necessary; to this day both envelopes remain sealed in the archives of Het Concertgebouw NV.56 Commentators have speculated that because the jury did not open the envelopes they knew in advance the architects that were associated with each motto, contributing to the belief that from the beginning this was not an entirely fair contest.57 In 1890, van Gendt published detailed drawings of the Concertgebouw and a short essay about the building.58 What is unique about the Concertgebouw is its width, 27.7 m. As a point of comparison, of the shoebox concert halls with which the Concertgebouw is typically grouped, Boston Symphony Hall is 22.9 m wide and Vienna’s Grosser Musikvereinssaal is 19.8 m; even the Tonhalle, a very wide hall, was only 24.2 m wide. These comparisons are interesting, but as van Gendt explained in his short essay, these halls did not influence the design of his Concertgebouw. It was Leipzig’s Neues Gewandhaus that he sought to imitate, writing that he hoped that the Concertgebouw would become to the people of Amsterdam what the Gewandhaus is to the people of Leipzig.59 Architecturally, there are many similarities between the Neues Gewandhaus and the Concertgebouw: the heating and ventilation systems are similar; the large hall in both buildings 56 GAA, Archive 1089, no.989. 57 Taat, Amsterdam Heeft het Concertgebouw, p. 36. 58 van Gendt, Concertgebouw te Amsterdam. This book was also published in De Bouwmeester 6 no. 16 (1890). 59 van Gendt also kept a book of images of Leipzig’s Gewandhaus titled ‘Das Neue Concerthaus zu Leipzig’ (1886). This book can be found in Het Nieuwe Instituut, Archive GEND 239, t301.

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The main concert hall of the Neues Gewandhaus, from a book on the Gewandhaus owned by A.L. van Gendt, 1886

is rectangular, with rounded corners; the placement of the staircases is similar; the location of the small hall at the back of the building, and the small hall itself, is meant to imitate an older hall (the Felix Meritis in the case of the Concertgebouw and the Altes Gewandhaus in the case of the Neues Gewandhaus); and the construction of hallways that surround the large hall is almost identical. But, there is one significant difference between the two buildings—size. The Concertgebouw was much wider than the Gewandhaus (19 m wide), and it could hold about 700 more people (1520 to 2200). Given these discrepancies, van Gendt’s remark about the Concertgebouw becoming for Amsterdam what the Gewandhaus is for Leipzig was not intended as a purely architectural analogy. Referencing Leipzig, the most renowned musical city in Europe in the late nineteenth century, a city whose concert hall was widely considered to be one of the acoustically finest halls in Europe, was van Gendt’s (and the board of Het Concertgebouw NV’s) not-so-subtle hope that the establishment of the Concertgebouw would inaugurate a well-regarded and lasting classical musical tradition in Amsterdam. Both van Gendt and Het Concertgebouw NV were correct in their assumptions about this building. By 1900, the classical music tradition had become a significant part of Amsterdam’s

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musical culture and by 1920 it was difficult to imagine that things could have been otherwise. Serious music was performed with precision and discipline for attentive audiences and the convivial musical culture of the nineteenth-century was relegated in both status and venue. Amsterdam’s concerts could now be distinguished between popular music, which could only be found in theatres, taverns, and other venues, and serious music, which was reserved for the Concertgebouw.

Towards a Contextual History of the Concertgebouw and Attentive Listening The work of Emily Thompson has been very influential in the formation of this chapter. Her book, The Soundscape of Modernity, is a masterpiece of how the history of technology and sound studies can complement each other and importantly Thompson is one of the first writers to study the concert hall as an aural/acoustic medium. In this concluding section I would like to reflect upon a comment that Thompson makes in her introductory chapter about modernity and the materiality of history in order to situate my own approach towards the history of buildings for music. Thompson writes: I believe that the essence of modernity is found in its material. I argue against the idea of modernity as a cultural zeitgeist, a matrix of disembodied ideas perceived and translated by great artists into material forms that then trickle down to a more popular level of consciousness […] modernity was built from the ground up. It was constructed by the actions and through the experiences of ordinary individuals as they struggled to make sense of their world.60

On the face of it there is nothing controversial about Thompson’s argument. She is reiterating a familiar methodological dictum of technology studies: follow the actors (ordinary people, but in particular engineers) by empirically tracing how they go about building the world. In this way, as she writes, modernity is found in ‘the creations of mundane engineers’, and our ideas about modern acoustics are produced through ‘unremarkable objects like sound meters and acoustical tiles’ that make up the history of acoustic architecture.61 She presents her methodological and conceptual 60 Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity, p. 11. 61 Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity, p. 11.

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ideas against an approach whereby grandiose abstract ideas about modernity ‘trickle down’ and are then taken up and translated by individuals, like mundane engineers. The job of the historian, in this top-down model, is to examine how abstract ideas are realized in the actions of people and the objects they build. Inverting this method, Thompson encourages the reader to interpret modernity from the ground up, as something that is nothing more than an accumulation of micro-level empirical facts that when taken together make up modernity. I find the distinction between ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ views of history to be unnecessary. Of course Thompson is correct in her assumptions about modernity being constructed by people who, through their actions, attempt to make sense of the world. But this is only one perspective to take towards the history of objects and technology. Alternatively, one could write a history inspired by the claim, made by Sigfried Giedion, that ‘tools and objects are outgrowths of fundamental attitudes to the world. These attitudes set the course followed by thought and action. Every problem, every picture, every invention, is founded on a specific attitude, without which it would never come into being’.62 Following Giedion, a history of architectural acoustics would include both an empirical history written from the perspective of ‘the ground up’ and a history of the ideas and contexts within which people act to build the world from the ground up. For example, in this chapter, I argued that the prioritization of acoustics in the design of a building for music presupposes the idea that audiences should listen in attentive silence. This aural disposition legitimates the idea that secular instrumental music is a serious art form capable of moments of aesthetic transcendence. These ideas about music and listening precede and provide the context within which Boston Symphony Hall, the Concertgebouw, and any other purpose-built concert hall is imagined and built. Attempting to find this aesthetic and aural context in the actions of engineers or objects like sound tiles or in the reverberation equation is pointless. These contexts escape the meticulous micro-level observations common to technology studies and other similar methodologies. Yet, without these aesthetic and aural contexts there would never have been a Boston Symphony Hall or a Concertgebouw; in other words, these ideas about music—what it means, how it is to be listened to, who its patrons are, its function—are as important as the actions of the individuals who constructed these buildings. This does not mean that concert halls are the materialization of some sort of Platonic ideal of attentive listening—a purely ‘top-down’ approach. What 62 Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, p. 3.

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this means is that technologies and architectural objects acquire their function and meaning within a specific context that is as historically important (and interesting) as the object itself. I would argue that this is not a matter of choosing a top-down or bottom-up view of history, but rather about establishing a balance between content, meaning technological devices and other objects, and the context within which these designs are proposed and make sense. In a city that generally avoided grandiose monuments, the presence of the Concertgebouw, a large neo-classical building dedicated to music, seemed conspicuous, given Amsterdam’s reputation as an unmusical city.63 But this was not simply a building; it was a musical medium that drew upon expectations concerning what music means and how it is to be listened to. I hardly think that these ideas, although mediated by the Concertgebouw, are co-original with the Concertgebouw (or the Gewandhaus or Boston Symphony Hall). What preceded this building and enabled Amsterdammers to identify with its intended design and meaning? In the next chapter I move beyond the empirical purview of technology studies to better contextualize the Concertgebouw within a larger musical culture so as to address questions concerning how and why this building made sense as a medium of the classical music tradition for nineteenth-century Amsterdammers.

63 ‘For some reason, monumental buildings do not work in Amsterdam […] the monumentality of Amsterdam exists only in the heads of its inhabitants, not on the streets’: Mak, Amsterdam: A Brief Life of the City, p. 4.

5.

Frisia Non Cantat: The Unmusicality of the Dutch What reason could there be for the fact that so few of our Dutch compatriots have a passion for music […] one is almost obliged to assume that it is entirely alien to our national character.1

Introduction Invoking both Sigmund Freud and Norbert Elias, Peter Gay writes that in response to the performance of a symphony, undivided silent attention is a triumph of the secondary over the primary process, ‘a civilized response that overrides instinctual urges’.2 From this perspective, the concert hall must seem odd to anyone unfamiliar with the rituals of classical music culture. To the uninitiated, these monuments to music are a material restraint against instinctual response, a temporary prison where we exhibit a bizarre type of self-discipline. As described in the introductory chapter, in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, secular instrumental music became endowed with meanings that transformed it from pleasant entertainment into an art-religion. These meanings are legitimated and reproduced through attentive listening. These transformations concerning how music is to be listened to and what music means normalized the material-musical presuppositions of the concert hall and allowed audiences to forget that attentive listening runs counter to fundamental human impulses. In the previous two chapters I examined how intermediaries, including Amsterdam’s bourgeois cultural elite, architects, and musicians, took it upon themselves to organize, fund, and design the construction of the Concertgebouw. The purpose of this exercise was to better understand the origins of the Concertgebouw, examining how these intermediaries proposed a distinctly sociotechnical vision of Amsterdam’s musical culture in which a concert hall would be the solution to what were considered musical problems. Following this, I examined the design of the Concertgebouw 1 ‘Over de beoefening der muzijk in Nederland’, Magazijn voor schilder- en toonkunst 2 (1828), 100; Quoted in Kloek and Mijnhardt, Dutch Culture in a European Perspective, p. 492. 2 Gay, The Naked Heart, p. 22.

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through a close attention to how ideas about musical meaning and attentive listening were translated into ideas about acoustic design. Yet, there is something missing in this history. The history of the Concertgebouw presented thus far does not explain why this particular building ‘made sense’ for Amsterdammers. For the Concertgebouw to ‘work’ as a musical medium, Amsterdammers had to identify with the ideas about listening and musical meaning that this building presupposed. On the event of the Concertgebouw’s inaugural concert, one of the founding members of Het Concertgebouw NV, D.H. Joosten, delivered a speech overflowing with sentiments that seemed to f it the occasion, perhaps none more fitting then his dedication of the building: ‘For her, the deeply treasured art of music, the sacred Muse, we have erected this temple.’ To borrow a term from Lewis Mumford, Amsterdammers had to be ‘culturally prepared’ to consider secular instrumental music a ‘deeply treasured art’ that is worthy of a ‘temple.’ Mumford explains cultural preparation through his examination of the origins of mechanization, which he dates back to changing concepts of time that paralleled the emergence of the clock in the thirteenth century. The clock materialized and disseminated a sense of order and regularity that had been part of monastic life. This change in the culture of time was the necessary precondition for the processes of industrialization and mechanization that would follow in the centuries to come. Before the new industrial processes could take hold on a great scale, a reorientation of wishes, habits, ideas, goals was necessary […] one must explore in detail the preliminary period of ideological and social preparation. Not merely must one explain the existence of new mechanical instruments: one must explain the culture that was ready to use them and profit by them so extensively.3

Following Mumford, in this chapter I delve deeper into the contextual origins of the Concertgebouw to explain why this building made sense for Amsterdammers as a medium of the classical music tradition. Asking how Amsterdammers became culturally prepared, examining how their attitudes and habits towards musical culture were reoriented, can explain how the Concertgebouw was able to make sense as a medium of classical music culture. This type of inquiry demands a closer examination of the meanings associated with the concert hall and the processes through which 3 Mumford, Technics and Civilization, p. 3.

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these meanings became normalized amongst Amsterdammers. Building a classical music culture is not just an architectural process—simply building a concert hall is not enough—building a musical culture also includes the development of a context that enabled listeners to identify with the presuppositions and expectations that inspired both the need and the design of the Concertgebouw. Philosophers of technology refer to this type of inquiry into the meaning of technical objects as a ‘hermeneutic’ approach to technology. A hermeneutic approach is oriented towards uncovering the reasons why individuals and social groups interpret technological objects as they do. The philosopher of technology Don Ihde persuasively argues that the meaning of any technological object can be accounted for by studying the contexts through which this meaning is produced. From this he argues that material objects are what they are only within a particular cultural context. 4 This means that ‘the “same” technology in another cultural context becomes quite a “different” technology’.5 In relation to the case at hand, a musical culture premised on the idea that secular instrumental music is a serious art form that should be listened to in attentive silence was little known in eighteenth-century Amsterdam and so the meaning, function, and design of any musical venue, including a purpose-built concert hall, would have been quite different from the meaning and function ascribed to this same building in the late nineteenth century. The meaning of any technical or material object, in other words, is not inherent to the object but contingent upon the context within which it is used. Another example from the history of musical culture can highlight the ‘fit’ between cultural context, technical device, and the meanings that are inscribed to these devices. In Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer, Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco conduct interviews with the designers of the Moog synthesizer and describe the difficulty of convincing people that an elaborate set of cords and dials could mean ‘musical instrument’ and that the sounds it produced was ‘music’. Robert Moog solved this problem by attaching a keyboard interface to his synthesizer: ‘The need to show that “you’re making music” was something of which Bob [Moog] was all too well aware […] and it is here that the wider culture and particularly the dominance of the piano played a role in shaping the synthesizer. Over time, almost inexorably, the Moog synthesizer became a keyboard synthesizer’.6 4 Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, p. 131. 5 Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, p. 144. 6 Pinch and Trocco, Analog Days, p. 61.

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Alternatively, Don Buchla’s synthesizer, which was developed and designed at the same time as Moog’s, was intentionally designed without anything that would denote it as a ‘musical instrument’. Buchla’s synthesizer never really took off as a musical instrument in the same way that Moog’s did; it became known as a tool that could create sounds, but not music. What contributed to the success of the Moog synthesizer as a musical instrument was that it fit within an existing musical culture where a keyboard signifies ‘musical instrument’. As much as the Moog synthesizer was something new and different, its meaning as a musical instrument was dependent upon a cultural and historical context wherein a keyboard interface equaled a musical instrument. Buchla’s synthesizer broke from this context, and because of this people had a difficult time understanding how this machine was a musical instrument. Andrew Feenberg writes that ‘both users and technologists act against a background of assumptions that belong to a lifeworld of technology which need not be thematized in the ordinary sense of events. A hermeneutic of technology must clarify this background’.7 In this chapter I attempt to clarify the background of assumptions and expectations that enabled the Concertgebouw to fit within the horizon of expectations of the building’s patrons, proponents, and potential audiences in late nineteenth-century Amsterdam. To do this I examine how ideas about musical meaning and attentive listening were articulated and disseminated through nineteenthcentury music criticism. Musical meaning is not a purely sonic or aural phenomenon, nor is it a historical inevitability that music be considered beautiful or transcendent or sublime. Ideas about musical meaning are constructed and disseminated through discourses about music. For historians of nineteenth-century musical culture, their chosen era of research is one in which people wrote a great deal about their musical experiences. Music criticism, newspaper articles, literature, concert programs, diaries, and even police reports have all been relied upon to reconstruct the contexts through which nineteenth-century musical culture was produced.8 Following the lead of these writers, in the following I draw from these discourses to better reveal the different ideas about musical culture and listening that existed in nineteenth-century Netherlands. Over the course of the nineteenth century, Amsterdam’s musical culture was transformed from largely inattentive audiences interested in what is 7 Andrew, Questioning Technology, p. 212. 8 Botstein, ‘Listening through Reading’; DeNora, Beethoven and the Construction of Genius; Johnson, Listening in Paris; Weber, The Great Transformation of Musical Taste.

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fashionable to audiences that listened attentively to works of the classical canon. The Concertgebouw was intended to be the materialization of ideas about music and listening that were significantly different than the popular, mimetic, or religious ideas about music that had held sway over Amsterdammer’s tastes for most of the nineteenth century. These ideas about musical meaning and listening behaviour did not originate with the Concertgebouw; rather, they circulated amongst critics and music lovers in the decades leading up to the opening of the Concertgebouw. Styling themselves after writers like E.T.A. Hoffmann, a few Dutch writers and critics were inspired to start their own journals based on the model of German-language music journals. These critics introduced a perspective that enabled readers to judge their country’s musical culture through formerly unimaginable standards regarding musical taste, audience behaviour, and the musicianship of orchestras. This chapter begins with a brief history of musical culture in the Netherlands, reviewing and addressing claims of a national musical impoverishment and suggesting that Musical Romanticism enabled the Dutch to recognize the importance of attentive listening and disciplined orchestras. From this, the emergence of music criticism in the Netherlands is placed within a trajectory that began with German-language publications in the late eighteenth century. Placing Dutch music criticism within this trajectory helps explain how biases concerning musical taste were developed in early Dutch music criticism. Following this I examine how critics projected this idea of taste onto musical performance. Turning to the reviews of a concert series by the Meininger Hofkapelle (the court orchestra of George II, duke of Saxe-Meiningen) that took place in Amsterdam in 1885, it is possible to see how critics were able to refine how Amsterdammers critically thought about what to listen for during concerts, in turn introducing standards against which orchestral performances could be judged. Frisia Non Cantat The Dutch are not known as a musical people. The Netherlands is a land of painters, a nation whose achievements with the brush seem disproportionate to its size. The Netherlands has also produced a number of important writers, including Erasmus, Spinoza, Multatuli, and Johan Huizinga. Is it little wonder, then, that even to themselves the Netherlands is a country that ‘writes with its left hand and paints with its right hand’.9 Although the 9 This phrase is attributed to Dutch cultural historian Gerard Brom, quoted in Wennekes, ‘Music and Musical Life’, p. 253.

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creative talents of the Dutch are hardly limited to the canvas and the page, one can’t help but think that their achievements in these fields have led to impossible expectations in other artistic endeavors. This may explain why, when considering themselves a musical nation, the Dutch are masters of self-deprecation. The idea that the Dutch are unmusical dates back almost two millennia. In Germania, Tacitus (56–117 AD) characterizes the Frisians, located in what is today the northern Dutch province of Friesland, with the phrase Frisia non cantat (Frisians do not sing). This slogan re-emerged in the Netherlands in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to distinguish the inferiority of Dutch compositions against the Italian, French, and German music that was popular amongst the cultural elite. In 1820, the Rotterdam organist and music critic Job Robbers proposed an interesting theory to explain his country’s lack of musical proclivity—blame it on the weather: Without a doubt we may rank ourselves among those nations that live beneath somber, dark, and cloudy skies, who scarcely enjoy more than a few hours each day of the cheerful, elating rays of the sun […]. This is the true cause of our backward nature in song.10

Meteorology notwithstanding, the apparent truth of Tacitus’s remark was confirmed by the Dutch composer and critic Willem Pijper in his polemical essay ‘The Anti-Musicality of the Dutch’. Other peoples sing, play violin, practice the piano diligently and thoroughly; in Italy one hears the music of mandolins and guitars, the Scots amuse themselves with the barbaric wail of their bagpipes, and the South American Mycetes tribes actually roar in unison. But in Holland the production of a series of sounds that more or less fit into a system has become an activity that falls first and foremost under the concept of Sunday.11

It may not have been his intent, but the comment that the Dutch are only musical under the concept of Sunday highlights the diminished place of music within their religious culture. Whereas in other countries musical life flourished under the auspices of the Christian church, this was not the case in the Netherlands. Here, Calvinism, in the form of the Dutch Christian 10 Quoted in Kloek and Mijnhardt, Dutch Culture in a European Perspective, p. 483. 11 Quoted in Wennekes, ‘Music and Musical Life’, p. 253.

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Reformed Church has had a distinct cultural influence since the sixteenth century.12 Calvin preached that improperly used, music led to ‘unbridled dissipations’ and ‘immoderate pleasure’.13 The sermon and the scripture, not their embellishment, should be the medium of worship. Motivated by Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians in which he wrote that it is better to speak five words of sense than a thousand in tongues, Calvin’s suspicions led him to equate instrumental music with nonsense. Like Plato, Calvin believed that music could lead the pious away from what is correct, writing: ‘As wine is poured into the cask with a funnel, so venom and corruption are distilled to the very depths of the heart by melody.’14 Calvin’s musical edicts were so strongly adhered to that in the years following his death in 1564, his followers melted down the organ pipes of his church in Geneva and had them made into flagons for the communion service. For nineteenth-century literary critic Conrad Busken Huet, the Dutch faithfully adhered to Calvin’s musical edicts, declaring war ‘against all musical forms without distinction, except for the singing of Psalms.15 This attitude, a leading Dutch musicologist contends, is responsible for instilling a ‘deep distrust against the lawlessness of the artist’ and prevented the average Dutch person from giving in to the ‘overwhelming exaltations and sultry sensualities’ of a truly moving musical experience.16 In contrast to other traditions of sacred music that contain moments of celebration, triumph, and elation, the lack of harmony and unchanging pitch that characterizes the unaccompanied singing of Psalms is the sound of thrift, toil, and the cruel fate of predestination. Hermann Hesse writes that ‘the music of a well-ordered age is calm and cheerful, and so is its government. The music of a restive age is excited and fierce, and its government is perverted. The music of a decaying state is sentimental and sad, and its government is imperiled’.17 Perhaps Calvinism is evidence of a religious equivalent to Hesse’s political theory of music. Calvinism proved to be a tremendous disadvantage for the development of a creative, or compositional, culture in the Netherlands. Compared 12 The southern part of the Netherlands (the provinces of Limburg and Brabant) remained Catholic after the reformation and Spanish revolt while the central and northern provinces (the Seven United Provinces) of the Netherlands, including the major cities of Amsterdam, Utrecht, Den Haag, and Rotterdam, embraced Calvinism. 13 Quoted in Blanning, The Triumph of Music, p. 10. 14 Calvin, ‘Geneva Psalter’, p. 347. 15 Quoted in Wennekes, ‘Music and Musical Life’, p. 259. 16 Reeser, Een eeuw Nederlandse Muziek, p. 104. 17 Hesse, The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi), pp. 31–32.

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against the musical embellishment encouraged by other denominations, the unaccompanied singing of Psalms is not conducive to elaborate creativity. To make matters worse, the Netherlands did not have a strong court culture outside of the minor court located in The Hague. Thus, the two primary institutions through which compositional talent flourished in Europe between the seventeenth and nineteenth century, the church and the court, were not widely recognized or exploited as musical institutions in the Netherlands.18 After the eighteenth century the Dutch cultural elite became increasingly aware that their culture of musical composition was mediocre. Rarely would indigenous talent be considered the equal of Italian, French, or German composers, and some audiences did little to discourage the idea of a national compositional inferiority. In the eighteenth century, when fashionable Dutch audiences ‘knew’ that Italian music was the only music worth listening to, the Dutch composer Quirinus van Blanckenburg (1654–1739) exploited this pretension to sell his music in his native land: When a few years ago I presented a musical composition of my own, it could not be sold at any price. But when, in place of my own name, van Blanckenburg, I put the Italian Di Castelbianco [being a direct translation] under it, it suddenly became exceedingly beautiful.19

For nationalistic music lovers of the nineteenth century, the lack of noteworthy Dutch composers became a source of consternation. In 1819, an anonymous critic conceded that music in the Netherlands was not Dutch but French: ‘We Dutch have no music of our own. Hard as I find it to make this confession, it is none the less based on the truth.’20 A century later, in 1920, the composer and writer Alphons Diepenbrock (1862–1921) reiterated this sentiment in a letter to the conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, Willem Mengelberg: ‘There is still no “Dutch” music, any more than there is a “Dutch” practicing of music, and that all our music is something imported from Germany, as it was imported from France and Italy during the eighteenth century’.21 It seems difficult to reconcile the idea that Musical Romanticism could flourish in Amsterdam, a city that is bereft of compositional talent, even to its own composers! 18 Kloek and Mijnhardt, Dutch Culture in a European Perspective, p. 484. 19 Quoted in Paap, ‘Composers’, p. 4. 20 Quoted in Reeser, ‘Introduction’, p. viii. 21 Reeser, Een eeuw Nederlandse Muziek, p. 10.

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Carl Dahlhaus writes that one of the conceits of Musical Romanticism is that individuality, originality, and nationalism are intertwined: ‘A composer was expected to be original, to bring forth the new in a manner which, at the same time, manifested the “origins” of his existence.’22 Diepenbrock’s letter is a reminder that the renowned musical capitals of nineteenth-century Europe are synonymous with great composers of the Romantic canon: Vienna has Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and Mahler; in Leipzig, J.S. Bach and Mendelssohn; and in Paris, Berlioz and Saint-Saëns; in Amsterdam, there is no comparable talent, and so for Diepenbrock the musical fate of his city and of his country will always be second-rate. What Diepenbrock didn’t realize is that it is only because of Romanticism’s influence in the Netherlands that this critique of musical culture is relevant. The lament that without any renowned composers to call their own Dutch musical culture would always be nothing more than a copy of another country’s musical culture provides an insight into the behaviours and norms through which Musical Romanticism was realized in Amsterdam. The idea of the great composer was co-original with Musical Romanticism. Freed from aristocratic dependence and adherence to a mimetic aesthetic, the romantic composer is free to create music for its own sake, embodying the heroic struggle of individual expression against the banality of convention. Commenting on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s review of Beethoven, R. Murray Schafer writes that the idea of the great composer is unique to Musical Romanticism: ‘the whole concept of the composer in the present-day sense of the word did not begin to be formulated until 1800 […] the Romanticists fashioned the concept of the composer in our sense of the word and flung him upward, a luminary, above other kinds of men and musicians’.23 Basing his tragic perspective on the notion of the great composer, Diepenbrock fails to recognize that Musical Romanticism, as a worldview or an epistemic framework, could flourish without a strong compositional tradition. Romanticism, Dahlhaus writes, is so expansive that it is not dependent on one single element. Even without a roster of canonic composers, it could still take hold: A collective term such as ‘Romanticism’ will contain some ideas that derive from a common root, others that merged from different sources, and still others that only came into casual contact with each other. And while the web they form is loose in some places and tight-knit in others, it 22 Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, p. 37. 23 Schafer, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Music, p. 76.

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nonetheless deserves the appellation of a collective name without necessarily being reconstructable from an underlying structure or substance from which all its elements derive.24

In the mid-twentieth century Dutch musicologists and historians confronted their compositional inferiority by emphasizing those aspects of their musical culture that fit within the expansive web of norms and behaviours that legitimated secular instrumental music as a serious art form. In doing so, a new history was constructed, one aware that the value of a country’s serious musical culture cannot be reduced to a roster of great composers. Critic, author, and composer Wouter Paap considers the history of Dutch musical culture this way, writing that the Netherlands, since the time of Sweelinck, is ‘certainly not favourable to creative music […]. In spite of all this, however, music was diligently practiced in Holland in the 17th and 18th century’.25 In his post-Romantic summary of twentieth-century Dutch musical culture, Eduard Reeser explains this perspective in more detail: There was a time when the musical culture of a country was measured mainly according to the brilliant individual creative talent which could develop there. Every valuation was made subservient to that standard, and thus it could happen that a country with few or no ‘great’ composers was passed over as being ‘unmusical’, without sufficient account being taken of other factors that can be of primary importance for a musical culture, such as a fertile musical folklore, flourishing amateurism, sound instruction in music, a widely varied concert and opera life, reproductive achievements of a high standard […] the lack of famous musicians in the Northern Netherlands by no means implies that there was no intensive musical life in these regions; on the contrary, there is ample proof that music had been practiced here with great enthusiasm at all times and by all levels of the population.26

Following Reeser’s historiography, I contend that serious musical culture in the Netherlands was realized through performance and reception and it was through these categories that Romanticism found a foothold in the Netherlands. Musical Romanticism is not limited to composers and their works; it is a musical culture that encompasses composition, performance, 24 Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, p. 25. 25 Paap, ‘Composers’, p. 4. 26 Reeser, ‘Introduction’, pp. vii–viii.

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and reception, and this is indicative of how the Dutch came to embrace Musical Romanticism—not through composition, but through listening and standards of performance. One need only refer to Gustav Mahler’s comment upon his first visit to the Concertgebouw in 1903, ‘the musical culture in this country is stupendous! The way the people can just listen!’27 Or Edvard Grieg, who in 1897 praised the Concertgebouw orchestra, imploring that Amsterdammers ‘should be proud of possessing such an orchestra’.28 The praise from these composers put Reeser’s comments in a Romantic context. With neither a history of compositional talent nor a musical culture that seemed favourable to developing composers of instrumental music, a serious attitude towards music was realized through attentive listening and an expectation that performances would be disciplined and demonstrate fidelity to the musical work. These themes were articulated and disseminated through music criticism that emerged in the Netherlands in the early nineteenth century.

The Invention of Modern Music Criticism and the Democratization of Taste The virtual explosion of music journalism that occurred in Europe in the early nineteenth century was an important means by which the Romantic ideals of aesthetic transcendence and autonomous musical works were introduced to a growing audience. Carl Dahlhaus writes that this tradition is as much literary as it is musical: Literature about music is no mere reflection of what happens in the musical practice of composition, interpretation, and reception, but rather belongs, in a certain sense, to the constituent forces of music itself. For insofar as music does not exhaust itself in the acoustical substrate that underlies it, but only takes shape through categorical ordering of what has been perceived, a change in the system of categories of reception immediately affects the substance of the thing itself. And the change in the conception of instrumental music that took place in the 1790s, the interpretation of ‘indeterminacy’ as ‘sublime’ rather than ‘vacuous,’ may

27 de Leur, ‘Gustav Mahler in the Netherlands’, p. 15. 28 Wouters, ‘Musical Performers’, p. 55.

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be called a fundamental one […] the pathos used to praise instrumental music was inspired by literature.29

Dahlhaus’s comments are quite revealing about the nature of musical culture: words contribute as much as sound to the meanings that are attributed to music. This is especially true in the case of instrumental music, which required persuasive arguments to be transformed from pleasant entertainment to sublime art. The question remains, though, whose words are given priority? Enter the professional music critic, an occupation that emerged alongside the need to define music as something greater than sound itself. The task of the critic, by virtue of extensive knowledge, professional instinct, and rhetorical persuasiveness, was to direct the taste of readers. This was a new profession within secular musical culture—someone who evaluates and judges music for the benefit of non-professionals and other listeners. Up until the mid-eighteenth century, music criticism was largely theoretical or didactic, and there was hardly any commentary on musical taste or discussions of music history.30 Matters of musical taste were strongly influenced by the aristocracy, who, by virtue of patronage and breeding, determined what was or was not good taste. As the cultural prestige of the aristocracy declined in the nineteenth century the task of taste making was taken up by publishers and the critics they paid, a new self-styled cultural elite who took it upon themselves to instruct others what they should listen to. This was the democratization of cultural elitism. Knowledge and opinion replaced ancestry and wealth as indicators of potential taste making prowess. What is unique to these critics is a style that is Romantic in both spirit and subject matter. These critics introduced categories and perspectives that constructed a history of Western musical culture that legitimated opinions and beliefs regarding listening, musical meaning, and creativity that, after two centuries, most listeners have unproblematically accepted as inherent to musical culture. Unlike eighteenth-century criticism that tended towards pedantic treatises written for specialists, the criticism found in nineteenth-century music journals emphasized ‘the interplay and correlation between musical details and the stimulating effects derived from them’, what Antje Pieper cleverly terms ‘subjective music criticism’.31 29 Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, p. 63. 30 Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, Vol. 3: The Nineteenth Century, chap. 38; Weber, The Great Transformation of Musical Taste, p. 20. 31 Pieper, Music and the Making of Middle-Class Culture, pp. 45–46.

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The popularity of this non-specialist style of criticism meant that for the growing audience of nineteenth-century music lovers, Musical Romanticism was not something encountered in the concert hall but something discerned from the standards of taste and rules of decorum that informed the music criticism found in journals, newspapers, and cultural magazines. There is a connection here between aesthetic philosophy, media content, and media form. The new standards of musical taste that emerged in the early nineteenth century required a new style of music criticism that included essays, reviews, and editorials written for interested listeners and other musical laity. As media theorists argue, the style and content of communication is intertwined with the forms that mediate communication. An increase in daily newspapers, for example, requires new content (editorials, comics, and advertisements) written in a new style (sensationalism) that appeals to a mass market. As a medium defined by the industrialization of print and the demands of a mass market, the daily newspaper was not suited for the communication of knowledge that required days and weeks to write and days and weeks to contemplate. The same was true for musical culture. An increase in printed material about music in the early nineteenth century required an increasing market for printed material about music. In order to appeal to a wide market, music criticism had to move beyond the technical details of scores or instrumentation. A new discourse, one that required openness to thinking about music through feeling, taste, history, and knowledge of a musical canon, but not necessarily notation, was well suited to a musical culture that was premised on aesthetic philosophy and historicism. Musical knowledge shifted from the specialized language of notation to the more inclusive language of interpretation, history, and aesthetics. This distinctly modern music criticism, which persists today in magazines, newspapers, and websites, can be dated to 1789 with the founding of the Leipzig-based journal Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (AmZ), whose editor was Friedrich Rochlitz (1769–1842). Translated as ‘universal musical news’ or, with more precision, ‘musical newspaper for the general public’, the AmZ has come to be known as one of the most important music journals of the early nineteenth century and played a crucial role in defining and disseminating the Romantic perspective.32 The AmZ emerged in response to the growth of the public concert and a demand for a nonspecialist literature 32 Weber, ‘Wagner, Wagnerism, and Musical Idealism’, pp. 34–37. See also Barbour, ‘Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung’; Taruskin, Oxford History of Western Music, Vol. 3: The Nineteenth Century, p. 289.

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about music and it was in this context that one of the most well-known and influential pieces of music criticism was published in 1810—a review essay about Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, entitled ‘Beethoven’s Instrumental Music’, written by the lawyer, critic, writer, composer, and conductor E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776–1822).33 In his essay, Hoffmann famously proclaims instrumental music to be ‘the most Romantic of all the arts—one might almost say, the only genuinely romantic one—for its sole subject is the infinite’.34 Predating the maxim, attributed to both Arthur Schopenhauer and Walter Pater, that all art aspires to the condition of music, Hoffmann argues that instrumental music’s non-representational nature is the perfect medium for expressing the essence of the sublime. He writes: ‘Music discloses to man an unknown realm, a world that has nothing in common with the external sensual world that surrounds him, a world in which he leaves behind him all definite feelings to surrender himself to an inexpressible longing.’35 Complementing this metaphysics of instrumental music, Hoffman emphasizes an important shift for modern music criticism: it is written for listeners, not musicians or composers. The consequence of this listenercentric criticism is a conflict between the tastes of the critic and the crass or simplistic tastes of unsympathetic, and largely anonymous, listeners. Although the critic stood between listeners and composers, they were firmly on the side of composers; their task was to teach listeners to appreciate music as composers would like audiences to appreciate music. Thus, the birth of music criticism was also the birth of an antagonism that persists in music criticism to this day between the poor taste of the masses (whomever they may be) and an authentic devotion to music that is truly important (as decided upon by critics). As one of the originators of this rhetorical strategy, Hoffmann is not kind to listeners, referring to them as ‘musical rabble’ who demand that Beethoven bridle his imagination so that his ideas are more accessible — as if the great composer should point listeners to specific interpretations like a caption does to a photograph. Against the demands of this imaginary audience of philistines, Hoffmann writes that it is the listener, not Beethoven, upon whom interpretive demands should fall: ‘How does the matter stand if it is your feeble observation alone that the deep 33 Hoffmann’s Beethoven review was originally published in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung in 1810. I refer throughout to the abridged form that was published in 1813 and anthologized in Strunk, Source Readings in Music History, pp. 775–782. Hoffmann’s musical writings in English can be found in Schafer, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Music. 34 Hoffmann, ‘Beethoven’s Instrumental Music’, p. 775. 35 Hoffmann, ‘Beethoven’s Instrumental Music’, p. 775.

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inner continuity of Beethoven’s every composition eludes? If it is your fault alone that you do not understand the master’s language as the initiated understand it, that the portals of the innermost sanctuary remain closed to you’?36 In the concluding paragraph of his review, Hoffmann imparts to the reader a lesson in the new art of musical appreciation: The correct and fitting performance of a work of Beethoven’s asks nothing more than that one should understand him, that one should enter deeply in his being, that—conscious of one’s own consecration—one should boldly dare to step into the circle of the magical phenomenon that his powerful spell has evoked. He who is not conscious of this consecration, who regards sacred music as a mere game, as a mere entertainment for an idle hour, as a momentary stimulus for dull ears, or as a means of self-ostentation—let him leave Beethoven’s music alone.37

There are also many religious allusions in Hoffmann’s Beethoven review (instrumental music ‘guides us out of life into the realm of the infinite’, and Beethoven’s symphony ‘leads the listener imperiously forward into the spirit world of the infinite!’38) that illustrate the importance of listening as an act of devotion and of potential religious-like transcendence.39 36 Hoffmann, ‘Beethoven’s Instrumental Music’, p. 778. 37 Hoffmann, ‘Beethoven’s Instrumental Music’, p. 780. 38 Hoffmann, ‘Beethoven’s Instrumental Music’, pp. 776, 778. 39 This idea preceded Hoffmann by a few decades in the writings of the German idealist and forerunner of Musical Romanticism Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (1773–1798). Wackenroder is one of the f irst to suggest that both secular and religious music be listened to devoutly. Writing anonymously in 1797 about the ‘art-loving Monk’ Joseph Berlinger, Wackenroder has his character attend a religious service and a secular music performance. In regards to the latter, Wackenroder writes that Berlinger, ‘Listened with precisely the same reverence as if he had been in church—just as still and motionless, his eyes cast down to the floor in the same way. Not the slightest sound escaped him, and his keen attention left him in the end quite limp and exhausted. His soul, eternally in motion, was wholly a play of sounds; it was as though, liberated from his body, it fluttered about the more freely, or even as though his body too had become part of his soul—thus freely and easily was his entire being would round with the lovely harmonies, and the music’s foldings and windings left their impress on his responsive soul. At the lighthearted and delightful symphony for full orchestra of which he was particularly fond…the music called forth a wondrous blend of gladness and sadness in his heart, so that he was equally inclined to simple and weep—a mood we met so often on our way through life, for whose expression there is no fitter art than music […] the art of which it may be said in general that the more dark and mysterious its language, the greater its power to affect us, the more general the uproar into which it throws all forces of our being’. Wackenroder, ‘The Remarkable Musical Life of the Musician Joseph Berlinger’, p. 753.

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But there is more to the sacralization of instrumental music than an affinity with religious piety. Hoffmann also assumes the aesthetic superiority of the symphony and the deification of the composer by constructing a particular historical trajectory that reaches its zenith with Beethoven. The emancipation of music from the demand to be either functional or mimetic was the work of the greatest composers: Haydn, Mozart, and, above all, Beethoven. Through their symphonies, these composers, ‘raised music to its present high estate’ by virtue of their profound and intimate ‘recognition of music’s specific nature’. 40 The influence of Hoffmann’s short essay cannot be underestimated. It is the manifesto of Musical Romanticism. It gave a lasting voice to an aesthetic transformation that had begun to influence musical thought in Germanspeaking Europe and would soon spread across Western culture. On the basis of this essay, Richard Taruskin calls Hoffmann ‘the most influential music critic of the early nineteenth century’; R. Murray Schafer refers to him as ‘an epoch-making critic, one of the greatest in the history of music’; and Mark Evan Bonds writes: ‘it is scarcely an exaggeration to call E.T.A. Hoffmann’s review of Beethoven’s Fifth the most influential piece of music criticism ever written.’41 Ideas about music that were first published in German-language music journals opened up new directions for musical culture in the Netherlands. Just as recordings enabled musical sound to travel beyond its point of origin in the twentieth century, in the nineteenth century print media enabled ideas about music to travel. Influenced by these journals, nineteenthcentury Dutch music critics were inspired to undertake the same edifying mission of their Eastern neighbours. In many ways, this ‘borrowing’ of a musical culture is as much a trait of Dutch musical culture than any indigenous style or sound. As musicologist Emile Wennekes points out, his own country’s musical history tends more toward adaptation than originality: ‘The place of the Netherlands in the musical history of the last four centuries was that of a loyal, indeed quite conservative trend follower. Developments abroad were followed at a modest distance but with warm interest, and skillfully assimilated.’42 In the nineteenth century, Dutch music lovers looked to German cities as models for their own musical culture, although they would have already been quite familiar with this musical 40 Hoffmann, ‘Beethoven’s Instrumental Music’, p. 776. 41 Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, Volume 2: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, p. 641; Schafer, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Music, p. 96; Bonds, Music as Thought, p. 6. 42 Wennekes, ‘Music and Musical Life’, p. 257.

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culture. German musicians held prominent positions in all of the major cities in the Netherlands in the nineteenth century, and German music was favoured by most of the country’s orchestras. 43 Of course, in the nineteenth century Germany’s musical culture was the envy of the Western world and so it is not surprising that in a small country that borders Germany, its music and musicians would come to be quite influential. What is compelling about the Dutch imitation of German musical culture is the characteristics that they choose to pickpocket. Unable to develop compositional talent to equal German composers, they imported other ideas. In particular, and especially in the case of Amsterdam, audiences were educated as to how to behave and how to listen and orchestras were critiqued for being undisciplined or encouraging the performance of ‘popular’ music. Foregoing questions of compositional talent, Dutch writers focused their critical gaze on how to listen and what to listen to. By developing these themes through music criticism, the horizon of expectations that Amsterdam audiences brought to concerts were, in time, comparable to German audiences and came to easily fit with the expectations presupposed by the Concertgebouw.

Music Criticism in the Netherlands in the early Nineteenth Century Influenced by the ideas of Wackenroder and Hoffmann, nineteenth-century audiences in Germany, Austria, and France listened devoutly as a means of aesthetic transcendence. In the Netherlands, concerts were social events, places to converse and socialize, not listen. In the 1806 Dutch novel, Historie van Mejuffrow Susanna Bronkhorst (History of Miss Susanna Bronkhorst), an idea of what the atmosphere was like at an orchestral performance in early nineteenth-century Amsterdam is conveyed when a character states that he could not hear the music over the conversations: ‘I would not have noticed that they were already playing if Suse Bronkhorst, after a movement of the first symphony had already passed, had not drawn my attention to this.’44 Writing about local musical audiences in 1814, the Amsterdam correspondent for the AmZ, German-born composer Johan Wilhelm Wilms, divided Amsterdammers into three categories: first, there was a small group who loved good music, like Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven 43 Reeser, Een eeuw Nederlandse Muziek, p. 10. 44 Loosjes, Historie van Mejufvrouw Susanna Bronkhorst, p. 13. Quoted in Metzelaar, From Private to Public Spheres, p. 51.

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or related composers; second, a more substantial group ‘who seek to enjoy the moment, but would rather not think whilst enjoying’; and finally, a third group who were satisfied when music ‘made a sound, was new, and pretty and light’. 45 An example of this last attitude can be found in an article that appeared in 1818 in the journal Euphonia: een weekblad voor den beschaafden stand (Magazine for the Cultured Class). Written in the form of a dialogue, this short piece, entitled ‘Letter to Cousin Abraham,’ was written by ‘Christiaan’, who described how his ‘Friend G’ took him to his first concert, only to mock him for listening with the utmost attention: He: ‘One can indeed see that you are not yet accustomed to attending concerts. But please enjoy yourself, it gives me great pleasure […].’ I (gazing in surprise): ‘But are you not enjoying yourself?’ He: ‘Oh yes, just not when hearing the music for the full orchestra. […]—Moreover, this symphony is already old.’ I: ‘Old or not—what is beautiful will be so forever.’ He: ‘One has a completely different style nowadays.’ I: ‘[…] Is beauty therefore in the new?’ He: ‘Fashion, my friend!—the spirit of the age—Besides, who visits a concert as if he were in church?’ I: ‘One is here to listen to the music, are they not?’ He: ‘And to meet one’s friends—to be able to say that one was there—[…] etc. etc’. 46

As these articles hint at, inattentiveness corresponded with a musical culture that was interested in fashion, spectacle, and sensationalism. 45 Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 16 (1814), 413; quoted in van Gessel, Een Vaderland voor Goede Muziek, p. 135. 46 Hij: “Men kan wel zien, dat gij nog niet aan het bijwonen van concerten gewoon zijt. Maar vermaakt gij u, het doet mij pleizier […].” Ik (hem vreemd aanziende): “Vermaakt gij u dan niet?” Hij: “O Ja, maar niet in het aanhooren van muzijk voor het vol orchest. […]—Bovendien, deze symphonie is reeds oud.” Ik: “Oud of niet—wat schoon is, blijft dit altoos.” Hij: “Men heeft heden een’ geheel anderen trant.” Ik: “[…] Bestaat dan het schoone in het nieuwe?” Hij: “De mode, mijn vriend!—de geest van den tijd—Bovendien wie bezoekt een concert als of hij in de kerk kwam?” Ik: “Men komt toch om de muzijk te horen?” Hij: “En om zijne vrienden te zien—om te kunnen zeggen, dat men er geweest is—[…] enz. enz.” Euphonia 4 (1818): 90–94, quoted in van Gessel, Een Vaderland voor Goede Muziek, p. 153.

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Fostering a musical culture premised on the ideals of Musical Romanticism did not take hold as quickly in the Netherlands as it did in other countries. Although the many newspapers and cultural journals that were published during this time included pieces about poetry, literature, theology, history, and law, music was largely overlooked. 47 In 1815, an anonymous group calling themselves the ‘Amsterdam Society of Friends of Art’ attempted to remedy this situation by proposing a series of music reviews in the journal Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen (National Literary Review). It must seem peculiar to each and every true music lover, how, in this city, over the past twenty years, music is almost universally performed, and has risen to great heights, yet one rarely reads any mention in our journals or newspapers of worthy performances (while some of them, often rightfully so, eagerly report of foreign talents). 48

It was ridiculous, they wrote, that music was rarely discussed in Dutch journals, and that the rare reviews that appeared in Algemene Kunst- en Letterbode (Arts and Literature Messenger) were merely translations of articles from the Allgemeine Musikalsche Zeitung. To counter this, the Amsterdam Society of Friends of Art decided ‘to place a few critical reviews of musical performances […] in order to […] allow the public to form a much more considered opinion of the music of our country than was possible until now’. 49 The response to this endeavour was not positive. Many felt that 47 Drop, ‘Het Nederlandse muziekleven tussen 1815 en 1840 in tijdschrift weerspiegeld’, p. 181. The first Dutch journal dedicated to music was published in 1756 and existed for only one year. Samenspraaken over muzikaale beginselen (Dialogues about Musical Principles) was modelled on the Hamburg-based journal Critica Musica (1722–1725) and contained information about musical literature, short reports on musical events, and translations of articles that had appeared in German music journals. Between the last issue of Samenspaaken over muzikaale beginselen (1756) and the first issue of Amphion (1818), there was little written about musical culture in the Netherlands: see van den Hul, ‘Early Music Periodicals in the Netherlands’. 48 ‘Zonderling, voorzeker, moet het elken echten beminnaar der Muzijk voorkomen, dat, hoezeer dezelve, hier ter Stede niet alleen, vooral sedert de laatste twintig jaren, schier algemeen beoefend wordt, maar ook in ons Land eene aanzienlijke hoogte bereikt heeft, men slechts zeldzaam, in onze Tijdschriften of Dagbladen, (in sommige van welke men gretig, schoon veelal met het hoogste regt, van uitheemsche talenten melding maakt) hoort gewagen van hier te lande verdienstelijk uitgevoerde Concerten of Muzijkstukken, of van uitmuntende inlandsche Toonkunstenaars, of van hunne muzikale voortbrengselen’: Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen 2 (1815), 606. 49 ‘Eenig beoordeelend berigt te plaatsen over uitgevoerde Muzijkstukken […] ten einde […] het kunstminnend Publiek in staat te stellen, om den toestand der Muzijk in ons Vaderland over

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publishing reviews discouraged musicians and music lovers because at this time concerts were organized by private societies, and many of the musicians were amateur performers. Because these concerts were limited to members, an aura of suspicion would follow critical reviews, and many of the amateur performers may be discouraged from participating. Given this, in 1816 it was announced that the publication of music reviews would cease: ‘The task that was executed by us for a few months, which we handled with the purest and most unselfish intentions and by which we tried to fulfill an unfulfilled need in order to promote the advancement of musical perfection, has ended.’50 Music criticism of the type found in journals like the AmZ had to wait until the publication of Amphion in 1818 to find a dedicated outlet in the Netherlands. The editor of Amphion was N.W. Schroeder Steinmetz (1793– 1826), a proponent of musical Romanticism and a loyal follower of E.T.A. Hoffmann, whose influence was decisive in the development of Steinmetz’s musical sensibilities. Both Steinmetz and his journal were located in the northern Dutch city of Groningen, which was geographically and culturally close to Germany. Steinmetz was a reader of Romantic literature (Novalis, Jean Paul, Johann Ludwig Tieck) and wrote in a style influenced by the writers whom he admired. The following is excerpted from a review in which Steinmetz takes the side of a composer whose work was performed by inadequate musicians for an unappreciative audience: Poor composer! Why do you not pull yourself out of the stream of diatribes that cover you from all sides? Why not hide yourself and your art in a desolated corner of the earth, where you, albeit in solitude, can quench your heart with the fruits of your genius, where you are free of the painful tortures of a beastly tyranny.51

het algemeen beter te kunnen beoordeelen, dan tot hiertoe’: Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen 2 (1815), 607. 50 ‘aan den taak, met de zuiverste en belangelooste bedoelingen vóór ons voor weinige maanden aangeslagen, en waarmede wij, naar ons vermogen en het bepaald bestek van dit Maandwerk, aan eene nog onvervulde behoefte poogden tegemoet te komen, ter bevordering van Muzikale volkomenheid’: Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen 2 (1816), 258. 51 ‘Arme komponist! Waarom rukt gij u niet uit den stroom der schimpredenen, die u van alle kanten bedekken? Waarom verbergt gij u niet u en uwe kunst in eenen afgelegen hoek de aarde, waar gij wel is waar, slechts in eenzaamheid uw hart aan de vruchten uwer genie kunt laven, maar waar gij ook bevrijd zijt van de pijnigende martelingen eener onmenschelijke dwingelandij’: Amphion 3 no. 1 (1820: 5).

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Under Steinmetz’s guidance, Amphion introduced E.T.A. Hoffmann to a Dutch audience by publishing translations of his musical writings that had appeared in the AmZ .52 In many ways, Amphion was intended to be the Dutch version of the AmZ. It was directed to a broad audience, indicated by its subtitle, A Journal for Friends and Students of Music, and like its German equivalent, the editors promised to publish pieces written in a way that would be ‘not only understandable and useful to musical professionals and experts, but also music lovers’.53 More concretely, the content of Amphion matched the content of the AmZ: philosophical and historical essays on music, short outlines of theoretical works on music, concert reviews, reports from cities in the Netherlands and abroad, and news items. And perhaps most telling for drawing parallels between these journals, Steinmetz was in possession of every volume of the AmZ published since 1798.54 Steinmetz made it the mandate of Amphion to introduce Dutch readers to the idea that secular instrumental music should be attended to as a serious art form, which befit a journal that took the AmZ as its model. Steinmetz characterized the Dutch as people who enjoy music, but do not take it seriously; music is ‘a means to spend time pleasantly’. This view, he writes, is unfavourable for developing ‘the purpose of music as art’ because it discourages a pursuit of the ‘higher meaning’ of music and prevents people from ‘appreciating the pleasure that art truly gives’.55 An important part of remedying this attitude was critiquing inattentive listening. ‘And what are our concerts?’ an essay in the first issue reads, ‘nothing other than talking parties […] the artist, in vain, displays his talents while audience members only want to draw attention to themselves’.56 In a later issue, the same complaint is raised in response to a performance of a Haydn symphony. 52 Hoffmann, ‘De muzikale pijnbank van den kapelmeester Johannes Kreisler’;Hoffmann, ‘De Ridder Gluck’. Steinmetz also translated Hoffmann’s collection of short stories, Nachtstücke (Night Pieces [1817]), which was published in the Netherlands in 1826. 53 van Gessel, Een Vaderland voor Goede Muziek, p. 98. 54 van Huffelen, ‘Het Muziektijdschrift “Amphion”’, p. 40; van den Hul, ‘Early Music Periodicals in the Netherlands’, p. 173. 55 ‘de muzijk beschouwd als een middle, om den tijd aangenaam door te brengen […] dat deze beschouwing van het doel der muzijk voor de kunst zelve hoogst nadeelig is, althans wanneer men niet tevens met derzelver hoogere bedoeling bekend is…waardoor hij tot het onwaardeerbaar genot geraken kan, hetwelk de kunst, in den waren zin genomen, schenkt’: Amphion 1 no. 1 (1818), 119. 56 ‘En wat zijn onze koncerten? Niets anders, als ik mij zoo een moge uitdrukken, dan praatpartijtjes en zamen komsten, om zich met elkander bezig te houden, terwijl de kunstenaar, vruchteloos, al zijne talenten ten toon spreidt, om de aandacht tot zich te trekken’: Amphion 1 no. 1 (1818), 80.

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The anonymous reviewer is distressed by Dutch audiences who amuse themselves by chattering on about the weather: ‘But why does one not try to let the audience, when it is in a talkative mood like that, be inspired by new and fine music, which we truly have in abundance, and instill interest in the true purpose of these musical gatherings’?57 The idea that music could inspire listeners, that it had a ‘true purpose’ other than as a pleasant backdrop for conversation, must have been a novel concept for many Dutch readers in the early nineteenth century. Noise and inattentiveness may have seemed natural to Dutch audiences, but it was conspicuous to foreign musicians and writers who attended concerts in the Netherlands. In 1823, the German composer Carl Friedrich Zelter wrote a letter to Goethe in which he described a performance that he had attended at Amsterdam’s Felix Meritis. He regaled his friend with reports of an audience who arrived intermittently and are seemingly interested in everything but the performance: ‘the men are smoking, the women are knitting […] one has a book and is reading, the ear itself shies off, reluctant to listen’.58 In the AmZ, similar observations are made. A review of a Rotterdam concert from 1826 reported that the Dutch considered music to be merely fashionable, not the ‘independent supreme art’ that the Romantics had made it out to be. For the Dutch, the concert hall was not a temple of art but more like a tavern or a casino, a place where people would meet their friends to the accompaniment of music: ‘So long as this attitude towards music prevails, the correspondent wrote, silence would remain a pious hope.’59 Despite the efforts of critics, the ideal of attentive listening continued to be a hard sell in the Netherlands throughout the early decades of the nineteenth century. In 1830, an anonymous member of an Amsterdam orchestra published a complaint about audience behaviour. He felt that a concert was a place ‘to listen to music’ and demanded that during performances ‘the audience be quiet and calm’. Many attended concerts, he complained, ‘to see people whom they don’t see every day, observe other’s attitudes, clothes, hair, etc. etc., even during the most beautiful performances, loudly discuss this with their friends, even so loudly that the people who were

57 ‘Maar waarom tracht men ook niet, het publiek, wanneer het zoodanig tot spreken gestemd is, door nieuwe schoone muzijk, waaraan het toch waarlijk niet ontbreekt, meer belang voor het eigenlijk doel der muzijkale bijeenkomsten in te boezemen’? Amphion 3 no. 3 (1820), 154. 58 E.A. Klusen, Johann Wilhelm Wilms und das Amsterdamer Musikleben 1772-1847, (Buren: F. Knuf, 1975), p. 119. Quoted in Metzelaar, From Private to Public Spheres, p. 51. 59 Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, XXVIII (1826), pp. 388-389, quoted in van Gessel, Een Vaderland voor Goede Muziek, p. 153.

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talked about could hear the often inappropriate remarks as if they were directly spoken to’.60 The battle against inattentive listening was not the only battle being fought. Critics also sought to introduce ideas of taste. Unsurprisingly, these ideas were in-step with the taste of German musical critics. Musical taste, be it for symphonies or punk songs or folk music, is the property of distinct social groups from subcultures to classes to nations.61 Following Hoffmann and the editorial principles of the AmZ, the criticism found in many German-language music journals invoked a notion of taste premised on the aesthetic superiority of the symphony, especially those written by German composers. As many musicologists and historians point out, this aesthetic idealization can also be considered a vehicle for German nationalism: ‘German music was being proclaimed as high art by designating foreign music as frivolous, unsubstantial, and unworthy. Aesthetic and national categories of distinction coincided, overlapped, and blurred.’62 These critics usually equated poor musical taste with an inclination for either French or Italian music. The music of these countries did not aspire to the heights of symphonic music. It was oriented towards entertainment instead of transcendence, dazzling spectacle instead of serious devotion. Against this, a powerful rhetoric against the culture of superficial (and ‘irrationally’ popular) musical frivolity associated with non-symphonic music became a theme of serious music criticism in the nineteenth century. For critics and their readers, dilettante and virtuoso were ‘code words for musicians who capitalized on bad taste […] fashion and mode were the unkindest words in their vocabulary, but gain and profit came a near second’.63 Of the two, dilettante and virtuoso, the latter was considered a greater threat to musical culture. While the former referred to amateur musicians, who, it was felt, brought down the level of performance, virtuosos brought down the standards of good taste by appealing to listener’s baser instincts: they were superficial and egocentric, and their significance was nothing more than displays of dexterity—a sort of musical gymnastics. The critique of virtuosity as a commentary on musical taste can be read in Rochlitz’s many musical sermons, like this one from AmZ: ‘The best artists find themselves compelled to waste their time in deceitful practices of petty artistry and 60 Algemeen nieuws- en advertentieblad, no. 24, March 24 1830, quoted in van Gessel, Een Vaderland van Goede Muziek, p. 154. 61 Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of Taste; Gramit, Cultivating Music; Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style. 62 Pederson, ‘A.B. Marx, Berlin Concert Life, and German National Identity’, p. 89. 63 Weber, ‘Wagner, Wagnerism, and Musical Idealism’, p. 34.

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charlatanism […] the contortions and excrescences, which the crowd is accustomed to seeing as something sublime, are among the many unfortunate effects of virtuosos upon the public.’64 Framed in this way, the battle against virtuosity was an attempt to construct standards regarding the types of meaning that could be attributed to particular musical styles: The most effective and concrete strategy for advancing the virtues of the symphony was to profile it against other instrumental music—variations, potpourris, fantasies, and concertos—not deemed ‘serious’ or ‘symphonic.’ Advocates for the symphony (above all Mozart and Haydn, but somewhat later Beethoven as well) thus built and reinforced an ideologically charged binary opposition positioning serious or ‘symphonic’ music against insignificant, ‘dilettantish’ instrumental music.65

In Amphion, German ideas of taste were developed through the derision of virtuosos. Part of Amphion’s self-declared civilizing mission was to scorn the taste that Dutch audiences had for bravura and shallow exhibitionism. In a review written by Steinmetz, he dismissed the virtuoso embellishment of a composition as nothing more than spectacle, ‘ritardando, tempo rubato, or whatever these tools to enchant the audience are called’.66 Fidelity to the score was the goal of musical performances, not cheap pandering to audiences. A negative attitude towards non-German music, especially French music, was also evident in the pages of Amphion. However, when considering this attitude it is important to remember that these aesthetic critiques were also influenced by a renewed nationalism. The French occupation (1795–1806) and annexation (1806–1815) of the Netherlands resulted in animosity towards France. In the aftermath of Napoleon’s defeat and the departure of French troops from Dutch soil, the term ‘French’ had derogatory connotations. In Amphion a reviewer complained that a composition was ‘put together in an entirely French way, this being with little plan and without any salt or spirit in the arrangement’.67 Steinmetz in particular had reason to be angry with the French—his father was conscripted into the

64 ‘Ueber reisende Virtuosen’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 4 (18 August 1802), 753; quoted in Weber, ‘Wagner, Wagnerism, and Musical Idealism’, p. 34. 65 Gooley, ‘The Battle against Instrumental Virtuosity’, pp. 77. 66 ‘Wars van alle misbruiken van ritardando, tempo rubato, en hoe die hulpmiddeltjes tot begoocheling van den toehoorder verder heten mogen […]’, Amphion 2 no. 4 (1819), 279. 67 ‘[…] geheel naar de Fransche wijze zamengesteld is, namelijk, met weinig plan en zonder zout of geest in de bewerking’: Amphion 3 no. 4 (1820), 229.

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French army and killed in the Battle of Talavera de la Reina in 1809.68 In an essay entitled ‘Over het karakter der Fransche muzijk en over den muzikalen aard der Hollanders’ (About the Character of French Music and the Musical Nature of the Dutch), Steinmetz intertwined aesthetics and nationalism by warning readers against the nefarious tendencies of French culture: ‘For truly it is about time to open our eyes and learn to see how the excessive use of French music will negatively influence our musical nature, indeed, even our moral and political culture.’69 For readers of the time, it may have been difficult to distinguish between the aesthetic and national—regardless, the sentiment was the same: French music was not ‘art’ in the same way that German music was. This equation of French music with frivolity continued throughout the early nineteenth century. In 1825, the future prime minister of the Netherlands, Johan Rudolph Thorbecke (1798–1872), in a letter to his father, complained that Amsterdam audiences follow the dictates of fashion, not art, and would probably go so far as dismissing Haydn and Beethoven if it was fashionable. The cause of this was the negative influence of French music: ‘Amsterdam’s high culture wants compositional tricks and skills rather than real masterpieces […] in this too they are imitating superficial French music and have no sense for art other than pleasure.’70 Although Amphion had a limited run (1818–1822), it had a detectable influence on the development of musical culture in the Netherlands. After Amphion, German essays and articles were translated in Dutch publications with greater regularity, including Beethoven’s Heiligenstadt Testament, which was published in Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen in 1828, and more of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s musical writings, which were published in Argus (1828/1829) and De Nederlandsche Mercurius (1828/1829).71 Amphion was also the first journal to publish the work of Dr. F.C. Kist (1796–1863), who was to play an important role in nineteenth-century Dutch musical culture.72 Kist served as editor for the Nederlandsch Muzikaal Tijdschrift (Netherlands Music Journal) between 1840 and 1844 before starting his own musical 68 van Huffelen, ‘Het Muziektijdschrift “Amphion”’, p. 41. 69 ‘Waarlijk het is meer dan tijd, dat wij onze oogen openen, en dat wij leren inzien, welke nadeeligen invloed dit onmatig gebruik der Fransche muzijk op onzen muzikalen aard, ja zelfs op onze zedelijke en politieke kultuur zal uitoefenen’: Amphion 1 no. 3 (1818), 202. 70 ‘De Amsterdamsche hoogbeschaafde toon wil liever kunststukjes van compositie en uitvoering, dan ware kunstwerken, die men toch niet verstaat te genieten. Men loopt ook in dezen de oppervlakkige Fransche muziek en uitvoering na en heeft dan geen zintuig meer overig voor eigenlijk kunstgenot’: quoted in van Gessel, Een Vaderland voor Goede Muziek, p. 136. 71 van Gessel, Een Vaderland voor Goede Muziek, p. 97. 72 Amphion 3 no. 1 (1820), 48–80.

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journal, Caecilia: Algemeen Muzikaal Tijdschrift van Nederland (Caecilia: General Music Journal), which was the longest-running music journal in the Netherlands (1844–1944). As explained in Kist’s introductory essay, Caecilia would not be a specialist magazine for musicians, it would be a ‘general’ music magazine intended for a wide audience of listeners: ‘its single and only goal should be the promotion of good taste in music and the flourishing of the art in this country.’73 For Kist, as it was for Steinmetz, impartiality meant that the tenets of Musical Romanticism were the standards against which musical culture was to be judged. This was to be expected, though, as it was well known that Kist had a never-ending enthusiasm for German music and admired everything that this culture had to offer musically.74 That this enthusiasm inspired what could be considered ‘serious’ Dutch music criticism was, by the middle of the nineteenth century, a matter of course. This brief history of music criticism in the Netherlands highlights a tendency amongst the self-appointed promoters and guardians of musical taste against superficial music characterized by virtuosity, which was clearly the choice of the masses. For those few who were gifted with an ear for music, only serious works by German composers could qualify as art. An appreciation of the composers who made up the Romantic canon was an indication of what critics deemed to be good taste. But more than this, critics began expecting these works to be performed professionally. By the 1850s, Musical Romanticism had slowly begun infiltrating Amsterdam’s musical culture, influencing how musicians, critics, and audiences thought, wrote, and spoke about music, which in turn began to have tangible effects on Amsterdam’s musical culture. An example of this influence was the formation of the Maatschappij Caecilia Orkest (Caecilia Orchestra Society) in 1841 (There is no association between the journal Caecilia and the Caecilia orchestra—both are named for Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of musicians). Historically, the level of the Dutch orchestras left much to be desired. This was especially true in Amsterdam. In an 1815 concert review, the Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen reported that the musicians were out of sync, and the conductor, instead of correcting them, just laughed. It seems that this was not an unusual occurrence. An 1816 review of a symphony in Amsterdam’s Felix Meritis printed in the same magazine complained of a disjointed performance in which many musicians lost their composure,

73 Caecilia 1 (1844), 1–3. Quoted in Hoedemaeker, ‘Caecilia: Algemeen Muzikaal Tijdschrift van Nederland’. 74 Reeser, Een eeuw Nederlandse muziek, pp. 64–65.

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laughing throughout the performance.75 The Caecilia orchestra introduced a new standard for Amsterdam concerts by banning virtuoso performances and institutionalizing the classical canon. Between 1841 and 1856, J.B. van Bree conducted 33 Caecilia concerts, most of which were orchestral works by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Mozart, and Carl Maria von Weber, with occasional works by Haydn, Schumann, and Bach filling out the repertoire.76 In Caecilia, Kist lauded this orchestra and their concerts with what, to him, must have been the greatest compliment imaginable—they were better than a German orchestra! In 1853 he wrote: There is no city in Germany that can boast an equal to this orchestra’s exquisite execution. The choice of works is outstanding […]. No wonder that not only the citizens of Amstel [Amsterdam] rush to be a part of the most beautiful concerts in Holland, but artists and amateurs from all over the country set out for them.77

In 1865, Johannes Verhulst was appointed director of the Caecilia concerts, and between his appointment and his retirement in 1886, he maintained an adherence to German symphonic music, favouring the works of Beethoven, Schumann, and Mendelssohn.78 Although Amsterdammers were convinced that their orchestras had improved, they were still second-rate when compared to orchestras from other European cities. There were two enduring problems with Dutch orchestras—the number of amateurs who filled their ranks and the lack of rehearsals. The former plagued most orchestras in the Netherlands and was unavoidable given the cost of outfitting an entire orchestra. The latter problem, Reeser writes, was the result of limited funds to pay musicians. Musicians had to play in as many orchestras as possible to earn a living. Given this situation, musicians did not have the time to dedicate themselves to one orchestra or one performance, thus rehearsals were a luxury: ‘Until the end of the century, rehearsals were, as a rule, limited to one plus a dress

75 Drop, ‘Het Nederlandse muziekleven tussen 1815 en 1840 in tijdschrift weerspiegeld’, p. 187. 76 Reeser, Een eeuw Nederlandse muziek, p. 59. 77 Reeser, Een eeuw Nederlandse muziek, p. 59. 78 Reeser examined the programs from the Caecilia concerts that Verhulst conducted between 1865 and 1886. He found that German composers dominated Verhulst’s programming: first was Beethoven with 45 performances, followed by Schumann with 23, Mendelssohn (16), Weber (16), Gade (15), Schubert (13), Haydn (11), Cherubini (11), Bach (9), Mozart (8), and Brahms (8); Reeser, Een eeuw Nederlandse Muziek, p. 107.

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rehearsal, with the orchestral accompaniments for soloists often played a prima vista.’79 The shortcomings of Amsterdam’s orchestras could no longer be hidden after Hans von Bülow and the Meininger Hofkapelle (the court orchestra of George II, duke of Saxe-Meiningen) performed three concerts in Amsterdam in 1885. These performances ‘astonished the Dutch and opened their eyes to the painful and irreversible fact that Dutch musical life lagged far behind what was happening in other countries’.80 Astonished at the quality of the Meininger orchestra and its conductor, Hans von Bülow, reviews of these concerts pointed to a ‘lack’ within Amsterdam’s musical culture. As cultural historians Jan Bank and Maarten van Buuren write, the Meininger concerts were a turning point for Dutch musical culture: ‘From then on it had been impossible to conceal the mediocrity of the average orchestral playing in the Netherlands. People also started to look with new eyes at Dutch conductors, who had been for so long regarded, with chauvinistic short-sightedness, as stars.’81 Although the Amsterdam critics did not openly critique their city’s orchestras, their reviews made sure to emphasize that Amsterdammers had never heard such tremendous performances. Examining the reviews, these concerts highlighted what Amsterdam audiences were missing from their own city’s orchestral concerts.

1885: The Meininger Hofkapelle visit Amsterdam Amsterdam audiences who had been educated to celebrate German composers and their canonical works must have been impressed by the programmes for these concerts: Thursday, 12 November 1885 Brahms—Tragic Overture Beethoven—Symphony No. 4 Brahms—Symphony No. 3 Beethoven—Leonora Overture No. 1 and Leonora Overture No. 3

79 Metzelaar, From Private to Public Spheres, p. 31; Reeser, Een eeuw Nederlande Muziek, p. 21. 80 de Leur, ‘Amsterdam—A Courageous Community’, p. 76. 81 Bank and van Buuren, Dutch Culture in a European Perspective, p. 471.

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Friday, 13 November 1885 Berlioz—King Lear Overture Brahms—Symphony No. 4 (Conducted by Brahms) Wagner—Faust Overture Beethoven—Symphony No. 8 Friday, 20 November 1885 Beethoven—Die Weihe des Hauses, Overture Schubert—Grosse Fantasie (Liszt arrangement) Saint-Saëns—Tarantelle Brahms—Variations on a Theme by Haydn Beethoven—Symphony No. 5

Critics emphasized that what they had heard from the Meininger Hofkapelle was an unprecedented level of precision. In a review of the first performance, the music critic from the Nieuws van den Dag wrote: ‘The performance of Brahms’s Symphony was more than excellent. The clear phrasing and the outstanding differentiation of what usually remained slightly vague was so pure and clear that no doubt remained about the composer’s intentions […] the two Leonore overtures, especially No. 3, were performed in a way we seldom get to hear.’82 The Algemeen Handelsblad impressed upon its readers that this orchestra operated as a whole: ‘What one admires most about the Meininger Orchestra is not the virtuosity of some of its members, although it undoubtedly contains several talented soloists, but the exceptional beauty of the ensemble […] the whole body, as it were, is one big instrument, played by its conductor.’83 And in Caecilia: There have never been orchestral performances that we admired or enjoyed as much as these concerts […]. The highlight of the three evenings was Brahms’s Third Symphony. We have heard this piece five 82 ‘De uitvoering van de symphony van Brahms was daarentegen boven allen lof verheven. Het duidelijk phraseeren, het voortreffelijk nuanceeren maakten nu, wat anders licht onduidelijk blijft, zoo klaar en helder, dat geen twijfel overbleef omtrent de intentiën van den componist… Evenzoo wedervoer de twee Lenore-Ouverturen, vooral de 3de, eene uitvoering zooals men ze wel zelden te hooren zal krijgen’: Coenen, ‘Muzikale Kroniek: Concert der Meiningers’, Nieuws van den Dag (14 November 1885). 83 ‘Wat men bij de Meiningerkapel het meest bewondert, is niet de virtuositeit van sommige harer leden, ofschoon zij ongetwijfeld verscheidens talentvolle solisten telt, maar het zeldzaam schoon ensemble…Het geheele lichaam is als ‘t ware één groot instument, dat bespeeld wordt door zijn directeur’: Algemeen Handelsblad (15 November 1885).

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times before, once even conducted by the composer himself, but all pale before the rendering heard the first night. It was if a new light was shed on this piece of music.

In response to the Beethoven symphonies that were performed, this same critic writes that audiences heard ‘elements in these symphonies we never noticed before, symphonies we thought we knew very well sometimes sounded completely different, much better than in the past’.84 The conductor of the Meininger Hofkapelle, Hans von Bülow (1830–1894), was a revelation for Amsterdammers. At the time of these performances, von Bülow was one of the most famous conductors in the world, and under his leadership the Meininger Hofkapelle, to which he was appointed conductor in 1880, had become one of the most celebrated orchestras in Europe.85 Von Bülow studied music intently, rehearsing and conducting without a score. He expected the same from his musicians and rehearsed until every tiny detail was as he wanted it.86 Writing in Caecilia, composer W.F.G. Nicolaï’s remarked on the control that von Bülow had over his orchestra and the infectious love of music he instilled in his musicians bordered on hyperbole, yet his enthusiasm was that of a true music lover: Discipline in the Meininger orchestra is of great importance. The eyes of the players were continually fixed on their leader or their score; their attitude was spirited and cheerful and on their face one could read an expression that reflected the warmth and pleasure for what they were doing. No one ever complained about rehearsals being too many or too long; on the contrary, the musicians themselves were convinced that only by constant practice could they achieve a result equal to what was expected from their orchestra.87 84 ‘Nooit hebben wij bij eenige orkestuitvoering dermate bewonderd en genoten als bij deze concerten […] voor ons was het glanspunt der drie concertavond de uitvoering van Brahms’ 3de symphonie (in F.). Vijf malen hebben wij dit werk reeds gehoord, waarvan eenmaal onder leiding van den componist, maar voor eene wedergave als het nu het geval was, zwijgt alles; het was ons als trad dit werk een geheel ander licht voor onze oogen, en dit was met al de werken van Brahms het geval […]. Dit een en ander maakte, dat wij in deze symphonien, die we toch goed meenden te kennen, werkingen hoorden, die wij nog nooit opgemerkt hadden en dat alles somtijds geheel anders, maar ook veel beter klonk dan vroeger’: Caecilia: Algemeen Muzikaal Tijdschrift van Nederland 23 (1 December 1885), 222. 85 For more on von Bülow, see Holden, The Virtuoso Conductors, pp. 11–37. 86 Hallmark, ‘The Star Conductor and Musical Virtuosity’. 87 ‘Een punt van groot belang is de dicipline die zichtbaar in het Meiningsche orkest heerscht. Onafgebroken was de blik der spelers op hun aanvoerder of hunne partij gevestigd; hunne

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Like Nicolaï’s remarks, the praise bestowed upon von Bülow by Amsterdam critics can be read as a reflection of his talent and a reflection of the level of conducting in Amsterdam. After the first concert, the Nieuws van den Dag exclaimed: ‘In one word, the Meininger Hofkapelle is a company with a soul, and that soul is von Bülow.’88 The critic for the Algemeen Handelsblad was similarly impressed after this first performance: ‘What a conductor! Few orchestras have the privilege of being conducted by such a gifted and intelligent man as Dr. Hans von Bülow.’89 And in Caecilia, Nicolaï’s lengthy article about von Bülow, which was published alongside the reviews of the concerts, was filled with enthusiastic praise for the conductor: All the qualities that one could ask for in an orchestra director come together in this exceptionally gifted man: he conducts everything from memory, indicates the different tempi with decisive gestures, just as he does with the entry of the different instruments or the sudden shift in nuance; he makes sure the principal motifs of each work can be heard above the others, or rather, he always makes sure the accompanying parts are subordinate […] he rehearses every piece with unflagging zeal, ensuring he will only appear in front of an audience when each and every member of the orchestra completely masters his or her part.90 houding was flink en opgewekt en op het gelaat eene uitdrukking waarin zich warmte en ingenomenheid met hetgeen zij te doen hadden, duidelijk afspiegelde. Geen klachten over te veel of de langdurig repeteeren hoorde men uit hunnen mond; integendeel ze waren zelf overtuigd dat slechts door aanhoudend oefenen een uitslag te verkrijgen was gelijk aan die van hun orkest’: Nicolaï, ‘Dr. Hans van Bulow’, Caecilia: Algemeen Muzikaal Tijdschrift van Nederland 23 (1 December 1885), 219. 88 ‘In één woord, de Saksen Meiningsche is een korps met eene ziel, en die ziel is Von Bulow’: Nieuws van den Dag (14 November 1885). 89 ‘En welk een directeur! Weinig orkesten hebben het voorrecht door een zoo begaafd en intelligent man als dr. Hans von Bulow te worden aangevoerd’: Algemeen Handelsblad (15 November 1885). 90 ‘Alle eigenschappen, die men in een voortreffelijk orkestdirecteur zou kunnen zoeken, vindt men in dezen buitengewoon begaafden man vereenigd: hij dirigeert alles uit het geheugen, geeft de tempo’s met beslistheid aan evenals het intreden der verschillende instrumenten of de plotselinge afwisseling van nuance; hij laat de hoofdmotieven van elk stuk boven de andere uitkomen, of liever hij laat de begeleidende partijen steeds ondergeschikt zijn; hij is cosmopolite inzooverre hij de meesterwerken zoowel der duitsche als de fransche school laat uitvoeren; hij stelde zijn orkest en het publiek in de gelegenheid onbekende of de nieuwste meesterwerken uit den jongsten tijd te leeren kennen; hij voert alle verbeteringen bij zijn orkest in, die tegenwoordig op het gebied van den instrumentenbouw worden uitgevonden en […] hij is onvermoeid in het repeteeren der uit te voeren werken, zoodat hij daarmede niet voor het publiek verschijnt tenzij ieder lid van het orkest zijne partij geheel in zijne macht heeft’: Caecilia: Algemeen Muzikaal Tijdschrift van Nederland 23 (1 December 1885), 219.

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One can’t help but think that Nicolaï’s remarks concerning rehearsals were intended to draw attention to the dismal state of preparation that plagued Amsterdam’s orchestras. The review that appeared in Caecilia, for example, pointed out that the Meininger orchestra ‘rehearses every day for a few hours and that the members of the orchestra have no other task than attending these rehearsals and the concerts’.91 That it was necessary to print this seemingly innocuous fact is evidence of how rare rehearsals were for Amsterdam’s orchestras. ‘It would be desirable,’ Nicolaï wrote, ‘for the many orchestral musicians […] who attended these “von Bülow concerts” to […] follow the wonderful examples they were given.’ Between 1818, when the f irst issue of Amphion was published, and 1885, when the Meininger concerts occurred in Amsterdam, a shift had occurred in Dutch musical culture. The meaning of instrumental music was transformed from a pleasant backdrop for socializing to something that is the object of devout attention. These ideas did not occur naturally in the Netherlands. They arrived as a copy of something that had originated in German-speaking Europe. Normally, this would imply a deviation or depreciation of the original culture, but this was not the case in the Netherlands. The assimilation of Musical Romanticism was an assimilation of certain elements of Musical Romanticism, namely, attentive listening, and the expectation of orchestral professionalism. This assimilation of an aesthetic philosophy was the cultural preparation that Amsterdammers required to make sense of the expectations that were designed into the Concertgebouw. From the construction of a world in which a new concert hall was the solution to the problems that ailed Amsterdam’s classical music culture to design decisions about acoustics, seating arrangements, capacity, and stage design—all of this was undertaken with the expectation that secular instrumental music should be listened to in attentive silence. This is how serious musical culture would be constructed in the Netherlands, by building a concert hall that was the materialization of the expectation of attentive listening and standards of performance that could rival other leading musical capitals.

91 ‘Naar wij uit goede bron vernamen, repeteert dit korps dagelijks eenige uren en hebben de orkestleden niets anders te doen, dan zich juist bij die repetitie en hunne concerten te bepalen’: Caecilia: Algemeen Muzikaal Tijdschrift van Nederland 23 (1 December 1885), 222.

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Coda: Amsterdam Becomes a Musical City The inaugural concert in the Concertgebouw, which took place on 11 April 1888, began with ‘The Entry of the Guests’ from Wagner’s Tanhäusser, followed by Handel’s ‘Hallelujah’ chorus from Messiah, Bach’s Orchestral Suite No.3 in D Major, and ‘Autumn’, from Haydn’s The Seasons. The second part of the concert was a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Reviews of the performance were overwhelmingly positive. The only complaints decried the lack of Dutch music on the program. In Het Nieuws van den Dag, Daniël de Lange wrote: ‘I think it is striking that at the inauguration of the Concertgebouw in the capital of Holland, there was not one work of Dutch origin […]the front of the building features Sweelinck’s bust and you can see his name in the hall, but his works seem to be hidden and kept safely under lock and key’.92 De Amsterdammer put it more bluntly: ‘The Concertgebouw is not a German “Tonhalle” on Dutch soil’!93 These nationalistic complaints were minor, though. The critics recognized that the significance of the evening was not the music. The critic from Het Nieuws van den Dag put it best when he wrote: ‘There is no serious music lover in the city who didn’t greet the beginning of this new era in the musical history of Amsterdam with interest, if not intense joy.’94 This new era did not arise instantaneously, as demonstrated in the letter, discussed in the introduction of this book, which was published in November 1888 and complained that the Concertgebouw did not engender a gezellig musical experience. Over time, however, these types of complaints and expectations became increasingly infrequent, and the Concertgebouw provided the necessary material counterpoint to the to the ideas and opinions disseminated through print media like the AmZ, Amphion, Caecilia, De Amsterdammer, and Algemeen Handelsblad. This new era of musical culture began in earnest with the appointment of Willem Kes (1856–1934) as the first conductor and musical director of the 92 ‘Ten eerste treft het mij, dat bij de inwijding van een Concertgebouw in de hoofdstad van Nederland, geen enkel werk ouderen of jongeren datum van een Nederlandsch kunstenaar waardig gekeurd werd op het programma eene plaats in te nemen. Wel is b.v. Sweelinck’s borstbeeld in ‘t front gebeiteld, wel neemt zijn naam een plaats in de zaal in, maar zijn werken houdt men, naar ‘t schijnt, zorgvuldig achter slot […]’: de Lange, ‘Muzikale Kroniek’. 93 ‘Het Concertgebouw is immers geene Duitsche “Tonhalle” op Nederlandschen bodem!’: De Amsterdammer (15 April 1888). 94 ‘Er is in de stad geen ernstig muziekvriend, die niet met belangstellen, zoo niet innige vreugde, den aanvang begroet van een nieuw tijdvak in de muziekgeschiedenis van Amsterdam’: Het Nieuws van den Dag (13 April 1888).

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Concertgebouw orchestra. Kes recognized that the Concertgebouw was a powerful medium, and he differentiated it from other musical institutions in Amsterdam by imposing an unprecedented degree of discipline on both the orchestra and audience. The orchestra was expected to display the professionalism and dedication of leading European orchestras, and Kes enforced this through measures such as fines for missing rehearsals or for talking during performances. As befits a purpose-built concert hall, Kes also disciplined audiences to suit this building’s distinct monumentality: ‘Waiters were banished from the auditorium—when the orchestra played there was to be no tea drinking, no strolling about, no chatting. The audience was to sit and listen attentively.’95 Kes succeeded in maintaining a ban on smoking during performances and in 1890 made it a rule that the doors of the hall were to be kept shut during performances.96 Kes’s achievements were noticed elsewhere, and in 1895 he accepted an offer to become the conductor of the Glasgow symphony. His replacement was the pianist and conductor from Utrecht Willem Mengelberg (1871–1951). The growing reputation of the Concertgebouw, which included its orchestra and its audiences, enabled Mengelberg to invite prominent foreign composers to perform their works with his orchestra in Amsterdam.97 As noted previously, Edvard Grieg (1843–1907) praised the Concertgebouw orchestra in 1897 and called ‘upon the Amsterdam public to be proud of possessing such an orchestra and always to hold it in high esteem’. In the same year, Richard Strauss (1864–1949) was so pleased with his experience in 95 de Boer, Concertgebouw & Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, p. 40 96 Bank and van Buuren, Dutch Culture in a European Perspective, p. 472. For more on Willem Kes’s disciplining efforts and the transformation of Amsterdam’s musical culture, see Taat, ‘Willem Kes’. 97 Mengelberg even undertook revisions of the acoustic design of the Concertgebouw. In 1896, Mengelberg opened the season with a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony. This performance was lauded by the press, who claimed that this symphony had demonstrated that the orchestra and its building were world class. Up to that point, critics of the Concertgebouw pointed to what they heard as a problem with the balance between the brass and percussion instruments, which they felt overpowered the sound of the other instruments, primarily the strings. The performance of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth seemed to many to be the first time that a conductor had used the reverberation and other material attributes of the Concertgebouw to intentionally influence the performance and reception of a musical work. Using the halls reverberation to emphasize the dynamic range and blending of sounds that Tchaikovsky’s composition called for, Mengelberg’s interpretation of this work forced people to rethink their critique of the Concertgebouw’s acoustics. The response to this symphony was not enough, though, to convince Mengelberg that the acoustics of the hall were perfect. In 1899, the very steep stage of the Concertgebouw was lowered in an attempt to create a greater balance in the sound of the orchestra: Clement, ‘The Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, in its Early Years’.

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Amsterdam that he dedicated his symphonic tone poem Ein Heldenleben (which had its world premiere in the Concertgebouw in 1899) to this same orchestra.98 Of all of the guests whom Mengelberg invited, composer Gustav Mahler (1860–1911), whose symphonies are considered by some to be the culmination of 150 years of the Classical-Romantic musical tradition, had the deepest connection with both Amsterdam and the Concertgebouw. There was a special affinity between Mahler and Amsterdam’s musical culture. Speaking in 1910 with his friend, the musician and writer Otto Neitzel, Mahler claimed that Amsterdam was a musical city where ‘I am completely understood—by the conductor, by the orchestra, by the public’.99 Mahler was so impressed with the city that he wrote to Mengelberg that Amsterdam had become a second home for him.100 Mahler first visited Amsterdam in 1903 to conduct the Concertgebouw orchestra’s performance of his Third Symphony, and in a letter to his wife Alma, he proclaimed: ‘The musical culture in this country is stupendous! The way the people can just listen!’101 Mahler returned in 1904 to conduct his Second and Fourth Symphonies; the Fourth actually performed twice in the same evening. Mahler could not contain his pleasure and wrote to his wife, ‘I am truly delighted by the people here. Just imagine the program for Sunday: I. Fourth Symphony by G. Mahler, Interval, II. Fourth Symphony by G. Mahler. What do you think of that?!’102 Mahler returned to the Concertgebouw in 1906 to hear Mengelberg conduct the Fifth Symphony, and in 1909 he returned to conduct his Seventh Symphony. Mahler died in 1911, 30 years after the destruction of the Parkzaal and the publication of Hayward’s widely discussed article suggesting that a new concert hall would solve Amsterdam’s musical malaise. Between 1888 and 1911, Amsterdam became widely known as a musical city on par with other musical capitals in Europe and North America. Audience behaviour typical of ‘beer concerts’ was replaced by attentive listening, the mix of amateur and professional musicians that made up many Amsterdam orchestras was replaced by a professional orchestra, and most importantly, unsuitable second-rate venues were replaced by a purpose-built concert hall.

98 Wouters, ‘Musical Performers’, p. 55. 99 de Leur, ‘Gustav Mahler in the Netherlands’, p. 15. 100 Martner, Selected Letters of Gustav Mahler, p. 273. 101 de Leur, ‘Gustav Mahler in the Netherlands’, p. 18. 102 de Leur, ‘Gustav Mahler in the Netherlands’, p. 22; Bank and van Buuren, ‘Dutch Culture in a European Perspective’, p. 469.

6. Listening to Media History If at some later point, instead of doing a ‘history of ideas’, one were to read the state of the cultural spirit [Geist] off of the sundial of human technology, then the prehistory of gramophone could take on an importance that might eclipse that of many a famous composer.1

Media History and the History of Musical Culture Prior to any sort of architectural or artistic significance, concert halls are musical media on par with other objects and technologies such as recorded music and instruments. Like these media, concert halls are the a priori of music’s performance, composition, and reception. In the late nineteenth century, the meaning of the Concertgebouw was debated in the pages of an Amsterdam newspaper. At issue was what type of musical culture the Concertgebouw was going to mediate. Was it to be a venue for serious musical culture or was it to be a home for the more gezellig musical cultures that could be found in other venues throughout the city? For some, the conviviality typical of Amsterdam’s orchestral concert tradition should influence the function and meaning of the buildings where concerts are held. From this perspective, buildings for music are neutral conduits that become defined through established musical practices and traditions. Other music lovers disagreed. The function and meaning of the concert hall is not malleable: a concert hall is purpose built for a musical culture that includes the belief that secular instrumental music, and in particular the symphony, is a serious art form capable of moments of aesthetic transcendence, and that audiences should demonstrate their reverence for these works of art through silent attentive listening. The history of the Concertgebouw that I have presented can be read as arguing that the latter opinion prevailed because the Concertgebouw was the culmination of decades-long efforts made by patrons, critics, and music lovers to elevate Amsterdam’s musical culture to the level of classical musical capitals like Leipzig and Vienna. Audiences were culturally prepared for the aural and aesthetic expectations that were presupposed in the design of the Concertgebouw, although these expectations were not completely congruent with Amsterdam’s existing orchestral music tradition. Thus, 1

Adorno, ‘The Form of the Phonograph Record’, p. 59.

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returning again to the debate from the Algemeen Handelsblad, to argue that the Concertgebouw should be used for anything resembling ‘popular’ musical culture would run counter to both the design of this medium and the musical tradition that it was intended to materialize in Amsterdam. In this concluding chapter I want to move further away from the case study of the Concertgebouw and musical culture in nineteenth-century Amsterdam to reflect upon questions concerning how the history of media and musical culture can be told. In particular, I am interested in whether the history of media and musical culture is the history of one particular medium, like a concert hall, or a history of concepts and ideas that can be traced across different musical media and different musical cultures. In this chapter I propose an approach that corresponds with the latter orientation by suggesting that the history of musical media be told as a history of listening to music. This may seem like an odd way to end this book, as the preceding history of the Concertgebouw can be read as doing the opposite of what I am proposing in this chapter—that is, it is a history of one particular object, the Concertgebouw. However, as the preceding chapter demonstrated, the musical culture that inspired this building is not unique to this building. Prioritizing the behavioural and aesthetic presuppositions that inspired and preceded the Concertgebouw’s design and construction opens up potential narratives in which attentive listening and musical meanings can be traced across other musical media. Certainly there is tremendous value in a history of the design and use of one particular medium or technical object, but the cost of specificity is a diminished sense of historical continuity. Recovering a sense of mediacultural continuity requires a closer attention to the similarities that can be identified across the design and meaning of different media—like attentive listening or the idea that music is a serious art form—as opposed to the differences that make each musical medium unique. Borrowing a concept from the philosopher of technology Andrew Feenberg, I emphasize these continuities and similarities by tracing what I call a ‘technical code’ of attentive listening.2

2 A similar approach to media history can be found in Jonathan Sterne’s study of the mp3 in which he traces how the mp3 is part of general history of media that compress sound, diminishing fidelity for the purpose of storage, transmission, and mobility. Just as I propose a technical code of attentive listening and fidelity as a way to study the history of musical media, Sterne, seeking the cultural origins of the mp3, looks backwards and suggests ‘compression as one possible basis for inquiry into the history of communication technology’ Sterne, Mp3: The Meaning of a Format, p. 5 note 20.

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Perhaps we could blame Thomas Kuhn or Michel Foucault for the tendency to look for abrupt breaks with the past, or perhaps it is the popularity of what historian Fernand Braudel calls ‘the history of the event’ against the ‘longue durée’.3 But the problem is much simpler than trends in intellectual history. Media determine how the history of media and musical culture is told. John Cage writes that Willem De Kooning was once asked which painters from the past had influenced him. He answered: ‘The past does not influence me; I influence it.’4 The history of musical culture tells us that no one person or style can claim to be both free from history and a determining force on it, but it does tell us that media can. An example can demonstrate this point. Marc Leman writes that ‘originally music was accessible only in an environment where it was played. There needed to be a direct transfer of sound energy from musician to listener’. After recordings, though, this unmediated immediacy was no longer necessary because ‘access to music became technically mediated’.5 Here, Leman defines mediation through the objects and technologies that he is familiar with, namely, recorded music. Looking backwards from contemporary musical culture and unable to find recordings and their related sociotechnical networks, he decides that access to music was not yet part of a media culture. Yet, the ‘direct transfer of sound’ that preceded recordings was technically mediated by any number of building types that had a distinct influence on the musical experience. A concert hall mediates a transfer of sound that is intertwined with the material attributes of the building, just as the transfer and experience of the same sound would be different in theatres, opera houses, or churches. For Leman, musical culture is defined by particular media. The consequence of this perspective is that media, not musical culture, shape the categories and concepts by which we come to know musical culture as media culture. Historians of technology struggle against the idea that history is a technologically driven phenomenon and have sought to explain why this approach dominates our historical imagination.6 These writers suggest that technology defines history by creating the categories through which we know history. The pervasiveness of this type of technological determinism, as Sally Wyatt points out, ‘has been common sense for so long that it has

3 Braudel, ‘History and the Social Sciences’. 4 Cage, ‘History of Experimental Music in the United States’, p. 67. 5 Leman, Embodied Music Cognition and Mediation Technology, p. 1. 6 Misa, ‘How Machines Make History’; Smith and Marx, Does Technology Drive History?.

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hardly needed a label’;7 it is part of a notion of progress and modernity that is difficult to identify, let alone critique: The modern age has defined history in terms of socioeconomic factors rather than in terms of, say, political or diplomatic or religious events. This way of defining history is itself a result of priorities that are technology based, if not technology-determined. Technology decisively entered the study of history in the Enlightenment and the early 19th century. In response to the great technological event of the epoch—the overwhelming and unprecedented increase in productivity—the concept of technological progress was gradually extrapolated to history as a whole, and history became redefined as the record of socioeconomic progress. In other words: For those of us living in the modern age, history is almost by definition a technology-driven process.8

A history of media and musical culture that prioritizes media without making it a determining influence can be written if the relationship between media and musical culture is reconceptualized. Although conventional logic says we should begin with media and read its impacts off of musical culture, a different history can be told if we begin with ideas and concepts developed within musical culture and examine how these are realized through musical media. Objects and technologies ranging from concert halls to Berliner’s gramophone to 8-tracks to mp3s all essentially do the same thing—mediate a listening experience. Yet, the similarities that unite these media as objects that mediate a listening experience are commonly overlooked in favour of the differences that make each of these media distinct. Continuity is pushed aside. The new must always be different, a scenario in which history becomes an unwitting ally. Alternatively, using attentive listening as a starting point to write the history of media and musical culture, the concert hall is simply one amongst many media that are designed and used for this aural disposition and the aesthetic philosophy that it legitimates.9 7 Wyatt, ‘Technological Determinism is Dead’, p. 168. 8 Williams, ‘The Political and Feminist Dimensions of Technological Determinism’, p. 221. 9 This approach has certain parallels with what media theorists call ‘media recursion’, or ‘recursive media history’: see Armitage, ‘From Discourse Networks to Cultural Mathematics’; Huhtamo, ‘From Kaleidoscomaniac to Cybernerd’; Winthrop-Young, ‘Siren Recursions’. As well, this approach shares affinities with Marxist philosophers of technology, who, following their namesake, argue that capitalist social relations precede and shape production technology. See Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital; Feenberg, The Critical Theory of Technology; Fleron,

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In what follows I work towards developing this type of history by examining, first, the different ways that the history of media and musical culture can be told. I look at how different writers use media as the starting point for thinking about musical culture and from this I reflect upon the varieties of methodological and conceptual balances that are used to make sense of the relationship between media and musical culture. The benefit of thinking about media history and musical culture in this way is that it allows for critical reflection upon the historiographical biases that shape how we come to know the history of media/musical culture. Arguing for a historical perspective that is more sensitive to continuity, I conclude this chapter by tracing a rudimentary history of a technical code of attentive listening across musical media ranging from concert halls to CDs.

Balancing Media and Musical Culture Drawing upon different social theories of technology, the balance between attentive listening and the Concertgebouw can be articulated in a variety of ways. Following actor-network theory, one could study the Concertgebouw as a complex sociotechnical network of associations between human and nonhuman actors that produce attentive listening. Following media theory, the material form of the concert hall invisibly shapes aural perception and ways of knowing musical culture. Constructivist technology studies could point us towards the processes by which different social groups interpret the aural meaning and acoustic design of the Concertgebouw. A Marxist approach could critique how class relations are normalized and reproduced through the listening expectations designed into the Concertgebouw. Philosophically, a hermeneutic theory of technology would orient the researcher towards the contexts that precede technological design and use. In each of these approaches, the balance between media (the Concertgebouw) and musical culture (attentive listening) opens up different perspectives that enable particular stories to be told. As these examples demonstrate, theorizing the relationship between media and musical culture through different methods and research strategies is an awkward balancing act that requires, amongst other things, deciding what counts as musical culture and what counts as media and, important for the argument I am making in this chapter, whether musical culture should be taken as the starting point Technology and Communist Culture; Lukács, ‘Technology and Social Relations’; MacKenzie, ‘Marx and the Machine’.

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for thinking about media or whether media should bound our knowledge of musical culture. To take attentive listening as the starting point for the study of musical media means that musical culture is the starting point for thinking about media. The next step is figuring out the details of this relationship. What do we mean when we say ‘musical culture’? Do we mean the details of our everyday musical lives and experiences, one’s unique subjective position in relation to music? Or does musical culture mean the grand narratives of modernist social theories that deal with concepts like aesthetics, ideology, beauty, rationality, and enlightenment? What do we mean when we say ‘media’? An essentialized Technology with a capital ‘T’, as in Heidegger’s philosophy or McLuhan’s media theory? Or does the term ‘media’ refer to an individual medium, distinct in its own right? Media historian Lisa Gitelman poses similar questions about the aim and scope of media history, arguing that the different styles and methods by which media history is undertaken make a difference in the types of histories that are told: Is the history of media first and foremost the history of technological methods and devices? Or is the history of media better understood as the story of modern ideas of communication? Or is it about modes and habits of perception? Or about political choices and structures? Should we be looking for a sequence of separate ‘ages’ with ruptures, revolutions, or paradigm shifts in between, or should we be seeing more of an evolution? A progress?10

Gitelman’s questions are a reminder that the historical relationship between media (recorded music, instruments, venues) and musical culture (taste, subcultures, aesthetic philosophy, modes of listening) is never a concrete fact. If ‘history is nothing but the re-enactment of the past in the historian’s mind’,11 then the relationship between media and musical culture exists only in the observations of social theorists of technology. These observations derive from perspectives and methods that contribute to the narratives that we use to make sense of history. Whether these narratives emphasize unchanging continuity, evolution, or abrupt paradigm shifts depends on the starting point one takes. To paraphrase Gitelman, if the history of musical media takes as its starting point an object or device, one type of narrative 10 Gitelman, Always Already New, p. 1. 11 Collingwood, The Idea of History, p. 228.

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unfolds; if one begins with something immaterial, like ideas concerning how music should be listened to, another type of narrative will unfold. Using examples from contemporary writers who study the relationship between media and musical culture can demonstrate in more detail how these perspectives influence historical narrative. Timothy Taylor begins his book Strange Sounds: Music, Technology and Culture with a striking claim: ‘The advent of digital technology in the early 1980s marks the beginning of what may be the most fundamental change in the history of Western music since the invention of music notation in the ninth century.’12 Given Taylor’s point of comparison, we probably won’t be able to verify his claim for at least a century or two. But there is more here than a bold prognostication. He is also proposing a way to think about the relationship between media and musical culture; namely, that media (digital technology) is the starting point for thinking about musical culture. Digital media, like notation before it, bounds the study of musical culture. As writers become more attuned to the materiality of musical culture, the sociotechnical balance implied in the dramatic claim that digital technology will fundamentally change musical culture is appearing with greater frequency. Some examples include: ‘the technology of sound recording, writ large, has profoundly transformed modern musical life’;13 ‘regardless of the music we listen to […] what we hear has been tempered first and foremost by the technology used to record it’; 14 ‘MP3 technology has transformed music reception and users’ ability to pursue their pleasurable and privatized auditory interests’.15 My intent is not to strategically decontextualizing these quotes to paint their authors as technological determinists. These writers avoid the pitfalls of technological determinism by emphasizing the social contingency of musical media, usually by examining how technologies are redefined by users—cassettes empower users to make their own music mixes, mixers and LPs are used by DJs as musical instruments, the mp3 enables musicians and fans to create their own distribution networks, and so on. An emphasis on user reconfiguration may deflect charges of determinism, but an emphasis on contingency does not change the fact that these writers use musical media—be it recordings, recording studios, or instruments—as the starting point for the study of musical culture.16 12 Taylor, Strange Sounds, p. 3. 13 Katz, Capturing Sound, p. 1. 14 Schmidt-Horning, ‘Engineering the Performance’, p. 703. 15 Bull, ‘iPod Culture’, p. 527. 16 There are, of course, other conceptual orientations in sociotechnical studies of musical culture that begin with musical culture or social theory to explain media. Arthur Loesser

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One of the unintended consequences of this approach is that the history of musical media comes to be written so that every new medium seems to inaugurate a new musical culture. The result is that the study of musical media is excruciatingly literal. Media history becomes medium history, restricted to discrete technical objects like the radio, a particular configuration of recorded music, an instrument, and so on. This particular balance diminishes the historical complexity of listening to music as a cultural phenomenon. When we start with media to explain musical culture, listening is no longer considered an activity with its own cultural history; instead, it becomes a result of music’s technical mediation, a mere consequence of technical function. An example of this can be found in studies of mobile listening. Beginning with transistor radios and Sony walkman and progressing to the Apple iPod, the starting point for these studies is the idea that media precede and shape listening.17 Mobile technologies lead to mobile listening, an aural experience defined by, and dependent upon, a particular technical object. This is not to suggest that in practice listening to music is some type of immaterial and unmediated ideal. The history of listening to music is always intertwined with media; depending on the situation, when people listen to music they may also be listening to instruments, iPods, LPs, headphones, radios, amplifiers, microphones, architecture, and so on. But this does not mean that how we listen and why we listen begin with these media. Culture and history precede and shape the technologies that mediate listening to music. The concert hall is not the starting point for attentive listening any more than iPods, walkmen, or transistor radios mark the beginning of mobile listening. identifies the addition of cast iron to the design of sounding boards in pianos as part of a larger shift in musical culture. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, the market for musical performances was growing. Impresarios wanted to exploit this market, and so bigger venues were needed. These venues required pianos with greater tension and resonance in order for the sound to reach everyone in the venue; hence, there was a need for a sounding board that was stronger than one made entirely of wood. Loesser goes one step further, though, and explains how changing cultural attitudes led to the acceptance of this technical transformation: ‘In 1750 “iron” was a word of terror, having to do with unpleasant violence far removed from music; by 1820 “iron” had something to do with the agreeable notion of money making and of “progress.” People could now look on it with some kindness, even in drawing rooms’: Loesser, Men, Women, and Pianos, p. 304. Another interesting example is Hans-Joachim Braun’s study of how trains, rockets, and planes have been thematized by composers like Arthur Honegger, Billy Strayhorn, and Sun Ra. Braun demonstrates that the sound and the arrangement of music can express ideas about technology; here, the technical is associated with grand narratives about progress and transportation: Braun, ‘“Movin’ On”’. 17 On the walkman, see Bull, ‘The World According to Sound’; du Gay, Doing Cultural Studies. For studies on the iPod, see: Bull, ‘No Dead Air!’; Williams, Portable Music and its Functions.

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As I argue in the following section, one of the consequences of using objects or technologies as the starting point to write the history of musical media is the production of a technical divide between musical cultures mediated by recorded music (beginning around 1900) and those cultures that preceded recordings. As new conf igurations are introduced, the nineteenth century recedes from view with increasing speed; history is fixed to particular media and written so that recordings not only mark the beginning of a new musical culture, they also mark the beginning of music’s technical mediation. Taking media as their starting point for studying musical culture, historians create a version of nineteenth-century musical culture that, by virtue of being free of recorded music, is free from all forms of technical mediation.

The Technical Shaping of Musical History Despite it’s aural-musical history, it seems diff icult to conceive of the concert hall as a musical medium. Measured against electro-acoustic and digital media, especially recorded music and the complex sociotechnical networks that these media are embedded in, architectural monuments to the performance and reception of music barely register as musical media. In some regards, it is easy to see how a distinction between recorded music and other musical media is accurate. Recordings have supplanted notation and printed scores as the definitive version of music while instruments have largely been replaced in the home by audio equipment and computers. The significance of recordings has been so great that it is common sense to say that everything changed after Thomas Edison and Emile Berliner. Hearing music, prior to recordings, was synonymous with seeing it. Music could not be owned, collected, manipulated, or listened to at will. Yet, over the course of a century, we find ourselves in a musical culture where almost all of the music we listen to is recorded music. We take it for granted that when we talk about music, what we are usually talking about is the recording of that music. Against all of this, it is easy to mistake the Concertgebouw as just architecture. Unlike the concert hall, recorded music has inspired writers to equate the significance of these media with other momentous events within media history. Theodor Adorno writes that recordings are to music what writing is to speech.18 For Don Ihde, recordings enable a music listening public in 18 Adorno, ‘The Form of the Phonograph Record’, p. 59.

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the same way that the printing press led to a reading public.19 Marshall McLuhan goes so far as to compare different configurations of recorded music (78, LP, tape) with ‘all the phases of the written, the printed, and the mechanized word’.20 These examples tell us that recordings mark the beginning of a musical culture that is significantly different than the eras that preceded it, a point that can be confirmed by pointing out the sheer number of books and articles that take recordings as the starting point to discuss musical culture.21 Never before have studies of musical culture been so explicitly intertwined with media. Of course, there are numerous studies of instruments and other media amongst the many histories of Western musical culture. With few exceptions, though, it is only in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that musical culture is so clearly identified as media culture. It would be unnecessarily controversial to say that recorded music did not drastically transform musical culture. There are significant differences between musical culture in 1881, 1971, and 2011, and these differences are impossible without recorded music; yet, only after the invention of recordings does the history of media and musical culture seem so tightly circumscribed along media-determined lines. After more than a century of recorded music, our historical imagination has become conditioned to associate eras of musical culture with specific media. Musical cultures have become intertwined with configurations of recorded music and taken to be significantly different, to the point of incommensurability, with other media/musical cultures and with those cultures that preceded recordings. The era of the concert hall is distinct from the era of recorded music, and never the twain shall meet. Commenting on the divide that separates modern and premodern scientific cultures, Bruno Latour writes that ‘all such dichotomous distinctions can be convincing only as long as they are enforced by a strong 19 Ihde, ‘Bach to Rock: Amplification’. 20 McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 277. 21 A short list of studies of musical culture that take recordings as a starting point includes: Ashby, Absolute Music, Mechanical Reproduction; Bayley, Recorded Music; Chanan, Repeated Takes; Cook and others, The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music; Day, A Century of Recorded Music; Eisenberg, The Recording Angel; Evens, Sound Ideas; Frederickson, ‘Technology and Music’; Frith, ‘The Industrialization of Popular Music’; Garofalo, ‘From Music Publishing to MP3’; Hull, The Recording Industry; Ihde, ‘Technologies-Musics-Embodiments’; Jones, ‘Music that Moves’; Katz, Capturing Sound; MacLeod, ‘MP3s Are Killing Home Taping’; Millard, America on Record; Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever; Negus, Producing Pop; Rothenbuhler and Peters, ‘Defining Phonography’; Suisman and Strasser, Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction; Symes, Setting the Record Straight; Taylor, Strange Sounds.

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asymmetrical bias that treats the two sides of the divide or border very differently’.22 Whether they divide modern and premodern cultures or media/musical cultures, Latour’s point is that epochal distinctions are an illusion, constructed and maintained through categories and conceptual distinctions that are used to order and make sense of the past and the present; distinctions, in other words, are produced, not discovered. The construction of the distinction between the era of recorded music and the era that preceded it originated with writers, musicians, and composers, who, shortly after the widespread popularity of recorded music, took recordings as their starting point to argue that musical culture was becoming increasingly listless. American composer John Philip Sousa, writing in 1906, argued that recorded music would lead to ‘a marked deterioration in American music and musical taste, an interruption in the musical development of the country, and a host of other injuries to music in its artistic manifestations, by virtue—or rather by vice—of the multiplication of the various music-reproducing machines’.23 The argument that Sousa makes has been repeated, in various guises, over the past 100 years, including laments for the loss of ‘aura’ or ‘authenticity’ that recordings eliminate from the musical experience or the belief that musical culture was somehow more ‘pure’ before being encumbered by complex technical networks. These types of arguments ignore the cultural and historical continuities that transcend technical divides. These continuities include ideas and practices such as patronage, acoustics, modes of listening, and musical meanings. As this short section has attempted to highlight, when used as a starting point media determine how media history is told. The benefit of a media or technological centric perspective is that it allows for a comprehensive understanding of the sociotechnical complexity that stands behind each and every technical object that make up musical culture, emphasizing the inherent differences that characterize these technical objects. But this is not the only type of narrative one can use to make sense of musical culture. An alternative narrative can be developed through a listening-centric history of media culture. In what follows, I draw from Andrew Feenberg’s philosophy of technology and sketch a tentative history of musical media that emphasizes a technical code of attentive listening.

22 Latour, ‘Drawing Things Together’, p. 20. See also Latour, We Have Never Been Modern. 23 Sousa, ‘The Menace of Mechanical Music’, p. 278.

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The Technical Code of Attentive Listening The Concertgebouw materialized the aesthetic requirement that audiences listen to symphonies of the Classic-Romantic canon in attentive silence. But it would be myopic to bind attentive listening and the musical meanings it invokes to this one particular object. Just as patrons, critics, and listeners interpreted the design and meaning of the Concertgebouw within a framework that included the idea that music is a serious art form that should be listened to in attentive silence, it is possible to imagine that designers and patrons of other media worked within a similar horizon of expectations. A useful way to make sense of this history is through the concept of the technical code, developed by the philosopher of technology Andrew Feenberg.24 The term ‘technical code’ provides a conceptual and methodological balance between the social and the technical in such a way that broader social and cultural patterns can be identified at the micro-level of technical design. In the case of any human-made material object, Feenberg writes that we can trace the technical code ‘from the highest level of worldviews down to the lowest level of technical design’,25 and so to speak of a technical code is to speak of the processes by which ideas are transformed into artifacts. The technical code, in this sense, is not transmitted, it is translated, rearranged, and materialized in different ways across different objects and technologies.26 Recognizing the processes of translation that occur as a technical code moves from abstract social theories to technical design, it is possible to describe not only how the translation of a technical code occurs but also a better understanding of the ideas, concepts, and cultural habits that are being translated. For the purpose of this historical sketch, attentively listening to music is one such technical code that can be used to draw connections between different objects and technologies that are designed and used as musical media When Thomas Edison introduced his diamond discs in 1913, attentive listening was invoked to define these media as part of the musical culture associated with the concert hall. Once Edison realized that the future of recorded sound was in music, he set about creating the best possible machine for playing discs. The best, for Edison, was measured through 24 On the technical code, see: Feenberg, Questioning Technology; Feenberg, Transforming Technology; Feenberg, ‘Critical Theory of Technology: An Overview’. 25 Feenberg, Alternative Modernity, p. 156. 26 This distinction between transmission and translation is taken from Latour, ‘The Powers of Association’.

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fidelity. His diamond discs were acoustically superior to any other machine on the market, a fact that he exploited in advertising campaigns and in his famous ‘tone-tests’.27 These tests, which occurred between 1915 and 1920, took place in concert halls and consisted of a singer singing along with a diamond disc. At times, the recording would stop, and the audience would only hear the singer. At other times, the singer would stop and the audience would only hear the recording. At a certain point, the lights would dim, the singer would stop singing, and the audience would have to guess what they were hearing: the singer or the recording. Edison’s tone-tests and his marketing campaigns for the diamond discs were an attempt to use the aesthetic and aural standards of the concert hall performance to judge the quality of recorded music. Locating these tests in concert halls like Boston Symphony Hall and New York’s Carnegie Hall indicated that Edison’s discs were a medium of serious musical culture that drew upon the aesthetic, aural, and material conventions of the public concert. As Emily Thompson points out, Edison was appealing to ‘the cultural pretensions of a certain segment of the population, and the external trappings of the tone test—“high class” location, European “classical” music on the program—were enough to satisfy those pretensions’.28 Consumers were being taught to listen to recorded music in a way that mimicked the attentive listening found in the concert hall. Just as nineteenth-century music critics convinced bourgeois listeners that attentive listening was a disposition that was demanded, and rewarded, by instrumental music, in the twentieth century advertisers convinced middle-class listeners that quality was measured through fidelity and that attentive listening was the only way to gauge the quality of recorded music. An ideal of fidelity premised on an assumption of attentive listening and the aesthetic meanings that this disposition invokes also contributed to the development and success of the high-fidelity long-playing (LP) microgroove record in 1948. The LP was a solution to the problems that beset the classical music tastes of engineers at CBS who wanted to listen to the full movements of symphonies in stereo sound without changing shellac-based 78-rpm recordings every three or four minutes.29 A survey of music consumers conducted shortly after the introduction of the LP revealed that the LP was enthusiastically welcomed by a new iteration of the bourgeois cultural consumer ‘above-average income and interested in classical music […] a 27 Gelatt, The Fabulous Phonograph, pp. 192–195; Read and Welch, From Tin Foil to Stereo, pp. 189–219; Thompson, ‘Machines, Music, and the Quest for Fidelity’. 28 Thompson, ‘Machines, Music, and the Quest for Fidelity’, p. 155. 29 Garofalo, ‘From Music Publishing to MP3’, p. 334.

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group of people devoted to collecting and listening to records and who were willing to pay any price for improved sound reproduction’.30 The pursuit of fidelity led to a new musical subculture, audiophiles, who pursued ‘perfect’ sound through speakers, amplifiers, turntables, and other musical media.31 For audiophiles, the standard against which recorded sound was measured was a concert of live, unamplified music, a standard that privileges a particular kind of music: ‘Although most “world music” is unamplified and acoustic, its contribution to the standard of fidelity is minimal compared with the institutionalized standard of the European art music tradition. Schematically speaking, according to the audiophile community, every good recording should sound like Beethoven played live: fidelity=Fidelio.’32 Fidelity, LPs, and the culture of attentive listening were influential in transforming the meaning of rock music in the 1960s. Rock ‘n’ roll, as it was originally conceived in the 1950s and early 1960s, was music for kids, a means to a profitable end for record companies. Once rock fans reached a certain age it was expected that their tastes would change and they would begin listening to more serious music, like classical, folk, or jazz: ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll throughout the second half of the fifties was party music: music to dance to, music to love to, music to dream to. It was not concerned with its legitimacy as culture; it was not troubled by questions of legitimacy at all.’33 Rock became a serious art form in the mid-1960s as the medium by which it was disseminated was no longer the 45 single but the LP, a medium formerly reserved for classical music. With this new seriousness came a dedication to creating sonically sophisticated recordings that were intended to be listened to in silent attentiveness. With origins in Phil Spector’s wall of sound (his self-proclaimed ‘symphonies for children’) and continuing through Pet Sounds, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Electric Ladyland, the media of rock culture became self-aware sonic artifacts designed for attentive listening.34 Writing about their post-1966 sound, Tim Blanning writes that the Beatles turned rock from, ‘a medium for lifting people up and helping them dance their blues away’ to ‘a music of introspective self-absorption, a medium fit for communicating autobiographical intimacies, political discontents, spiritual elevation, inviting an 30 Millard, America on Record, p. 208. 31 O’Connell, ‘The Fine-Tuning of a Golden Ear’; Perlman, ‘Golden Ears and Meter Readers’; Evens, Sound Ideas. 32 Evens, Sound Ideas, p. 7. 33 Coyle and Dolan, ‘Modeling Authenticity, Authenticating Commercial Models’, p. 28. 34 Moorefield, The Producer as Composer.

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audience, not to dance, but to listen—quietly, attentively, thoughtfully’.35 Although the rock music culture of the 1960s was 150 years removed from Wackenroder and Hoffmann, the meanings that transformed rock from convivial party music to serious music were as useful for the Beatles as it was for Beethoven’s instrumental music. Listeners were introduced to digital music in 1982 with the release of a new configuration of recorded music, the compact disc (CD). Although the CD was initially the scourge of the audiophile community, the CD, like the LP before it, was designed to maximize fidelity, which appealed to classical music listeners much more than rock fans: ‘The compact disc is the latest in a long line of audiophilic devices in the history of the attempt to eliminate the long-standing enemies of “fidelity” in playback: surface noise, scratch, hum, and hiss. To render music free of noise is to grant it its proper musical status as sonically autonomous.’36 This teleological goal of perfect fidelity has, in recent years, been translated through the marketing of high-end headphones and enhanced digital audio. Musicians and music lovers, Richard Taruskin writes, have lived under the iron rule of Romanticism since Hoffmann’s Beethoven review appeared in 1810.37 But the iron rule of Romanticism is no longer limited to the concert hall or the classical music tradition; it has been translated across different musical media and musical cultures through technical designs that materialize attentive listening and the idea that music is a serious art form. The technical code of attentive listening connects the media of musical culture from the late eighteenth century to today. The benefit of this type of history is that it allows for a greater resonance with the history of musical culture. The history of Western musical culture is told as a history of styles like polyphony, atonalism, bop, punk, and rap. Or, it is told as a history of composers and musicians like Monteverdi, Bach, Beethoven, Schoenberg, Parker, and Hendrix. Styles and musicians are used to distinguish and bound specific eras. However, these eras are not autonomous. There is always historical continuity. New styles and musicians are always a response to those styles and musicians that came before them. The past influences the present; it is the horizon within which new ideas emerge and change can occur. However, when musical culture is considered media culture, cultural continuity is routinely pushed aside in favour of 35 Blanning, The Triumph of Music, p. 121. 36 Corbett, ‘Free, Single and Disengaged’, p. 41. 37 Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music: Volume 2: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, p. 651.

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technical specificity. The emerging canon of texts that make up technical turn in the studies of musical culture contain fascinating studies of instruments, recorded music, recording techniques, amplification, distribution and storage technologies, and the technical mediation of listening. But these media, and the musical cultures they are intertwined with, can seem disconnected from each other across both space and time. A bias towards specificity can contribute to a history of media and musical culture that is made up of a series of discrete case studies that are only tangentially related to one another. This is certainly an impoverished perspective from which to understand musical culture.

Conclusion The concert hall emerged from the confluence of music’s commodification and the development of the public concert in seventeenth-century London and the sacralization of secular instrumental music that developed in German speaking Europe in the eighteenth century. After the mid-nineteenth century, the concert hall and the classical music tradition could be found in cities across Europe and North America such that a composer working during this period would have been composing symphonies to be part of the permanent collection of a concert hall that could hold an audience of approximately 2000 people, an orchestra of up to 100 musicians, and have a reverberation time of between 1.8 and 2.1 seconds. By the end of the twentieth century this tradition had become a significant aspect of musical cultures throughout the world. The classical music tradition can now be found from Tokyo to Vancouver, from Los Angeles to Miami, and from Porto to Moscow. The concert hall, as part of a complex network of musical discourses that includes print media, university departments, publishers, record companies, and promoters provides a powerful means by which this tradition is able to traverse time and space. The emergence and continuity of a musical culture is never an autonomous or immaterial phenomenon and this is especially true when musical cultures take hold in geographical regions far removed from where a culture originated—think of reggae in London or Western classical music in Tokyo. Historically, Amsterdam was never known as a capital of musical culture, and in the nineteenth century it had failed to keep up with the standards of serious musical culture found in German-speaking cities. Music travels, but only through media; the history of the classical music tradition in Amsterdam is a history of the media that established this tradition.

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My starting point for the history of the Concertgebouw is the early 1880s, when ideas about listening began to have tangible influence among Amsterdam’s bourgeois cultural elite. Members of this class formed a small committee in 1881 to organize, fund, and build a proper concert hall for Amsterdam. Redefining the problems that had beset Amsterdam’s musical culture as ones that could be solved by building a concert hall, the Concertgebouw was a material solution to what had formerly been considered aesthetic problems. At the micro-level, design ideas and building proposals by architects, musicians, and patrons highlight the myriad ways in which attentive listening could be realized through acoustic design. At this level, attentive listening was articulated through ideas about good acoustics and architectural designs that could guarantee these good acoustics. Moving away from the micro-level of design and extending the history of the Concertgebouw to the beginning of the nineteenth century enables a better explanation of the origins of these ideas about attentive listening. This longer view of the history of the Concertgebouw begins not with wealthy patrons but with ideas borrowed from German-language critics that were imported by Dutch writers who sought to educate listeners and improve musical culture by defining problematic aspects of Dutch musical culture, including musical taste, standards of musicianship, and listening behaviour. Although this context, or horizon of expectations, cannot be identified in the micro-level design of the Concertgebouw, this context is necessary for the Concertgebouw to ‘work’ as a medium of musical culture. My interest in the history of the Concertgebouw developed out of questions concerning the relationship between technology and listening to music. My initial starting point was the idea that media, whether it is a venue like the Concertgebouw or a configuration of recorded music like an mp3, are the a priori of musical culture, including listening. After studying the concert hall as a musical medium designed for attentive listening, I came to recognize that the history of attentive listening could not be fixed to one object or technology. There is a material history of attentive listening that extends from E.T.A. Hoffmann and Beethoven and concert halls to Rolling Stone magazine, LPs, and Bob Dylan38 to audiophiles, digital audio, and 38 In a 1970 interview, Herbert Marcuse argued for the connection between attentive listening and taking the music of Bob Dylan seriously. After stating that Dylan’s protest music signified, ‘the most radical stage of contemporary popular music’, Marcuse took exception to the interviewer’s disdainful remark that at Dylan concerts, ‘the people just sat there. There was no unification of experience’. Marcuse responded that unification of experience is not essential, ‘I believe in the effect of listening in silence…is there anything wrong with sitting there and listening in silence? Dylan’s lyrics stick. They have contributed to changing people’s minds

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high-end headphones. Musical culture is media culture, and this culture persists and endures across decades and centuries through modes of listening and musical meanings.

as well their senses. At no point is the political impact of his songs lost, while in these “rock festivals” almost all such impact has disappeared. ‘Interview with Marcuse’, p. 11.



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Index of Names

Abel, Carl Friedrich 71 Adorno, Theodor 27, 29n, 32, 38-43, 39n, 40n, 149 Albrecht, Robert 20 d’Alembert, Jean le Rond 47 Alpers, Svetlana 17 Attali, Jacques 39, 63, 69, 75 Bach, J.S. 42, 64, 65, 71, 72n, 113, 131, 137, 155 Bach, Johann (John) Christian 71 Bacon, Francis 88 Bagenal, Hope 65n, 74, 89, 90 Banister, John 69-71 Bank, Jan 132 Barthes, Roland 33, 34 Beethoven, Ludwig van 18n, 35, 39, 40, 44-46, 64, 87, 113, 118-121, 128-134, 137 Bellamy, Edward 32 Benjamin, Walter 26 Beranek, Leo 64, 65n, 81, 86 Berliner, Emile 144, 149 Berlioz 86, 113, 133 Besseler, Heinrich 43n, 44n Blanckenburg, Quirinus van 112 Blanning, Tim 154 Bleijs, A.C. 97 Blume, Friedrich 45, 46 Bonds, Mark Evan 27n, 36, 120 Brahms, Johannes 13, 51, 68, 86, 113, 131n, 132, 133, 134n Braudel, Fernand 143 Bree, J.B. van 131 Brom, Gerard 109n Buchla, Don 108 Bülow, Hans von 132, 134-136 Burkholder, J. Peter 21 Buuren, Maarten van 132 Cage, John 143 Callon, Michel 57, 58 Calvin, Jean 111 Chanan, Michael 77 Corbett, John 20 Crary, Jonathan 22n Cuypers, P.J.H. 59, 60, 62, 90-93, 91a, 95, 97 Dahlhaus, Carl 46, 48, 113, 115, 116 Dauthe, Johann Friedrich Carl 73, 74 de Kruijff 97 Diderot, Denis 47 Diepenbrock, Alphons 112, 113 Duchamp, Marcel 29 Dylan, Bob 157

Edison, Thomas 37n, 57n, 149, 152, 153 Elias, Norbert 105 Eliot, Charles 83, 84 Erasmus 109 Feenberg, Andrew 48, 108, 142, 151, 152 Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de 47 Forster, E.M. 30, 35, 36 Forsyth, Michael 86 Foucault, Michel 20, 143 Freud, Sigmund 105 Garnier, Charles 80 Gay, Peter 105 Gehry, Frank 16, 79 Gendt, A.L. van 97-101, 100a, 101a George II 109, 132 Giedion, Sigfried 103 Gitelman, Lisa 146 Goehr, Lydia 17, 46, 77 Goethe 126 Gosschalk, I. 97 Grieg, Edvard 115, 138 Gutenberg, Johannes 19, 30, 70 Habermas, Jürgen 62, 69 Handel, G.F. 137 Hartogh, A.F.K. 58 Havas, Richard 34 Haydn, Joseph 21, 45, 64, 71, 86, 120, 121, 125, 128, 129, 131, 133, 137 Hayward, G.C.C.W. 51-56, 58, 60n, 61, 62, 90, 92, 93, 96, 139 Heidegger, Martin 44n, 146 Hendrix, Jimi 155 Hennion, Antoine 57, 58 Hesse, Hermann 111 Higginson, Henry Lee 84, 85 Hiller, Johann Adam 73 Hoffmann, E.T.A. 109, 113, 118-121, 124, 125, 127, 129, 155, 157 Huet, Conrad Busken 121 Hughes, Thomas 57n Huizinga, Johan 109 Ihde, Don 31, 32, 107, 149 Janssen, Peter Wilhelm 62 Jauss, Hans Robert 44 Jay, Martin 30n, 31n Johnson, James H. 22n, 44, 65 Jonas, Hans 33 Joosten, D.H. 58, 62, 97, 106

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Kes, Willem 137, 138 King Charles II 69 Kist, F.C. 129-131 Kittler, Friedrich 22n, 37n Kivy, Peter 17 Koolhaas, Rem 16 Kooning, Willem De 143 Koopmans, W. Cnoop 58, 62, 97 Kuhn, Thomas 22, 143 Lange, Daniël de 60, 137 Latour, Bruno 22, 50, 150, 151 Law, John 25, 57n Leman, Marc 143 Leppert, Richard 38, 39n Liszt, Franz 51, 68, 133 Loesser, Arthur 72, 147n Lowe, Donald 33n Mahler, Alma 139 Mahler, Gustav 21, 86, 113, 115, 139 Marcuse, Herbert 32, 157n Marez Oijens, H.J. de 58, 62 McLuhan, Marshall 19, 30, 88, 146, 150 Mendelssohn, Felix 113, 131 Mengelberg, Rudolf 78 Mengelberg, Willem 112, 138, 139 Monteverdi 155 Moog, Robert 107, 108 Mozart, W.A. 42, 43, 45, 64, 86, 113, 120, 121, 128, 131 Multatuli 58, 109 Mumford, Lewis 24, 106 Muysken, C. 97-99 Neitzel, Otto 139 Neubauer, John 48 Nicolaï, W.F.G. 134-136 Ogtrop, P.A.L. van 58, 62, 97 Paap, Wouter 114 Parker, Charlie 36, 155 Pater, Walter 118 Petrucci, Ottaviano die 70 Pieper, Antje 74, 116 Pierson, N.G. 60, 62 Pijper, Willem 110 Pinch, Trevor 107 Plato 39, 111 Pollones, J.C.G. 62 Prince Esterhazy 64 Pynchon, Thomas 36

Raynor, Harry 71n Reeser, Eduard 114, 115, 131 Richter, Enoch 73 Rochlitz, Friedrich 117, 127 Sabine, Wallace 82-89, 93, 96, 99 Saint-Saëns, Camille 113, 133 Salm, G.B. 97-99 Sanders, Th. 97, 98 Schafer, R. Murray 20, 113, 120 Schill, Th.G. 97-99 Schoenberg, Arnold 40n, 155 Schonberg, Harold C. 79 Schopenhauer, Arthur 118 Schubert, Franz 131n, 133 Sennett, Richard 76 Sillem, J.A. 58, 62, 97 Sluijters, J.H. van 97 Sousa, John Philip 151 Spector, Phil 154 Spinoza 109 Springer, J.L. 97 Steinmetz, N.W. Schroeder 124, 125, 128-130 Sterne, Jonathan 34n, 37, 38, 142n Strauss, Richard 138 Stumpff, Willem 60 Subotnik, Rose Rosengard 41, 43, 47 Swieten, Baron Gottfried van 64 Szendy, Peter 29, 31n Taruskin, Richard 17, 120, 155 Taylor, Timothy 31, 32, 147 Thompson, Emily 81-83, 96, 102, 103, 153 Thooft, W.F. 93-96 Thorbecke, Johan Rudolph 129 Tienhoven, Gijsbert van 62 Trocco, Frank 107 Verhulst, Johannes 131 Vitruvius 80, 81 Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich 119n, 121, 155 Wagner, Richard 22n, 133, 137 Wallace, David Foster 39n Weber, Carl Maria von 131 Weber, William 42 Wegman, Rob C. 17, 44n Wennekes, Emile 120 Wilms, Johan Wilhelm 121 Wyatt, Sally 143 Zelter, Carl Friedrich 126



Index of Subjects

Actor-Network Theory (ANT) 22, 145 Engineer-Sociologists (Callon) 57, 58 Aesthetic autonomy 24, 25, 35, 47, 77 Algemeen Handelsblad 60, 80, 92, 93, 133, 135, 137, 142 debate between een muziekliefhebber tevens aandeelhouder and een muziekliefhebber 16, 96, 142 Meininger Hofkapelle concerts 60n, 132-136 Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (AmZ) 117, 121, 123-127, 137 Amphion 123n, 124, 125, 128, 129, 136, 137 and the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (AmZ) 124, 125, 137 anti-French sentiment 128, 129 and Hoffmann, E.T.A. 125 Amsterdam 13-15, 23-25, 49-56, 58-63, 66-68, 78, 88, 91a, 92-95, 97-102, 104-109, 112, 113, 121, 123, 126, 129-132, 134-139, 141, 156-158 concerts 13-15, 51, 60n, 66-68, 102, 109, 121, 126, 131, 132, 135, 136, 141 nineteenth-century expansion 49, 59 as non-musical city 104 orchestras 13, 56, 121, 126, 130-132, 135-139, 141 seventeenth-century golden age 66 Avery Fischer Hall (New York City) 80 Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer (Pinch and Trocco) 107 Architectural acoustics 80-103 before 1900 80-101 and musical sound 85-89 reflection 82 reverberation time 82-89 Sabine, Wallace 82-89, 93, 96, 99 Thooft, W.F. on 93-96 Aristocratic patronage 63, 64, 68, 69, 76, 77 Attali, Jacques on 69 Bach, Johanne Sebastian and 64 and buildings for music 77 the musician and 63, 64 Attentive listening 16-19, 22, 24, 26, 27, 36-48, 44n, 55, 57, 75, 76, 88, 89, 96, 104-109, 115, 126, 136, 139, 141, 142, 144-146, 148, 151-157 long-playing record (LP) 18, 26, 154 Marcuse, Herbert on 157n and musical meaning 16, 22, 26, 47, 57, 89, 106, 108 technical code 142, 145, 151-156 tone tests (Edison) 152, 153 Audile technique (Sterne) 37, 38 Audiophiles 154, 155, 157

Beatles, the 154, 155 Beethoven’s Instrumental Music (Hoffmann) 118, 155 Berlin 72 Birmingham School for Cultural Studies 20 Bourgeois patronage 63, 69, 75-78, 88, 153, 157 Attali, Jacques on 69, 75 attentive listening 75, 76, 153, 157 musical meaning 76 public concerts 69 Bouwkundig Weekblad 99 Caecilia: Algemeen Muzikaal Tijdschrift van Nederland 80, 93, 130, 131, 133-137 and German musical culture 130 on Meininger Hofkapelle concerts 133-136 Caecilia orchestra society 130, 131 Calvinism 110, 111 Carnegie Hall (New York) 153 Casa de Musica (Porto) 16 Centraal Station (Amsterdam) 59, 97 Classic-Romantic Canon 49, 54, 152 Collegia Musica (Frankfurt) 72, 73 Collegia Musica (Leipzig) 72, 73 Compact discs (CDs) 26, 145, 155 Composers 16, 20, 26, 29, 33, 35, 39n, 45-47, 60, 64, 86, 93, 110, 112-115, 118, 120-122, 124, 126, 127, 130, 131n, 132-134, 138, 139, 148n, 151, 155, 156 Beethoven paradigm (Goehr) 46 Hoffmann, E.T.A. on 118, 120 Composition 20, 24, 29-31, 33, 35, 46, 48, 64, 72n, 86n, 110-115, 119, 121, 128, 138n, 141 as active engagement with music 29, 31 Concertgebouw 12a, 13-16, 18, 19, 21-26, 37, 48-51, 56-63, 68, 78, 80, 88-109, 100a, 101a, 112, 115, 136-139, 141, 142, 145, 149, 152, 157 acoustics 13, 21, 23, 24, 80, 88, 89, 93- 96, 98, 99, 102, 103, 138n, 145, 157 and Cuypers, P.J.H. 59, 60, 62, 90-93, 95, 97 design contest 95, 97-100 and Gendt, A.L. van 97, 100, 100a, 101, 101a inaugural concert 80, 106, 137 and Kes, Willem 137, 138 and Mahler, Gustav  115, 139 and Mengelberg, Willem 112, 138, 139 Concert Halls. See also by name 13, 15-26, 37, 42, 46, 49-51, 54-65, 69, 71-107, 91a, 101a, 117, 126, 136, 138, 139, 141-145, 148-150, 152, 153, 155-157 attentive listening 16-19, 22, 24, 26, 37, 57, 88, 89, 96, 104-106, 136, 138, 141, 142, 144, 145, 148, 152, 153, 157 bourgeois musical culture 60, 61, 63, 69, 72, 78 and classical music tradition 46, 155, 156

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design 21, 59, 74-78, 82, 84-101 Leipzig tradition (Bagenal) 89, 90 as museum 17, 21, 72 as musical media 16, 141-145, 149, 157 public concerts 16, 17, 69, 71, 72, 153, 156 shoebox-style 18, 54, 65, 89, 100 Crystal Palace (London) 52 Cultural preparation (Mumford) 106 Culture and Congress Centre Concert Hall (Lucerne) 21n De Amsterdammer 51, 54, 60, 61, 90, 137 on Concertgebouw inaugural concert 137 De architectura (Vitruvius) 80 De Opmerker 98, 99 DJs 31, 147 Dorothy Chander Pavilion (Los Angeles) 79 Dresden 67, 72 Electric Ladyland (Hendrix) 154 Euphonia: een Weekblad voor den beschaafden 122 Felix Meritis (Amsterdam) 52, 56, 66-68, 67a, 92-95, 101, 126, 130 as model for Concertgebouw 92-95 Fidelity 45, 115, 128, 142n, 153-155 Friesland 110 Germania (Tacitus) 110 Gewandhaus (Altes) (Leipzig) 73-75, 87, 89, 90, 93, 101 acoustics 84, 85, 87, 93, 94 design 73-75 Gewandhaus (Neues) (Leipzig) 75a, 87, 89, 90, 100, 101, 101a, 104 design 89 as model for Concertgebouw 100, 101 as model for Symphony Hall (Boston) 84, 87 Groningen 124 Grosser Musikvereinssaal (Vienna) 13n, 18n, 100 Gürzenich (Cologne) 51 Haarlemsche Courant 80 Hamburg 72, 123n Hanover Square Rooms (London) 71, 87 Het Concertgebouw NV 62, 80, 89, 97, 100, 101, 106 Hickford’s Great Room (London) 71 iPod 18, 148 Introduction to the Sociology of Music (Adorno) 40 Kaisersaal (Düsseldorf) 54

La Maison Symphonique (Montreal) 79 Leipzig; see also Gewandhaus 14, 64, 72-74, 84, 87-90, 93, 98, 100, 101, 113, 117, 141 Bach, Johann Sebastian 64, 113 grand concerts 73, 74 public concert 72 as trading city 72 Lincoln Center (New York City) 41, 79 Listening; see also attentive listening 18, 20, 24, 26-48, 69, 70, 76, 83, 86, 88, 89, 96, 103, 106, 109, 112, 115, 116, 119, 122, 142, 144-146, 148, 149, 151, 154-158 attentive listening 16-19, 22, 24, 26, 27, 36-48, 44n, 55, 57, 75, 76, 88, 89, 96, 104-109, 115, 126, 136, 139, 141, 142, 144-146, 148, 151-157 Barthes, Roland and Havas, Richard on 33, 34 distinct from hearing 33, 34 entertainment listening (Adorno) 40, 41 Forster, E.M., on 35, 36 horizon of expectations (Jauss) 44 method 36 mobile listening 148 passive listening 31-33 structural listening (Adorno) 38, 40-43 Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich on 119n London 52, 69-71, 156 London Gazette 70 London symphonies (Haydn) 71 Long-playing records (LPs) 19, 31, 32, 153-155 Looking Backward (Bellamy) 32 Maastschappij Arti et Amicitiae (Society for Art and Friendship) 98 Maatschappij tot Bevordering der Toonkunst (Society for the Promotion of Music) 54n, 55, 58, 62 Media history 26, 141, 142n, 144n, 145, 146, 148, 149, 151 Media theory 19-21, 30, 117, 144n, 145, 146 Meininger Hofkapelle 60n, 68, 109, 132-135 mp3 142n, 144, 147, 157 Music criticism 26, 36, 86n, 108, 109, 115-118, 120, 121, 124, 127, 130 before 1800 86n, 116 critique of dilettante and virtuoso 127 Dahlhaus, Carl, on 115, 116 and German nationalism 127 in the Netherlands 109, 115, 121, 124, 130 subjective music criticism (Pieper) 116, 117 Music Hall (Boston) 84, 85 Musical Romanticism 27, 45-49, 69, 76, 86n, 88, 109, 112-115, 117, 119n, 120, 123, 130, 136 and classicism 45, 46 and composers 46, 113, 114 and instrumental music 45, 47 Musicology 18, 19, 24, 34

175

Index of Subjec ts

Nederlandsch Muzikaal Tijdschrift 68n, 129 Nederlandsche Staatscourant 62 Nieuws van den Dag 133, 135, 137 Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Attali) 39 Odeon (Amsterdam) 52, 60, 92 Odeon (Munich) 51, 71n On Popular Music (Adorno) 40 On The Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening (Adorno) 40 Opera City Concert Hall (Tokyo) 21n Palais Royal (Paris) 65 Paleis voor Volksvlijt (Amsterdam) 16n, 52, 52a,54, 56, 61, 68, 92 Paris 22n, 44, 45, 51, 65-67, 97, 113 Park Orchestra 60 Parkzaal (Amsterdam) 14, 15, 51-56, 53a, 61, 68, 92, 139 Performance 14, 15, 17, 24, 26, 29-33, 36, 41, 42, 48, 49, 51, 53, 56, 58, 67-69, 74, 76, 77, 86, 105, 109, 114, 115, 121, 123, 125-128, 130-139, 141, 149, 153 as an active engagement with music 29, 31, 36 Pet Sounds (Beach Boys, The) 154 Philharmonic Hall (New York City) 79 Philharmonie (Berlin) 21n, 82n Philosophy of technology 19, 24, 151 Public concert 16, 17, 27n, 47, 48, 52, 69-73, 117, 153, 156 Habermas, Jürgen on 69 Leipzig 72, 73 London 69-71 and the sacralization of music 47, 48, 71, 156 Recorded music 20, 25, 31, 32, 141, 143, 146, 148-157 Adorno, Theodor on 32, 149 Ihde, Don, on 31, 32, 149, 150 McLuhan, Marshall, on 150 Sousa, John Philip on 151 Redoutensaal (Vienna) 18n Republic, The (Plato) 39 Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam) 59 Rotterdam 110, 11n, 126 Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra 13, 112, 115, 137-139 Grieg, Edvard on 115, 138 Strauss, Richard and 138 Saalbau (Frankfurt) 51 Science and technology studies (STS) 19, 22 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Beatles, the) 154

Social construction of technology (SCOT) 22 Soundscape of Modernity, the (Thompson) 102 Sound studies 24, 25, 34n, 102 Stadsschouwburg (Amsterdam) 59 Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam) 59 Strange Sounds: Music, Technology and Culture (Taylor) 147 Sydney Opera House 21n Symphony 13, 18n, 21, 24, 26, 27, 35, 42, 44-46, 51, 52, 56, 77, 88, 105, 118-122, 125, 127, 128, 130, 132, 133, 137-139, 141 Benjamin, Walter on 26, 27 Hoffmann, E.T.A. on 118-121, 127 Symphony Hall (Boston) 13n, 21n, 82-87, 96, 100, 103, 104, 153 Sabine, Wallace and 82-87, 96 Task of the Translator, The (Benjamin) 26, 27 Technical code 142, 145, 151, 152, 155 Technological determinism 143, 147 Technology studies 22, 23, 26, 49, 50, 102-104, 145 method 22, 23[2] Temporary Committee for the Building of a Concert Hall 58-61, 90 The Hague 112 Thomaskirche (Leipzig) 64, 65, 90 acoustics 64, 65 Bach, Johann Sebastian and 64, 65 Three Swans Inn (Leipzig) 73, 90 Tonhalle (Düsseldorf) 51, 54, 55, 90-93, 100, 137 as model for the Concertgebouw 54, 55, 90-93 Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen 123, 129, 130 Vendu (London) 71 Vereeniging tot het Vormen van een Openbare Verzameling van Hedendaagsche Kunst (Society for the Creation of a Public Collection of Contemporary Art) 58 Vienna 13n, 14, 18n, 21n, 59, 64, 100, 113, 141 composers 113 musical culture 141 Ringstrasse 59 Vision 19, 31, 33, 48 Jonas, Hans on 33 McLuhan, Marshall on 19 visual bias 29, 30, 34, 83 Vondelpark 59 Vrij Gemeente (Amsterdam) 97n Walt Disney Concert Hall (Los Angeles) 16, 79 York Buildings (London) 70, 71