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Copyright Page The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries Edited by Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer Print Publication Date: Jan 2019 Subject: Music Online Publication Date: Nov 2018
(p. iv)
Copyright Page
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2019 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Thorau, Christian. | Ziemer, Hansjakob. Title: The Oxford handbook of music listening in the 19th and 20th centuries / edited by Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018009730 (print) | LCCN 2018011318 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190466978 (Updf) | ISBN 9780190466985 (Epub) | ISBN 9780190466961 (cloth) | ISBN 9780190466992 (companion website) Subjects: LCSH: Music—Social aspects—History—19th century. | Music—Social Page 1 of 2
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Copyright Page aspects—History—20th century. | Concerts—History—19th century. | Concerts—History—20th century. Classification: LCC ML3916 (ebook) | LCC ML3916.O968 2018 (print) | DDC 781.1/709—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018009730 135798642 Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
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Illustrations
Illustrations The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries Edited by Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer Print Publication Date: Jan 2019 Subject: Music Online Publication Date: Nov 2018
(p. ix)
Illustrations
I.1. Concertpublikum (Concert audience) 4 I.2. Auf dem Stehplatz in einem [Arthur] Nikisch Concert (Standing-room audience at an [Arthur] Nikisch Concert in Berlin) 6 I.3. Klangweltwunder (Sound wonder of the world) 18 1.1. P.-S. Germain, Salle des Concerts du Conservatoire 39 1.2. Salle Herz, Paris 44 1.3. Le concert Musard aux Champs-Elysées 47 1.4. Jules Pelocq, Le concert aux Champs-Elysées 48 1.5. Jules Pelocq, Représentation d’un ballet dans un café-concert des ChampsElysées 49 2.1. George du Maurier, “The Latest Fashion in Music at Home” 63 3.1. Concert program for the Salle Herz 81 3.2. Concert program for the Grand Casino de Paris 83 3.3. Concert program for the Singspiel-Halle (or Salon Variété), Hôtel de Saxe, Leipzig 86 6.1. Forkel, Commentar 148 7.1. Gewandhaus program, January 29, 1807 173 7.2. Gewandhaus program, April 2, 1829 175 7.3. Gewandhaus program, January 22, 1829 176 8.1. Extract from Ella’s analytical notes for the Musical Union 190 8.2. Extract from the program booklet for a Crystal Palace Saturday Concert 192 8.3. Quartet Party at the Musical Union 196 8.4. Bound copy and opening of John Murray’s 1879 Handbook for Travellers in Switzerland 197 9.1. Carl Spitzweg, English Tourists in the Roman Campagna 208 10.1. Interior view of the Theater an der Wien 233 10.2. Floor plan of the main floor of the new Schauspielhaus in Berlin 240 10.3. Concert hall of the Schauspielhaus in Berlin 241 10.4. Auditorium of Symphony Hall, Boston 242 Page 1 of 2
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Illustrations 11.1. View of the Magnificent Box Erected for Their Majesties in Westminster Abbey . . . at the Commemoration of Handel (1792–1803) 260 11.2. The audience at the 1823 Yorkshire Grand Musical Festival 261 11.3. Detail of York Minster Interior Structure, Rear Gallery 263 11.4. Interior of Birmingham Town Hall 269 12.1. Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix, study for the portrait of Frédéric Chopin and George Sand 285 12.2. Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix, Frédéric Chopin 286 12.3. Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix, George Sand 286 13.1. Pibaraud, Interior of the Théâtre du Châtelet 314 13.2. Montanari, Auditorium of the Teatro Costanzi 315 13.3. Onofre Alsamora, performance of Bellini’s Norma in the Gran Teatre del Liceu 316 14.1. Berliner Konzert-Anzeiger (Berlin Concert Advertiser) 339 14.2. “Concert Garden at the Turn of the Century” 340 14.3. Heinrich Zille, advertisement for sheet music 343 14.4. Heinrich Zille, “The newest Gassenhauer” 345 15.1. Ludwig Hohlwein, Telephonische Übertragung (Telephonic broadcast) 358 15.2. Service map of the broadcast network in Bavaria showing the Leitungsrund spruchnetz in Bayern 359 15.3. Großleistungverstärker für die telephonische Opernübertragung (High-pow ered amplifier system used for the Opera-Telephone) 361 15.4. After a painting by Albert Gräfle, Die Intimen bei Beethoven 366 16.1. Tone Test oral instructions 374 16.2. Tone Test response card 375 16.3. Finger-tapping device 379 16.4. Mood Change Chart 384 18.1. James Abbott McNeill Whistler, The White Girl 424 18.2. Fernand Khnopff, Listening to Schumann 425 18.3. Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Interrupted Reading 429 18.4. François Auguste Biard, The Salon at 4:00 p.m. 430 18.5. Wassily Kandinsky, Impression III. Concert 431 21.1. Illustration for a text on types of concert-goers 484 (p. x)
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Tables, Charts, and Music Examples
Tables, Charts, and Music Examples The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries Edited by Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer Print Publication Date: Jan 2019 Subject: Music Online Publication Date: Nov 2018
(p. xi)
Tables, Charts, and Music Examples
Table 11.1. Middle-Class Attendees at the 1828 Yorkshire Grand Musical Festival Morning (Sacred) Concerts in York Minster 258
Charts 7.1. Percentage of symphonies announced along with their key in relation to the re spective absolute number of symphonies being performed 170 7.2. Percentage of symphonies announced with both their key and their running number in relation to the respective absolute number of symphonies being per formed 171 9.1. Semiotic model of a tourist attraction 215
Music Examples 12.1. Brahms, Sonata for Violoncello and Piano in F major, op. 99, Adagio affettuoso, mm. 1–19 294 12.2. Brahms, Sonata for Violoncello and Piano in F major, op. 99, Adagio affettuoso, mm. 31–44 295 (p. xii)
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Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries Edited by Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer Print Publication Date: Jan 2019 Subject: Music Online Publication Date: Nov 2018
(p. xiii)
Acknowledgments
THIS book grew out of a dialogue between the two editors—a musicologist and a histori an by training—as well as with a number of scholars from various disciplines. Many of them took part in the international conference “The Art of Listening: Trends and Perspec tives of a History of Music Listening” in 2012 that took place at Radialsystem V—Space for Arts and Ideas in Berlin, Germany, which proved to be a congenial location to reflect on the transformations of music listening through the centuries. We thank its co-founder and co-director, Folkert Uhde, for this collaboration and Janine Wiesecke (Max Planck In stitute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt am Main) for her assistance in organizing this conference, which drew more than a hundred participants, some of whom joined this book project. This handbook benefited from the inspiration and critical feedback of many of our colleagues over a long period of time, and we thank the authors for their openness and readiness to enter a dialogue about the history of listening, and—not least—for their patience. In particular, we thank Katharine Ellis, Daniel Morat, and Viktoria Tkaczyk for continuously supporting this book since the beginning, offering their advice and thoughts on the conception of the book. We are also very grateful to Mark Evan Bonds and Neil Gregor, who read an earlier draft of the introduction to this volume and offered insightful feedback and food for thought. Our volume also benefited from the anonymous reviewers of Oxford University Press who commented on the conception and the individual chapters at two different stages which helped to further shape the project. This book would not have been possible without the support of our home institutions—the University of Potsdam and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science—and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft as well as the Ernst Schering Foundation, which gen erously provided funding for the initial conference event. We thank Kristyna Comer in particular for her careful, meticulous, and patient support in editing and managing the manuscript. We also thank Urte Brauckmann for her expertise and help in obtaining per missions as well as Kate Sturge and Kerry McCarthy for their advice and assistance with translation. At Oxford University Press, we thank Suzanne Ryan and Lauralee Yeary for
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Acknowledgments their continuous encouragement, advice, and support during the long process of bringing this volume together. (p. xiv)
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Contributors
Contributors The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries Edited by Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer Print Publication Date: Jan 2019 Subject: Music Online Publication Date: Nov 2018
(p. xv)
Contributors
Christina Bashford, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Mark Evan Bonds, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
James Deaville, Carleton University
Katharine Ellis, University of Cambridge
Wolfgang Fuhrmann, Universität Leipzig
Wolfgang Gratzer, Universität Mozarteum Salzburg
Neil Gregor, University of Southampton
Alexandra Hui, Mississippi State University
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Contributors
James H. Johnson, Boston University
Anselma Lanzendörfer, Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Frankfurt am Main
Fred Everett Maus, University of Virginia
Charles Edward McGuire, Oberlin College and Conservatory
Daniel Morat, Freie Universität Berlin
Sonja Neumann, Deutsches Museum Munich
Gesa zur Nieden, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
Christiane Tewinkel, Universität der Künste Berlin
Christian Thorau, Universität Potsdam
Viktoria Tkaczyk, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin
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Contributors Axel Volmar, Universität Siegen
William Weber, California State University, Long Beach
Stefan Weinzierl, Technische Universität Berlin
Hansjakob Ziemer, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin
(p. xvi)
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The Art of Listening and Its Histories: An Introduction
The Art of Listening and Its Histories: An Introduction Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries Edited by Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer Print Publication Date: Jan 2019 Subject: Music, Musicology and Music History Online Publication Date: Nov 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190466961.013.1
Abstract and Keywords In the introduction, the “art of listening” is established as a heuristic tool and a historio graphical concept with which to study and evaluate the history of music listening. Using Peter Gay’s formulation of the concept as a starting point to reformulate and define the art of listening in a systematic way, the introduction gives an overview of more than two hundred years in the evolution and distribution of music listening by interweaving the twenty-one chapters of the volume. Special attention is given to methodological issues that a history of an invisible and amorphous subject has to face and to establishing a framework for writing such a history. Keywords: art of listening, aesthetic hierarchies, cultural turn, historicity of listening, implicit listener, listener types, listening behavior, modes of listening, norms of listening, plurality of listening
Overview THIS handbook examines the history of music listening over the course of the past two hundred years. It focuses on ways of listening to music that emerged in the concert halls of Europe during the nineteenth century and then travelled beyond its borders as both an ideal and a practice. The authors take the “art of listening” as a leitmotif and a historic concept, using it as a heuristic tool to observe practices and discourses about a learnable mode of perception and to deconstruct their normative notions. Such a mode of music lis tening first emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century, although it has its his torical roots in early modern practices of focused attention in musical and nonmusical contexts. The idea of music listening as a practice in itself was inseparably linked to the emphatic recognition of music as art in the nineteenth century, with the concert hall most clearly representing the ascent of music listening. Concert halls and opera houses were not the only venues where the art of listening evolved, however. It was adopted and adapted across the public realm to suit a wide range of collective listening situations, in
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The Art of Listening and Its Histories: An Introduction which it was redefined and practiced in accordance with prevailing conventions, ideolo gies, and objectives. For a long time, music listening escaped scholarly attention. As an invisible and amor phous phenomenon, it appeared as a timeless and naturally given mode of perception not worthy of exploration as a historical subject. Some attempts were made in the 1920s to reflect on the possibility of such a history, but these efforts did not find many followers in the ensuing decades.1 Yet over the course of the past twenty years, there has been a fun damental shift in attitudes toward the history of music listening, reflected in studies as pi oneering as James H. Johnson’s now-classic book about the transformation of music lis tening in Paris between 1750 and 1850.2 Historians and musicologists (p. 2) have now be gun to engage seriously with the history of listening to music. This volume takes stock of these developments. Its task is to explore whether, how, and why practices of music lis tening changed as they moved from pleasure gardens and concert venues in the eigh teenth century to the living rooms of hi-fi listeners in the twentieth and the mobile de vices of the twenty-first. Combining case studies from several disciplinary perspectives, it seeks to understand the relation between long-term and short-term processes of change and the multiple historical meanings associated with music listening. Relying on a growing literature concerning the social histories of concert life and musical performance, the chapters in this volume pursue what has recently been termed a “cul tural history of music.”3 The contributing authors unveil listening habits hidden in histori cal layers and find traces of learned listening in practices and discourses as diverse as the designing of acoustic space, the programming of pieces and the building of canonical repertoires, the ideologies of ideal listeners, the uses of scientific methods in the analysis of listening, the visual representations of listening situations, the emergence of di chotomies between “high” and “low” culture, the designative and annotative practices used in concert programs, and seemingly trivial everyday listening habits. This volume thus attempts to historicize the evolution of listening styles, to reconstruct the wealth of variants in listening and the relevance of listeners to histories of music and culture in general. Until the present day, an idealized concept of concert-goers as focused and silent recipients of musical masterpieces has prevailed. This collection seeks to situate such an ideal in a contradictory field of listening practices by outlining a problem-oriented, source-based, and theoretically informed history of the listener.
Defining the Art of Listening A history of music listening in the past two hundred years can be written alongside the rise of a culturally significant phenomenon: the emergence of a highly focused auditory attentiveness among an audience that consciously cultivated an exclusive form of listen ing. During this period we see the growth of a cultural practice that Peter Gay has called “the art of listening.” We trace its emergence in the second half of the eighteenth century, its solidification during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and its questioning at the beginning of the twenty-first. Gay adapted the notion as the title of the opening essay to Page 2 of 35
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The Art of Listening and Its Histories: An Introduction his book The Naked Heart, part of his multivolume study The Bourgeois Experience. In line with James H. Johnson’s research, Gay argued that a type of undistracted listening that immerses the listener into the musical experience, using all cognitive and emotional capacities while muting any physical reactions—as well as any social interactions—was a product of the nineteenth century. Such an attitude toward music was a symptom, a means, a behavior, and a need expressed by a social class conducting a “pilgrimage to the interior.”4 Music, in Gay’s perspective, was given the highest regard as an art form pre cisely because it served the bourgeois passion for introversion and a (p. 3) focus on the self. Turning into a silent listener—and encouraging fellow concert-goers to do the same —was part of this practice. The care that devoted listeners took to avoid distraction was “more than a snobbish sense of their superiority over the uncouth. It almost literally [took] them away from themselves.” All disturbances “act[ed] as direct interferences with a deeply regressive communion with one’s past.”5 Gay’s attempt to make sense of histori cal changes in music listening, which was bound to his psychoanalytically inspired histori ography, has been criticized for overlooking the point that “the invention of a modern, at tentive, ‘inward’ listening as the culmination of a long history of cultural ‘achieve ment’ . . . is deeply interwoven with the Othering of the senses within the larger project of Western colonial domination.”6 By historicizing the concept of listening as an art, we put its cultural achievement into perspective and show that it can be both deconstructed and developed in productive and illuminating ways. In this volume we use three defining aspects of the art of listening that correspond to three readings of this phrase: the history of the concepts involved, listening in relation to other senses and other arts, and the normative aspect that made this conception a defin ing force itself. First, without referring to music, the “art of listening” draws on two terms that have their own long history. The older meaning of the term “art,” or ars, Kunst, or techné, survived after the emancipation of les beaux arts or die schönen Künste (the fine arts) at the end of the eighteenth century: a skill, ability, or technique that is not given by nature but has to be learned and acquired and that the practitioner can either fail or succeed in mastering. Since then, art has been attributable to nearly every cultural practice that requires exper tise and allows refinement. So the art of listening can mean an ability to listen very close ly to intimate acquaintances, to family members, to groups, to society, and, not least, to oneself.7 Most European languages provide a broad variety of words to mark the sensory and communicative function that goes beyond perceiving or hearing (in the sense of “to listen to” in English, or zuhören, ascoltare, escuchar, and so on, in other languages). Such linguistic differentiation continues to serve socially distinctive functions also in the aes thetic realm. In a case study of British music festivals in the 1820s, Charles Edward McGuire shows that the general term “auditors” is set off from “amateurs” and “connois seurs” when at the same time it is hoped that these auditors become “better,” more knowledgeable listeners (Chapter 11). Accordingly, during the course of the nineteenth century, the English word “listener” in the sense of “attentive hearer” assumed the defini tion in common use today. Wolfgang Gratzer (Chapter 20) looks at how the use of the phrase has expanded and at the “language games” in which it was applied at the end of Page 3 of 35
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The Art of Listening and Its Histories: An Introduction the twentieth century. The idea of an art of listening is used widely in such contexts as psychotherapy, spiritual counseling, sociology, and philosophy. Gratzer discerns a recur ring rhetoric of loss in which a new or renewed art of listening may cure a societal deficit. Second, the “art of listening” can relate specifically to perceiving music, to an ability that belongs to the realm of the fine arts. The phrase “art of listening to music” singles out lis tening as an aural specialization. Music critics, theorists, and philosophers from Rochlitz through Hanslick and Adorno have argued strongly for a refined conception of listening as a quasi-autonomous mode of aesthetic perception that answers the (p. 4) demands of an “absolute” or “pure” music and is mostly directed toward form, structure, and sound.8 Instructions are given to focus solely on what is heard. Physical or emotional responses to music—dancing, singing, imitating the sound, or calling out in joy or wonder—are ruled out, and the work of the other senses is diminished. This extreme attitude is, however, on ly one among many approaches that either complemented or transgressed against a structural listening and an imposed monosensoriality.9 One heuristic function of the con cept is that it makes clear that defining the role of the art of listening should not prede termine research because there is never an entirely pure listening situation. It follows that a history of listening has to be written in the context of the other senses and arts. Such parallels to the art of seeing and the art of reading are treated in James H. Johnson’s chapter (Chapter 18). He expands the scope of his original study of music lis tening in Paris and places his work against the backdrop of a history of the senses and emotions. Several other contributors to this volume address multisensory practices in lis tening situations and investigate the relations between the senses on these occasions. Paintings and drawings, especially, can portray the multitude of listening experiences that involve not only the aural but also the visual senses and show the simultaneity of seem ingly different listening postures next to one other. In fact, the engraving after a painting by René Reinicke (1899) shown in Figure I.1 takes (p. 5) such variety of postures as its fo cus. The highly absorbed listener who mutes his visual sense by covering his eyes sits next to a couple who are reading and a finely dressed young woman who dropped the concert program and looks down to the side absently. A few seats down the row, a woman wrapped in her fur seems to be watching rather than listening. Even more diversity is found in a drawing by Eduard Cucuel (1902, Figure I.2), which shows music enthusiasts in the inexpensive standing room section following the musical score. Some listeners fol low the musical score, most of them do not care for a view of the stage, and they assume a variety of bodily postures for listening (see Figure I.2).
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The Art of Listening and Its Histories: An Introduction
Figure I.1. Concertpublikum (Concert audience) (1899), wood engraving by Alfred Heide after a painting by René Reinicke. From the art supplement (Kunstbeilage) of the Illustrirte Zeitung (Leipzig and Berlin, 1899), vol. 113, no. 2936, October 5. Staats bibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz (2 Ac7169-113=2923/2948.1899).
Yet it is not only such a simultaneous multiplicity of listening modes that puts the ideal type of the highly absorbed, individual listener into perspective. Attentive listening has al ways been supported and facilitated by complementary cues that guide the listener visu ally, verbally, and emotionally through what they hear. The chapters in Part II (“Listening Ideologies and Instructions”) take up Leon Botstein’s scheme of “listening through read ing”10 and look at instructional media that prepare the audience and accompany the lis tener in real time. In the way musical works are announced and in the emergence of an notated concert programs we can grasp how the arts of seeing, reading, and listening in tertwine. Anselma Lanzendörfer argues that such an instructional process starts with an act of communication we almost always take for granted: the way pieces are named and announced on the concert program (Chapter 7). One particular field outside the concert hall provides another useful example of interaction of the senses, namely, the history of tourism. The rise of modern commercialized tourism was a catalyst for the emergence of a mode of listening that is guided by descriptions, in much the same way as tourists are guided through cities and landscapes by guidebooks. Christina Bashford finds the origins of such parallels in British Victorian culture (Chapter 8), and Christian Thorau (Chapter 9) suggests the idea of “touristic listening” from the period when, around 1850, listening began to take on characteristics of the visually dominated practice of sightseeing. The knowledge distributed through the musical guidebooks popularized a canon of works and defined what should be listened to in the music. It appears that after the beaux arts had distinguished themselves as autonomous artistic and academic disciplines, they solicited and increasingly became dependent on an artfulness in the way they should be received. An art was needed in order to appreciate art. Music appreciation as an integral part of higher education in the English-speaking world was rooted in these early attempts to guide the ear and has emerged as an educational institution since then. It is no coinci
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The Art of Listening and Its Histories: An Introduction dence that a university textbook first published in 1985 adopted the notion up front: Mu sic: The Art of Listening.11 Third is the normative meaning: the idea that music is the art that teaches us how to lis ten and refines our ability to do so. Music is the art in which—and through which—we might be made good listeners in the widest sense to others, to ourselves, to other music, and to nature. This aspect follows Gay’s reasoning as to why music was sacrosanct in bourgeois culture. The belief that music itself functions as a school of listening resonates here, and such an attitude can also be seen in pedagogical credos for teaching music that circulate to the present day. Exercises for perceiving and distinguishing soundscapes like the ones R. Murray Schafer introduced in the 1970s can thus be understood as (p. 6) (p. 7) (p. 8) extending an ideal of attentiveness to all acoustic environments that was orig inally cultivated and trained in the environment of the concert hall. In turn, expanding the art of listening in this way would not have been possible without such artists as John Cage (see Johnson, Chapter 18). Cage taught Western listeners to break free from the in tentionality and hierarchy of sounds. His approach, however, relied at its core on a cogni tive tradition cultivated over the course of many centuries that involves the concept of tonality and inherited distinctions between what is art and what is not. Discipline is re quired in order to let sounds “become themselves”; the listener must remain quiet and at tentive. In this stillness, one must listen actively into a space outside of syntax or mean ing and beyond distinctions.12 Yet it would undoubtedly be ignorant to claim Cage’s radi calism exclusively for a Western history of listening. Highly attentive and disciplined lis tening is a practice followed by many cultures, and it is often rooted in religious tradi tions. Cage himself was influenced by Zen Buddhism, and recent ethnographical studies concerning listening in avant-garde concerts in Tokyo have discerned a similar mode of highly disciplined listening in Japanese social practice.13 At the same time, the rituals and conventions of the Western concert hall were also exported to other parts of the world as a consequence of nineteenth-century cultural colonialism. Such aspects have become globalized in the course of the internationalization of classical music. Although it is be yond the scope of this handbook to examine such global processes of cultural exchange, establishing an art of listening as a heuristic concept in the study of differentiating histo ries of listening across cultures would prove fruitful for further research.14
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The Art of Listening and Its Histories: An Introduction
Figure I.2. Berliner Bilder: Auf dem Stehplatz in einem [Arthur] Nikisch Concert. Nach dem Leben gezeichnet von Ed. Cucuel (Standing-room audience at an [Arthur] Nikisch Concert in Berlin. After a drawing from life by Ed. Cucuel) (1902), wood en graving. From Illustrirte Zeitung (Leipzig and Berlin, 1902), vol. 118, no. 3068, April 17: 582f. Courtesy of bpk.
The normative implications of the concept have been especially influential. One trope in particular—that of the implicit listener—has become a defining category and is connected with the highest estimations of musical listening. This trope was transferred, with alter ations, from literary studies, where it refers to expectations of meaning and structure that a text affords to its reader as a disposition of its poetic potential.15 With regard to lis tening, it encompasses the idea that music can imply the best form of a listener and that a certain way of listening is, so to speak, composed into sound and therefore requested by it. To rethink its impact for a modern history of music listening is to trace it back to a point long before its conceptualization in literary and musicological studies and to reveal a tricky, ambiguous concept that conflates aspects of intention and perfection but also of attitude toward the musical work and, not least, of cultural learning. When we look for the implicit musical listener avant la lettre, our search takes us back as far as 1750. It was the time when an “art de l’écouter” was explicitly demanded and dis cussed among the French encyclopedists: “After having created an art of learning music one ought also to create an art of listening to it,” Jean-Baptiste Le Rond d’Alembert re quested in his Discours préliminaire, for example.16 He was convinced that music had to fit into the concept of the imitation of nature and that the listener should be able to un derstand what the music portrays, especially in the case of instrumental music without words. The French philosopher Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle took the same line when he posed the question “Sonate, que me veux-tu?” (Sonata, what do you want of me?), as cited by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his dictionary of 1768 and circulated (p. 9) widely since. In this utterance from a prominent audience member at a mid-eighteenth-century symphony concert, Mark Evan Bonds (Chapter 6) identifies a starting point for the implic it listener. Fontenelle’s question “might well be said,” Bonds states, “to mark the begin ning of modern listening: the idea that members of a concert audience have an obligation Page 7 of 35
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The Art of Listening and Its Histories: An Introduction to come to terms with what they are hearing.”17 Bonds discerns a novel attitude toward the act of listening to music: that “listening itself might be an active process requiring a certain investment of energies on the part of listeners and that a work of music might pose a challenge of some kind to its auditors.”18 Right up to the twentieth century, and despite all promises and praises of the metaphysical attractions of an absolute music, in strumental music of a symphonic dimension and fabric remained a challenge or at least an irritation for many listeners, making them wonder how to listen. Such challenges never disappeared over the span of the two hundred years of listening history that we consider here. In fact, the figure of an ideal listener implied and request ed by the music was renewed with every generation and with every intensification in composition that composers expected their audiences to keep up with. A line can be traced from Fontenelle’s doubts to a 2004 popular introduction to music by Christiane Tewinkel titled “Am I normal when I feel bored in a concert?”19 To emphasize the nexus between 1768 and 2004 is not to overlook the self-confident irreverence that separates Fontenelle’s question from the intimidated and anxious “Am I normal?” of the current lis tener. Both questions suppose that the music has something to say and implies some art of listening, yet meanwhile the figure of the implicit listener has grown into an authorita tive shadow whose presence looms over the concert-goer. The discomfort emanates not only from the auratic work of art performed on stage but also from the intimidating ele ments of the very space, ritual, and musicking (in Christopher Small’s sense) that form the context of the performance. Whereas Fontenelle prefers to blame the music rather than his own inadequacies for the boredom, the early twenty-first century audience mem ber has internalized the idea of the implicit listener as a standard that must be attained and his or her listening skills emulated, or one has somehow failed. Tewinkel’s chapter in this volume analyzes how and why introductory books to music written since the 1950s have been noticeably reticent about any form of audience inattentiveness. This is the re sult of long-term implementation of practices and discourses that make music listening a form of cultural socialization. Perhaps the most outspoken protagonist in this discourse, and someone who contributed greatly to defining the art of listening as an aesthetic norm, was the Viennese music critic Eduard Hanslick. He argued vigorously that as a music critic his main goal was to edu cate the audience about how to listen.20 Such an intent is clear in his aesthetic manifesto Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (1854), a highly influential text that can be read as a school of listening. The concept takes a fixed shape as he separates the rational act of listening (“the deliberate, pure contemplation” of a musical piece) from the emotional reaction to music, which he regards as passive and “pathological.”21 As he writes, With every artistic pleasure, there is an indispensable intellectual aspect, as can be effectively demonstrated by the very different levels on which one and the same (p. 10) musical work can be listened to: With sensuous and sentimental peo ple, the intellectual aspect can diminish to a minimum; with predominantly intel lectual people, it becomes nothing short of crucial. The true “happy medium” [rechte Mitte], in our view, here inclines preferably a bit to the right Page 8 of 35
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The Art of Listening and Its Histories: An Introduction [nach rechts]. To become drunk requires only weakness, but there is an art of lis tening. The person who wallows in feeling is in most instances untrained in the aesthetical comprehension of the musically beautiful.22 While defining the right and true way to listen, Hanslick accepts “very different levels” and a wide variety of listening fashions and abilities. Nevertheless, his conclusions are unmistakably hierarchical. A multitude of diverse listening modes and attitudes is re duced to a binary option, the rational versus the emotional, with a preference for the first. An art of listening is introduced as a technique to overcome the weakness of being ravished by the music. Here, the heuristic character of the concept helps raise awareness of the multiplicity of modes of listening that lie beyond Hanslick’s binary distinction sim ply by revealing how ambivalent, frayed, and limited the idea of a normative listener was. The ideal of a disciplined and attentive listening audience—Katharine Ellis in Chapter 1 terms it the “gold standard of attentive listening”—was probably more often questioned or ignored than regulated or enforced. The gold standard is not and never was a given. In fact, there are many alternatives to the idea of listening as an art. Other definitions can be more relevant to individuals in the way they develop a very close bond to the music to which they listen. Fred Maus explores this idea in relation to interviews from the 1980s. In such cases the act of listening can be identified with a feeling of possession, of owning “my music” (Chapter 19). By describing the art of listening as a practice of individual and social boundary-drawing, this volume offers a new perspective on the multiplicity of lis tening modes and on the dependence of this art on certain historical conditions.
Historicizing the Art of Listening Chronologies of the history of music listening by such authors as Heinrich Besseler, Peter Gay, and James H. Johnson usually treat the period after 1750 as the beginning of the modern listening tradition. Indeed, these years mark a watershed in the evolution of lis tening as an alleged art that was to develop over the subsequent two and a half centuries. But as recent scholarship concerning the early modern period has shown, the roots of the modern definition of an art of listening reach back well before 1750. In seventeenth-cen tury England an “art of hearing,” for example, emerged in Protestant services as a way for individual service-goers to memorize and to appropriate sermons. A focused attention on the spoken word could be used as a tool to “take a lengthy and complex body of reli gious teaching and to make it [one’s] own through a process of mental sorting and filter ing.”23 Correlations between religious practices and music (p. 11) listening can be ob served up to Victorian times: Christina Bashford, in the context of the first annotated con cert programs, points to silent worship and following Bible passages during a church ser vice (Chapter 8). But even in the musical realm there were practices suggesting that a general reorienta tion toward the listener was under way. For example, the presence of the listener can be traced in the growing preference for listening to professional performers instead of par ticipating in amateur music making. With regard to the Italian elite in the early modern Page 9 of 35
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The Art of Listening and Its Histories: An Introduction period, Andrew Dell’Antonio observed a move from “creation of sounds to listening to sound, or more precisely to discourse about sounds.”24 David Charlton challenges Johnson’s picture of the tumultuous behavior in the standing area of the Paris Opera around 1750. “If not indicative of total, modern silence, there is evidence of a relative si lence, especially by comparison with Italy.”25 Furthermore, William Weber, in a review of Johnson’s book, has cautioned against oversimplification if we reflect on behavior in opera houses in the eighteenth century, reminding us that we should conclude not that people did not listen or had no serious interest in music but, rather, that “they paid atten tion to it in ways different from our own,” their practices adhering to different social eti quette.26 The same seems to have been true throughout the nineteenth century, when some of these habits persisted or resurfaced, as Katharine Ellis shows in Chapter 1 of this volume. During the eighteenth century, the general shift toward the listener can be observed to have taken place in several areas of the musical world. As a process of differentiation, distinction, and definition, it secured for music listening its privileged place. This reorien tation was reflected in ongoing theoretical discussions about the relation between listen ing and music. Writers such as Johann Mattheson and Johann Nikolaus Forkel trans formed the notion of how music should be received or appreciated from the mere hearing of a piece to the actual understanding of it. As Mark Evans Bonds explains in his chapter, Forkel argued that in order to judge a piece of music fully and to recognize it as art, it is not enough to consider the mere skill of performing or the players’ technique. Assuming that listening could be equated with an act of thinking, a consensus was reached with re gard to the transcendental potential of music, the ideal of an aesthetic community, and the belief in the universal validity of music.27 Celia Applegate has argued that these de bates took place within a “discursive context fraught with significance,” pointing to the insecure position of music and musicians in culture and society at that time, when music and music listening needed to be recognized as a serious art and legitimized in a social context.28 The rise of theories about listening formed a crucial part of this general trend toward acknowledging the role of listeners. Listening as a meaningful activity could be justified and legitimized in society by relating it to the high standards of an art.29 The redefinition of listening as an art was both a cause and an effect of the rise of Bürger lichkeit, which reached its peak at the beginning of the nineteenth century; Wolfgang Kaschuba has termed this social shift a “bourgeois awakening.”30 A new culture was about to emerge in which the social, cultural, and economic order was reconfigured and new modes of communication signaled the end of particularized (p. 12) societies. Bürger lichkeit as a new, “historically developing cultural practice” provided fertile ground for music and listening.31 Like museums, theaters, or journals, concerts became social insti tutions that were intimately connected with the rise of the new middle class and that can be considered part of the rise of a public sphere, famously conceptualized by Jürgen Habermas as the “realm of private people assembled to form a public.”32 These new loca tions served as links between individuals and society, bringing people with similar lifestyles together and helping cultivate similar tastes. As a consequence, these relations became structured in the world of music, as seen in the emergence of societies, orches Page 10 of 35
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The Art of Listening and Its Histories: An Introduction tras, architectural styles, journals, and program notes, and, furthermore, in a number of practices of music listening reaching from private to public settings. These new institu tions and practices called for reflection, which proved to be “an essential tool in the mak ing of a modern bourgeois person, a means of expressing cultural values and experiment ing with new identities and cultural practices.”33 The public sphere allowed the reconcep tualization of bourgeois identity, which was translated into a set of questions regarding musical life: Who is permitted to listen? Where can the act of listening take place? How are we listening and why do we need to listen at all? Questions such as these were ad dressed—often only implicitly—in institutional practices of inclusion and exclusion, but they were also explicitly discussed, for example, in treatises about the architecture of mu sical spaces, in journalistic reports about observing the listening experience, or in aes thetic pamphlets that offered guidance in matters related to listening. This body of litera ture helped contemporaries understand what they were doing and define the roles, stan dards, classifications, and aspirations that listening to music entailed. Concerning the evolution and dissemination of listening as an art throughout the nine teenth century, the contributors to this volume discuss the precise roles attributed to lis tening in various private and public spheres. Wolfgang Fuhrmann argues that close listen ing was particularly favored in a “social space of intimacy” (Chapter 12). A discussion of the relation between musical intimacy and intense listening can be found in the corre spondence of Johannes Brahms and his friends, for example, and Fuhrmann observes a compositional configuration of intimacy in Brahms’s Sonata for Violoncello and Piano in F Major, op. 99. Alternatively, Charles Edward McGuire investigates the transformation of listeners by analyzing the transformation of music festivals in Yorkshire between 1810 and 1830 (Chapter 11). These festivals often took place in churches that for such occa sions were equipped with temporary seating. The social composition of the audience changed over time from the nobility to the middle classes. So did the physical and spatial structures, which were oriented toward large groups, relied on a certain social ideal of music listening, and tried to ensure the best possible listening experience. There were overlaps between the public and the private spaces in the homes of members of the upper middle class, as James Deaville points out in his analysis of how social and sonic practices for listeners and musicians were exercised in certain “zones of attention” within these homes (Chapter 2). The most visible manifestation of these spatial boundaries could be seen in the architec ture of the spaces devoted to music listening. As Viktoria Tkaczyk and Stefan Weinzierl (p. 13) argue (Chapter 10), by 1820 there was a consensus that performances of operas and symphonies required their own distinct spaces. This distinction grew out of ongoing discussions throughout Europe starting in the eighteenth century about “good sound” in theater buildings, reflecting increasing interest in the spoken word and greater attention to auditorium acoustics with the aim of enhancing understanding. Whereas architectural theory had had a strong bias toward visual design, architects now began to focus on acoustic design. The authors show how this design involved the collaboration of archi tects, scientists, acoustic experts, and technicians, all seeking to achieve an acoustic ide al that would improve the listening experience for audiences.34 Concert halls seemed to Page 11 of 35
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The Art of Listening and Its Histories: An Introduction come closest to achieving the ideals of certain music listening techniques. This ideal spread with the dispersion of new concert halls (and opera houses) across Europe and, soon after, in North America. Yet at the same time, as Gesa zur Nieden’s chapter on opera buildings in Rome, Barcelona, and Paris illustrates, the spatial conditions of listening ex periences were strongly influenced by music-theoretical considerations, sociological con cerns, and locally specific needs (Chapter 13). The histories of these buildings show how the application of the art of listening was influenced by local variables. By the beginning of the twentieth century, a great variety of local buildings shaped the cityscapes and, in deed, the expectations of the listeners.35 The construction of performance spaces allowed and implied a differentiation and organi zation of the listeners as an audience. From early on, the audience was viewed as a uni fied whole. Any notion of “the audience” was in conflict, however, with observations of the multiplicity of judgments and listening habits they exhibited. Observers of concert life, such as journalists and scientists, grouped listeners on the basis of certain characteris tics. As early as 1799 we find listener typologies such as that proposed by Friedrich Rochlitz, who formulated certain types of listeners in an attempt to systematize the vari ety of listening habits in operation and the disparate social make-up of the concert-hall audience. He differentiated the audience into four groups: those who “listened with their whole soul” and were only interested in music, the “rational listeners” who knew the mu sic well, the “virtuoso listeners” who only came to a performance because of the technical skill of the musicians, and finally the “deplorable listeners” who came only out of “vanity and fashion” and had no real relationship with the music.36 Beyond this journalistic ap proach, explaining the multiplicity of listening habits also became a research topic over the course of the nineteenth century for physiologists and psychologists, who wondered to what extent hearing could be thought of as a universal experience.37 As Alexandra Hui shows in her study of the Edison Company (Chapter 16), such classifications would be useful for commercial purposes in the twentieth century, when listeners were seen as consumers who bought recordings in order to create particular moods. But even with noncommercial goals in mind, Adorno’s infamous denigration of certain listener types in the late 1930s can be seen as part of this ingrained need to explain and describe the vari ety of listener types (see also Chapter 4 by Ziemer and Chapter 21 by Tewinkel).38 All these typologies show not only diversity but also ideals of listeners from which deviation in behavior could then be observed and, of course, critiqued. This tension between ideals and practice, which caused a “kaleidoscope of differ ent modes of listening” (Christina Bashford), is explored in various chapters.39 Katharine Ellis discerns anachronistic listening behaviors in concert audiences in Paris in the sec ond half of the nineteenth century, noting that “the democratization of art music depend ed on contexts that did not impose ‘religious’ listening.”40 Ellis reframes the original question of James H. Johnson’s “Listening in Paris” from “When did audiences fall silent?” to “Where and why did audiences fall silent?” From the 1850s onward, attentive listening became the gold standard at musical performances, but it was often the case that audi ences could not live up to such expectations. Ellis presents evidence instead for a “walk and talk” during performances that stands in contrast to the simple idealized listener. As (p. 14)
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The Art of Listening and Its Histories: An Introduction Hansjakob Ziemer points out, the struggle to live up to such ideals was still an issue well into the twentieth century, as listeners showed resistance to reforms in concert-going and deviation from the norm was noticed with particular alacrity (Chapter 4). The gold stan dard clearly was not equally important to all audience members. Findings like these call for further local studies analyzing the role of urban traditions in the evolution of varia tions in listening habits and conceptions of identity. The establishment of typologies of listeners and hierarchies of listening habits was close ly linked to the establishment of hierarchies of genres and communities of taste. William Weber explores the extent to which listeners followed “multiple kinds of taste.”41 He states that such eclectic listening was still common at the end of the nineteenth century but that the differentiation of genres and associations of the practice with certain loca tions proved to be powerful markers of identity and often were associated with particular modes of listening.42 These hierarchies of genres constructed in the nineteenth century have governed popular and academic writing to the present day.43 A pessimistic tone has pervaded much of this writing; critics surveyed the popular forms and discerned falling musical standards in genres such as popular music, entertainment music, Salonmusik, and other styles that were felt to be the polar opposite of art music or serious music. By the end of the nineteenth century, a binary system was firmly in place that not only or dered the musical world but had multiple social connotations and could thus be used as a means of demarcation whereby the middle and upper classes distinguished themselves materially and morally from the lower classes.44 These distinctions have to be viewed as historical constructions, as Daniel Morat shows with regard to listening in the streets of Berlin around 1900, and he makes clear that these distinctions appeared to be natural or could be taken for granted (Chapter 14). Through negative descriptions of it, observers brought this kind of listening into opposi tion with seemingly superior modes of listening that allegedly prevailed in the concert hall. But urban listening habits, Morat explains, could facilitate a process of mental adap tation to big-city life and helped establish a metropolitan identity. The politics of listening and the formation of hierarchies of types, the observation of atti tudes, and the drawing of boundaries all formed part of the establishment of an art of lis tening that reached a climax around 1900 in terms of public recognition and status in the musical world. It also indicated a focus on hearing alone within the context of the senses and even within the variations of music listening itself. The belief in the concert (p. 15) hall as the prime location, the best possible place to cultivate one’s own aural sense, was firmly established. But the bulk of the statements about listening in this period can also be interpreted as attempts to legitimize its value to society, for, at the same time, listen ing as the dominant practice was fundamentally called into question. The urgency with which conditions of listening were challenged at the beginning of the twentieth century was without precedent. This questioning was caused by a confluence of social, cultural, political, and musical factors resulting from a fundamental transforma tion of society. A crisis of listening was perceived on nearly all levels: the spatial, the sen Page 13 of 35
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The Art of Listening and Its Histories: An Introduction sual, the programmatic, the performative, the personal, and the social (see Ziemer, Chap ter 4). In 1928 the German music critic Adolf Weißmann placed the golden age of music listening in the late nineteenth century and detected “symptoms of the decay” in the early twentieth century.45 His book The De-Deification of Music was an example of the funda mental questions that were now being asked: What is listening, what was its past, and what will be its future? How can we pay for musicians and the maintenance of concert halls? Is radio a threat to listening traditions? Who are the music listeners, and does a so ciety need music listening in the concert hall at all? Is listening a social or an individual matter? Can the arbitrariness of listening practices be objectified and guided by science? Such questions about listening could certainly be placed in the context of Jonathan Crary’s observation of a “crisis of attentiveness” in visual culture at about the same time.46 But it is important to bear in mind that the crisis was not only a matter of abstract debate. It was also perceived in everyday concert-going practices in the 1920s. Contem poraries desperately searched for practical solutions that they hoped to find in listener education, in scientific research into listening conditions (see Hui, Chapter 16), and in municipalization of the musical institutions.47 For the public in the 1920s, the most visible signs of the crisis lay in the new technologi cal alternatives, and it was indeed technology that triggered a fundamental transforma tion of the listener’s world. In her pioneering analysis of the reform of American concert halls in this period, historian Emily Thompson describes how listening was modernized through innovation in sound technologies and in changes from one auditory technique (the instrument) to another (the gramophone).48 For contemporaries, the shift in the me dia with which music was produced had to be adapted to, and the use of new media such as the Munich Opera Telephone, about which Sonja Neumann writes (Chapter 15), had to be learned. Listening to the radio, for example, was defined by contemporary commenta tors around 1930 as a new art of listening in order to prevent the danger of Ver alltäglichung (trivialization) of the music that people heard.49 These changes did not nec essarily mean a turn away from established traditions. Rather, they engendered an inten sification of ideological debates from the nineteenth century. In his chapter on the rise of the hi-fi listener, Axel Volmar shows how Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain narrates protagonist Hans Castorp’s first experience of recorded music, in which listen ing becomes a personal, individual, intimate, and domestic ritual observed by Castorp with almost religious devotion. In this way, he appears as an heir to the (p. 16) ideologies at work in the nineteenth century, fulfilling the old ideals with the new media of the twen tieth century. Later, according to Volmar, the hi-fi enthusiasts of the cold war era emphati cally linked ideals of sophisticated music listening to recorded music and used a concep tion of skilled music listening in hi-fi culture. On closer inspection, they proved to be heavily biased in terms of class and gender and deviated from existing social norms in other cultural spheres. Volmar’s chapter reminds us that the spread of all kinds of techni cal devices for music listening did not automatically imply new forms of distracted listen ing (Chapter 17).
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The Art of Listening and Its Histories: An Introduction Adopting new forms of music and adapting to new contexts and to new media are con stant features in the evolution of listening as an art, but they played a particularly domi nant role in the twentieth century.50 A prominent example is the spread of jazz music from sessions in private houses to shows at dance halls and finally to performances in concert rooms, grand venues that saw their first jazz concert in 1938 with Benny Goodman’s famous Carnegie Hall show. There it became clear how listening to jazz could be perceived as an art and how this form of music listening was a practice that created its own set of standards.51 Around that time the halls were also divided in different ways, fa cilitating attentive listening by restricting the space for dancing. Audiences made an “at tempt to . . . capture the music itself, marked externally by unusual bodily reactions as a demonstration of the depth of their listening,” as Jazz scholar and historian Catherine Tackley summarized the aspirations of those listening to jazz. Other members of the audi ence went so far as to listen especially for “deviations from the recorded versions” that they already knew, “demonstrating complete dedication to listening through a minimal physical response.”52 We can observe features in the culture of jazz listening that were observed in nineteenth-century concert-going: the rise of listening guides and a growing literature of self-reflection analyzing what was happening in the dance and concert halls. In 1955 Nat Hentoff wrote that “the practice of listening to jazz as a serious avocation is only 25 or 30 years old,” which indicated not only the emergence of a particular kind of listening that had been rendered “serious” but also the extent to which it was bound to a particular time.53 Even if a minority of audience members were “active listeners,” jazz de manded its own expert listener scheme with required technical knowledge.54 There was not necessarily a unified set of listening habits, but listening to jazz and to other kinds of popular music displayed a similarity to developments, modes, and understandings of lis tening to art music. In the midst of this spread and evolution of listening modes across different genres and spaces typical practices persisted, even in times of political turmoil and hypernationaliza tion in the first half of the twentieth century. Neil Gregor (Chapter 5) offers new perspec tives on concert-hall listening in Munich during World War II by concentrating on the everydayness of listening. Arguing that the precise role of politics in the act of concertgoing has to be determined in its specific historical context, he depicts the way the “regime of listening” determined behavior in the concert hall, with concert-goers demon strating attitudes that were much less nationalistic than one might assume. Gregor cau tions against an oversimplification of the situation and calls for a long-term perspective. The simultaneous operation of different kinds of politics in (p. 17) the listening experience has to be acknowledged, though the association of the audience with larger social entities such as the nation remained an attractive way to legitimize and explain the audience as well as the nation. During the 1950s and 1960s, contemporary sources indicate a strengthening of tradition al practices and an often surprising persistence of concert-hall listening. This can be ex plained, according to Christiane Tewinkel, by the longevity of entrenched ideology within the “musicological landscape” of the mid-twentieth century, in which avant-garde com posers and German immigrants in the United States contributed to a strengthening of the Page 15 of 35
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The Art of Listening and Its Histories: An Introduction idea that the canon of Western works had to be appreciated (Chapter 21). We can situate such trends within the 1950s “emotional landscape” determined by memory and nostal gia, which Neil Gregor has analyzed elsewhere, by considering Richard Strauss’s Meta morphosen from the listener’s perspective. In this work Gregor finds the influence of “an immediate post-war culture in which earlier audiences connected, through the experi ence of musical listening, to the memory of a temps perdu located in the elite cultural habitus of the Wilhelmine era.”55 The continuing influence of earlier emotional and musi cological landscapes illustrates the influence of different layers of time at any given mo ment in this history of music listening. Despite pessimistic predictions about the future of concert life, the concert-hall experi ence continues to exist in our contemporary period marked by demographic change, a general decline of the bourgeois lifestyle, a globalization of tastes, and a digitalization that makes sound, music, and the listening experience mobile on all levels and by all means.56 Concert halls are being transformed into cultural venues that draw all kinds and styles of music into the architectural, acoustic, and ritual frame of the once-bourgeois temples of music. In the age of virtual reality, concert-hall performances may look like a niche of auditive culture, but they remain a powerful one. Observers and analysts of such crisis and change emphasize that a live performance retains its unique characteristics by forming a communal presence of artists and audience that cannot be replaced but only remediated.57 Since the 1960s concert halls are once again being built all over Europe and the United States. Initially, architects used the innovative model of Scharoun’s circusshaped Berlin Philharmonie, and then, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, archi tects and acoustic designers also returned to the shoebox model of the nineteenth centu ry. Listening experiences in prominent concert halls are advertised as attractions that— again—continue the tradition of “touristic listening,” as illustrated by the efforts of the City of Hamburg to advertise the 2017 Elbphilharmonie as a “Klangweltwunder” (sound wonder of the world; see Figure I.3). Indeed, such promotions have become, more than ever before, integral to modern cities’ marketing efforts.58 Moreover, the learned traditions of listening continue in and through all media beyond the concert halls in ways that illustrate the fragmentation of communi ties of taste and the continuing differentiation of listener groups. These offer a wide array of tools for identity formation for all ages. A concert-goer in the early (p. 18) twenty-first century might share some of the ideals of a concert-goer in, say, 1870, and perhaps those ideals may—or may not—differ sharply from those of the fellow MP3 listener in the sub way. It seems that the “multiplicity problem,” making sense of the variety of judgments that Enlightenment theorists once observed, has multiplied even further today.
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The Art of Listening and Its Histories: An Introduction
Figure I.3. Klangweltwunder (Sound wonder of the world) (2017), advertisement. © Hamburg Marketing GmbH. Courtesy of Hamburg Marketing GmbH and Elbphilharmonie Hamburg.
A Note on Methodology Writing the history of the art of listening, as indeed writing the history of any sensory mode, brings its own obstacles and challenges. Some are caused by disciplinary (p. 19) traditions in musicology and in social and cultural history, while others are caused by the very nature of an ephemeral, invisible, and transient subject that easily escapes documen tation and description. This volume places itself in the series of recent attempts to histori cize the senses in general, very much in the spirit of what Mark M. Smith has defined as the underlying goal: “We need to expose the senses for what they are: historically and culturally generated ways of knowing and understanding.”59 The contributors to this vol ume adopt this general insight and adapt it to the subject of music listening. First, this volume defines music listening not as a universal good but, rather, as a product of specific times and places. The historian Jan Friedrich Missfelder has used the term “the period ear” to highlight this historicity of aural perception, writing, “Sounds can only be constituted as historical phenomena and objects of historical research through the his torically changing patterns of perception and interpretation and their forms of media rep resentation.”60 This implies that listening, and music listening in particular, has to be un derstood by defining contexts at specific times while being aware of the interrelation ships with other sensory modes.61 Second, if we treat listening as a time-bound subject, then it follows, as Johnson empha sizes in Chapter 18, that it is subject to change. The authors critically reflect on seeming Page 17 of 35
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The Art of Listening and Its Histories: An Introduction ly natural and stable categories of listening practices while avoiding simple assumptions of change such as the general idea of an undisturbed evolution of silent audiences in the nineteenth century (see Ellis, Chapter 1) or the simple affixing of national politics during World War II onto listening habits (see Gregor, Chapter 5). Change only happens in the context of stable components, and rather than perceiving change and stability as a di chotomy, the contributions in this volume illustrate how these two modes can coexist. This implies that change does not have to mean a linear progression but can move in mul tiple directions. The practices of music listening have relied on a repeated process of ap propriation of music, and the concert halls have functioned as spaces for the experience of “performance as ritual,” as Christopher Small has called it.62 Note that the result of change in the musical world is neither coherent nor homogenous but reflects the material and immaterial conditions in its regional diversity and often mirrors the lack of stable identities and cultures. The circuitous roads that music listening took as it evolved over time, the varying speeds of these developments, and the moments of crisis that arose are other recurring themes in the contributions presented in this volume. The scholarly enterprise of writing the histories of music listening has its own history. The burgeoning literature on listening produced between 1910 and 1930, which can be seen as an early attempt to historicize listening, was often driven by practical concerns such as how to connect music and society, and it was within this context that the academic dis course about the history of music listening emerged among music historians, most no tably Arnold Schering and Heinrich Besseler.63 This discourse continued through the 1930s and beyond with contributions from scholars such as Theodor W. Adorno and Zofia Lissa, among others, often in dialogue with theorists and composers of the avant-garde. But the possibility and desirability of such a history remained in dispute at that time; as the German musicologist Wolfgang Dömling put (p. 20) it in 1975, “The idea of an inde pendent ‘history of musical listening’ has to be called a phantom.”64 It was not before the early 1990s, in the wake of the cultural turns in the humanities, that the project of writ ing a history of music listening transcended disciplinary boundaries on both sides of the Atlantic. Twenty years after the publication of such landmark studies as James Johnson’s, scholars now live in what Celia Applegate has called a “Schengen Zone of scholarship where people cross disciplinary borders without hindrance yet remain conscious of differ ences in language, custom, knowledge and ways of going about their work.”65 Despite some protectionists on both sides, the cross-disciplinary working in the field termed musi cal culture has grown into an established area of study, as attested by the publication of the Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music in 2011.66 But it is not only the efforts of musicologists and historians that have made the study of listening through history such a vibrant field in recent years: sound studies, the history of science, social anthropology, cultural studies, communication studies, and empirical aesthetics are all disciplines that have in their own way contributed to a fertile wider discourse. So have historians of literature, theater, and architecture, whose innovative contributions to lis tening research are too numerous to mention here.67
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The Art of Listening and Its Histories: An Introduction The increasing dialogue across disciplines and the rejuvenating influence of sound stud ies have brought about a diversity of approaches to writing a history of music listening. In 1989 the British historian James Obelkevich predicted that writing the history of music listening would imply “a kind of Copernican revolution in our approach to the history of music.”68 Indeed, the study of listening in its historical contexts has benefited from a fun damental reorientation within musicology that, in the words of Nicholas Cook, now focus es not on “products but process.”69 At the heart of this redefinition was a critique of the musical work-concept as the focal point of scholarship. Cook argued for a rehabilitation of performers and listeners, who were marginalized in traditional musicological analysis. When the study of listening is the central concern, the historicity of listening should not be derived from particular aesthetic styles—thought of as expressions of the Zeitgeist—or from the musical pieces and their compositional styles, as in the work of Besseler, but from the performances and the practices that are associated with the music.70 As David Gramit put it: “Musicology has come to privilege the (scholar’s) act of listening to the ex tent that other significant elements of musical practice have been rendered all but invisi ble.”71 The result of such a favoring of an ideal and cultivated form of listening was that it located the “significance within the work rather than in the behaviors and relationships that constitute musical activity.”72 The authors of this volume explore such relationships and use listener-oriented source material that shifts the perspective from the work to the listener and to the cultural, social, and political meanings that were created within these processes of music appropriation. The scholarly rehabilitation of the listener, however, does not mean that a traditional his tory of musical works is being replaced by a history of music listening. The works still have a powerful relevance, yet they are not necessarily defined from the position of an (p. 21) implicit ideal listener. Of course, the constituting features of the music (tempo, du ration, volume, and so on) cannot be ignored. In comparison to other musical genres, chamber music generally affords a more intimate, close listening (see Fuhrmann, Chapter 12), and concert programs that show the order of pieces can be sources that speak for an “eclectic listening” (see Weber, Chapter 3). Moreover, the work-oriented listening retains when the guiding function of verbal designations and descriptions becomes an integral part of the listening experience. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, popular in structional literature has promoted pragmatic musical objects that function much as tourist attractions do and should rather be called auditory musical sights and not au tonomous works of musical art (see Thorau, Chapter 9).73 In this way, a listening history can also reveal that contrary to the academic shift of focus from products to process, the popular ear still clings to such objectifications as “piece” and “song.” Accordingly, the authors in this volume assume that the interplay of musical structures and listener reactions cannot be reduced to either psychophysiological processes or the form of the composition. Listening experiences, understood as cognitive and emotional reactions, originate in a complex system of ideas and behaviors that defines what music means, what purpose it serves, and how it is perceived. There are now a number of ap proaches that historians of listening can use to define their research subjects: Christo pher Small’s concept of “musicking,”74 Judith Becker’s definition of listening as a kind of Page 19 of 35
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The Art of Listening and Its Histories: An Introduction habitus,75 Eric Clarke’s approach to the “ecology of listening,”76 Tia DeNora’s sociology of the everyday,77 Steve Goodman’s approach to acoustic communication,78 and Steven Feld’s acoustemology79 are just some examples of the range of available theoretical mod els on offer. These approaches avoid traditional categories of Western scholarship about musical culture such as “work” or “composer” and instead define listening as an active process that was bound to particular times and spaces, to specific cultures and estab lished rituals. A special methodological challenge is posed by the nature of the empirical evidence. What kind of traces, if any, does music listening leave behind? The volume’s authors avail themselves of the co-occurrence of various practices and discourses at the moment of lis tening in order to grasp its ephemeral nature. Crowdsourcing projects like the Listening Experience Database (online since 2013) or Sound & Science: Digital Histories (online since 2018)80 might change the basis for future research. Yet even if we include visual and literary renderings of listening situations, explicit descriptions of music listening are relatively few. A large number of sources have to be read and interpreted for what they imply about listening. Several of this volume’s authors open up new documents, collec tions, and archives; others read well-known sources against the grain. They find traces of listening inscribed in documents such as annotated concert programs, which link listen ing with a descriptiveness similar to that found in travel books; in bourgeois diary entries and private correspondences, which show aspects of a musically constituted intimacy; in journalistic reports in which observations about listening habits were summarized; in the oretical and philosophical treatises in which supposed truths about listening and the ap parent decline of listening were formulated; (p. 22) in archival materials that suggest the ways in which listening was an organized activity; in architectural drafts that show con cepts of room acoustics and the shift toward the listener; in historical-psychological stud ies of listener research in the context of new sound storage media at the beginning of the twentieth century; in introductions to music from the 1950s; in concert-hall announce ments in Leipzig in the early nineteenth century, or, to conclude this list, in books of eti quette in British homes in the latter half of the nineteenth century and in seating arrange ments for music festivals. Many of the authors use images as their sources. These images cannot be taken as straight documentation, of course, but figure always as a visual inter pretation of the perceptive act. As such they provide new insights into the subjective worlds of listeners and observers of listening. And as sources for a historiography of lis tening, images of all kinds remain a field to be further explored.81
Structure of the Volume The bulk of the twenty-one chapters in this volume consists of historic case studies that exemplify the approach outlined above. They are organized into five parts. Part I, “Listen ing Behaviors and Emotions,” historicizes listeners and their behavior patterns in musical situations, as well as the ways in which listeners actively engage in performances. Part II, “Listening Ideologies and Instructions,” focuses on verbalized notions of listening and the multiple guiding effects of designations, technical knowledge, formal descriptions, Page 20 of 35
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The Art of Listening and Its Histories: An Introduction metaphorical renderings, and evaluative labeling on listeners. Part III, “Listening Spaces and Encounters,” addresses architecture and acoustics and discusses the ways in which ideas of space influenced listening practices. Part IV, “Listening and Technologies,” exam ines the influence of modern technological devices on listening techniques in the twenti eth century, in particular, how the establishment of opera telephones was an attempt to democratize listening experiences, how phonographs could be used to establish and mea sure changes of moods, and how high fidelity became a new standard for listening. Whereas the case studies reconstruct histories of music listening, Part V, “Toward an Art of Listening of the Twenty-First Century,” takes a cross-sectional perspective across time and space. The chapters in this part consider the role of listening in a larger context of the history of senses and emotions. They address the issue of ownership in the process of listening, give an overview of the boom in various “art of listening” approaches, and point to the longevity of ideologies and norms in the concert hall that placed high demands on the listener. Taken together, these chapters suggest new ways of thinking about listening to music as a historical phenomenon. They attest to the consolidation of a field of research that has emerged over the course of the past twenty years or so and that has established music lis tening as a subject across academic disciplines. They summarize recent research trends but also point to the avenues of research that are already under way and deserve more scholarly attention.
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The Art of Listening and Its Histories: An Introduction Müller, Adam. (1812) 1920. “Von der Kunst des Hörens.” In Zwölf Reden über die Bered samkeit und deren Verfall in Deutschland: Mit einem Vorwort herausgegeben von Arthur Salz, edited by Adam Müller, 47–67. Munich: Drei Masken Verlag. Nußbaumer, Martina. 2007. Musikstadt Wien: Die Konstruktion eines Images. Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach. Obelkevich, James. 1989. “In Search of the Listener.” Journal of the Royal Musical Associ ation 114:102–108. Osterhammel, Jürgen. 2015. The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Papenburg, Jens Gerrit, and Holger Schulze, eds. 2016. Sound as Popular Culture: A Re search Companion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Plourde, Lorraine. 2008. “Disciplined Listening in Tokyo: Onkyō and Non-Intentional Sounds.” Ethnomusicology 52 (2): 270–295. Reez, Leslie. 1931. “Von der Kunst des Hörens.” Mecklenburgische Monatshefte 7:29–30. Riesman, David. 1950. “Listening to Popular Music.” American Quarterly 2 (4): 359–371. Riley, Matthew. 2004. Musical Listening in the German Enlightenment: Attention, Wonder, and Astonishment. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Rochlitz, Friedrich. 1799. “Die Verschiedenheit der Urtheile über Werke der Tonkunst.” Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung 32:497–506. Salmen, Walter. 1988. Das Konzert. Eine Kulturgeschichte. Munich: C.H. Beck. Scholes, Percy A. 1935. Music, the Child and the Masterpiece: A Comprehensive Handbook of Aims and Methods in All That Is Usually Called “Musical Appreciation.” Lon don: Oxford University Press. (p. 32)
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The Art of Listening and Its Histories: An Introduction Smith, Mark M. 2007. Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History. Berkeley: University of California. Sterne, Jonathan. 2003. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke University Press. Sterne, Jonathan. 2012. MP3: The Meaning of a Format. Durham: Duke University Press. Steven. 2015. “Acoustemology.” In Keywords in Sound, edited by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, 12–28. Durham: Duke University Press. Storck, Karl Gustav Ludwig. 1911. Musik-Politik: Beiträge zur Reform unseres Musik lebens. Stuttgart: Greiner and Pfeiffer. Supper, Alexandra, and Karin Bijsterveld. 2015. “Sounds Convincing: Modes of Listening and Sonic Skills in Knowledge Making.” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 40 (2) (June): 124–144. Tackley, Catherine. 2012. Benny Goodman’s Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert. New York: Oxford University Press. Taruskin, Richard. 1995. Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance. New York: Ox ford University Press. Tewinkel, Christiane. 2004. Bin ich normal, wenn ich mich im Konzert langweile? Eine musikalische Betriebsanleitung. Cologne: DuMont. Thompson, Emily. 2002. The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Thorau, Christian. 2012. Vom Klang zur Metapher: Perspektiven der musikalischen Analyse. Hildesheim: Olms. Thorau, Christian. 2013. “Werk, Wissen und touristisches Hören: Popularisierende Kanon bildung in Programmheften und Konzertführern.” In Der Kanon der Musik: Theorie und Geschichte; Ein Handbuch, edited by Klaus Pietschmann and Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann, 535–561. Munich: Text und Kritik. Tkaczyk, Viktoria. 2014. “Listening in Circles: Spoken Drama and the Architects of Sound, 1750–1830.” Annals of Science 71 (3): 299–334. Tröndle, Martin, ed. 2011. Das Konzert: Neue Aufführungskonzepte für eine klassische Form. 2nd ed. Bielefeld: Transcript. Weber, William. 1975. Music and the Middle Class: The Social Structure of Concert Life in London, Paris and Vienna Between 1830 and 1848. London: Croom Helm. Weber, William. 1997. “Did People Listen in the 18th Century?” Early Music 25 (4): 678– 692. Page 27 of 35
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The Art of Listening and Its Histories: An Introduction Weber, William. 2008. The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wegman, Rob C. 1998. “‘Das musikalische Hören’ in the Middle Ages and Renais sance: Perspectives from Pre-War Germany.” Musical Quarterly 82 (3–4): 434–455. (p. 33)
Weißmann, Adolf. 1928. Die Entgötterung der Musik. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt. Wicke, Peter. 2001. Von Mozart zu Madonna: Eine Kulturgeschichte der Popmusik. Leipzig: Kiepenheuer. Ziemer, Hansjakob. 2008. Die Moderne hören: Das Konzert als urbanes Forum, 1890– 1940. Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Ziemer, Hansjakob. 2017. “Konzerthörer unter Beobachtung: Skizze für eine Geschichte journalistischer Hörertypologien zwischen 1870 und 1940.” In Wissensgeschichte des Hörens in der Moderne, edited by Hör-Wissen im Wandel, 183–207. Berlin: De Gruyter. (p. 34)
Notes: (1.) See Wegman, Rob C. 1998. “‘Das musikalische Hören’ in the Middle Ages and Renais sance: Perspectives from Pre-War Germany.” Musical Quarterly 82 (3–4): 434–455. (2.) Johnson, James H. 1995. Listening in Paris: A Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press. (3.) Fulcher, Jane F. 2011. “Introduction: Defining the New Cultural History of Music, Its Origins, Methodologies, and Lines of Inquiry.” In The Oxford Handbook of the New Cul tural History of Music, edited by Jane Fulcher, 3–16. New York: Oxford University Press. (4.) Gay, Peter. 1995. The Naked Heart. Vol. 4 of The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud. New York: Norton, 4. (5.) Gay (1995): 22–23. (6.) Erlmann, Veit. 2016. “The Invention of the Listener.” In Sound as Popular Culture: A Research Companion, edited by Jens Gerrit Papenburg and Holger Schulze, 163–173. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 167. (7.) The genealogy of the phrase also points to its usage in rhetorics, as Wolfgang Gratzer points out in Chapter 20 and refers to Müller, Adam. (1812) 1920. “Von der Kunst des Hörens.” In Zwölf Reden über die Beredsamkeit und deren Verfall in Deutschland: Mit einem Vorwort herausgegeben von Arthur Salz, edited by Adam Müller, 47–67. Munich: Drei Masken Verlag. (8.) For the long history of this concept see Bonds, Mark Evan. 2014. Absolute Music: The History of an Idea. New York: Oxford University Press; see also Kaltenecker, Martin. Page 28 of 35
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The Art of Listening and Its Histories: An Introduction 2017. “Zu einer Diskursgeschichte des musikalischen Hörens.” In Geschichte und Gegen wart des musikalischen Hörens: Diskurse—Geschichte(n)—Poetiken, edited by Klaus Aringer, Frank Karl Praßl, Peter Revers, and Christian Utz, 21–42. Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach; and Kaltenecker, Martin. 2011. L’oreille divisée: les discours sur l’écoute musi cale aux XVIII e et XIX e siècles. Paris: MF. (9.) Such a spectrum is explored in Dell’Antonio, Andrew, ed. 2004. Beyond Structural Lis tening? Postmodern Modes of Hearing. Berkeley: University of California Press. (10.) See Botstein, Leon. 1992. “Listening Through Reading: Musical Literacy and the Concert Audience.” 19th Century Music 16:129–145. (11.) Ferris, Jean, and Larry Worster. (1985) 2014. Music: The Art of Listening. 9th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill. For an early history of music appreciation see Scholes, Percy A. 1935. Music, the Child and the Masterpiece: A Comprehensive Handbook of Aims and Methods in All That Is Usually Called “Musical Appreciation.” London: Oxford University Press. (12.) Regarding the paradoxical nature of Cage’s anti-intentional listening see Thorau, Christian. 2012. Vom Klang zur Metapher: Perspektiven der musikalischen Analyse. Hildesheim: Olms, 257–268. (13.) Plourde, Lorraine. 2008. “Disciplined Listening in Tokyo: Onkyō and Non-Intentional Sounds.” Ethnomusicology 52 (2) (Spring–Summer): 270–295. (14.) In a recent publication about music and migration, members of the Hagen Quartet of Austria report on extremely disciplined, literally inaudible audiences they encountered on their tour through Japan and China (Gratzer, Wolfgang et al., eds. 2016. Salzburg: Sound of Migration; Geschichte und aktuelle Initiativen. Vienna: Hollitzer, 204); see also the 1999 special issue Baumann, Max-Peter, and Linda Fujie, eds. 1999. “Hearing and Lis tening in Cultural Contexts.” World of Music 41 (1); and on opera as a global good, see Osterhammel, Jürgen. 2015. The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 5–6. (15.) See Iser, Wolfgang. 1972. Der implizite Leser: Kommunikationsformen des Romans von Bunyan bis Beckett. Munich: Fink; and for a more recent discussion Butt, John. 2010. “Do Musical Works Contain an Implied Listener? Towards a Theory of Musical Listening.” Suppl. 1. Journal of the Royal Musical Association 135:5–18. (16.) d’Alembert, Jean Le Rond. (1751) 1995. Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot. Translated by Richard N. Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 39. (17.) Bonds in this handbook: Chapter 6. (18.) Bonds in this handbook: Chapter 6. (19.) Tewinkel, Christiane. 2004. Bin ich normal, wenn ich mich im Konzert langweile? Eine musikalische Betriebsanleitung. Cologne: DuMont. Page 29 of 35
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The Art of Listening and Its Histories: An Introduction (20.) Gärtner, Markus. 2005. “Der Hörer im Visier: Hanslicks und Listzts Prinzipienstreit über die wahre Art, Musik zu verstehen.” In Hanslick, Eduard. 2005. Sämtliche Schriften 1.5, edited by Dietmar Strauß, 457–468. Cologne: Böhlau, 457. (21.) Hanslick, Eduard. (1854) 1986. On the Musically Beautiful: A Contribution Towards the Revision of the Aesthetic of Music. Translated and edited by Geoffrey Payzant. Indi anapolis: Hackett, 63. In German the phrase reads “das bewusste reine Anschauen eines Tonwerks.” Hanslick, Eduard. 1854. Vom Musikalisch-Schönen: Ein Beitrag zur Revision der Aesthetik der Tonkunst. Leipzig: R. Weigel, 77. (22.) Hanslick ([1854] 1986): 65. The translation was slightly altered. Geoffrey Payzant translates “aber es gibt eine Kunst des Hörens” as “but true aesthetical hearing is an art,” making the normative aspect explicit with the charged phrase “true aesthetical hearing.” In the 1854 edition this passage is found on p. 79. (23.) Hunt, Arnold. 2010. The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and Their Audiences, 1590–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. See also Hanns-Werner Heister who points to roots in Calvinistic and Jesuit practices: Heister, Hanns-Werner. 1996. “Konzer twesen.” In Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, edited by Ludwig Finscher, Sachteil, vol. 5, cols. 686–710. Kassel: Bärenreiter, col. 691. (24.) Dell’Antonio, Andrew. 2011. Listening as Spiritual Practice in Early Modern Italy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 5 (emphasis in original). (25.) Charlton, David. 2012. Opera in the Age of Rousseau: Music, Confrontation, Realism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 188. (26.) Weber, William. 1997. “Did People Listen in the 18th Century?” Early Music 25 (4): 678–692, here 678. See in this context also Edward Muir’s study of opera-going a century earlier: Muir, Edward. 2011. “An Evening at the Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice.” In The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music, edited by Jane F. Fulcher. New York: Oxford University Press, 335–354. (27.) See also Bonds, Mark Evan. 2006. Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven. Princeton: Princeton University Press, xiii–xiv. (28.) Applegate, Celia. 2005. Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn’s Revival of the St. Matthew Passion. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 48. (29.) In general on this period and efforts to establish listening: Riley, Matthew. 2004. Mu sical Listening in the German Enlightenment: Attention, Wonder, and Astonishment. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. (30.) Kaschuba, Wolfgang. 1993. “German Bürgerlichkeit After 1800: Culture as Symbolic Practice.” In Bourgeois Society in Nineteenth-Century Europe, edited by Jürgen Kocka and Allen Mitchell. Translated by Gus Fagan, 392–422. Oxford: Berg, 394. (31.) Kaschuba (1993): 394. Page 30 of 35
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The Art of Listening and Its Histories: An Introduction (32.) Habermas, Jürgen. (1962) 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger. Cam bridge, MA: MIT Press, 222 (the quotation reads in the original German: “Sphäre der zum Publikum versammelten Privatleute.” Habermas, Jürgen. [1962] 1990. Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 86.) (33.) Applegate (2005): 102. (34.) See also Tkaczyk, Viktoria. 2014. “Listening in Circles: Spoken Drama and the Archi tects of Sound, 1750–1830.” Annals of Science 71 (3): 299–394. (35.) Forsyth, Michael. 1985. Buildings for Music: The Architect, the Musician, and the Listener from the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. See also for the iconography of concert halls and the visual history of concert life: Sch wab, Heinrich W. 1971. Konzert. Öffentliche Musikdarbietung vom 17.–19. Jahrhundert. Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik; and Salmen, Walter. 1988. Das Konzert. Eine Kulturgeschichte. Munich: C.H. Beck. (36.) Rochlitz, Friedrich. 1799. “Die Verschiedenheit der Urtheile über Werke der Tonkun st.” Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung 32:497–506. See also the analysis of literary and journalistic typologies in the nineteenth century by Fuhrimann, Daniel. 2005. “Herzohren für die Tonkunst”: Opern- und Konzertpublikum in der deutschen Literatur des langen 19. Jahrhunderts. Freiburg: Rombach. (37.) Hui, Alexandra. 2013. The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840–1910. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (38.) For a recent study of modes and typologies of listening from the perspective of histo ry of science, see Supper, Alexandra, and Karin Bijsterveld. 2015. “Sounds Convincing: Modes of Listening and Sonic Skills in Knowledge Making.” Interdisciplinary Science Re views 40 (2) (June): 124–144. (39.) Bashford in this handbook: Chapter 8. Bashford points to E. M. Forster’s famous ac count of a variety of listener types in a performance of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 5 that he gives in his novel Howards End (1910). (40.) Ellis in this handbook: Chapter 1. (41.) Weber in this handbook: Chapter 3. (42.) See also Weber, William. 2008. The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms. New York: Cambridge University Press. (43.) See, e.g., the notion of “trivialized listening” in Dahlhaus, Carl. 1989. NineteenthCentury Music. Berkeley: University of California Press, 314–315 (quoted in Scott, Derek
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The Art of Listening and Its Histories: An Introduction B. 2008. Sounds of the Metropolis: The Nineteenth-Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna. New York: Oxford University Press, 86). (44.) There is a growing literature about the history of these dichotomies. On the evolu tion of the “rift between art and entertainment” see, e.g., Scott (2008): 85–117. The clas sic study for this topic is Weber, William. 1975. Music and the Middle Class: The Social Structure of Concert Life in London, Paris and Vienna Between 1830 and 1848. London: Croom Helm; for “Salonmusik” see Ballstaedt, Andreas, and Tobias Widmaier. 1989. Salonmusik: Zur Geschichte und Funktion einer bürgerlichen Musikpraxis. Stuttgart: F. Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden; a thoughtful discussion about the origins and the evolution of this differentiation is Gramit, David. 2002b. Cultivating Music: The Aspirations, Interests, and Limits of German Musical Culture, 1770–1848. Berkeley: University of California Press, 134–139. For a perspective from popular music see Wicke, Peter. 2001. Von Mozart zu Madonna: Eine Kulturgeschichte der Popmusik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. See al so Ziemer, Hansjakob. 2017. “Konzerthörer unter Beobachtung: Skizze für eine Geschichte journalistischer Hörertypologien zwischen 1870 und 1940.” In Wissens geschichte des Hörens in der Moderne, edited by Hör-Wissen im Wandel, 183–207. Berlin: De Gruyter. (45.) Weißmann, Adolf. 1928. Die Entgötterung der Musik. Stuttgart: Deutsche VerlagsAnstalt, 56. (46.) Crary, Jonathan. 1999. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 14. (47.) For a case study on the structures and experiences of this moment of crisis see Ziemer, Hansjakob. 2008. Die Moderne hören: Das Konzert als urbanes Forum, 1890– 1940. Frankfurt am Main: Campus. (48.) Thompson, Emily. 2002. The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (49.) Reez, Leslie. 1931. “Von der Kunst des Hörens.” Mecklenburgische Monatshefte 7:29–30. (50.) Sterne (2003): 8. See also Sterne, Jonathan. 2012. MP3: The Meaning of a Format. Durham: Duke University Press, 5–9. (51.) See Tackley, Catherine. 2012. Benny Goodman’s Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert. New York: Oxford University Press, especially 5–9, for listening habits. (52.) Tackley (2012): 9. See also DeVeaux, Scott. 1989. “The Emergence of the Jazz Con cert, 1935–1945.” American Music 7 (1): 6–29. (53.) Hentoff, Nat. 1955. “Jazz and the Intellectuals: Somebody Goofed.” Chicago Review 9 (3): 110–121, here 118.
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The Art of Listening and Its Histories: An Introduction (54.) Riesman, David. 1950. “Listening to Popular Music.” American Quarterly 2 (4): 359– 371, here 365. (55.) Gregor, Neil. 2014. “Music, Memory, Emotion: Richard Strauss and the Legacies of War.” Music and Letters 95 (4): 1–22, here 2. (56.) For the abundance of aspects pertaining to this field, see Gopinath, Sumanth S., and Jason Stanyek, eds. 2014. The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies. New York: Ox ford University Press. (57.) See Tröndle, Martin, ed. 2011. Das Konzert: Neue Aufführungskonzepte für eine klassische Form. 2nd ed. Bielefeld: Transcript; for a discussion of mediated opera and processes of remediation, cf. Morris, Christopher. 2010. “Digital Diva: Opera on Video.” Opera Quarterly 26 (1): 96–119. (58.) For the case of Vienna see Nußbaumer, Martina. 2007. Musikstadt Wien: Die Kon struktion eines Images. Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach. For the Berlin case see, from an ecological perspective with regard to sound, Jasper, Sandra. 2014. “Acoustic Ecology: Hans Scharoun and Modernist Experimentation in West-Berlin.” In The Acoustic City, edited by Matthew Gandy, 145–156. Berlin: Jovis Verlag. (59.) Smith, Mark M. 2007. Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 3. (60.) “Klänge sind eben erst durch die sich historisch wandelnden Wahrnehmungs- und Deutungsmuster sowie ihre medialen Repräsentationsformen als historische Phänomene und Gegenstände historischer Forschung konstituierbar.” Missfelder, Jan-Friedrich. 2012. “Period Ear: Perspektiven einer Klanggeschichte der Neuzeit.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 38:21–47, here 34. For the notion of the “period ear” see Burstyn, Shai. 1997. “In Quest of the Period Ear.” Early Music 25 (4): 692–697, 699–701. (61.) Smith (2007): 5. See also Gregor (2014) for an application of such an anthropologi cal-historical approach. (62.) Small, Christopher. 1987. “Performance as Ritual: Sketch for an Enquiry into the True Nature of a Symphony Concert.” In Lost in Music: Culture, Style and the Musical Event, edited by Avron Levine White, 6–33. London: Routledge. (63.) Wegman (1998): 434–455. (64.) “Die Idee einer selbständigen ‘Geschichte des musikalischen Hörens’. . . darf man als ein Phantom bezeichnen.” Dömling, Wolfgang. 1975. “‘Die kranken Ohren Beethovens,’ oder Gibt es eine Geschichte des musikalischen Hörens?” Hamburger Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft 1:181–195, here 195. (65.) Applegate, Celia. 2012. “Music Among Historians.” German History 30 (3): 329–349, here 329. Page 33 of 35
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The Art of Listening and Its Histories: An Introduction (66.) Fulcher (2011). (67.) An interdisciplinary dialogue initiated by musicologists can be found in Bacht, Niko laus, ed. 2010. “Listening: Interdisciplinary Perspectives.” Suppl. 1. Journal of the Royal Musical Association 135. Recent examples for the mentioned disciplines are Bijsterveld, Karin, and Trevor Pinch, eds. 2012. The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies. New York: Oxford University Press; Hui (2013); Hui, Alexandra, Julia Kursell, and Myles Jackson. 2013. “Music, Sound, and the Laboratory from 1750–1980.” Osiris 28:1–11; Kursell, Julia. 2015. “A Third Note: Helmholtz, Palestrina and the Early History of Musicology.” Isis 106 (2): 353–366; Born, Georgina. 2010. “Listening, Mediation, Event: Anthropological and Sociological Perspectives.” Suppl. 1. Journal of the Royal Musical Association 135:79–89; Bull, Michael. 2007. Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban Experience. London: Rout ledge; Sterne (2003); Thompson (2002). For a broad overview of recent literature see Missfelder, Jan-Friedrich. 2015. “Begriffe, Traditionen und Methoden der Sound History.” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 66 (11–12): 633–650. (68.) Obelkevich, James. 1989. “In Search of the Listener.” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 114:102–108, here 108. (69.) Cook, Nicholas. 2001. “Between Process and Product: Music and/as Performance.” Music Theory Online 7 (2), para. 7. Accessed November 28, 2016. http://www.mtosmt.org/ issues/mto.01.7.2/mto.01.7.2.cook_frames.html. There is now a vast literature on the top ic, see for example: Small, Christopher. 1998. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press; Taruskin, Richard. 1995. Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance. New York: Oxford University Press; Martin, Robert L. 1993. “Musical Works in the Worlds of Performers and Listeners.” In The Inter pretation of Music: Philosophical Essays, edited by Michael Krausz, 119–127. Oxford: Clarendon; Goehr, Lydia. 2004. “Dissonant Works and the Listening Public.” In The Cam bridge Companion to Adorno, edited by Thomas Huhn, 222–247. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004; Goehr, Lydia. 1992. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music. Oxford: Clarendon. (70.) See Gratzer, Wolfgang. 1997. “Motive einer Geschichte des Musikhörens.” In Per spektiven einer Geschichte abendländischen Musikhörens, edited by Wolfgang Gratzer. Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 11–17. (71.) Gramit, David. 2002a. “Music Scholarship, Musical Practice, and the Act of Listen ing.” In Music and Marx: Ideas, Practice, Politics, edited by Regula Burckhardt Qureshi, 3–22. New York: Routledge, 4. (72.) Gramit (2002a). (73.) See also Thorau, Christian. 2013. “Werk, Wissen und touristisches Hören. Popular isierende Kanonbildung in Programmheften und Konzertführern.” In Der Kanon der Musik: Theorie und Geschichte. Ein Handbuch, edited by Klaus Pietschmann and Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann, 535–561. Munich: Text und Kritik. Page 34 of 35
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The Art of Listening and Its Histories: An Introduction (74.) Small (1998). (75.) Becker, Judith. 2010. “Exploring the Habitus of Listening. Anthropological Perspec tives.” In Music and Emotion: Theory, Research, Applications, edited by John Sloboda and Patrik Juslin, 127–157. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (76.) Clarke, Eric F. 2005. Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (77.) DeNora, Tia. 2000. Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (78.) Goodman, Steve. 2010. Sonic Warfare: Sound, Effect and the Ecology of Fear. Cam bridge, MA: MIT Press. (79.) Feld, Steven. 2015. “Acoustemology.” In Keywords in Sound, edited by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, 12–28. Durham: Duke University Press. (80.) See http://www.listeningexperience.org. Last visited January 4, 2018; and https:// acoustics.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de. Last visited July 13, 2018. (81.) See the pioneering monograph by Leppert, Richard. 1993. The Sight of Sound: Mu sic, Representation, and the History of the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Christian Thorau
Christian Thorau, Universität Potsdam Hansjakob Ziemer
Hansjakob Ziemer, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin
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Researching Audience Behaviors in Nineteenth-Century Paris: Who Cares if You Listen?
Researching Audience Behaviors in Nineteenth-Centu ry Paris: Who Cares if You Listen? Katharine Ellis The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries Edited by Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer Print Publication Date: Jan 2019 Subject: Music, Musicology and Music History Online Publication Date: Nov 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190466961.013.2
Abstract and Keywords This chapter starts by revisiting a now-familiar text: James H. Johnson’s book Listening in Paris (1995). On the basis of concert and opera reviews, images, and the paratexts of con cert programs, Ellis reframes Johnson’s question “When did audiences fall silent?” as “Where and why did audiences fail to fall silent?” Multilayered answers show how (1) many of the noisier phenomena of the eighteenth century resurfaced in new guises from the 1850s onward; (2) the democratization of art music took place in contexts that could not always impose “religious” listening; and (3) there was a resurgent demand, possibly concomitant, for music as pure entertainment in venues where silence was neither re quired nor expected. The chapter argues that although attentive listening was a gold standard during the latter two-thirds of the nineteenth century in Paris, practice rarely lived up to such expectations, and it was in effect a niche activity. Keywords: aesthetic hierarchies, concert-hall listening, ideology of silence, James H. Johnson, listening behavior, norms of listening, Paris concert halls
SILENCE, stillness, and reverentially attentive listening: these are the defining character istics of a well-behaved audience at concerts of Western art music the world over. They are politely normative, bound up with social expectations relating to venue and event and to the high respect commanded by music that history has designated canonic. In the wake of landmark studies such as James H. Johnson’s Listening in Paris, the question of precisely when audiences became attentive has gained impetus, for although Johnson’s central question is “Why did audiences fall silent?” his narrative approach suggests a teleology in which a decisive victory for audience silence was gained during the 1830s as part of Romanticism, bourgeois ascendancy, and the belated Parisian embrace of Beethoven’s orchestral music.1 My intention is to complicate that narrative by asking what happened “after Johnson” in Paris, where silent listening was, even at the end of the century, rare enough to be commented on. I advocate a layered approach to the study of audience behavior, one that accepts attentive listening as a gold standard that operated well in certain circumstances but failed miserably or remained irrelevant in others. And I shall attempt to explain why its victory over audiences was forever incomplete, why early Page 1 of 19
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Researching Audience Behaviors in Nineteenth-Century Paris: Who Cares if You Listen? evangelism for “widening participation” among social inferiors is an important middleclass context for this history, why the rise of a musical entertainment industry matters, and why we should be careful before we assume that during this period audience noise and inferiority of social class went together. My layered approach takes into account walking as much as talking (or interjecting), since both were freedoms that the gold standard curtailed. To invoke a brief modern-day example from London: a common, and frequently incredulous, reaction of concerto and vocal soloists to Prommers in the arena at the Royal Albert Hall is how attentive they are, (p. 38) even though they are standing up and, in theory, free to walk around. Seen in his torical perspective, this behavior is, indeed, striking because Prommers occupy what was once every theater’s noisiest area, the standing-only parterre. They are, after all, attend ing a Promenade Concert. In remaining as quiet as those who have booked their seats, Prommers exhibit a collective discipline that represents the highest form of submission to the gold standard, and their collective backache something of a sacrifice to the artistic deities. In this sense, they exemplify the continued relevance of Johnson’s thesis. But the Proms also illustrate the perils of generalization. Those accustomed to the hushed still ness in the arena might be scandalized by the amount of walking around that goes on high up in the gallery during performances. And from the perspective of a history of late nineteenth-century listening, the curtained loggia boxes that circle this 1871 hall, with its resemblance to an opera house, bring the prospect of eating, drinking, and socializing close to the stage, though the venue was constructed as a purpose-built concert hall. That comparison between opera house and concert hall is predicated on a now-traditional understanding that nineteenth-century opera houses before and after Wagner’s first Bayreuth Festival of 1876 remained social meeting places enhanced by musical theater whereas concert halls became temples to art, that their horseshoe shape and the reten tion of house lights during performances facilitated people-watching, and that with the exception of the works of Wagner, opera participated only marginally in the process of canon formation that helped produce audience silence. According to this understanding, opera occupied a no man’s land between art and entertainment. It was neither properly serious nor fully mature. The case of Paris from the 1840s onward suggests, however, that such clear-cut segmentation of the music market is an oversimplification. On one hand, concerts included commotion; on the other, opera house audiences in and beyond Paris recognized that the gold standard existed. The documentary challenge rests in the fact that unlike the source material available to researchers interested in particular com posers, events, or works, very little of the evidence relating to historical audiences is di rect or clustered; indeed, much of it takes the form of dispersed slivers of commentary hidden within discussion of other things. Much comes from the press, some from novelis tic portrayal, some from images, some from memoirs, and some from ephemera such as posters and programs. It can also be contradictory, drenched in irony, or written by a crit ic who cannot be identified or trusted.
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Researching Audience Behaviors in Nineteenth-Century Paris: Who Cares if You Listen?
Layers of Behavior An 1843 engraving of the concert hall attached to the Conservatoire on the rue Bergère in the ninth arrondissement of Paris offers an entry point into these challenges (see Fig ure 1.1). This, the hall in which Johnson’s argument about audience silence finds its culmination, was the hybrid space in which Beethoven’s symphonies were definitively rendered sacred art for the thousand or so people who could squeeze into its seats on a Sunday (p. 39) af ternoon. It has many elements of the Italian theater: an elongated horseshoe shape, bal conies, and loggias leading to corridors that encircle the auditorium. The text accompany ing this detail from an unidentified music journal underplays these theatrical elements in order to foreground the seriousness of artistic purpose indicated by the architects’ dis dain for decoration, show, and bright lights. Within the image, however, we sense an im mediate contradiction: a violin solo with orchestral accompaniment appears to be in full swing, but it is in competition with conversation and people-watching, especially in the balconies. Notwithstanding the fact that the solo item in programs presented by the So ciété des Concerts was often a virtuoso piece included for light relief, are we really see ing opera house customs invading the temple of Beethoven? A closer look suggests not, and reminds us that sometimes a richly detailed image such as this can tell us precisely nothing about audience behavior while revealing a great deal about audience disposition by gender (men seated in the old parterre area, women in the balconies) and class.2 With his mix of left-handed and right-handed string players the engraver Saint-Germain dis plays a certain musical or technical insecurity, but all told, if we are witnessing a particu lar moment in the concert, it is more likely to be tuning up (p. 40) than performance. The crucial evidence is on stage: members of the chorus, partbooks in hand, are still talking.
Figure 1.1. P.-S. Germain, Salle des Concerts du Con servatoire [1843]. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
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Researching Audience Behaviors in Nineteenth-Century Paris: Who Cares if You Listen? A musicologically more famous image of the Société des Concerts displays a different kind of ambiguity and is, by contrast, intimately connected to the act of listening. It is the very one that is segmented for use on Johnson’s book jacket: Eugène Lami’s Andante de la Symphonie en La (1840), which portrays seven men in an audience during the Allegret to from Beethoven’s Symphony no. 7.3 Johnson, with Taruskin, sees Lami as having “cap tured the mood of complete absorption”; Nicholas Cook places the interiority of each of the listeners in counterpoint with Fernand Khnopff’s equally famous domestic portrait, Listening to Schumann (1883).4 Others have seen it differently. Cormac Newark detects various levels of inattention, while the art historian Alessandra Comini is, to my knowl edge, the only scholar to emphasize that Lami’s chosen genre is caricature.5 The latter is important. What is Lami critiquing? Is it serious listening per se, people affecting serious listening for show (that is, hypocrites), or the Sublime as overblown and overrated? For there is irony in exaggeration here, which attests to the existence of silent listening while also indicating resistance to its Romantic aura, much in the manner of late E. T. A. Hoff mann.6 The serious listening of initiates or of aspirants to initiate status is lampooned via Lami’s more detached gaze. Central to the considerations discussed above are whether the music in question was ap proached by audiences as art or as entertainment and the extent to which it functioned as foreground or background in the listening experience. These categories can be both lay ered and fluid: layered in the sense that not everyone does the same thing, and fluid in that the same person does different things at different times. When Mary King Wadding ton, the American wife of the French politician William Henry Waddington, described opera attendance at the new Palais Garnier in the mid-1870s, she indicated the presence of stratified listening traditions: We had a box at the opera [Garnier] and went very regularly. The opera was never good, never has been since I have known it, but as it is open all the year round, one cannot expect to have the stars one hears elsewhere. Still it is always a pleas ant evening, one sees plenty of people to talk to and the music is a cheerful ac companiment to conversation. It is astounding how they talk in the boxes and how the public submits.7 There is slippage between her personal narrative and the “they” of the boxes, but Waddington creates a clear distinction between high-spending segments of the audience who converse and a socially inferior (but still middle-class) “public” that listened while tolerating the chatter of others. The theater was socially demarcated not only by ticket price and associated seating area but also by audience behavior within each category of seat. In this environment, the gold standard of attentiveness was a significant presence, fueling as it did Waddington’s surprise at the public’s lack of protest. She, however, bought herself freedom from the necessity to conform to it. 8 The fluid aspect concerns selectivity—on a psychological level the propensity to phase in and out of attentiveness during a performance (arias versus recitatives, for in stance), or, on a physical one, to vote with one’s feet. The latter could be dramatic: in (p. 41)
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Researching Audience Behaviors in Nineteenth-Century Paris: Who Cares if You Listen? March 1864, when Gounod’s Provençal opera Mireille was having a difficult start at the Théâtre-Lyrique, one of the clearest messages coming from the audience was that two of its five acts required cuts. As one Marseille critic observed (he had attended five perfor mances in the first run), at the beginning of the Rhône scene in act 3, which contained ex tensive dramatic monologue, most of the occupants of the loges and fauteuils routinely left the hall, to return for act 5, whose mix of chorus, ensemble, and aria suited them bet ter.9 These occupants of the expensive seats wielded considerable power, and as the opera’s later career in a three-act version suggests, they won their cuts.
Ownership Both these acts—talking and walking—signal what Newark has rightly described as a sense of audience ownership of a repertory and of the space in which a repertory is pre sented.10 The gold standard of attentive listening demands something closer to the oppo site: a sense that, on account of its aesthetic value, the music owns the audience, which willingly subjugates itself and which in turn demands that the performers to whom it lis tens are faithful vehicles for the composer’s genius. The religious language quickly falls into cliché, but the link goes deeper, for the closing of the circle between performer and audience in terms of their reverential attitude toward the composer’s music is what brings a socially disparate audience together, temporarily neutralizing the asymmetries of social power described above. In the case of chamber music it appears especially strong because of the nature of chamber concert attendance as an act of eavesdropping on a fundamentally private but participatory form of musical experience. Collective belonging encourages other phenomena. First, it brings with it the sustained concentration that allows for themed, rather than miscellaneous, programming in order to develop and cement the kind of reverent tradition that chamber concerts still display. Paris showed this trend from as early as 1814 with the concerts of Pierre Baillot’s string quartet, but its extreme exemplification had to wait for 1852, when the violinist Pierre Maurin set up a concert society dedicated not merely to a single composer but to that composer’s late quartets (La Société des Derniers Quatuors de Beethoven). Second, the idea of collective belonging as opposed to collective ownership inculcates the attitude that the audience is “taught” by the great composer, and the resulting inequality between owner and owned encourages a tendency for the audience to submit, rather than to protest, in the face of aesthetic strangeness or challenge. For these reasons, if we are to look for an origin for the gold standard, I suggest that we are more likely to find it in chamber concerts than in orchestral ones. In the case of Paris, Johnson briefly mentions the Baillot Quartet concerts as early sites of attentiveness—of a religious silence progressively more animated by vocal enthusiasm (p. 42) (but not talking) in the late 1820s and early 1830s as the quartet’s audiences dou bled and then trebled in size.11 The early work of Joël-Marie Fauquet helps explain why: There was, initially, a structural rapport between performers and audience members. Baillot’s quartet concerts emerged from a mixed and participatory chamber music culture Page 5 of 19
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Researching Audience Behaviors in Nineteenth-Century Paris: Who Cares if You Listen? of the ancien régime in which aristocratic groups enamored of “serious” music were stiff ened by the presence of a friendly professional, and his subscriber lists illustrate how his series redistributed the same social mix, now casting those amateur string players along side his private pupils as listeners.12 His quartet, accordingly, performed for an audience many of whose members knew the works by heart and from the inside out. Perhaps most telling, however, is the manner in which audience protest functioned. When Baillot’s sub scribers rejected his few attempts at late Beethoven, they did so not with heckling or by heading for the exits but by writing letters after the concert; the occasional attendance at these concerts of Beethoven’s aristocratic patrons—including Prince Gallitzin and Count Razumovsky—indicates a broader communality with rarefied Viennese practice and with a long tradition of semiprivate salon performance.13
Education Alongside audience submission, collective belonging brought with it elements of what we would now call widening participation. Although ticket prices ensured that social inclu siveness did not characterize chamber and orchestral concert audiences of the 1830s and 1840s, later attempts to democratize such music via the use of large halls and a lowering of prices in the bottom range resulted in much more heterogeneous gatherings—hetero geneous because the well-heeled who had never been able to get in to the Société des Concerts took advantage of these new “popular” series, and those with lower incomes be gan to buy whatever exceptionally cheap tickets they could. The Sunday afternoon Con certs Populaires (1861–1884) conducted by Jules Pasdeloup complemented those of the Société des Concerts in a manner that the critic Edouard Monnais likened idealistically to a musical 1789, enfranchising a brand-new lower-class audience in respect of the clas sics; the Séances Populaires de Musique de Chambre led by violinist Charles Lamoureux from 1863 complemented the activity of several string quartets besides that of Maurin.14 Both societies, however, attracted more high-bourgeois attendees than had originally been intended, and apparently they had never reached the poorest of the working classes in any case.15 A rather surprised Berlioz suggested in a review of the first Concert Popu laire that the gold standard operated perfectly, with a “silence religieux et profond” (religious and deep silence) punctuated by collective murmurs of approbation during the music and then energetic applause at the end of each piece or movement.16 He wrote as though bowled over by witnessing the instantaneous transfer of good listening practices from one social stratum to another. However, he also noted, quite early, that fewer and fewer blue-collar workers (blue shirts, as he called them) attended.17 The series quickly became known for its audience participation: expressions of ap probation mid-piece, collective voting of pieces in or out via cries of “bis” or “chut,” and sometimes violent contestation of new music, especially that of Wagner.18 Such was the noise that encoring a piece by Wagner could mean having to restart several times.19 These scenes lay outside Parisian norms of bourgeois civility. Distinct from the world of audience chatter because here the music mattered too much to escape comment, they were a world away from the subservience model of the Société des Concerts, yet much of (p. 43)
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Researching Audience Behaviors in Nineteenth-Century Paris: Who Cares if You Listen? the core repertory was identical. Yannick Simon, summarizing what we know about Pasdeloup’s public and its “disrespectful” behavior toward the orchestra, cannot hide his embarrassment at the move from silence to shouting,20 and contemporary comparisons by critics writing about other societies press home the point that, at the very least, this audience dynamic was not one of passivity or restraint. Perhaps most challenging to a his torical teleology of audience silence in Paris is the fact that aspects of this interactive au dience dynamic could move in the other direction, surfacing in the most traditional of chamber concerts. One such concert featured the string quartet led by Delphin Alard and Auguste Franchomme, of which the physician and Wagner critic Auguste de Gasperini re marked in 1866 that “[p]eople applauded as they do at the Concerts Populaires, at the end of each movement, between the sections of each piece, at each passage; it was ma nia, a whirlwind.”21 Gasperini would have been much happier had he lived to attend the Concerts Lamoureux of fifteen years later, which took place in the four-thousand-seat Eden-Théâtre. Here, from 1881, the focal point was Wagner rather than Beethoven, with entire acts from the late music dramas performed to rapt Parisian audiences in the traditional Sunday after noon concert slot. Lamoureux, unlike Pasdeloup, enforced the gold standard from the podium, would stop and restart works if there was the slightest disturbance, and allowed the public very little say over encores.22 After the demise of Pasdeloup’s concert series in 1884 his main rival was Edouard Colonne at the Théâtre du Châtelet, whose audiences present yet another variant—vocal, demanding, and progressively more susceptible to seeing concert-going as an educational activity rather than one of leisure or even of art. In 1886 the critic Hippolyte Barbedette compared the Colonne audience to the more distingué (distinguished) one of Lamoureux: The public at the Châtelet is more democratic; you have the spontaneous fits of anger of crowds, but also their generous instincts. Everything is up front. . . . Don’t go asking this public for the solemnity and traditional reflectiveness appro priate for the rendition of Wagnerian preludes.23 A decade later and after a publicity drive by Colonne to increase family attendance by marketing the concerts as quasi-educational, we read of complaints that the lighting in the cheap one-franc seats of the amphitheater was too dim. This was not, however, a bid to overturn the gold standard in favor of conversation or people-watching. On the (p. 44) contrary, those complaining had been planning a rather rigorous form of silent attentive ness: the in-concert reading of programs and even scores.24
Resisting Attempts at audience education such as those of Colonne were not new in Paris, though in the 1890s they took on a new form. Lobbying done on behalf of various types of early music had for decades tapped into perceptions of a need for “regeneration” through aes thetic re-education—and not just for lower-class listeners. Here, too, we find new de Page 7 of 19
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Researching Audience Behaviors in Nineteenth-Century Paris: Who Cares if You Listen? mands for reverent appreciation running up against the normal concert-going behavior of so-called owners. Newark writes about the habit of arriving late at the Opéra;25 concertgoing showed a similar pattern that held throughout the century and was inscribed into an 1870s image of the elegantly gilded and chandeliered Salle Herz, where straight rows of seats and an absence of boxes or balconies seem unconducive to in-performance social izing but where people are finding their seats, greeting each other on the way, and talk ing to their neighbors once seated (see Figure 1.2).
Figure 1.2. Salle Herz, Paris (ca. 1870). Courtesy of the Musée de la Ville de Paris, Musée Carnavalet, Paris, France, Archives Charmet/Bridge man Images.
(p. 45)
These are not just foreground figures used to dress a crowd scene such as that of the Salle des Concerts as shown in Figure 1.1 or to create a sense of scale, and the concert is most definitely in progress. In addition, leaving early (usually during the last programmed piece) was endemic and would remain so throughout the century. The case of an amateur choral society of the 1840s indicates as much. Dedicated to the regeneration of church music via a return to Counter-Reformation polyphony and eighteenth-century choral music, the high-bourgeois Société des Concerts de Musique Vocale Religieuse et Classique (1843–1846) was affiliat ed with the St. Cecilia Society of Rome and led by Joseph-Napoléon Ney, prince de la Moskowa, whose project Rémy Campos wryly describes as “turning stones into bread, or rather, diamonds into the Host.”26 Its audience consisted of friends and relatives, routine ly pressed into the very same Salle Herz to imbibe music of solemnity, seriousness, and grace by Palestrina, Lassus, Victoria, and other sacred masters. Though rooted in real, rather than merely concert-hall, religiosity, even La Moskowa’s project could not keep its audience members in their seats for a whole concert. A regular “insider” critic, the composer Adolphe Adam, wrote in 1845 about a closing piece during Page 8 of 19
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Researching Audience Behaviors in Nineteenth-Century Paris: Who Cares if You Listen? which “not one of the noble spectators got up before the end to request her carriage” and that, in response, the performers sang better because they were “galvanized by this unex pected mark of deference.”27 The norm, clearly, was to try to beat the rush. What reli gious classic had such magic powers? Unfortunately for La Moskowa, it was not a reli gious classic at all. It was, as Adam noted, the society’s favorite piece—or, more precisely, its audience’s favorite piece: Clément Jannequin’s La bataille de Marignan of 1528.28 Granted, the work had a sense of national pride attached to it, and in published antholo gies it doubtless held its place in part for that reason. But for La Moskova’s singers it was a party piece—full of vocal explosions, battle signals, and evocations of drumbeats and fanfares. Neither sacred nor sacralized, it was a lollipop that enabled an audience to en joy watching elegant people they knew make silly noises in public. In the second half of the century, the tendency for audience members to leave concerts early seems never to have abated, and the increase in the size of concert spaces in the name of musical democratization produced what must have been spectacular (and spec tacularly disruptive) scenes of exodus. In the case of the organists Alexandre Guilmant and Eugène Gigout, it is tempting to see this problem reaching an embarrassing level. Bach-lovers both, they began complementary series of organ recitals in 1878 and 1879, respectively, at the Trocadéro, which had been the central festival venue for the Exposi tion Universelle of 1878. Guilmant’s idea was bold: He would introduce the mass public to the major organ works of Bach and Handel, interspersed with instrumental solo items. Gigout followed suit. Hundreds of people were regularly turned away. One Thursday af ternoon in July 1879, up to seven thousand people filled the hall beyond capacity. Yet an unsigned review in the Revue et Gazette musicale lamented that when, at the end of the program, Gigout began Bach’s Fantasia and Fugue in G minor, 75 percent of his audience —potentially more than five thousand people—got up to leave.29 There is a complication here. If we try to corroborate this report with reports of the same concert in other papers, we find that the Ménestrel, where Eugène de Goyon gave (p. 46) Gigout’s recitals fulsome reviews, claimed that the audience remained “impressed and at tentive right to the end.”30 The occupational hazard of critical bias is difficult to negotiate with certainty, but as I have written elsewhere, the regretful tone of the first report, which went across the editorial desk of the Bach-lover Charles Bannelier, gives it the greater credibility.31 If that view is borne out, then Gigout’s concert offers a precious ex ample of how the gold standard was valued (Goyon) but elusive (unsigned/Bannelier), while his own experience of disruptive audience behavior bears comparison with the La Moskowa concerts and the Alard-Franchomme quartet concert that felt like a Concert Populaire. The implications for the middle-class project of widening participation are stark: far from the masses being educated in canonically respectful behavior by their so cial superiors, we find instead that high-bourgeois traditions of sociability, leisure, and ownership were invading arenas of popular education. In the middle—and we might even perceive it as a “squeezed middle”—are the evangelists for serious music and audience si lence.
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Researching Audience Behaviors in Nineteenth-Century Paris: Who Cares if You Listen?
Art and Entertainment A distinction between art and entertainment grew ever more important during the Se cond Empire and beyond and became inextricably linked, from the point of view of audi ence listening practices, with two kinds of crossover: that of repertories and that of audi ence members. The very notion of crossover, of course, suggests that separation has be come the norm; however, here again I make a distinction between print evangelism about “high” and “low” and what we can glean about practice. To return briefly to an earlier pe riod, the natural ancestor of the park bandstand was the outdoor concert, where the audi ence could amble and talk in beautiful surroundings. The conductor Philippe Musard, famed for his polkas and quadrilles, had already exploited those traditions in Paris in the 1830s, as had his rival Louis Jullien, but between 1835 and 1838 the latter mixed dance and symphonic music in striking fashion at the exotic musical pleasure garden known as the Jardin-Turc. As we read in the Ménestrel: Thousands of fountains and all manner of pyrotechnic surprises now add a fairy tale charm to the musical effects. . . . The new quadrille on Guido et Ginevra worked well; M. Jullien is in any case well supported by his orchestra. Beethoven’s Symphony in C minor was performed perfectly by these artists, most of whom come from the Théâtre-Italien.32 The promenade atmosphere is far removed from that of the Sunday Conservatoire con certs; indeed, it appears as something of a parallel universe in which to hear Beethoven, especially given the drama of this particular work. But to make that comment is to posit the Conservatoire experience as normative in a way that the jostling crowds of the JardinTurc briefly challenge—even if, as is possible, the orchestra played (p. 47) only a single movement. Perhaps those who went up close to the orchestra wanted to listen more at tentively than those who stayed on the fringes or those for whom the music was simply a background to drinking (the garden had a café) and talking. Whatever the case, the boundaries were blurred and the level of ambient noise was high. Later in the century the pleasures of an evening at the Jardin-Turc separated out into those of the park bandstand, on one hand, and the café-concert, cabaret, or music hall, on the other. Both bear a complex relation to the domains of leisure and art and the modes of listening most commonly associated with them. Brass or military bands played in the in creasingly common venue of the “kiosque à musique” on weekend afternoons while the public milled about, in and out of earshot. The Concert Musard of the late 1850s (see Fig ure 1.3) did precisely the same, and, as Jules Pelocq’s caricature (see Figure 1.4) sug gests, even the seats close to the orchestra at the Champs-Elysées venue were no guaran tee of quiet listening.
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Researching Audience Behaviors in Nineteenth-Century Paris: Who Cares if You Listen?
Figure 1.3. Le concert Musard aux Champs-Elysées (1859). From Le monde illustré, August 27: 144. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Program listings for band concerts were given out in the press a few days in advance. They consisted of solo and ensemble pieces along with military, opera, concert, and dance-based numbers. Beethoven was left behind in such circumstances, but Wagner eventually replaced him. Arrangements of his overtures, preludes, and set pieces such as the Wedding Chorus from Lohengrin became increasingly common, with sudden new (p. 48) momentum in the 1890s.33 It is in the nature of such events that one is not neces sarily sure what is being played when one arrives. Moreover, as distinct from the situa tion at an indoor concert, one might never reach a spot close enough to the performance to pick up a program sheet. And with information so much more sparse than at a concert with program notes, the potential effect was of “leveling”: an arrangement of a canonic orchestral piece had the same value as a Johann Strauss polka unless the listener decided otherwise. There was no listening etiquette, no name-dropping; and the more rousing ex cerpts from Wagner’s Romantic operas reached a wide audience in circumstances far re moved from the penitential benches of the shrine at Bayreuth—where Lohengrin was first performed in 1891—or at a Lamoureux concert.34
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Researching Audience Behaviors in Nineteenth-Century Paris: Who Cares if You Listen?
Figure 1.4. Jules Pelocq (active ca. 1866–1888), Le concert aux Champs-Elysées. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
That lack of etiquette brings me to the question of what happened when opera as a genre faced crushing competition from lowlier kinds of music for the stage in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Opera in Paris was, like all theater, intended as educational, the gold standard of concert-hall silence becoming increasingly evident even as it was evaded (as it was by audiences at Mireille) or flouted (per Lady Waddington). Yet at mid-century Parisian opera was also widely lamented as uninteresting because (p. 49) repertorially stagnant, dominated by a small number of house composers headed by Meyerbeer and Auber. One might, therefore, expect that in 1864, when the French government priva tized the theater industry, there would be an explosion of new opera in the city, in new theaters. Nothing of the sort happened. Instead, to the dismay of those devoted to opera, the explosion took place within the entertainment sector and at opera’s expense. The in crease in activity ranged from operetta, where laughter prevailed, to the café-concert, where ballet, operatic arias, operettas, risqué chansons were all mixed together (see Fig ure 1.5).35
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Researching Audience Behaviors in Nineteenth-Century Paris: Who Cares if You Listen?
Figure 1.5. Jules Pelocq (active ca.1866–1888), Représentation d’un ballet dans un café-concert des Champs-Elysées [1870]. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
The problem had less to do with repertoire than with public demand, for these lowlier genres did not cater to exclusively lowly audiences. Operetta, which Jacques Offenbach cannily ennobled by coining the generic label opéra-bouffe, attracted “le tout Paris” throughout the Second Empire, most notably in the attendance of royalty from across Eu rope at La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein in 1867 during the Exposition Universelle; to moral arbiters such as the Catholic journalist Louis Veuillot the clientèle of the café-con cert of the same period appeared scandalously mixed. As he wrote in the aggressively ti tled Les odeurs de Paris (1867), he was appalled to find women amid the drinking, the smoking, and the sung double entendre of a café-concert. Indeed, he found worse: sup posedly respectable ladies who, to his eyes, looked far too much at home, alongside hus bands (as he supposed) looking distinctly uncomfortable: (p. 50)
This was the first time I had visited this venue, the first time I had seen women in a café for smokers. Around us were not only women, but Ladies. // Twenty years ago you would have searched in vain for such a spectacle in the whole of Paris. Ev idently these ladies had dragged their hen-pecked husbands there; the downcast and trapped look of these poor men showed that pretty clearly. The ladies, by con trast, looked barely disoriented. . . . The presence of these “proper” ladies gave the audience a distinct cachet of slovenliness: social slovenliness.36 It is an image taken up later by Guy de Maupassant amid the sleaze of his 1885 novel Bel ami. The high-bourgeois Madame de Marelle begs the anti-hero Duroy to take her to the Folies-Bergère but regrets her foray into the world of the music hall the moment it be comes apparent that Duroy knows one of the house prostitutes rather well. Neither Veuil lot nor Maupassant was being fanciful about audience demographics: one eyewitness ac
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Researching Audience Behaviors in Nineteenth-Century Paris: Who Cares if You Listen? count of Thérésa, the most famous café-concert singer of the Second Empire, comes from the memoirs of Napoleon III’s cousin, the countess Stéphanie de Tascher de La Pagerie.37 That “slumming” occurred in this way raises questions about the range of social and mu sical experience that Paris audiences sought from the middle of the century onward. The example of operetta is striking enough; that of the café-concert is extreme. Together they suggest that future research about the consumers of music in the nineteenth century should focus not only on where and when audiences were silent but also on whether the increasing moral pressure to engage in musical worship actually encouraged audience crossover and the embrace of noise, chatter, and smoke, thereby ensuring that for all the attempts at the democratization of art music by an evangelizing stratum of the middle class, reverent listening would remain a minority pursuit. “The more you play him learned music, the more he will run to operetta,” wrote the comic playwright Edouard Pailleron in 1879, suggesting that evangelism for serious repertoire among Parisians had actually backfired.38 His comment implies a second maxim: “And the more you enforce silence the more they will escape to where they can talk.” In the late nineteenth century the public voted with its feet, across a surprisingly wide class base, when given greater opportunity to swap art for entertainment, or to mix them; we persistently find examples of audiences treating as leisure what has been served to them in the name of art, not least because the assertive behavior patterns of high bourgeois audience ownership endured, finding their way into the sphere of the popular concert. In short, a gold standard of attentive listening was present—and assiduously defended—during the nineteenth century in Paris, but re sistance, evasion, and deregulation ensured a mixed economy.
References Adam, Adolphe. 1845. “Société des concerts de musique vocale, religieuse et classique dirigée par M. le Prince de La Moskowa. Quatrième concert.” La France musicale 8 (17) (April 27): 131–132. Barbedette, H. 1886. “Paris et Départements.” Le ménestrel 53 (3) (December 19): 22. Bernard, Elisabeth. 1987. “Les abonnés à la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire en 1837.” In Music in Paris in the Eighteen-Thirties, edited by Peter Bloom, 41–54. Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon. Boutarel, Amédée. 1897. “Revue des grands concerts.” Le ménestrel 63 (1) (January 3): 6. Campos, Rémy. 2000. La Renaissance introuvable? Entre curiosité et miltantisme; La So ciété des Concerts de Musique Vocale Religieuse et Classique du prince de la Moskowa (1843–1846). Paris: Klincksieck. “Chronique.” 1838. Le ménestrel 5 (27) (June 3): 4. Comini, Alessandra. (1987) 2008. The Changing Image of Beethoven: A Study in Myth making. Rev. ed. Santa Fe: Sunstone.
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Researching Audience Behaviors in Nineteenth-Century Paris: Who Cares if You Listen? “Concerts, nouvelles diverses.” 1879. La revue et Gazette musicale de Paris 46 (28) (July 13): 230. Cook, Nicholas. 1998. Music: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ellis, Katharine. 2005. Interpreting the Musical Past: Early Music in Nineteenth-Century France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ellis, Katharine. 2009. “Systems Failure in Operatic Paris: The Acid Test of the ThéâtreLyrique.” In Music, Theater, and Cultural Transfer: Paris, 1830–1914, edited by Mark Everist and Annegret Fauser, 49–71. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ellis, Katharine. 2011. “Unintended Consequences: Theatre Deregulation and Opera in France, 1864–1878.” Cambridge Opera Journal 22 (3): 327–352. Fauquet, Joël-Marie. 1986. Les sociétés de musique de chambre à Paris de la Restaura tion à 1870. Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres. (p. 54)
Flaubert, Gustave. (1856) 1877. Madame Bovary: mœurs de province. Paris: G.
Charpentier. Goyon. 1879. “Concerts et soirées.” Le ménestrel 45 (33) (July 13): 263. Johnson, James. 1995. Listening in Paris: A Cultural History. Berkeley: University of Cali fornia Press. Mirevelt, T. 1866. “Critique musicale. Mireille, opéra en 3 actes. Paroles de M. Michel Carré, musique de Ch. Gounod.” La voie nouvelle: Revue philosophique, scientifique et lit téraire (Marseille), no. 1 (January 1): 25–29. Newark, Cormac. 2013. “Not Listening in Paris: Critical and Fictional Lapses of Attention at the Opera.” In Words and Notes in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Phyllis We liver and Katharine Ellis, 35–53. Woodbridge: Boydell. Pailleron, Edouard. 1879. “Les soirées parisiennes de 1878.” Preface to Un monsieur de l’orchestre by Arnold Mortier, v–xix. Paris: E. Dentu. Pasler, Jann. 2008. “Expanding the Public for Serious Music in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris.” In Organisateurs et formes d’organisation du concert en Europe, 1700–1920: Insti tutionnalisation et pratiques, edited by Hans Erich Bödeker, Patrice Veit, and Michel Werner, 333–357. Berlin: BMV. Richardson, Joanna. 1971. La vie parisienne, 1852–1870. New York: Viking. Riley, Matthew. 2013. “E. T. A. Hoffmann Beyond the ‘Paradigm Shift’: Music and Irony in the Novellas, 1815–1819.” In Words and Notes in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Phyllis Weliver and Katharine Ellis, 119–143. Woodbridge: Boydell.
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Researching Audience Behaviors in Nineteenth-Century Paris: Who Cares if You Listen? Simon, Yannick. 2011. Jules Pasdeloup et les origines du concert populaire. Lyon: Symétrie. Taruskin, Richard. 2010. The Oxford History of Western Music: Music in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press. Tascher de la Pagerie, Stéphanie de. 1894. Mon séjour aux Tuileries. Vol. 2. Paris: Ollen dorff. Veuillot, Louis. 1867. Les odeurs de Paris. Paris: Palmé. Waddington, Mary King. 1914. My First Years as a Frenchwoman, 1876–1879. London: Si mon Elder. Weber, William. (1975) 2004. Music and the Middle Class: The Social Structure of Con cert Life in London, Paris and Vienna Between 1830 and 1848. 2nd ed. Aldershot: Ash gate.
Notes: (1.) Johnson, James H. 1995. Listening in Paris: A Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1. I reference Milton Babbitt’s provocative “Who Cares if You Lis ten?” (1958) for its title alone, since the question “Who Cares?” usefully invites reflection on social and class distinctions among audiences. On the link between musical “classics” and middle-class ideologies, see Weber, William. (1975) 2004. Music and the Middle Class: The Social Structure of Concert Life in London, Paris and Vienna Between 1830 and 1848. 2nd ed. Aldershot: Ashgate, esp. “Preface: Second Edition,” xi–xxxiv, which pro vides a new definitional, historical, and bibliographical conspectus for a much wider peri od and which touches on some of my concerns here. (2.) On the subscribers’ lists for these concerts, see Bernard, Elisabeth. 1987. “Les abon nés à la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire en 1837.” In Music in Paris in the Eigh teen-Thirties, edited by Peter Bloom, 41–54. Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon. (3.) Cover image: Johnson (1995). Accessed December 31, 2015. http://www.ucpress.edu/ book.php?isbn=9780520206489. (4.) Johnson (1995): 262; Taruskin, Richard. 2010. The Oxford History of Western Music: Music in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 86–87; Cook, Nicholas. 1998. Music: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 19–22. (5.) Newark, Cormac. 2013. “Not Listening in Paris: Critical and Fictional Lapses of Atten tion at the Opera.” In Words and Notes in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Phyllis Weliver and Katharine Ellis, 35–53. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer; Comini, Alessandra. (1987) 2008. The Changing Image of Beethoven: A Study in Mythmaking. 2nd ed. Santa Fe: Sunstone, 231.
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Researching Audience Behaviors in Nineteenth-Century Paris: Who Cares if You Listen? (6.) This is not the usual musicological Hoffmann of the Fifth Symphony review but the more ironic later Hoffmann whose anti-Romantic musical fiction has recently been brought to life by Matthew Riley; see Riley, Matthew. 2013. “E. T. A. Hoffmann Beyond the ‘Paradigm Shift’: Music and Irony in the Novellas, 1815–1819.” In Words and Notes in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Phyllis Weliver and Katharine Ellis, 119–143. Wood bridge: Boydell. (7.) Waddington, Mary King. 1914. My First Years as a Frenchwoman, 1876–1879. Lon don: Simon Elder, 33–34. (8.) Compare the famous scene from Lucie de Lammermoor at the Rouen opera house that closes Part II of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), where conversation between Em ma, Léon, and Charles is cut short by protest from within the audience. Flaubert, Gus tave. (1856) 1877. Madame Bovary: mœurs de province. Paris: G. Charpentier, 245–254, at 251. (9.) Mirevelt, T. 1866. “Critique musicale. Mireille, opéra en 3 actes. Paroles de M. Michel Carré, musique de Ch. Gounod.” La voie nouvelle: Revue philosophique, scientifique et lit téraire (Marseille), no. 1 (January 1): 25–29. (10.) Newark (2013): 42–43. (11.) Johnson (1995): 204, 264. (12.) Fauquet, Joël-Marie. 1986. Les sociétés de musique de chambre à Paris de la Restau ration à 1870. Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres, 20, 71. (13.) Fauquet (1986): 52–53, 71. (14.) For chamber concerts and their publics, see Fauquet (1986). For the Concerts Popu laires, see Simon, Yannick. 2011. Jules Pasdeloup et les origines du concert populaire. Ly on: Symétrie, esp. 86–90. Edouard Monnais’s comment (writing as Paul Smith) is at p. 88. (15.) See the comments of Louis Roger on Lamoureux’s quartet, cited in Fauquet (1986): 164, and of Berlioz and others on the Concerts Populaires, cited in Simon (2011): 88–89. (16.) Journal des débats, November 12, 1861, cited in Simon (2011): 89. (17.) Journal des débats, November 12, 1861, cited in Simon (2011): 88. (18.) Simon (2011): 89. (19.) Simon (2011): 94. (20.) Simon (2011): 89. (21.) “On applaudissait comme aux concerts populaires, à chaque mouvement, entre les parties de chaque morceau, à chaque page; c’était une furie, un ouragan.” Gasperini, A.
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Researching Audience Behaviors in Nineteenth-Century Paris: Who Cares if You Listen? de. 1866. “Revue des Concerts.” Le ménestrel 33 (9) (January 28): 69, given in Fauquet (1986): 88. (22.) Amédée Boutarel refers in 1897 to the “les habitudes du lieu” (traditions of the venue) in this respect. Boutarel, Amédée. 1897. “Revue des grands concerts.” Le ménestrel 63 (1) (January 3): 6. (23.) “Le public du Châtelet est plus démocratique, il a les emportements irréfléchis des foules, mais aussi leurs instincts généreux. Il est tout en dehors. . . . N’allez pas deman der à ce public la componction et le recueillement convenu qui doivent présider à l’audition des préludes wagnériens.” Barbedette, H. 1886. “Paris et Départements.” Le ménestrel 53 (3) (December 19): 22. (24.) Pasler, Jann. 2008. “Expanding the Public for Serious Music in Late Nineteenth-Cen tury Paris.” In Organisateurs et formes d’organisation du concert en Europe, 1700–1920: Institutionnalisation et pratiques, edited by Hans Erich Bödeker, Patrice Veit, and Michel Werner, 333–357. Berlin: BMV, 345. (25.) Newark (2013): 39–41. (26.) “[C]hanger les pierres en pain, ou plutôt les diamants en osties.” Campos, Rémy. 2000. La Renaissance introuvable? Entre curiosité et miltantisme; La Société des Con certs de Musique Vocale Religieuse et Classique du prince de la Moskowa (1843–1846). Paris: Klincksieck, 24. (27.) “[P]as une des nobles spectatrices ne s’est levée avant la fin pour demander sa voiture. . . . Électrisés par cette marque de déférence inattendue . . .” Adam, Adolphe. 1845. “Société des concerts de musique vocale, religieuse et classique dirigée par M. le Prince de La Moskowa. Quatrième concert.” La France musicale 8 (17) (April 27): 132. (28.) The piece was introduced March 18, 1844, encored on April 8, 1844, and requested, though not on the program, at the closing concert of that year, May 15, 1844. Before the concert of April 23, 1845, it had never been used to close a program. See Campos (2000): 234–239. (29.) “Concerts, nouvelles diverses.” 1879. La revue et Gazette musicale de Paris 46 (28) (July 13): 230. (30.) Goyon. 1879. In “Concerts et soirées.” Le ménestrel 45 (33) (July 13): 263. (31.) See Ellis, Katharine. 2005. Interpreting the Musical Past: Early Music in NineteenthCentury France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 86. (32.) “Des milliers de jets d’eau et toutes les surprises de la pyrotechnie viennent ajouter maintenant un charme féerique aux impressions musicales. . . . Le nouveau quadrille de Guido et Ginevra obtient du succès; M. Jullien est du reste très bien secondé par son or chestre. La symphonie en ut mineur, de Beethoven, est parfaitement interprétée par ces Page 18 of 19
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Researching Audience Behaviors in Nineteenth-Century Paris: Who Cares if You Listen? artistes, dont la plupart sortent du Théâtre-Italien.” “Chronique.” 1838. Le ménestrel 5 (27) (June 3): 4. (33.) The same momentum is charted by Pasler in her study of programs for concerts giv en by the workers’ band at the Bon Marché department store between 1873 and 1897. See Pasler (2008): 348–349. (34.) Tannhäuser and Lohengrin were brought into the Bayreuth canon later than the mu sic dramas but were mounted there from 1894 and 1891, respectively. (35.) See Ellis, Katharine. 2011. “Unintended Consequences: Theatre Deregulation and Opera in France, 1864–1878.” Cambridge Opera Journal 22 (3): 327–352, and Ellis, Katharine. 2009. “Systems Failure in Operatic Paris: The Acid Test of the ThéâtreLyrique.” In Music, Theater, and Cultural Transfer: Paris, 1830–1914, edited by Mark Everist and Annegret Fauser, 49–71. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (36.) “C’était la première fois que j’étais dans ce lieu, la première fois que je voyais des femmes dans un café fumant. Nous avions autour de nous non seulement des femmes, mais des Dames. / Il y a vingt ans on eût cherché inutilement ce spectacle dans tout Paris. Visiblement, ces dames avaient traîné là leurs maris vaincus; l’air dépité et empêtré de ces malheureux le proclamait assez haut. Mais, pour elles, à peine semblaient-elles dé paysées. . . . La présence de ces femmes ‘comme il faut’ donnait à l’auditoire un cachet tout particulier de débraillement: le débraillement social!” Veuillot, Louis. 1867. Les odeurs de Paris. Paris: Palmé, 142–143. (37.) Tascher de la Pagerie, Stéphanie de. 1894. Mon séjour aux Tuileries. Paris: Ollen dorff, 2:247–248. Cited in Richardson, Joanna. 1971. La vie parisienne, 1852–1870. New York: Viking, 152. Veuillot’s description of the celebrated singer whom his ladies have come to see could not easily apply to anyone but Thérésa (Veuillot [1867]: 144–145). (38.) “Plus vous lui jouerez de musique dite savante, plus il courra à l’opérette.” Pailleron, Edouard. 1879. “Les soirées parisiennes de 1878.” Preface to Un monsieur de l’orchestre by Arnold Mortier, v–xix. Paris: E. Dentu, x.
Katharine Ellis
Katharine Ellis, University of Cambridge
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The Well-Mannered Auditor: Zones of Attention and the Imposition of Si lence in the Salon of the Nineteenth Century
The Well-Mannered Auditor: Zones of Attention and the Imposition of Silence in the Salon of the Nineteenth Century James Deaville The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries Edited by Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer Print Publication Date: Jan 2019 Subject: Music, Musicology and Music History Online Publication Date: Nov 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190466961.013.12
Abstract and Keywords The chapter explores the way English-language etiquette books from the nineteenth cen tury prescribe accepted behavior for upwardly mobile members of the bourgeoisie. This advice extended to social events known today as “salons” that were conducted in the do mestic drawing room or parlor, where guests would perform musical selections for the en joyment of other guests. The audience for such informal music making was expected to listen attentively, in keeping with the (self-) disciplining of the bourgeois body that such regulations represented in the nineteenth century. Yet even as the modern world became noisier and aurally more confusing, so, too, did contemporary social events, which led au thors to become stricter in their disciplining of the audience at these drawing room per formances. Nevertheless, hosts and guests could not avoid the growing “crisis of atten tion” pervading this mode of entertainment, which would lead to the modern habit of inat tentive listening. Keywords: attentive listening, crisis of attention, salon, drawing room, etiquette book, inattentive listening, listen ing and the body, listening behavior
NINETEENTH-CENTURY practices of listening at concerts and operatic performances in the public sphere are well documented in primary sources that include aesthetic texts, critics’ comments, and recorded observations by audience members, performers, and composers.1 This published and unpublished material has informed a variety of studies about the listening experience associated with such musical events, research that has helped establish a foundation for understanding the histories and social and cultural con texts that influenced how audiences attended performances during this era and how these events in turn constructed musical and sonic publics.2 A different body of literature reveals how members of the “best society” listened to music in a context where performances did not serve as the focus of attention or as the primary reason for assembling but, rather, acted as one of various forms of entertainment for in vited guests in a private residence. Such social occasions demanded adherence to a set of Page 1 of 23
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The Well-Mannered Auditor: Zones of Attention and the Imposition of Si lence in the Salon of the Nineteenth Century codes of behavior for a type of hybrid public-private sphere at urban functions in what commentators of today have designated as “salons.”3 The rules and principles for proper manners in these settings were codified in widely popular “self-help” books about eti quette that prescribed how a well-mannered member of bourgeois society behaves (and listens) when others are present. Such publications, produced in large numbers in the mid-nineteenth century (and up to the present), bespeak the perceived need for guidance in matters of sociability4 and describe specific context-determined regimes of listening (among other topics). Study of etiquette books from this era suggests the establishment of clearly demarcated social and sonic practices for listeners and “soundmakers” (conversers and musical performers) in domestic settings. The need for such regulatory advice certainly existed; activities in certain spaces (p. 56) demanded silent at tention, which was difficult to maintain because of sonic disruptions from within and the intrusion of outside sounds into these zones of audition. The soundscape varied according to the type of activity within a given zone of the space and also fluctuated in keeping with the movement of sound producers. The only truly fixed spaces for sound were those sur rounding the piano and the dinner table.5 This chapter concentrates on “mannered” lis tening at social functions (teas, dinners, evening parties, musicales, and so on), especially during impromptu musical entertainments when the invited guests were requested to perform. This study emphasizes the etiquette literature from the Anglophone world, where the greatest concentration of such texts arose later in the nineteenth century.6
Etiquette Books in the English-Speaking World of the Nineteenth Century The Victorian era in Britain, defined roughly as the second half of the nineteenth century, called forth hundreds of guides to manners and social decorum.7 As Lynda Nead has es tablished, “the advice offered on the pages of the etiquette handbooks is necessarily un ambiguous and conservative; it represents the attempt to codify respectable public man ners at a moment when actual behaviour seemed to lack definition.”8 In the face of grow ing uncertainties and anxieties about modern life, the emergent bourgeoisie subjected their bodies to “all kinds of discipline and censorship,” albeit not without fluidity and vari ation according to time and place.9 The readers were expected to internalize these codes or at least draw on them in regulating and normalizing their behaviors in a society that was “increasingly saturated with sensory input.”10 Of course, men and women who sub jected themselves to the prescriptions of the guides did so with the expectation of attain ing some degree of prestige and successful living within Victorian society, or at least not failing in the exercise of social mobility. Émile Durkheim famously remarked: “If I do not conform to ordinary conventions, if in my mode of dress I pay no heed to what is custom ary in my country and in my social class, the laughter I provoke, the social distance at which I am kept, produce . . . the same results as any real penalty.”11 Indeed, the manu als’ detailed prescriptions for acceptable manners at social functions participated in pro ducing the “docile bodies” that Michel Foucault identified as endemic to modern society and that result from the exercise of (self-)disciplining power.12 The imposed auditory Page 2 of 23
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The Well-Mannered Auditor: Zones of Attention and the Imposition of Si lence in the Salon of the Nineteenth Century practices for guests during the music making reveal how the tongue and the ear were subjected to the same normalizing disciplinary power that Foucault proposes. Nobert Elias’s classic study The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners establishes the histor ically advancing thresholds of embarrassment, shame, and guilt regarding non-adherence to the codes of conduct, even as the modern personality developed.13 In essence, these publications embodied the desires of the newly moneyed middle classes to emulate aristocratic manners, converting their “economic success into social prestige,” given that the distinctions between social classes and status groups were not as inflexible as they have been thought to be.14 Etiquette books were intended as much to assist the reader in avoiding the humiliating social blunders that Durkheim describes as to prescribe behaviors such as how the well-mannered auditor should listen to music (and speech) at various functions and events, with the focus on attentiveness. Behind the nor malizing social codes stood the belief that tact, consideration of others, and self-sacrifice should govern an individual’s path through the challenges of “best society.” (p. 57)
Of course, the establishment of such norms to control behavior affirms what Michel Fou cault wrote in Discipline and Punish: that social order is maintained via codes of this kind. According to Nancy Fraser’s summation of his thoughts, Foucault described a “new, dis tinctively modern form of power: normalizing-disciplinary power.”15 The authors of eti quette books participated in the capillary power that Foucault described as the “power that reaches into individuals so deeply that it makes them who they are.”16 The prescrip tions of these publications attempted to normalize behaviors in the “relations of power that order societies and make human beings into subjects, i.e. subjects to government by others and to self-government.”17 Disciplining current listening practices in social set tings represents one means to gain that control.
Listening Standards and Hosting Most etiquette guides provide instructions concerning the performance of music by guests for other guests invited to a social event in a private residence (such as a tea or a dinner party). In such cases the boundaries between private and public, amateur and pro fessional, well-mannered and ill-mannered, and attentive and inattentive became blurred (like the borders of their zones of audition), suggesting a space where the upwardly striv ing bourgeois subject was more strongly challenged than in the public sphere of the con cert hall. For example, whereas conversation during a public concert was forbidden by the authorities on manners, it was allowed in parlor performances under certain condi tions (and by certain mavens of etiquette), as we shall see.18 Gems of Deportment and Hints of Etiquette (1881), for instance, makes clear that absolute silence was expected at public musical events: The true lover of music does not . . . talk and laugh during the performance of any of the numbers. . . . They must listen to the strains that delight other ears in deco rous silence, if not with pleased attention. . . . The intensity of feeling displayed by musical people towards those who rudely shatter the silver sphere of sound is ap Page 3 of 23
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The Well-Mannered Auditor: Zones of Attention and the Imposition of Si lence in the Salon of the Nineteenth Century preciated only by the music lover. In an exaltation of sentiment that lifts the spirit almost out of the body, the ear attuned to the lingering melody hears some com monplace voice remark, “We had puddin’ for dinner yesterday.”19 Ironically, the enforcing of silence at public concerts required sound: “No such overt vulgarity, for instance, as talking aloud at the opera will ever be endured in London, because a powerful class of really well-born and well-bred people will hiss it down, and insist on the quiet which music, of all other things, demands.”20 (p. 58)
Peter Gay notes that “worshipful silence . . . gradually established itself as the standard in the nineteenth [century], a standard that composers and conductors, performers and lis teners set up and tried to enforce.”21 In discussing John Ella’s chamber music concerts in London during the late 1840s, Christina Bashford observes that at that time “notions of concert etiquette were still evolving . . . it was still relatively rare . . . for pin-dropping si lence to be upheld throughout, and more than common for some whispering or distur bance to compete with the music.”22 Thus, the writers of etiquette books may have felt compelled to remind concert- and opera-goers of the behavior expected of them. Florence Hartley, for example, wrote in 1860: THE OPERA[:] . . . Never converse during the performance. Even the lowest toned remark will disturb a real lover of music, and these will be near you on all sides. Exclamations of admiration, “Exquisite!” “Beautiful!” or “Lovely!” are in the worst taste. Show your appreciation by quiet attention to every note, and avoid every ex clamation or gesture. . . . CONCERTS[:] . . . Again, I repeat, do not converse, or disturb those around you by exclamations or gesticulations.23 The social codes that included such prescriptions were coming under pressure from the forces of modernity, and the sonic spaces of the domestic-public social event became the sites for their contestation. It is no coincidence that the etiquette books devote consider ably more space to domestic entertainments than to public concerts or operatic perfor mances, since they posed a veritable minefield of opportunities for social blunders, not least being an inappropriate level of listener attentiveness—too little or even too much. The salon of the nineteenth century combined elements of the private sphere—a gather ing in a personal residence, invited guests all known to the organizer—with aspects of the public: a relatively large assemblage, extrafamilial involvement, and common activities in which everyone present participates. Unlike the closed association, membership was not fixed (though the rules made clear who belonged and who did not), and unlike Habermas’s coffee house, the topics of conversation were strictly policed. The etiquette books provided members of the newly arrived bourgeoisie with advice regarding accept able and unacceptable modes of conduct for social situations that were unavoidable on the path to success but likely also complex and confusing to a neophyte in well-mannered society.
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The Well-Mannered Auditor: Zones of Attention and the Imposition of Si lence in the Salon of the Nineteenth Century Within the world of the salon, women occupied key positions, and not only as performers of propriety. The hostess of a social event wielded considerable authority, both in the im mediate sense of establishing and policing rules of behavior at the function, and, more broadly conceived, as a guardian and mediator of social influence (p. 59) within her do mains of activity.24 The bounded space of the drawing room afforded the hostess the op portunity to demonstrate “careful control of her proper place, in physical as well as figu rative terms, . . . by which a woman could create a stronger cultural position for herself.”25 That the hostess’s power over this space could be compromised by inappropri ate listening or speaking behavior helps explain the serious concern of guidebook authors with the soundscape of the salon.
Performing Music in the Salon The English-language etiquette literature assigns a leading role to music among the fine arts, both as a marker of breeding and a vehicle for entertainment, standing beside—and at times over—conversation as a mainstay of the discourse on manners. Indeed, as Jane Aster lamented in 1882, “[I]t therefore becomes more and more essential that there should be some talent to supply the want of good conversation. And, for that end, there is nothing like music.”26 Of course, music itself was subject to the principles of decorum that reigned in the drawing rooms and parlors of the respectable, even in the hybrid prac tices that blurred the traditional boundaries between the private and the public and in the nested and overlapping sonic zones of the space, which brought the sounds of music and conversation into conflict with each other. Among musical issues in the salon, the question of performing ability was of particular concern to the mavens of fashion; the topic invariably appeared among their recommen dations for music at dinner parties, musicales, and so on. This informal entertainment might take place before or after the meal (depending on the source consulted) and prefer ably provided by a “lady of the family,” but it must be competent. As one contemporary guide stated, “A large party is no time or place for practising or for risking attempts at new things, or for vainly trying to remember old ones.”27 In the choice of performers for the music making, it stood to reason that the hostess would reign supreme. It was considered the height of vulgar self-promotion for a guest to propose himself or herself without being invited. The burden on the lady of the house was for her to know the visitors well enough to assess their individual abilities as musicians, while the burden on the guests was to “comply immediately when she [paid] them the compliment of asking them to play or sing,”28 and to do that without being prompted or making a scene.29 This principle is invariably upheld in the etiquette books, and yet one risked social disapproval if the playing or singing were too long,30 inappropriate for the audience,31 or even too good.32 The apparent acquiescence of guests to such demands for acts of vulnerable self-display and risk reflects the degree to which they were willing to subject their bodies to the social control exercised by the agents of so-called best society.
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The Well-Mannered Auditor: Zones of Attention and the Imposition of Si lence in the Salon of the Nineteenth Century The presence of such admonitions in multiple sources suggests that variation in the quali ty of impromptu musical entertainments dictated the need for standardization at the hands of the gatekeepers of fashion and good manners. The range of talent displayed (p. 60) at the performances must have been considerable, from the rank beginner who “has the folly and assurance to . . . annoy the company by an hour of tinking and tanking with one finger only,”33 to the equally maligned near-professional who elects to render bravura arias or performs densely notated scores.34 The complex socio-musical transactions of the salon necessitated this type of guidance for the bourgeois subject, who desired to avoid blunders in conduct that would mark his or her as deficient in proper manners. And yet if the etiquette books are to be believed, the musical entertainment at such occasions was rife with opportunities for the display of all sorts of ill manners, potentially on a par with errors and miscalculations in conversation. Negotiating these codes of etiquette was difficult for the uninitiated. The bodily and so cial shame or, at least, embarrassment that could result from failure to participate “by the book” must have weighed heavily on the aspiring socialites of the time, considering the context of rising thresholds of embarrassment, shame, and guilt about behavioral issues during the course of the century.35 Nathan Urner’s satirical publication Always: A Manual of Etiquette for the Guidance of Either Sex into the Empurpled Penetralia of Fashionable Life (1884) well illustrates the dilemma of the bourgeois subject with regard to music: “Al ways pretend to be deeply interested in—nay, even ravished by, the music, though deaf as a post. It is a testimonial that you owe to society.”36
Listening in the “Best Society” Given the wide range in quality and context of musical entertainment within the salon, the question arises: How was the well-mannered member of the bourgeoisie supposed to listen to the music provided? The etiquette books did not give advice about this topic oth er than requiring silence and identifying inappropriate listening behaviors. Is it possible to reconstruct appropriate listening behaviors on this basis? The answer to this question may reside in the issue of attention, which was in crisis mode in the late nineteenth century—indeed, as Jonathan Crary remarks, “by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the specifically modern problem of attention [was] identifiable in many places.”37 The art theorist Conrad Fiedler put it this way in 1876: “Almost every where . . . the capacity of perceiving decay[ed], becoming restricted to an almost uninten tional casual use.”38 Crary points to the increasing saturation of sensory input due to the “dynamic logic of capitalism” as leading to a crisis of attentiveness.39 In making that ar gument, his study details how inattention had become a major problem in various branch es of the cognitive sciences by the 1880s, a development that coincided with (and result ed from) the rise of capitalist modernity. Theorists who regarded attention as a matter of focus, including John Dewey, necessarily invoked the concept of perceptual selection, which meant that attention became an act of exclusion of objects or stimuli from certain fields of perception.40 This selectivity suggests that attention could no longer be assigned Page 6 of 23
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The Well-Mannered Auditor: Zones of Attention and the Imposition of Si lence in the Salon of the Nineteenth Century to the simple binary of attentiveness or inattentiveness (equated with distraction by Crary).41 As Crary argues, “attention and (p. 61) distraction cannot be thought [of] out side of a continuum in which the two ceaselessly flow into one another, as part of a social field in which the same imperatives and forces incite one and the other.”42 Music in particular and the auditory in general are not Crary’s primary concerns; rather, he studies visual art and visuality. Nevertheless, the sensory processes he describes and his core arguments about the late nineteenth-century crisis of attention may apply equal ly to listening culture during that period. Moreover, Crary considers the core of Wagner’s position with regard to attention and distraction among his audience as dating back to mid-century,43 citing above all the Bayreuth Festspielhaus as embodying “Wagner’s desire to exercise a fuller control over the attentiveness of an audience.”44 Remarks by Niet zsche, Eugène Véron, and Charles and Pierre Bonnier about their experiences in the Bayreuth theater confirm the effectiveness of Wagner’s approach to attention.45 For Wag ner, these efforts at listener immersion were necessary because of larger cultural trends toward increasing levels of distraction. Reinforcing Crary’s observations, the majority of the etiquette sources do address prob lems directly and indirectly associated with attention, suggesting the perceived need for creating or upholding a code of auditory etiquette at private social gatherings. Before turning to the texts themselves, however, it is crucial to map out the sonic terrain of so cial events in the realm of the salon in order to determine the conditions under which the socialites were supposed to listen.
Sonic Terrains and Appropriate Listening Considering the social event as the site where the prescriptions were enacted and en forced, it is possible to identify a series of nested and overlapping sound fields, or zones of audition, as framing devices for the musical performances.46 Within the overall diege sis of the event, we find one or more spaces of listening reserved for a unidirectional sound-producing activity (a musical performance or recitation with multiple listeners) that requires some degree of attentiveness by the guests. Generally speaking, one can construct a normative set of sonic spaces nested within the overarching frame of the event: 1) the space of conversation as a fixed background sound that ebbs and flows but continues as a constant unless interrupted; 2) the zone of musical performance (when of fered by guests) that centers on the drawing-room piano as a fixed site, and 3) nonfixed sound spaces created by recitations, card games, and related amusements. As a result, any attempt at the mapping of music and sounds at domestic-public social events must be flexible, and it also must account for the overlapping of discrete sound spaces, for exam ple, of conversation and musical entertainment. The recognition of intersecting sonic spaces is crucial for identifying what we might call zones of attention for the bourgeois listener within the context of the event. And it is in the policing of these zones (p. 62) and their boundaries that the etiquette books attempt to discipline the listening (and speak ing) bodies of guests, at once appearing to hold the line against inattention while allow Page 7 of 23
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The Well-Mannered Auditor: Zones of Attention and the Imposition of Si lence in the Salon of the Nineteenth Century ing for its accommodation through readily accessible repertory and modifications of poli cies concerning silence. The sources do suggest that the ideal condition of listening to music performed at social gatherings is attentive silence. Writing in 1872, Florence Hartley well presented the ex pectations of auditory behavior by guests: “When others are playing or singing, listen qui etly and attentively; to laugh or talk loudly when there is music in the room is rude, both toward the performer and your hostess.”47 Although she does not mention rudeness to fellow listeners, other sources include such references in their interdictions. For example, in the Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Pocket Companion of Etiquette and Manners, we read that: Nothing is more rude than to converse whilst people are singing. If you do not like music sufficiently to listen to it, you should remember that others may do so, and that not only do you interrupt their enjoyment of it, but you offer an offence to the singers.48 Good Manners of 1889 advises guests to: Be scrupulous to observe strict silence when any of the company are playing or singing. Remember that they are doing this for the amusement of the rest; and that to talk at such a time is as ill-bred as if you were to turn your back upon a person who was talking to you, and begin a conversation with some one else.49 Children seemed particularly needful of instruction: When you are in a room where there is music, you must on no account talk, or whisper, or laugh: you must make no noise of any kind, but keep perfectly silent and quiet.50 The strength (if not the severity) of these admonitions reflects the desire to create a zone of audition or attention where guests can listen to the music in undisturbed, respectful si lence. The authors make no direct suggestions with regard to the aesthetic aspects of lis tening, that is, how the audience should attend to the music, but they clearly establish an ideal frame for that activity. Bodies, tongues, and ears all need to be submitted to the dis ciplinary regimes of control and order. Should a guest not comply, the following mea sures, which reinforce the authority of the hostess while confirming her status, would ap ply: “During the performance of . . . music, it is the duty of the hostess to keep silence among her guests. If anyone is forgetful of his manners on such an occasion, she should be a pleasant reminder of what is polite.”51 Moreover, “The hostess has the privilege of indicating, to a noisy group, by a gesture, her desire for silence.”52 The relatively late date of these directives implies that the intrusion of (p. 63) unwanted sounds into the zone of audition for music had become a problem, even as the crisis of modern inattentiveness spread within society. If order and control could not be imposed on the distracting, con fusing soundscape of modernity in the streets or at work, at least they could be upheld and enforced in private social functions in salon culture. Page 8 of 23
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The Well-Mannered Auditor: Zones of Attention and the Imposition of Si lence in the Salon of the Nineteenth Century The etiquette books actually do recognize that guests will devote varying degrees of at tention to the performances. Yet as Charlotte Eliza Humphry succinctly observed in 1897, “It is . . . uncivil to betray inattention.”53 Listeners are admonished to feign attention, if not enjoyment, and to maintain silence in order not disturb fellow attendees:54 “At a con cert they are bound, even if indifferent to music themselves, to have the courtesy not to talk, but to allow others who are more appreciative to enjoy themselves.”55 Barbara Lorenzkowski has ascertained that such practices of polite listening became popular in the Anglophone world during the second half of the nineteenth century, bringing with them the “stilted atmosphere of the concert hall” and also the promise of upward social mobility (see Figure 2.1).56
Figure 2.1. George du Maurier, “The Latest Fashion in Music at Home” (1881), printed illustration. From Punch 80, April 2: 150. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz (4°Ze3832).
(p. 64)
Making Zones of Attention Permeable Police as they may the sound space for the musical performances of the salon (and with the assistance of hostesses), the gatekeepers of high society were unable to keep that lis tening experience free from disruptions. The etiquette books establish that the bound aries of the sound spaces for conversation were permeable, and thus they concede that some degree of “sound bleed” between rooms and spaces of the host residence—zones of audition—was inevitable. Possibly the most comprehensive topography and problematiza tion of sound spaces for social functions within the salon appear in the fourth volume of Cassel’s Household Guide from 1869: The guests . . . betake themselves for amusement according to the bent of their in clination. Some look at engravings, others talk—very loudly sometimes—and pay no deference whatever to the occasional exertions of a performer to be heard Page 9 of 23
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The Well-Mannered Auditor: Zones of Attention and the Imposition of Si lence in the Salon of the Nineteenth Century above buzz and laughter going on in all parts of the room. . . . In fashionable soci ety, where the necessity of receiving large numbers is met by adequately numer ous apartments, suites of rooms, galleries, and so forth, all conversation is not re strained when music commences; only those within earshot of the performers are compelled by courtesy to keep silence. In the adjoining rooms conversation has full sway, and although the distant murmur may penetrate to the music-room, lis teners are not supposed to be disturbed by it. . . . It is in houses of smaller dimen sions, and amongst persons less accustomed to the habits of society, that the dis agreeables complained of abound, and often render amateur music an annoyance instead of pleasure. . . . On the hostess’s part, every accommodation should be provided. For instance, in the rooms appropriated to music, sufficient chairs should be placed in rows to seat the number of guests invited. . . .57 If any space be left out of hearing of the performers, people may stand about and talk at will, provided their conversation be carried on in a subdued tone. The landings and staircases leading to the music-room afford a fair opportunity for general conver sation. At evening parties at which music is only an occasional feature, greater lib erty of action is allowable to the general company. Those who like music generally find places for themselves near the piano; and, except in the immediate neigh bourhood of the performers, a hostess should not impose silence on the general company.58 Cassel’s description of the sites of the social event necessarily accommodate considerable diversity in the sound spaces, not only because of their layout but also because of the un predictable distribution of sound-producing activities (other than performance on the pi ano and accompanied singing). The author nonetheless establishes principles of audition based on proximity to the source of music and prescribes proper behaviors of listening and speaking in consideration of the guest’s relative position within such zones of atten tion. Those near the performers occupy a space of “being silent” and “being silenced,” al though sound bleed will occur from adjacent spaces that are given over to conversation.59 Listening in that sonic environment entails the ability to overhear (p. 65) nearby speech, conversation serving as a background sound that ebbs and flows yet remains a constant sonic presence—hence the admonitions to use repertory that does not demand too much of the listener’s attention. In more intimate settings, talking should not be audible to the performers; adjacent spaces are identified as suitable for conversation. For less formal occasions, it appears that listeners are not required to make any particular accommoda tion beyond being positioned close to the performers, with talking banned only within the sound zone adjacent to the musicians. Thus the zone of attentive silence surrounding the performers can expand or shrink, depending on the overall space available for the event, the degree of formality of the occasion, and the number of guests listening to the music. Just one year later, in 1870, an author writing as Cecil Hay reminisced fondly about an evening party:
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The Well-Mannered Auditor: Zones of Attention and the Imposition of Si lence in the Salon of the Nineteenth Century There was a good deal of light conversation, there was a little card playing, not of too severe or business-like an order to be interrupted by the gentle babble of undisciplined talk; and then in another room there was music. If you wished to mix in the general tide of visitors you could join the main circle; if, on the other hand, you felt disposed to glide tranquilly away into the comparative quiet of the musicroom, solus cum sola, there was nothing to prevent you.60 These recollections refer to a time the author calls the “old regime,” when “persons were enabled . . . to give really social and pleasurable little parties.”61 As described, the sonic spaces at such events seem to have been clearly differentiated into rooms dedicated to conversation and to music. However, the author’s manner of presentation suggests the evocation of an idealized past, and indeed, as already illustrated, other sources from the time contradict these observations about the purity of the listening experience. Recognizing that some conversation may be necessary or unavoidable, select sources al low for talking in a low voice. They do not specify where talking sotto voce would be per mitted—whether at the performance, in the adjoining rooms, or out of earshot of the mu sic. The guiding principle appears to have been to avoid any egregious form of sonic dis traction that might disturb the concentration of the performer or the audience. The al lowance for conversing in the lowest tones sheds light on the expectation and practice of attentive listening in such settings, where “attention and distraction . . . existed on a sin gle continuum, and thus attention was . . . a dynamic process, intensifying and diminish ing, rising and falling, ebbing and flowing according to an indeterminate set of variables.”62 The murmur of conversation that served as a pedal tone to the event, the penetration of the zone of musical audition by speech and other distracting sounds from other spaces, and the potential for disruptive sounds within the performance space all conspired to diffuse the concentrated listening experience. Under such auditory condi tions the guidebooks necessarily advised against performing works like Beethoven’s sonatas,63 which would demand more “critical” attention than would the customary musi cal fare at the informal performances.
(p. 66)
Music for the Distracted Listener
Not all music performed at social gatherings was intended for the rapt attention of guests, and in fact it could serve as a source of irritation if too prominent. At dinner par ties, for example, readers were told that music that “interferes with conversation, or that is loud enough to force the company into tone of speech above the ordinary, is not a plea sure . . . but only a nuisance and a weariness.”64 Indeed, under these conditions even the “best music” can be regarded, in the words of Holt’s Encyclopedia of Etiquette, as an “in terruption” or a “distraction.”65 This advice recognizes that not all musical performances demand undivided attention. The sources present social contexts—dinners, teas, or gar den parties—where music serves as a background for conversation, in which cases the professional performers often occupy concealed or unobtrusive yet strategic places with in the general setting of the event. Page 11 of 23
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The Well-Mannered Auditor: Zones of Attention and the Imposition of Si lence in the Salon of the Nineteenth Century For Holt and others, the diffusion of sound is not regulated except for its volume, to which end the author recommends sequestering instruments away from the dining hall in order to dull their acoustic effects. This practice of using hidden performers as an accom paniment to a meal represents an interesting reversal of the auditory standards estab lished for the concert hall, the opera, and the music room or parlor of the private resi dence: the performance conditions should, in a way, facilitate distracted listening, so that guests may engage in conversation and other sound-producing activities without disrup tion. In the cases described, the prescribed factors of distance and even invisibility again suggest the zoning of listening, with proximity equating to attentiveness.
The Battle over Control Despite their efforts to exert normalizing and regulatory power over bourgeois ears and tongues, the authors and editors of the guides found themselves increasingly challenged by issues of inattention, which quite likely reflected the ever more confusing, disturbing soundscape of modern life. The manuals’ increasing circumspection in matters of listen ing and speaking at social events appears to have failed to stem the tide of distracted lis tening, associated with the sensory crisis that Georg Simmel identified in 1903 with modernity and urban life:66 disruptions by conversation and other human sounds threat ened the order of the spaces dedicated to attentive listening to music. A passage from the Ladies Home Journal of January 1888 illustrates the crisis in manners taken from actual experiences in the drawing room, while making an important link with the machinic pace of modern urban life: It seems to those who happen to be in the sway of the “society girl,” that almost any manners would be better than those that are now in vogue. . . . It seems as though all (p. 67) our modes of living had kept pace with machines. Certainly, the noisy, undignified and offensive manners of some supposedly well-taught women nowadays bear to the old-fashioned ways a similar correspondence.67 Nevertheless, some writers simply relinquished the battle for control, acknowledging that strict (or even relative) silence within the zone of audition had become an impossibility. For example, the author of Etiquette for Ladies and Gentlemen (1876) adopts a pragmatic approach in advising would-be performers: “Do not expect perfect silence, because, though it is in bad taste, people will persist in regarding music as a cover for conversa tion.”68 And to the extent that guests will converse, the performer should not allow those sounds to deter them from demonstrating their talent: “Never wait till the company is silent, do not go on playing introductory bars, and looking round as if you expected them to stop talking for . . . you will seldom succeed in making them do so.”69 Other guide books from the last three decades of the century make similar admonishing observations, directed both at the performers and their listeners, even as the crisis of attention was manifesting itself in society in general.70 Despite such repeated reproaches, guests invit ed by the hostess to perform music had to anticipate some level of (background) conver sation, while their audience members could not expect a listening experience without dis Page 12 of 23
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The Well-Mannered Auditor: Zones of Attention and the Imposition of Si lence in the Salon of the Nineteenth Century turbances. As the state of distracted listening seems to have normalized itself during the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sound spaces within the salon became noisier affairs, which could have led to the following observation by the American physician John H. Girdner in 1896: “At a fashionable reception my lady’s drawing-room becomes a pandemonium of shouting, screeching women, each doing her best to make herself understood.”71
Conclusion We may forgive anti-noise activist Girdner a touch of hyperbole, but it nevertheless ap pears that attempts to regulate the soundscape of the salon of the Anglophone world in the late nineteenth century were doomed to failure. The encroachment of distracting sounds and disruptive behavior into music spaces during the social functions of the up wardly striving bourgeoisie threatened to undermine the established etiquette of atten tive listening to music by guests. The media historian Kate Lacey identifies the problem as one of “how to act as a private citizen within a public listening space that was bifurcat ed between the space of the imagined public constructed through sound and the embod ied sonic space of the immediate community.”72 Lacey’s invocation of nested sonic spaces —in our case, that of mannered listening to impromptu musical performances and of the sounds from the larger social event in which they were embedded—cuts to the core of the inherent difficulty behind the etiquette books’ prescriptions for appropriate listening (and speaking). These zones of audition were not precisely defined and segregated sonic spaces in the domain of the salon, with the (p. 68) murmur of conversation as a sonic backdrop and more pronounced sounds flowing into and out of the area dedicated to mu sic performance. Such acoustic conditions detracted from the concentrated listening ex perience that remained the standard for most manual authors, who attempted to answer the rising crisis of (in)attention via greater rigor in their literary policing of performed sound. Such attempts at stabilizing the increasingly confusing, distracting sound world of moder nity serve to confirm Foucault’s hypothesis about the production of “docile bodies” that was endemic to modern society and that resulted from (self-)disciplining power. That the socially situated individual’s auditive behavior became subject to control mechanisms is borne out by the many admonitions to silence in the manuals, which ultimately would fail in achieving that goal. Whereas the experience of attentive listening to music may have increasingly eluded listeners at social functions in good society, the etiquette books’ chas tisement of improper manners in listening did help identify a (troubling) state of audition for the bourgeois subject that reflected and embodied the variegated soundscape of mod ern life: distracted listening. But that was not the well-mannered auditor, who wished to rise in the social hierarchy through appropriate listening behaviors and whose interest in self-discipline fueled a whole branch of the publishing industry in the nineteenth century.
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The Well-Mannered Auditor: Zones of Attention and the Imposition of Si lence in the Salon of the Nineteenth Century
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The Well-Mannered Auditor: Zones of Attention and the Imposition of Si lence in the Salon of the Nineteenth Century Durkheim, Émile. 1982. “What Is a Social Fact?” In The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and Its Method, edited by Steven Lukes, 20–28. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Eigeldinger, Jean-Jacques. 2013. Chopin: Âme des salons parisiens (1830–1848). Paris: Fa yard. Elias, Norbert. 1969. History of Manners. Oxford: Blackwell. Elias, Norbert. 1978. The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners. Translated by Ed mund Jephcott. New York: Urizen. Elias, Norbert. 1982. Power and Civility. Oxford: Blackwell. Emmerson, Simon. 1998. “Aural Landscape: Musical Space.” Organised Sound 3 (2): 135– 140. Etiquette for Gentlemen, or Short Rules and Reflections for Conduct in Society. 1847. Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston. Etiquette for Ladies and Gentlemen. 1876. London: Frederick Warne. Fiedler, Conrad. (1876) 1949. On Judging Works of Visual Art. Translated by Henry Schae fer-Simmern and Fulmer Mood. Berkeley: University of California Press. Foucault, Michel. (1975) 1978. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon. Fraser, Nancy. 1985. “Michel Foucault: A ‘Young Conservative’?” Ethics 96 (1): 165–184. Gay, Peter. 1995. The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud. Vol. 4, The Naked Heart. New York: Norton. Gerber, Mirjam. 2016. Zwischen Salon und musikalischer Geselligkeit: Henriette Voigt, Livia Frege und Leipzigs bürgerliches Musikleben. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag. Girdner, John H. 1896. “The Plague of City Noises.” North American Review 163 (478): 296–303. Good Manners. 1889. New York: Butterick. Gow, Alex. 1873. Good Morals and Gentle Manners for Schools and Families. New York: American. Gradenwitz, Peter. 1991. Literatur und Musik in geselligem Kreise: Geschmacksbildung, Gesprächsstoff und musikalische Unterhaltung in der bürgerlichen Salongesellschaft. Stuttgart: Steiner. Harris, Susan. 2002. The Cultural Power of the Late Nineteenth-Century Hostess: Annie Adams Fields and Mary Gladstone Drew. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Page 15 of 23
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The Well-Mannered Auditor: Zones of Attention and the Imposition of Si lence in the Salon of the Nineteenth Century Hartley, Florence. 1860. The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, and Manual of Politeness. Boston: Cottrell. Hartley, Florence. 1872. The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, and Manual of Politeness: A Complete Handbook. Boston: Lee and Shepard. (p. 74)
Haskell, Harry. 1996. The Attentive Listener: Three Centuries of Music Criticism. Prince ton: Princeton University Press. Hay, Cecil [pseud.]. 1870. The Club and the Drawing-Room: Being Pictures of Modern Life; Social, Political, and Professional. Vol. 2. London: Robert Hardwicke. Holt, Emily. 1901. Encyclopedia of Etiquette. London: McClure, Phillips. Houghton, Walter Raleigh. 1883. American Etiquette and Rules of Politeness. 7th ed. New York: Standard. How to Shine in Society, or The Art of Conversation; Containing Its Principles, Laws, and General Usage in Modern Polite Society. 1867. Glasgow: George Watson. Humphry, C[harlotte] E[liza]. 1897. Manners for Men. Exeter: Webb and Bower. Johnson, James H. 1995. Listening in Paris: A Cultural Study. Berkeley: University of Cali fornia Press. Kasson, John. 1990. Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Hill and Wang. Lacey, Kate. 2013. Listening Publics: The Politics and Experience of Listening in the Me dia Age. Malden, MA: Polity. E-book. Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Pocket Companion of Etiquette and Manners . . . by an Ameri can. N.d. New York: Stearns. Langman, Lauren. 2008. “Carnivalization, the Body and the Liminal: From the Flaneur to the Urban Primitive.” In The New Boundaries Between Bodies and Technologies, edited by Bianca Maria Pirani and Ivan Varga, 55–90. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars. Leslie, Eliza. 1859. Miss Leslie’s Behaviour Book: A Guide and Manual for Ladies. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson. Lippman, Edward. 1988. Musical Aesthetics: A Historical Reader. Vol. 2, The Nineteenth Century. Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon. Lorenzkowski, Barbara. 2010. Sounds of Ethnicity: Listening to German North America, 1850–1914. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press. Manners and Rules of Good Society . . . by a Member of the Aristocracy. 1888. 15th ed. London: Frederick Warne. Page 16 of 23
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The Well-Mannered Auditor: Zones of Attention and the Imposition of Si lence in the Salon of the Nineteenth Century Marlin-Bennett, Renée. 2011. “On the Nature of Empirical Evidence.” In Alker and IR: Global Studies in an Interconnected World, edited by Renée Marlin-Bennett, 28–41. Lon don: Routledge. Marshall, Mrs. 1839. The Child’s Guide to Good Breeding. London: John W. Parker. Merlingen, Michael. 2003. “Governmenality: Towards a Foucauldian Framework for the Study of IGOs.” Cooperation and Conflict 38 (4): 361–384. Morgan, Marjorie. 1994. Manners, Morals, and Class in England, 1774–1858. London: Macmillan. Müller, Sven Oliver. 2006. “Distinktion, Demonstration und Disziplinierung: Veränderun gen im Publikumsverhalten in Londoner und Berliner Opernhäusern im 19. Jahrhundert.” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 37 (2): 167–187. Müller, Sven Oliver. 2014. Das Publikum macht die Musik: Musikleben in Berlin, London und Wien im 19. Jahrhundert. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht. Nead, Lynda. 2012. “‘Many Little Harmless and Interesting Adventures . . .’: Gender and the City.” In Victorian World, edited by Martin Hewitt, 291–307. London: Routledge. Paster, Gail Kern. 1993. The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Puckett, Kent. 2008. Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel. New York: Oxford University Press. (p. 75)
Rayne, Martha Louise. 1882. Gems of Deportment and Hints of Etiquette. Chicago: Tyler. Sherwood, Mary Elizabeth Johnson. 1887. Manners and Social Usages. Rev. ed. New York: Harper. Simmel, Georg. 1903. “Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben.” In Die Großstadt: Vorträge und Aufsätze zur Städteausstellung; Jahrbuch der Gehe-Stiftung Dresden 9:185–206. The Habits of Good Society. 1872. New York: G. W. Carleton. The Manners of the Aristocracy by One of Themselves. 1881. London: Ward, Lock. The Manners That Win: Compiled from the Latest Authorities. 1880. Minneapolis: Buck eye. Thorau, Christian. 2009. “Guides for Wagnerites: Leitmotifs and Wagnerian Listening.” In Wagner and His World, edited by Thomas Grey, 133–150. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Thornwell, Emily. 1859. Ladies’ Guide to Perfect Gentility. New York: Derby and Jackson.
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The Well-Mannered Auditor: Zones of Attention and the Imposition of Si lence in the Salon of the Nineteenth Century Urner, Nathan. 1884. Always: A Manual of Etiquette for the Guidance of Either Sex into the Empurpled Penetralia of Fashionable Life. London: George Routledge. Williams, Adrian. 1990. Portrait of Liszt, by Himself and His Contemporaries. Oxford: Clarendon. (p. 76)
Notes: (1.) These historical documents have appeared (translated) in twentieth-century antholo gies including those by Edward Lippman on musical aesthetics (Lippman, Edward. 1988. Musical Aesthetics: A Historical Reader, vol. 2: The Nineteenth Century. Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon), Harry Haskell on music criticism (Haskell, Harry. 1996. The Attentive Listen er: Three Centuries of Music Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press), and Adri an Williams on audience responses to the music and performance of Liszt (Williams, Adri an. 1990. Portrait of Liszt, by Himself and His Contemporaries. Oxford: Clarendon). (2.) For example, Georgina Born recently assembled a collection of studies regarding lis tening practices in various cultural contexts in Born, Georgina. 2015. Music, Sound, and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer sity Press. The first important monograph to investigate cultural listening was Johnson, James H. 1995. Listening in Paris: A Cultural Study. Berkeley: University of California Press, although Leon Botstein had already published the landmark article: Botstein, Leon. 1992. “Listening Through Reading: Musical Literacy and the Concert Audience.” 19thCentury Music 16 (2): 129–145. Since then, other relevant studies have appeared, includ ing Bonds, Mark Evan. 2006. Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven. Princeton: Princeton University Press; Müller, Sven Oliver. 2006. “Distinktion, Demonstration und Disziplinierung: Veränderungen im Publikumsverhalten in Londoner und Berliner Opernhäusern im 19. Jahrhundert.” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 37 (2): 167–187; Thorau, Christian. 2009. “Guides for Wagnerites: Leitmotifs and Wagnerian Listening.” In Wagner and His World, edited by Thomas Grey, 133–150. Princeton: Princeton University Press; and Müller, Sven Oliver. 2014. Das Pub likum macht die Musik: Musikleben in Berlin, London und Wien im 19. Jahrhundert. Göt tingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht. (3.) The following discussion adopts the generic term “salon” for invited social gatherings in private residences, though the English-language writings of the period do not seem to have adopted the concept of “salon” from the French models; the present chapter uses the designation for the sake of clarity and for uniformity with the other chapters. Still, the entertainments under discussion here distinguish themselves from the historical French practice as single events intended for and hosted by the rising bourgeoisie, who needed instruction in the details of etiquette, unlike the established Parisian salons of prominent figures and members of the nobility. Regarding the salon, see, e.g., Gerber, Mirjam. 2016. Zwischen Salon und musikalischer Geselligkeit: Henriette Voigt, Livia Frege und Leipzigs bürgerliches Musikleben. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag; Eigeldinger, Jean-Jacques. 2013. Chopin: Âme des salons parisiens (1830–1848). Paris: Fayard; Chimènes, Myriam. Page 18 of 23
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The Well-Mannered Auditor: Zones of Attention and the Imposition of Si lence in the Salon of the Nineteenth Century 2004. Mécènes et musiciens: Du salon au concert à Paris sous la IIIe République. Paris: Fayard; Beci, Veronika. 2000. Musikalische Salons: Blütezeit einer Frauenkultur. Düssel dorf: Artemis and Winkler; Gradenwitz, Peter. 1991. Literatur und Musik in geselligem Kreise: Geschmacksbildung, Gesprächsstoff und musikalische Unterhaltung in der bürg erlichen Salongesellschaft. Stuttgart: Steiner. (4.) Lynda Nead, for example, speculates that “it was . . . to the upwardly middle classes that the books were addressed.” Nead, Lynda. 2012. “‘Many Little Harmless and Interest ing Adventures . . .’: Gender and the City.” In Victorian World, edited by Martin Hewitt, 291–307. London: Routledge, 300. (5.) Because dinners represented only one type of social function and were accompanied by music in only the wealthiest of households, they do not figure in the discussions below. (6.) For an explanation, see, e.g., Kasson, John. 1990. Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Hill and Wang, 34–69. (7.) Nead (2012): 300. (8.) Nead (2012): 300. (9.) Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. “Price Formation and the Anticipation of Profits.” In Lan guage and Symbolic Power, translated and edited by Gino Raymond and Matthew Adam son, 66–90. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 87. See also Puckett, Kent. 2008. Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, chap. 1 (“Some Blunders”), for example, for a lively discussion of how etiquette books followed the changing dictates of fashion. (10.) Crary, Jonathan. 1999. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 13. (11.) Durkheim, Émile. 1982. “What Is a Social Fact?” In The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and Its Method, edited by Steven Lukes, 20–28. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 21. (12.) Foucault, Michel. (1975) 1978. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans lated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon, 135–169. (13.) Elias, Norbert. 1978. The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. New York: Urizen. See also Paster, Gail Kern. 1993. The Body Embar rassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2–19, for an introduction to twentieth-century discourse about physical and social, inner and outer bodies. (14.) Curtin, Michael James. 1981. Etiquette and Society in Victorian England. Berkeley: University of California Press, 412. See also Morgan, Marjorie. 1994. Manners, Morals,
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The Well-Mannered Auditor: Zones of Attention and the Imposition of Si lence in the Salon of the Nineteenth Century and Class in England, 1774–1858. London: Macmillan, 3–6, for an introduction to recent debates about class structure in Victorian England. (15.) Fraser, Nancy. 1985. “Michel Foucault: A ‘Young Conservative’?” Ethics 96 (1): 174. (16.) Alford, C. Fred. 2000. “What Would It Matter If Everything Foucault Said About Prison Were Wrong? Discipline and Punish After Twenty Years.” Theory and Society 29 (1): 125. (17.) Merlingen, Michael. 2003. “Governmenality: Towards a Foucauldian Framework for the Study of IGOs.” Cooperation and Conflict 38 (4): 366. (18.) Of course, prescriptive sources such as the manner books do not necessarily do jus tice to the full array of audience behavior documented in descriptive sources such as the reports from opera houses cited in this volume by Katherine Ellis (Chapter 1). (19.) Rayne, Martha Louise. 1882. Gems of Deportment and Hints of Etiquette. Chicago: Tyler, 346. (20.) Sherwood, Mary Elizabeth Johnson. 1887. Manners and Social Usages. Rev. ed. New York: Harper, 37. This self-policing on the part of audiences was not restricted to London, of course, since the behavioral codes dictating silence during public musical events would have been well established by mid-century. See Johnson (1995): 228–236 for an account of the social basis for the rise of audience silence in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. (21.) Gay, Peter. 1995. The Naked Heart. Vol. 4 of The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud. New York: Norton, 18. (22.) Bashford, Christina. 2007. The Pursuit of High Culture: John Ella and Chamber Mu sic in Victorian London. Woodbridge: Boydell, 139–140. (23.) Hartley, Florence. 1860. The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, and Manual of Politeness. Boston: Cottrell, 175, 176. (24.) Harris, Susan. 2002. The Cultural Power of the Late Nineteenth-Century Hostess: Annie Adams Fields and Mary Gladstone Drew. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 6. (25.) Harris (2002): 6. (26.) Aster, Jane. 1882. Sensible Etiquette and Good Manners of the Best Society. New York: G. W. Carleton, 259. (27.) ([) Beeton, Samuel Orchart]. 1875. All About Etiquette, or The Manners of Polite So ciety, for Ladies, Gentlemen and Families. London: Ward, Lock, 302. See also Hartley (1860): 189, where author Florence Hartley states, “It is better to play the simplest airs in a finished, faultless manner than to play imperfectly the most brilliant variations.”
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The Well-Mannered Auditor: Zones of Attention and the Imposition of Si lence in the Salon of the Nineteenth Century (28.) Good Manners. 1889. New York: Butterick, 85. The same wording for instructions regarding behavior toward the hostess’s request for performance appear in multiple texts of the time, reflecting their importance and her authority in the parlor. (29.) Thornwell, Emily. 1859. Ladies’ Guide to Perfect Gentility. New York: Derby and Jack son, 109. See also the anonymously published Manners of the Aristocracy by One of Themselves, 1881. London: Ward, Lock, 37: “[N]othing is in worse taste than the affected modesty which refuses and refuses, and would be terribly mortified were the refusal qui etly accepted.” (30.) “Those who play or sing should bear in mind that ‘brevity is the soul of wit.’ Two verses of a ballad, or four pages of a piece, are at all times enough to give pleasure.” Good Manners (1889): 86. Other writers adopt a musically more sensible position when they recommend Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words or certain of Stephen Heller’s com positions (see Etiquette for Ladies and Gentlemen. 1876. London: Frederick Warne, 29). (31.) “A sonata of Beethoven would be as much out of place in some circles as a comic song at a Quaker’s meeting.” Good Manners (1889): 86. (32.) “If you are a skilful musician or a fine singer, take care not to put your gifts too prominently forward.” Etiquette for Ladies and Gentlemen (1876): 28. (33.) Leslie, Eliza. 1859. Miss Leslie’s Behaviour Book: A Guide and Manual for Ladies. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson, 112. (34.) Etiquette for Ladies and Gentlemen (1876): 27. (35.) Langman, Lauren. 2008. “Carnivalization, the Body and the Liminal: From the Fla neur to the Urban Primitive.” In The New Boundaries Between Bodies and Technologies, edited by Bianca Maria Pirani and Ivan Varga, 55–90. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars. This source addresses the rise of “bodily shame” with the institution of greater control “by ever more repressive standards of modesty and manners” (63). See also Elias, Nor bert. 1982. Power and Civility. Oxford: Blackwell, 232; Elias, Norbert. 1969. History of Manners. Oxford: Blackwell, 164, 189–90. (36.) Urner, Nathan. 1884. Always: A Manual of Etiquette for the Guidance of Either Sex into the Empurpled Penetralia of Fashionable Life. London: George Routledge, 75. (37.) Crary (1999): 22. (38.) Fiedler, Conrad. (1876) 1949. On Judging Works of Visual Art. Translated by Henry Schaefer-Simmern and Fulmer Mood. Berkeley: University of California Press, 40. (39.) Crary (1999): 13–14. (40.) Dewey, John. 1887. Psychology. New York: Harper and Brothers, 134. (41.) Crary (1999): 77. Page 21 of 23
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The Well-Mannered Auditor: Zones of Attention and the Imposition of Si lence in the Salon of the Nineteenth Century (42.) Crary (1999): 51. (43.) Crary (1999): esp. 247–255. (44.) Crary (1999): 250. (45.) Crary (1999): 254–255. (46.) Emmerson, Simon. 1998. “Aural Landscape: Musical Space.” Organised Sound 3 (2): 138. (47.) Hartley, Florence. 1872. The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, and Manual of Politeness: A Complete Handbook. Boston: Lee and Shepard, 56. (48.) Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Pocket Companion of Etiquette and Manners . . . by an American. N.d. New York: Stearns, 180. (49.) Good Manners (1889): 85. That a number of etiquette-book authors compare listen ing to an amateur salon performance to participating in conversation reflects the connec tions they made between speech and music. See above all How to Shine in Society, or The Art of Conversation; Containing Its Principles, Laws, and General Usage in Modern Polite Society. 1867. Glasgow: George Watson. (50.) Marshall, Mrs. 1839. The Child’s Guide to Good Breeding. London: John W. Parker, 94. (51.) Houghton, Walter Raleigh. 1883. American Etiquette and Rules of Politeness. 7th ed. New York: Standard, 149. (52.) Cooke, Maud C. 1896. Social Etiquette, or Manner and Customs of Polite Society. Philadelphia: National, 263. (53.) Humphry, C[harlotte] E[liza]. 1897. Manners for Men. Exeter: Webb and Bower: 96. (54.) The disturbing sounds extended beyond conversation to include “fidgeting, rustling about, chattering, [and] laughing” (Humphry [1897]: 96). Children were admonished to refrain from “the cracking and eating of nuts, and the rustling of fans, programmes, and dresses,” as we read in Alex Gow’s 1873 publication Good Morals and Gentle Manners for Schools and Families. New York: American, 215. (55.) The Manners of the Aristocracy (1881): 17. (56.) Lorenzkowski, Barbara. 2010. Sounds of Ethnicity: Listening to German North Amer ica, 1850–1914. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 213. (57.) He also proposes that “[i]f the number of invitations issued be more than the room can accommodate, the places nearest the piano or orchestra should be assigned to the earliest arrivals. It is presumable that those guests who are most punctual will be those
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The Well-Mannered Auditor: Zones of Attention and the Imposition of Si lence in the Salon of the Nineteenth Century who care most about music” (Cassell’s Household Guide. [1869]. London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 4:327). (58.) Cassell’s Household Guide [1869]: 4:327. (59.) Marlin-Bennett, Renée. 2011. “On the Nature of Empirical Evidence.” In Alker and IR: Global Studies in an Interconnected World, edited by Renée Marlin-Bennett, 28–41. London: Routledge. (60.) Hay, Cecil [pseud.]. 1870. The Club and the Drawing-Room: Being Pictures of Mod ern Life; Social, Political, and Professional. London: Robert Hardwicke, 2:102. (61.) Hay (1870): 2:101. (62.) Crary (1999): 47. (63.) Etiquette for Ladies and Gentlemen (1876): 27. (64.) Holt, Emily. 1901. Encyclopedia of Etiquette. London: McClure, Phillips, 82. (65.) Holt (1901): 82. See also The Manners of the Aristocracy (1881): 24. (66.) Simmel, Georg. 1903. “Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben.” In Die Großstadt: Vorträge und Aufsätze zur Städteausstellung; Jahrbuch der Gehe-Stiftung Dresden 9:185– 206. (67.) Clark, Kate Upson. 1888. “Old-Fashioned Manners and New.” Ladies Home Journal, January 3. (68.) Etiquette for Ladies and Gentlemen (1876): 102. (69.) The Habits of Good Society. 1872. New York: G. W. Carleton, 306. (70.) Cassell’s Household Guide [1869]: 4:326. (71.) Girdner, John H. 1896. “The Plague of City Noises.” North American Review 163 (478): 302. (72.) Lacey, Kate. 2013. Listening Publics: The Politics and Experience of Listening in the Media Age. Malden, MA: Polity. E-book, 75.
James Deaville
James Deaville, Carleton University
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The Problem of Eclectic Listening in French and German Concerts, 1860– 1910
The Problem of Eclectic Listening in French and Ger man Concerts, 1860–1910 William Weber The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries Edited by Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer Print Publication Date: Jan 2019 Subject: Music, Musicology and Music History Online Publication Date: Nov 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190466961.013.4
Abstract and Keywords Between 1820 and 1870, European musical culture changed. Previously, a certain type of program had dominated the musical sphere: contemporary works spanning various gen res including opera. In the 1870s new actors emerged. A learned world of classical music came into being, focusing on orchestral and chamber pieces, with less of a connection to opera. New kinds of songs, increasingly termed “popular,” began to make their mark in roughly similar European venues. In these contexts, listening practices reflected radically different social values and expectations. But did mixed programming remain in some con cert performances? Did listeners demonstrate eclectic musical tastes? Taking examples from Paris, Frankfurt, Leipzig, and Berlin, this chapter shows how links were made be tween contrasting repertoires by the importation or adaptation of works. A process that seems at first to have been an exception turns out to have been a conventional system of exchange. Keywords: aesthetic hierarchies, canonization, concert programs, eclectic listening, listening and Europe, listen ing habitus
EUROPEAN musical culture changed fundamentally between 1820 and 1870. By tradi tion, contemporary works held sway on a concert program over the occasional old pieces that were performed, and a variety of genres would be offered, almost always including opera selections. A certain unity held the contrasting pieces together within a coherent structure of musical taste. As I show in The Great Transformation of Musical Taste, by 1870 that framework disappeared as new groups of performing institutions arose, and concert programming changed from a “patterned miscellany” to “homogeneity within separate musical spheres.”1 The new learned world of classical music, focused on orches tral and chamber music concerts, had less and less to do with opera. Opera houses devel oped their own canons of old works, repertoires which exercised broad influence over certain areas of concert life. At the same time, new kinds of songs, increasingly termed “popular,” emerged in roughly similar venues—the French cafés-concert, the British mu
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The Problem of Eclectic Listening in French and German Concerts, 1860– 1910 sic hall, and the German Variété. In these contexts, listening arose from radically differ ent social values and expectations. I nonetheless qualify this narrative in two respects. First, the term "miscellany” is some times seen to portray a confusion of taste and thereby question the intellectual integrity of eighteenth-century musical culture. It is vital to approach that period of music in its own terms, independent of post-Romantic assumptions.2 Second, traditional practices continued in reshaped form, playing important roles in the fragmented musical world of the nineteenth century. The primacy of the musical theater survived in changed form, bringing cultural legitimacy to commercialized areas of musical life. Brash idealists in the new classical music world did not make much headway in their challenge to musical com mercialism. Moreover, I have serious doubts that a “triumph (p. 78) of the silent” came about thoroughly in classical music concerts, as James H. Johnson has argued so brilliant ly. Even if that point of view can be seen in critical commentary, it is not all that clear in actual practice, as Katharine Ellis shows in Chapter 1 of this handbook. Most important of all, I have great doubts that musicians or critics brought about an education of the public, since concert-goers assumed a substantial autonomy in their values and practices. The notion of a higher taste may have influenced listeners, but just what they did is not at all clear. To put the discussion on a more theoretical plane, I suggest the notion that members of the public listened to one another as they heard musical genres that manifested potential ly conflicting tastes or social values. Although social rank and education dictated how mu sical taste is formed, people went to an opera or a concert looking about them, getting a sense of what kinds of people liked what kinds of music for what reasons, and in the process they adapted their own tastes in complex ways. This process came about because a program sometimes included pieces that were not usually thought to come from the same aesthetic mold, chosen, in fact, to make a concert seem open to contrasting publics and thereby to seem stimulating and like a signal event. This “sociability of listening” lay at the core of what went on in musical life traditionally; changes occurred chiefly in the nature and the scale of contrast between tastes. By 1830 the tastes that predominated in the separate worlds stood much farther apart from one another than they had in the eighteenth century. The most fundamental division emerged between classical music concerts for orchestra, string quartet, or solo per former and the world of opera and concerts devoted to opera selections and virtuoso pieces. On one hand, the classical music world asserted an intellectual authority that was seen to stand above the public as a whole, legitimating the authority of certain revered composers. On the other, the extraordinary popularity of grand opéra reinforced the tradi tional belief in the supremacy of public opinion and brought about a competing canon of old operas, excepts from which predominated in important areas of concert life.3 At the same time, the commercial popular song, followed by the middle classes and better-off ar tisans, developed as a third major sphere. These events linked with the opera world by of fering selections from diverse kinds of musical theater.4
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The Problem of Eclectic Listening in French and German Concerts, 1860– 1910 To what extent did these increasingly different musical worlds share repertoire? On what terms might a classical symphony or piano sonata be performed with a lot of opera selec tions? Did many listeners have eclectic tastes? To answer these questions, examples of concerts given between 1860 and 1910 in Paris, Leipzig, Berlin, and Bad Homburg near Frankfurt am Main are considered (see the program listings in the chapter’s Appendix). The concept of eclecticism that has emerged in music sociology offers a useful means by which to analyze the extent to which individuals follow multiple kinds of taste. Originally sociologists drew a dichotomy between the narrowly focused “univore” and the open-end ed “omnivore” to define the extremes of such activity. But problems seen in the latter con struct have led to a less value-laden concept of eclecticism, as sociologists have discov ered power relations ordering such cultural frameworks.5 At the same time, there has been increasing interest in historical treatment of the social structure of musical life in other periods, since it is obvious that diverse patterns of eclecticism have (p. 79) been common in the past.6 A historian can find limited information about individual tastes, but a great deal of information exists about concert programs in the nineteenth century, which can disclose patterns of taste, whether inclusive or exclusive. The concept of “cultural fields” provides a useful tool for analyzing how musical spheres interact. Sociologists from the United States and a variety of European countries have gone a long way in rethinking the concepts of Pierre Bourdieu, some backing away from his concept of habitus owing to its inherent hierarchical structure, as Tony Bennett did in his article on the notion of “habitus clivé.”7 A set of cultural fields can instead be defined not as a unified set of values and social practices but, rather, as related, but largely inde pendent, spheres that maintain internal processes of legitimation. By the same token, though music historians often speak of The Canon, it is now widely recognized that canons in separate musical fields have evolved to have complicated relations with one an other. That is why I argue that the performance of a piece of music in a concert or an opera house is not legitimated by musical culture as a whole but, rather, by the field in which it is participating. A process of negotiation can go on between two such fields—an opera house and a symphony orchestra, for example—that brings partial collaboration among potentially hostile tastes. It is best to imagine several such spheres behaving as amoeba-like bodies in a three-dimensional space, interacting as changes in public life cause them to encounter one another. Exchange of music between two quite different spheres can come about from such a process just as much as from ideological conflict. I find it useful to apply the term “univore” to the ideology propagated by critics to de scribe classical music as a “high” taste of an uncompromising nature. Their view was that a listener should forswear salon music, opera medleys, and perhaps the more popular op eras of the time. Nonetheless, most listeners who went to classical music concerts must also have valued opera and virtuoso music to some extent. The cultural field surrounding opera is best called “operatic virtuosity,” since virtuoso instrumental genres were deeply influenced by opera and were performed with opera selections in concerts. The bestknown fantaisies on themes from famous operas took on canonic status for the whole nineteenth century, the most significant being pieces by Niccolò Paganini, Henry Vieux Page 3 of 27
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The Problem of Eclectic Listening in French and German Concerts, 1860– 1910 temps, and Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst. Attacks on this repertoire made from the 1820s framed a deep conflict between idealism and virtuosity in music criticism.8 Indeed, Rossi ni brought a bold virtuosity that influenced the way listeners understood instrumental music, as James H. Johnson has demonstrated.9 Theaters continued to function as the most important public gathering places of elite groups, helping bring about the integration of aristocrats and high bourgeois into a new upper class. Public acceptance of a piece—un succès, as was said in France—governed judgment of a piece much more directly than was the case in classical music concerts. Al though commentators were thought empowered to judge operas from about 1790, their influence remained limited in the cultural marketplace compared to the public’s. Indeed, critics often cited how much money was taken in at the door as evidence of the relative popularity of a piece; this was unusual for an orchestral concert. The benefit concert—organized by one or two musicians for their own profit or loss —was the most common kind of concert in most cities, serving as a key gathering point for the central cultural field: operatic virtuosity.10 The programs involved chiefly opera se lections and virtuoso numbers, most commonly the fantasy upon the best-known tunes of an opera. The “promenade concert,” where social mingling might take place, also formed part of that cultural field. Such events grew from eighteenth-century institutions such as London’s Vauxhall and venues outside Leipzig’s city walls and thereby became one of the key traditions in musical life. Such series were produced internationally on a large scale starting in the 1830s thanks to early efforts by Philippe Musard and Adolphe Jullien in Paris; they usually offered dance pieces, virtuoso pieces, fantasies, and sometimes move ments from classical symphonies. Pieces thought to be classical did not appear in quite a few programs. (p. 80)
From that point in time, a piece could be related to more than one cultural field and so be interpreted in different ways. Different genres of a composer’s music became established in two competing fields during his lifetime although eventually they would be associated with just one. For example, in Paris, Schubert’s songs were originally performed in salons along with opera selections long before many people knew his symphonies or chamber pieces, so they belonged to the category “operatic virtuosity.” Likewise, overtures and opera selections by composers whose orchestral works were performed at classical music concerts—those by Mozart and Weber most of all—would appear in benefit concerts with a different identity, taking a role independent of classical music events. It was convention al to open a benefit concert with a piece from a prior generation, and in quite a few cases that involved a piano trio from Beethoven’s op. 1, a formidable set of works chosen by the composer as his first published pieces. Piano trios seemed to fit in that context; they were not performed often in chamber music concerts, either because a piano was unavailable or because the ensemble’s director wished to keep his distance from the commercial world of the piano. Indeed, Pierre Baillot rarely included them in his important series of chamber music concerts.11 An even bolder move toward eclecticism came when occasion ally a piano sonata by Beethoven was performed at a benefit concert. The sonatas had be come known to educated listeners from the 1850s but were still unfamiliar to the general Page 4 of 27
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The Problem of Eclectic Listening in French and German Concerts, 1860– 1910 public. Pianists usually chose the more virtuosic of Beethoven’s sonatas, those from his middle period most of all, because they related closely to the showy kinds of performing that predominated in such concerts.
Parisian Programs I examine two benefit concerts given in Paris in the 1860s that illustrate the field of oper atic virtuosity in its most concentrated form.12 Starting in 1850, most benefit concerts provided accompaniment by piano rather than orchestra, as was also often the case for opera selections at orchestral concerts. The best-known singers gave benefit concerts in big halls with orchestral accompaniment, and the two kinds of events evolved into the (p. 81) “opera gala,” conventional in Great Britain and the United States in the twentieth century. Example 1 provides the list of works in a concert given in the Salle Herz in 1869 by the violinist Antonio Sighicelli. He pursued an eclectic career typical of violinists in that time (see Figure 3.1). In Modena, his hometown, he not only conducted the opera oc casionally but also led a string quartet featuring the works of Beethoven. This program offered two modest examples of eclecticism. It followed convention in opening with a quintet by Johann Nepomuk Hummel, probably the one in E-flat from 1802, and included Schubert’s “Erlkönig,” which was often performed in Parisian salons. The taste of the sa lons was reflected as well in the performance of Charles Gounod’s Méditation sur le Pre mier Prélude de Piano de S. Bach, along with Bach’s prelude in C Major. The program (p. 82) drew from the basic repertoire of benefit concerts with pieces by Rossini and Wag ner, the Duo fantaisie sur Guillaume Tell written jointly by George Osborne and Charles de Bériot, and instrumental numbers by Vieuxtemps, Stephen Heller, and Sighicelli him self. Note that Sighicelli avoided ideological division over Wagner’s operas by including the Abendstern from Tannhäuser along with music that Wagner despised. Indeed, one can find many pieces by Wagner in Parisian benefit concerts throughout the 1860s, usually the transcriptions made by Franz Liszt.13 Typical of the cosmopolitanism of benefit con certs was the song by the Berlin music critic Ferdinand Gumbert, whose pieces were pub lished in many European cities.
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The Problem of Eclectic Listening in French and German Concerts, 1860– 1910
Figure 3.1. Concert program for the Salle Herz, Paris, April 8, 1869, directed by Antonio Sighicelli. Bibliothèque-Musée de l’Opéra. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
A much more unusual program offering pieces from all three cultural fields was given in the Salle Pleyel in 1875 by three young men from one family, les enfants Frémaux (Example 2). After opening with the Beethoven Piano Trio, op. 1, no. 3, the first half closed with a performance of his highly virtuosic “Waldstein” Sonata, op. 53, by the emi nent Camille Saint-Saëns, demonstrating the family’s high musical connections. Defer ence to classical taste was shown as well when the second half of the concert began with a piano trio by Joseph Mayseder, who had followed in Beethoven’s footsteps writing in a conservative style. But the rest of the program typified operatic virtuosity: not only an aria from Verdi’s Macbeth and a piece from a comic opera by the prominent composer Victor Massé, but also fantasies on Bellini’s Norma and Auber’s Muette de Portici along with two pieces by Vieuxtemps. Thanks in part to his regular performance of opera fan tasies, the genre remained popular for benefit concerts and even orchestral programs for the rest of the century. Then, extraordinarily enough, many concert programs took eclecticism even further by offering songs by Edmond Lhuillier, the most famous composer in the early cafés-con certs. “Les épouseux du Berry” (Oh, Those Fiancés in Berry) became canonic among French popular songs, whose text we see in Example 3. Thought to have been composed in 1856, the chansonnette remained in singers’ repertoires into the twentieth century and has been available in recordings since about 1910.14 Opera selections were also standard repertoire at Parisian cafés-concerts. Students from the Conservatoire inaugurated their operatic careers at such venues starting in the 1850s, providing a cultural savoir faire to institutions that were struggling to establish Page 6 of 27
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The Problem of Eclectic Listening in French and German Concerts, 1860– 1910 themselves in Parisian life. Such a blend of opera and popular song can be found in a pro gram given in 1868 at the Grand Casino de Paris, located near the Place de la Bastille (Example 4; see Figure 3.2).15 The program opened with songs by nine men and women, after which came a ballet pantomime called “The Millers” and then several acrobatic acts. A long final section comprised eighteen operatic duos, as often occurred at the end of an evening. Among the sixteen I could identify, six were from the genres of vaudeville, opérabouffe, or saynète (a skit), four were from opéra-comique, and three came from grand opera, including pieces by Ferdinand Hérold and Adolphe Adam. As those names suggest, the opera selections tended to be fairly old, going back to a vaudeville first produced in 1808. The newest pieces were a parody of Offenbach and a piece from Georges Bizet’s La Jolie fille de Perth. The list indicates that many in the audience were knowledgeable about the diverse genres of musical theater. (p. 83)
Figure 3.2. Concert program for the Grand Casino de Paris, February 1868. Bibliothèque-Musée de l’Opéra. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
A bold contrast between two constructs of musical taste appears in programs per formed by students and faculty from two music academies at the Salle Pleyel in1910 (Ex ample 5). The more prominent academies would hold a concert every year at such a venue, offering vocal and instrumental pieces sung and played by twenty to fifty people.16 The Cours Chevillard was run by that prominent musical family—Camille Chevillard had succeeded Charles Lamoureux, his father-in-law, as director of the Chatelet orchestral concerts in 1899. Their program was focused more extensively on classical repertoire than was that by the Chorale Le Grix, a school dating from the 1880s, whose taste stood (p. 84)
closer to that of the general public. To be sure, both schools offered pieces by Mozart, Schumann, Wagner, Gounod, and Gabriel Fauré, suggesting the particular importance of the latter two figures. That both schools offered only one opera selection by a living com Page 7 of 27
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The Problem of Eclectic Listening in French and German Concerts, 1860– 1910 poser is testimony to how much opera repertoires had shifted to old works by that time. Puccini’s Tosca (1900) was given by les Chevillards, and Saint-Saëns’s conservative Phryné (1893) by les Le Grix, perhaps suggesting less interest in new trends at the latter school. But among opera selections by deceased composers, the Chevillard program went deep into the eighteenth century with pieces by Handel, Gluck, and Grétry, while the oth er school favored more recent figures—Auber, Délibes, and Massenet, even though the number of dead composers was similar in the two programs. The same contrast appears in their repertoires of concert pieces: strictly classical for the one school, and numerous living composers, many composing domestic music, for the other. Likewise, the Chevillard concert ended with a challenging recent piece, Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder (1904) accom panied by piano, and the Le Grix program concluded with the universally known Tannhäuser March (upon entry of the guests into Wartburg Hall), played on four pianos, sixteen hands. Nonetheless, it is striking that the school catering more to the general public offered “Les Jardins de la pluie” from Claude Debussy’s Les Estampes (1903), per haps because of its lullaby theme, which is reminiscent of folk music. Thus did Debussy develop a public significantly beyond the world of composers and their patrons.
German Programs The benefit concert and the promenade concert followed parallel histories in German cities but tended to resemble one another more than did those in Paris. Though practice varied greatly, I sense that classical pieces were included with some caution. Benjamin Bilse made it a moral cause to bring different realms of works together in his repertoire, applying a shrewd sense of what the public would accept, first in Liebnitz and then in Berlin. Yet he often presented separate genres on different days of the week—classics on Tuesdays and lighter music on Sundays.17 Programs of opera selections and virtuoso pieces, for which many examples are found in the large collection of concert programs at the Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek in Frank furt am Main, became particularly prominent in the bath towns of central (p. 85) Europe.18 Contrasting kinds of programs are evident in three concerts given in Bad Homburg, the prestigious tourist town north of Frankfurt. We can presume that some of the wealthy families who took the waters in Bad Homburg also attended Frankfurt’s Museums-Con certe.19 Example 6, typical of many German benefit concerts, sported a French title and pieces by Henri Herz and Alexandre Artôt, along with cosmopolitan attention to Paganini, Hummel, and Verdi. The aria from Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito, given a German text, carried a complicated set of associations. His operas were primarily interpreted through traditions of musical theater and seen in different terms when identified either with Ital ian or German dramatic traditions. A selection, moreover, was perceived quite differently when performed in benefit concerts or as part of classical music repertoire and almost certainly was performed in somewhat different terms. Example 7 shows how German dance pieces and opera selections would cohabit on a pro gram designed in the tradition of the promenade concert. Held in the Kursaal of Bad Page 8 of 27
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The Problem of Eclectic Listening in French and German Concerts, 1860– 1910 Homburg, the program was framed by three dance pieces—a polonaise, a waltz, and a polka. The piece by Heinrich Henkel (born in nearby Offenbach) was of the same genera tion as those by Josef Gung’l and Josef Strauss, second son of Johann Strauss the Elder. It is particularly striking to find a set of canonic opera selections by composers of mostly Germanic origin: Mozart, Marschner, Halévy, and Meyerbeer. The only opera piece by a living composer was a grosse Posse by the prominent August Conradi, first performed at the Münchener Aktien-Volks-Theater.20 The third program from Bad Homburg (Example 8) resembled the Parisian programs dis cussed above by opening with a piece by Beethoven, in this case a piano sonata. It was particularly bold to offer the unusually long “Kreutzer” Sonata (op. 47, 1803), though on ly the Andante and the Finale of this intensely virtuosic piece were performed. The rest of the program was typical of the benefit concert, offering selections by Bellini and Donizetti and virtuosic pieces for piano, flute, and violin. That the only living composer represented was Anton Rubinstein illustrates how the virtuosic repertoire was aging just as the opera selections were. Programs not dissimilar to those of the French cafés-concerts can be found in Germany in this period, offering opera selections and virtuoso pieces as well as popular songs. One given in Leipzig in 1866, held in the prominent Hôtel de Saxe, was called Singspiel-Halle (Salon variété) (Example 9; see Figure 3.3).21 The program combined opera selections by Mozart, Bellini, and Boieldieu with popular songs in genres called komische Scene or dramatischer Scherz, the most striking of them being Ein politischer Hausknecht and the dialect-based Der guate Bu’a. Here eclecticism originated in professional opportunism, since the piece by pianist Ernst Pauer illustrates how a musician involved in reviving ear ly music would also write pieces aimed at the general public. His Cascade in effect served as a contemporary work paralleling Weber’s canonic Rondo brillante. The newest piece on the program was by Clara Röhmeyer, a member of a family that directed the conservatory in Pforzheim; her music has been revived recently.22 A particularly bold example of eclecticism was presented in 1886 by the orchestra that was to become the Berlin Philharmonic (see Example 10). Four years earlier, a large group of players had left the Bilse ensemble with the purpose of building a professional (p. 86) society on their own.23 The first half of the program made an arch canonic state ment by offering pieces by Wagner, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Liszt. Almost all of the rest of the program came from opera or instrumental repertory; indeed, singers and pi anists would often open a program with Germanic classics and conclude with cosmopoli tan virtuoso pieces. Save the concluding Hochzeitsmarsch by Mendelssohn, all the com posers represented were from other countries—Spain, Italy, France, Russia, Britain, and the Netherlands. François Dunkler was prominent in Utrecht; Cesare Ciardi had taught Tchaikovsky to play the flute; and Olivier Métra was a conductor at the Folies-Bergères and promenade concerts in Paris. Given the tradition of arriving late to concerts, it can be presumed that much of the public was particularly interested in the latter portion of the program.
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The Problem of Eclectic Listening in French and German Concerts, 1860– 1910
Figure 3.3. Concert program for the Singspiel-Halle (or Salon Variété), Hôtel de Saxe, Leipzig, 1866. Courtesy of the Stadtgeschichtliches Museum Leipzig.
Hans von Bülow moved away from such programming when he took charge of the Phil harmonic the following autumn. His first concert offered symphonies by (p. 87) Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, reviving the strict programming long followed by the Prussian court orchestra.24 Mixed repertoire can be found in other orchestral concerts. Con fronting this subject in interesting ways, Hansjakob Ziemer cited a performance in 1890 at the Frankfurt Museums-Konzerte of the fantasia on Rossini’s Otello by the violinist Heinrich Ernst, a work of canonic standing that had been published in 1838 and was reis sued as late as 1910.25
Conclusion It can thus be seen how the fragmentation of musical culture in the middle of the nine teenth century ended up stimulating carefully defined eclectic tendencies among its sepa rate parts. Most listeners did not want to hear the same music all the time, but pieces brought from separate musical spheres had to be judiciously chosen. The programs show how public demand for variety caused quite different cultural fields to enter into the framework of musical taste generally. Proponents of classical music had a deep impact on musical culture in the nineteenth century through their univore-like ideas about a “high er” realm of music. But such taste was rivaled by the enthusiasm of the general public for canons of the best-known operas and virtuoso pieces that dominated benefit and prome nade concerts. The hegemony of the musical theater continued from the eighteenth cen tury, providing a cultural legitimacy to the benefit concert and to the venues where com mercial popular song evolved. The exchanges that went on between the three cultural Page 10 of 27
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The Problem of Eclectic Listening in French and German Concerts, 1860– 1910 fields responded to both changing interests in the audience and the need to refresh repertoire on a controlled basis. In this way the major spheres of musical culture interacted, amoeba-like, as pieces moved back and forth from one field to another. It can be assumed that most listeners built up multiple types of taste in different areas of musical culture, following the patterns of eclecticism revealed in the provided examples. In addition, one can be certain that most listeners at such events developed critical priorities among the contrasting kinds of music they heard; they did not simply like to hear everything. Yet in the process they developed an openness to quite different kinds of music, as is reflected in the coexistence in these concerts of music by Mozart, Donizetti, Vieuxtemps, Wagner, and Rubinstein.
References Abbate, Carolyn, and Roger Parker. 2012. A History of Opera. New York: Norton. Bayerischer Courier [Munich]. 1866. “Konzerte.” November 24: 2239. Bennett, Tony. 2007. “Habitus clivé: Aesthetics and Politics in the Writing of Pierre Bour dieu.” New Literary History 38 (1): 201–228. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. DiMaggio, Paul. 2010. “Class Authority and Cultural Entrepreneurship: The Problem of Chicago.” In The American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Centu ry, edited by Sven Beckert and Julia Rosenbaum, 209–232. London: Macmillan. Donnat, Olivier. 1994. Les Français face à la culture: De l’exclusion à l’éclectisme. Paris: La Découverte. Dorin, Stéphane. 2013. “Dissonance et consonance dans l’amour de la musique contem poraine: Les limites de l’omnivorisme musical dans l’auditoire de l’Ensemble Intercon temporain.” In Trente ans après la Distinction de Pierre Bourdieu, edited by Philippe Coulangeon and Julien Duval, 99–112. Paris: La Découverte. Fauquet, Joël-Marie. 1986. Les sociétés de musique de chambre à Paris de la Restaura tion à 1870. Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres. Gooley, Dana. 2006. “The Battle Against Instrumental Virtuosity in the Early Nineteenth Century.” In Franz Liszt and His World, edited by Christopher Gibbs and Dana Gooley, 113–166. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gramit, David. 2002. Cultivating Music: The Aspirations, Interests, and Limits of German Musical Culture, 1770–1848. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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The Problem of Eclectic Listening in French and German Concerts, 1860– 1910 Grotjahn, Rebecca. 2003. “Die Entdeckung der Terra incognita: Benjamin Bilse und sein reisendes Orchester.” In Le musician et ses voyages: Pratiques, réseaux et répresenta tions, edited by Christian Meyer, 253–282. Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag. Hamilton, Kenneth. 2008. After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (p. 90)
Johnson, James H. 1995. Listening in Paris: A Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lahire, Bernard. 2011. The Plural Actor. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Manskopfsches Musikhistorisches Museum. 2014. “Musik- und Theatersammlung: Geschichte der Bestände.” Accessed October 11, 2014. http://www.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/ musik/bestandsgeschichte.html. Muck, Peter. 1982. Einhundert Jahre Berliner Philharmonisches Orchester: Darstellung in Dokumenten. 3 vols. Tutzing: Schneider. Peterson, Richard, and Roger Kern. 1996. “Changing Highbrow Taste from Snob to Omni vore.” American Sociological Review 61:900–907. Röhmeyer, Clara, and Theodor Storm. [1900s?]. Waisenkind. Pforzheim i/B: T. Röhmeyer. Women Composers Collection at the University of Michigan Music Library, Hathi Trust Digital Library (003166515). Accessed April 25, 2018. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/ Record/003166515. Steinmetz, George. 2011. “Bourdieu, Historicity and Historical Sociology.” Cultural Soci ology 5:45–66. Stiftung Berliner Philharmoniker. 2007. Variationen mit Orchester: 125 Jahre Berliner Philharmoniker. 2 vols. Berlin: Henschel Verlag. Stresemann, Wolfgang. 1977. Philharmonie und Philharmoniker. Berlin: Stapp Verlag. Weber, William. 1980. “Learned and General Musical Taste in Eighteenth-Century France.” Past and Present 89:58–85. Weber, William. 1997. “Did People Listen in the 18th Century?” Early Music 25:678–691. Weber, William. 1999. “The History of Musical Canons.” In Rethinking Music, edited by Mark Everist and Nicholas Cook, 340–359. New York: Oxford University Press. Weber, William. 2001. “From Miscellany to Homogeneity in Concert Programming.” Poet ics 29:125–134. Weber, William. 2008. “Variations on Miscellany.” In Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms, 40–81. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni versity Press. Page 12 of 27
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The Problem of Eclectic Listening in French and German Concerts, 1860– 1910 Weber, William. 2011. “Die Entwicklung des klassischen Repertoires in Frankfurt und an deren europäischen Städten von 1808 bis 1870.” In Musik-Bürger-Stadt: Konzertleben und musikalisches Hören im historischen Wandel, 200 Jahre Frankfurter MuseumsGesellschaft, edited by Christian Thorau, Andreas Odenkirchen, and Peter Ackermann, 101–118. Regensburg: ConBrio. Weber, William. 2014. “Beyond the Classics: Welche neue Musik hörte das deutsche Pub likum im Jahre 1910?” In Kommunikationschancen: Entstehung und Fragmentierung sozialer Beziehungen durch Musik im 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Sven Oliver Müller, Jür gen Osterhammel, and Martin Rempe, 79–81. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht. Weber, William. [Under review]. “Richard Wagner, Concert Life, and Musical Canon in Paris, 1860–1914.” Edited by William Weber. Ziemer, Hansjakob. 2008. Die Moderne hören: Das Konzert als urbanes Forum, 1890– 1940. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag.
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The Problem of Eclectic Listening in French and German Concerts, 1860– 1910
Appendix Ten Examples of Concert Pro grams (p. 91)
(† pieces by deceased composers) Example 1 Program for concert in the Salle Herz, Paris, April 8, 1869, directed by Antonio Sighicelli. (Courtesy Bibliothèque-Musée de l’Opéra, Paris.) Quintette [E-flat, 1802 (?)]
†
Air
†
Fantaisie-Caprice
Henry Vieuxtemps
Song, Medjé
Charles Gounod
Berceuse
Stephen Heller
Scherzo
†
Le Roi des Aulnes (Erlkönig)
†
Ave Maria, prelude de J. S. Bach
Gounod
Mira la Bianca luna, Soirées musi cales
†
Abendstern, Tannhäuser
Richard Wagner
Air, Hymne au Printemps
Joseph O’Kelly
Valse, Willis
Jean-Louis Maton
Berceuse, Valse
Antonio Sighicelli
Air, Oiseaux légers
Ferdinand Gumbert
Duo sur Guillaume Tell
George Osborne and C.-A. de Bériot
Johann Nepomuk Hummel Giaocchino Rossini
Hermann Wollenhaupt Franz Schubert
Rossini
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The Problem of Eclectic Listening in French and German Concerts, 1860– 1910 Example 2 Program for the concert of the Frémaux Family, Salle Pleyel, Paris, April 14, 1875. (Courtesy Bibliothèque-Musée de l’Opéra, Paris.) Piano trio, op. 1, no. 3, Allegro and An dante
†
Air, Macbeth (1847)
Giuseppe Verdi
Ballade and Polonaise, violin and piano
Henry Vieuxtemps
Chansonnette, En Visite
Edmond Lhuillier
Sérénade et Saltarelle, cello and piano
Auguste Tolbecque
Ludwig van Beethoven
Romance †
Beethoven
Piano trio no. 2, Andante
†
Joseph Mayseder
Air, Les Saisons (opéra-comique, 1855)
Victor Massé
Fantaisie, flute sur des motifs de Norma
Carlos Allard
Sonata for piano, op. 53 (“Waldstein”), performed by Camille Saint-Saëns
Chansonette Fantaisie sur la Muette de Portici, violin and piano
Délphin-Jean Alard
Chansonette, Il ne faut jurer de rien
Lhuillier
(p. 92)
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The Problem of Eclectic Listening in French and German Concerts, 1860– 1910 Example 3 Text for the popular song “Les épouseux du Berry” (Oh, Those Fiancés in Berry, 1856), chansonnette composed by Edmond Lhuillier, as sung by Henry Laverne in 1927. When in the land of Berry A nice young girl Has come to say yes to her fiancé. Her parents and friends all in festival clothes Come with a bagpiper, Oh! eh! oh! eh! And they bring the girl a maypole with ribbons, Oh! eh! oh! eh! And put it in front of her door as the emblem of lovers.
Page 16 of 27
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The Problem of Eclectic Listening in French and German Concerts, 1860– 1910 Example 4 Final part of a concert program for the Grand Casino de Paris, February 10, 1868. (Courtesy Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.) 1.
Le Chalet: opéra-comique in 1 act, †Adolphe Adam (1834)
2.
Le Trouvère, Verdi (1857 Paris production)
3.
La Reine de Chypre: opera in five acts, †Fromental Halévy (1841)
4.
Mousquétaires de la Reine: comic opera in 3 acts, †Halévy (1846)
5.
Le Pré aux Clercs: opéra-comique in 3 acts, †L.-J.-F. Hérold (1832)
6.
Le Cabaret de Suzon: skit (saynète bouffe), Jules Javalet (1863)
7.
Mademoiselle J’ordonne: song on the novel by Irène Loiseau Du Piot (1862)
8.
Un Bonne pour tout faire: vaudeville in 1 act (1860)
9.
La Jolie Fille de Perth: opera in 4 acts, Georges Bizet (1867)
10.
Les Dragons de Villars: comic opera in 3 acts, Aimé Maillart (1856)
11.
La Bonne Institutrice, ou l’Enfant gâté: song from comedy in 1 act (1856)
12.
La Perle de l’Alsace: pastorale-opérette in 1 act, Hervé (1854)
13.
Le Retour d’Ulysse: opéra-bouffe in 1 act, Hervé (1862)
14.
Le beau Paris: parody and saynète bouffe on music of Offen bach for the Eldorado (1867)
15.
Les deux Lutteurs: dance music by Colin de Blamont ? (1782)
16.
Marjolaine: vaudeville (1844) or comic opera (1855)
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The Problem of Eclectic Listening in French and German Concerts, 1860– 1910 17.
Monsieur et Madame Denis, ou La veille de la Saint Jean: vaudeville (1808)
(p. 93)
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The Problem of Eclectic Listening in French and German Concerts, 1860– 1910 Example 5 Programs for concerts by two musical academies, Salle Pleyel, Paris, 1910. (Courtesy Bibliothèque-Musée de l’Opéra, Paris.) Cours Chevillard
Chorale Le Grix Opera: Living composer
Puccini, Tosca
Saint-Saëns, Phryné Opera: Deceased composers
Mozart Don Juan
†
Gounod, Faust
Gounod, Sapho
Wagner, Tannhäuser
Wagner, Tannhäuser, March
Handel, Héraclès
Weber, Euryanthe and Oberon
Gluck, Iphigénie en Aulide
Auber, Haydée
Grétry, Céphale et Procris
Meyerbeer, Le Prophète
Mozart, Turkish march
Thomas, Le Caïd; Reyer, La Statue Massenet, Cendrillon and Manon Délibes, Coppélia Concert: Deceased composers Schumann
Schumann
Handel
Weber
Beethoven
Mendelssohn
Schubert
Liszt
Chopin
Lalo
Bizet
[Unknown]
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The Problem of Eclectic Listening in French and German Concerts, 1860– 1910 Concert: Living composers Fauré
Fauré
X.X. [an aristocrat]
Pauline Viardot, Debussy
Boellmann
Le Grix, Giraud, Spindler
Duparc
Landry, Marietti, Pfeiffer Final pieces
Mahler, Kindertotenlieder
Wagner, Tannhäuser March, 16 hands
(p. 94)
Example 6 Program for a Grand Concert Vocal and Instrumental avec Orchestre, Kursaal, Bad Homburg, September 8, 1856. (Courtesy Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main.) Overture, Oberon
†
Klavier-Konzert, No. 5
Henri Herz
Fantaisie militaire, The last rose of summer, Op.
Henri Herz
Weber
159 Arie, La Clemenza di Tito
†
Grande fantaisie, Robert le diable
Alexandre Artôt
Bolero, Les vêpres siciliennes (1855)
Verdi
Le Streghe
†
Paganini
Variationen über La tyrolienne
†
Hummel
Mozart
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The Problem of Eclectic Listening in French and German Concerts, 1860– 1910 Example 7 Concert program for the Kursaal, Bad Homburg, Novem ber 4, 1868. (Courtesy Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main.) Fest-Polonaise
Heinrich Henkel
Ouverture, Le Val d´Andorre (Opéra-Comique, 1848)
†
Arie aus Robert le Diable (Opéra, 1836)
†
Walzer Soldatenlieder
Josef Gung’l
Arie, Don Juan (1787)
†
Halévy
Meyerbeer
Mozart
Der Banquier aus dem Stegreif, oder: Unruhige Zeiten, grosse Posse mit Gesang und Tanz (Munich, 1866[?])
August Conradi
Der Templer und die Jüdin, grosse romantische Oper (Leipzig, 1829)
†
Lock-Polka Française, op. 233
Josef Strauss
Marschner
(p. 95)
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The Problem of Eclectic Listening in French and German Concerts, 1860– 1910 Example 8 Concert program for the Kursaal, Bad Homburg, December 7, 1879. (Courtesy Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt, Frank furt am Main.) Bernard Ullmann, Concert Agentur “Kreutzer” Sonata, Op. 47, Andante and Finale
†
Lieder, Arien
†
Concertino f. Flöte
†
Concert 1. Satz
†
Sérénade
Anton Rubinstein
As-Dur-Walzer and Nocturne
†
Arie
†
Beethoven Bellini
Jules Demerss mann Paganini
Chopin Donizetti
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The Problem of Eclectic Listening in French and German Concerts, 1860– 1910 Example 9 Concert program for a Singspiel-Halle (or Salon Variété), Hôtel de Saxe, Leipzig, 1866. (Courtesy Stadtgeschichtliches Muse um, Leipzig.) I La Cascade, piano
Ernst Pauer
Lied, In den Augen liegt das Herz!
Gustav Hölzel
Komische Scene, Der dumme Peter Arie und Rondo, Die Nachtwandlerin
†
Couplet, Die Waisenkinder
Clara Röhmeyer
Bellini
II Dramatischer Scherz, Bei Wasser und Brot
B. Röder
Walzer-Rondo
Ferdinand Gumbert
Soloscherz, Narziss im Frack
August Conradi
Duett, Figaro’s Hochzeit
†
Mozart
Komische Scene, Ein politischer Hausknecht III Rondo brillante, piano
†
Arie des Seneschall, Johann von Paris
†
Lied, Die stille Wasserrose
Friedrich-Wilhelm Kücken
Weber Boieldieu
Oestereichisches Lied, Der guate Bu’a Komische Scene, Das Liebesgeständniss ein er Köchin (p. 96)
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The Problem of Eclectic Listening in French and German Concerts, 1860– 1910 Example 10 Concert program for the Eröffnungs-Concert des Philhar monischen Orchesters, Berlin, Sunday, October 3, 1886, directed by Franz Mannstaedt. (Muck, Peter. 1982. Einhundert Jahre Berliner Philharmonisches Orchester: Darstellung in Dokumenten. 3 vols. Tutz ing: Schneider, 1:69, 81.) I Vorspiel, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
†
Wagner
Variationen, Streichquartett A-Dur, op. 18, no. 2
†
Beethoven
Scherzo, Ein Sommernachtstraum
†
Mendelssohn
Ungarische Rhapsodie
†
Liszt
Dritte Ouverture, Leonore
†
Beethoven
Fantasie für Violoncello, O cara memoria
†
Adrien Servais
Fantasie über Themen aus Don Juan
†
François Dunkler
Vorspiel, Lohengrin
†
Wagner
Carneval russe für Flöte
†
Cesare Ciardi
Zigeunerweisen für Violine
Pablo Sarasate
Spanische Serenade
Olivier Métra
II
III
IV Ouverture, Zampa (1831)
†
Characterstück für Harfe, Im Herbst
J. Thomas
Toréadore et Andalouse
Anton Rubinstein
Ferdinand Hérold
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The Problem of Eclectic Listening in French and German Concerts, 1860– 1910 Hochzeitsmarsch
†
Mendelssohn
Notes: (1.) Weber, William. 2008. “Variations on Miscellany.” In The Great Transformation of Mu sical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms, 40–81. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Weber, William. 1980. “Learned and General Musical Taste in Eigh teenth-Century France.” Past and Present 89:58–85; Weber, William. 1999. “The History of Musical Canons.” In Rethinking Music, edited by Mark Everist and Nicholas Cook, 340– 359. New York: Oxford University Press; Weber, William. 2001. “From Miscellany to Ho mogeneity in Concert Programming.” Poetics 29:125–134. (2.) Weber, William. 1997. “Did People Listen in the 18th Century?” Early Music 25:678– 691. (3.) Abbate, Carolyn, and Roger Parker. 2012. A History of Opera. New York: Norton, 425– 455, 516–548. (4.) For discussion of specialized concerts of new music, see Weber, William. 2014. “Be yond the Classics: Welche neue Musik hörte das deutsche Publikum im Jahre 1910?” In Kommunikationschancen: Entstehung und Fragmentierung sozialer Beziehungen durch Musik im 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Sven Oliver Müller, Jürgen Osterhammel, and Martin Rempe, 79–81. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht. (5.) Peterson, Richard, and Roger Kern. 1996. “Changing Highbrow Taste from Snob to Omnivore.” American Sociological Review 61:900–907; Donnat, Olivier. 1994. Les Français face à la culture: De l’exclusion à l’éclectisme. Paris: La Découverte; Dorin, Stéphane. 2013. “Dissonance et consonance dans l’amour de la musique contemporaine: Les limites de l’omnivorisme musical dans l’auditoire de l’Ensemble Intercontemporain.” In Trente ans après la Distinction de Pierre Bourdieu, edited by Philippe Coulangeon and Julien Duval, 99–112. Paris: La Découverte; Lahire, Bernard. 2011. The Plural Actor. Cam bridge, UK: Polity. (6.) Steinmetz, George. 2011. “Bourdieu, Historicity and Historical Sociology.” Cultural Sociology 5:45–66; DiMaggio, Paul. 2010. “Class Authority and Cultural Entrepreneur ship: The Problem of Chicago.” In The American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Sven Beckert and Julia Rosenbaum, 209–232. London: Macmillan. (7.) Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Trans lated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; Bennett, Tony. 2007. “Habitus clivé: Aesthetics and Politics in the Writing of Pierre Bourdieu.” New Literary History 38 (1): 201–228; Dorin (2013).
Page 25 of 27
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The Problem of Eclectic Listening in French and German Concerts, 1860– 1910 (8.) Gooley, Dana. 2006. “The Battle Against Instrumental Virtuosity in the Early Nine teenth Century.” In Franz Liszt and His World, edited by Christopher Gibbs and Dana Gooley, 113–166. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (9.) Johnson, James H. 1995. Listening in Paris: A Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 216–228. (10.) Gramit, David. 2002. Cultivating Music: The Aspirations, Interests, and Limits of German Musical Culture, 1770–1848. Berkeley: University of California Press. (11.) Fauquet, Joël-Marie. 1986. Les sociétés de musique de chambre à Paris de la Restau ration à 1870. Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres, 293–331. (12.) On programming in the benefit concert, see Weber (2008): 141–168, 245; Hamilton, Kenneth. 2008. After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance. Ox ford: Oxford University Press, 36–44. (13.) Weber, William. [Under review]. “Richard Wagner, Concert Life, and Musical Canon in Paris, 1860–1914.” Edited by William Weber. (14.) The song is in the Marvin Duchow Music Library, McGill University, part of the nine teenth-century French Sheet Music Collection. I am indebted to Kimberley White for that information. (15.) Collection Arts et Spectacles, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. (16.) Salle Pleyel, Bibliothèque-Musée de l’Opéra, Paris. (17.) Grotjahn, Rebecca. 2003. “Die Entdeckung der Terra incognita: Benjamin Bilse und sein reisendes Orchester.” In Le musician et ses voyages: Pratiques, réseaux et répresen tations, edited by Christian Meyer, 253–282. Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag. (18.) See Manskopfsches Musikhistorisches Museum. 2014. “Musik- und Theatersamm lung: Geschichte der Bestände.” Accessed October 11, 2014. http://www.ub.unifrankfurt.de/musik/bestandsgeschichte.html. (19.) Ziemer, Hansjakob. 2008. Die Moderne hören: Das Konzert als urbanes Forum, 1890–1940. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag; Weber, William. 2011. “Die Entwicklung des klas sischen Repertoires in Frankfurt und anderen europäischen Städten von 1808 bis 1870.” In Musik-Bürger-Stadt: Konzertleben und musikalisches Hören im historischen Wandel, 200 Jahre Frankfurter Museums-Gesellschaft, edited by Christian Thorau, Andreas Odenkirchen, and Peter Ackermann, 101–118. Regensburg: ConBrio. (20.) Bayerischer Courier [Munich]. 1866. “Konzerte.” November 24: 2239. (21.) Stadtgeschichtliches Museum, Leipzig.
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The Problem of Eclectic Listening in French and German Concerts, 1860– 1910 (22.) See, e.g., Röhmeyer, Clara (music) and Theodor Storm (words). [1900s?]. Waisenkind. Pforzheim i/B: T. Röhmeyer. Women Composers Collection at the University of Michigan Music Library, Hathi Trust Digital Library (003166515). Accessed April 25, 2018. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/003166515. (23.) Muck, Peter. 1982. Einhundert Jahre Berliner Philharmonisches Orchester: Darstel lung in Dokumenten. 3 vols. Tutzing: Schneider, 1:69, 81; Stresemann, Wolfgang. 1977. Philharmonie und Philharmoniker. Berlin: Stapp Verlag; Stiftung Berliner Philharmoniker. 2007. Variationen mit Orchester: 125 Jahre Berliner Philharmoniker. 2 vols. Berlin: Hen schel. (24.) See a typical program from the court orchestra in 1859 in Weber (2008): 257. (25.) Ziemer (2008): 55.
William Weber
William Weber, California State University, Long Beach
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The Crisis of Listening in Interwar Germany
The Crisis of Listening in Interwar Germany Hansjakob Ziemer The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries Edited by Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer Print Publication Date: Jan 2019 Subject: Music, Musicology and Music History Online Publication Date: Nov 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190466961.013.13
Abstract and Keywords This chapter analyzes why concert reformers in interwar Germany associated practices of listening with the notion of crisis and how this notion was affected by political, social, and economic changes. It also asks whether this period was, indeed, a watershed in the histo ry of music listening. Starting with Adorno’s various descriptions of listening in crisis, the chapter traces the discourses and practices of listening in his hometown of Frankfurt am Main in order to show how manifest and perceived notions of crisis were used to legit imize traditions of listening and to invent strategies to counter their alleged decline. Us ing journalistic accounts and other contemporary sources, this chapter aims to recon struct the perspectives of listeners and situate concert-hall experiences in their historical and cultural context. Keywords: bourgeois identity, concert-hall listening, crisis of listening, Frankfurt am Main, ideal listener, listening behavior, reform, Theodor W. Adorno, Weimar Republic
IN 1930, looking back at the first three decades of the twentieth century, Theodor W. Adorno observed what he considered to be an unprecedented crisis in listening culture. In his view, listeners were no longer a homogeneous social group in terms of class, educa tion, and shared values. Beyond that, the concert hall itself had lost its power to secure music’s status as an art form for society. Adorno saw this as a moment of decisive change and diagnosed a “manifest crisis of the concert” that was “unambiguously dictated by the social situation.”1 Adorno closely associated the crisis of listening with a general crisis of society. His point of reference was nineteenth-century concert-going—the “most charac teristic form of bourgeois musical practice”—which, in his view, could still pretend to be protected from the forces of commercialization and capitalism.2 By the twentieth century, in contrast, he saw economic reality forcing itself onto concert audiences, writing, “[t]he concert hall’s hermetic insulation from reality is crumbling away.”3 The result of reality entering the concert hall was to render it nothing more than an archive or a museum of times long gone. The decay of the intellectual middle class, the emergence of a new gen eration of listeners finding pleasure in entertainment and sports, and the rise of radio were all just further evidence of the decay of the kind of listening found in the nineteenthPage 1 of 28
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The Crisis of Listening in Interwar Germany century concert hall. Adorno predicted that only small circles of music lovers would sur vive in its “ruins” once the change was complete and concert listening as once practiced had come to an end.4 Descriptions of crisis such as Adorno’s have often been analyzed in philosophical and so ciological contexts as interpretations of the rise of modernity, with typical features such as the ascendancy of the subject and its autonomy, the rise of distraction as an example of the dominance of capitalist consumption culture, or the “epistemological dilemma” of “defining a human capacity for synthesis within the fragmentation and atomization of a cognitive field.”5 This chapter takes a slightly different route by historicizing such reflec tions on listening in light of concert-going practices that had been fundamentally called into question since the 1890s. This was not only (p. 98) a phenomenon of the musical world but was also part of a general trend that the historian Detlev Peukert has memo rably summarized as “crisis years of classical modernity,” in which the breakthrough of modernity created the feeling of a general crisis in society at all levels.6 The term “crisis” went beyond traditional assumptions of a divide between liberal and illiberal elements within society, suppositions that were inherent in contemporary literature about the musi cal world. The term also evoked the idea that the situation was open and full of uncertain ty—a decision was due but had not been reached, in Reinhart Koselleck’s definition.7 In such situations, apocalyptic visions or utopian ideals could provide guidance in making sense of fundamental changes. Such ideals could also help in pointing out new options and alternatives that would break with traditional boundaries, values, and institutions. The result was what historians now portray as a cultural laboratory, in which the sense of perceived and manifest crisis led to an unprecedented cultural dynamism.8 In the spirit of this historiographical shift, this chapter analyzes how and why contemporaries observed and imagined a crisis of listening for concert-going in the 1920s, how the use of this no tion was affected by political, social, and economic turning points in this period, and the extent to which contemporary perceptions of this period as a watershed in the history of listening can be justified. Recent scholarship has done little to illuminate the relation between the history of listen ing and the broader notion of crisis in the musical world.9 In conventional narratives about music listening, the 1920s often appear as a period in which listening was changed forever by the arrival of new musical languages—from Schönberg to the compositions of Gebrauchsmusik—and the breakthrough of modern technological innovations such as ra dio and the gramophone. The inventions of the period were often treated as “self-evident ly decisive,” as Jonathan Sterne has critically noted, and discussions of them are often characterized by teleological undertones.10 What is still lacking is an attempt to recon struct the reflections and practical experiences of listeners and to scrutinize the role played by the notion of crisis as an immediate context for listening. Both new technolo gies and Neue Musik (new music) changed the material context and the sound sources of listening experiences. Later interpretations of these innovations have often relied on aes thetic treatises on listening rather than actual practices and perspectives from the con cert hall. If we are to take recent calls for a “historical positioning of listening behaviors” seriously and stretch the groundbreaking work by James H. Johnson into the twentieth Page 2 of 28
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The Crisis of Listening in Interwar Germany century,11 then we need to historicize and contextualize the experiences of listeners in the 1920s, both imagined and real, in order to reconstruct their relation to the music and the culture that surrounded it.12 This chapter offers an analysis of the concert halls of the 1920s from a holistic perspec tive. It investigates how musicians, composers, conductors, managers, journalists, and other participants in the musical world constructed and reconstructed the listener and the social imageries that were connected with the experience of listening. It focuses on journalistic accounts as historic traces in which the experiences of listening can be found inscribed, relating them to their immediate urban context. Journalists often contextual ized their reflections and reports in a way that was understood and perhaps even shared by a wider audience. As a loose group of observers, they formed (p. 99) an interpretive community that shared a sense of experiencing a fundamental turning point in the history of listening, one that called for practical reform as well as intellectual reflection. It was no accident that Adorno first published his reflections in music journals and newspapers. In them, he found an intermediate space in which to reflect on everyday musical experi ences. But as much as Adorno himself is today often read with critical distance, journalis tic accounts in general have to be treated with caution as well when it comes to general izability, and more often than not journalists came under attack by audience members for their views (as will be pointed out below). This chapter seeks to overcome such method ological challenges by contextualizing these accounts with a number of complementary materials, where possible, especially those by other audience members.13 Frankfurt am Main, where Adorno grew up and spent his formative years through the age of twenty-one, offered an institutional context in which the role of listening in society could be reflected on and experimented with. Frankfurt in the early twentieth century en joyed a bourgeois tradition as a free city, ample financial opportunities, wealthy music lovers, a thriving conservatory, and a liberal, open-minded city administration. It was rec ognized at the time as one of Germany’s new cultural centers. The high point was reached with the monumental 1927 World Music Exhibition, with its optimistic belief in the reformability and the universality of the musical world and of musical experiences.14 It was this context that appealed not only to Adorno but also to journalists such as Paul Bekker and Karl Holl, composers such as Paul Hindemith and Ernst Toch, and conductors such as Hermann Scherchen and Clemens Krauss, to name but a few. The richness and variety of its concert offerings and institutional settings were also signs of the dynamic cultural life of the Weimar Republic, while at the same time the contemporaries thought that Frankfurt’s musical life seemed to be “dragged down by crisis.”15 Frankfurt is, there fore, fruitful ground for considering the crisis of listening as it exemplified the Janusfaced characteristics of the “crisis years of classical modernity” in all their contradictions and paradoxes.16 This chapter reconstructs the perspective of the German urban listener of the interwar period on three levels. First, it addresses how the notion of crisis was connected to con cepts of listening. Second, it analyzes various attempts to reform the act of listening. Fi
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The Crisis of Listening in Interwar Germany nally, it reflects on the personal approaches and experiences of listeners in the concert hall. As a conclusion, I return to Adorno’s own quest for the ideal listener.
Diagnosing Crisis Adorno’s notion of musical crisis around 1930 had journalistic roots in two traditions. On one hand, he was reaching back to an ideal that had been present since the beginning of European concert-going: a “gold standard” of listening practice that must be secured and protected from persistent deviations.17 On the other, he was also writing within a newer discursive framework that dated from the 1890s and that was only eliminated (p. 100) by the rise of National Socialism. Observers of musical culture, fueled by the booming mar kets for newspapers and journals, disseminated their sensations of a penetrating crisis in print articles that interpreted the current social, political, technological, and economic changes in the context of the concert hall. As Siegmund von Hausegger, a composer and conductor who was leading Frankfurt’s Museums-Gesellschaft between 1906 and 1908, stated, never before was there so much talk about music and its development.18 The on going discussion about the crises of culture or society offered ample rhetorical tools for including music and listening in the general perception of decay. This atmosphere of declinism was based on the growing uncertainty of seemingly stable bourgeois categories at the beginning of the twentieth century. Fundamental questions were asked with new urgency: What was music? What was its role in society? How can its practice be legitimized? How can listening help reform society? What were the right and wrong ways to listen to music? These questions were raised in a 1901 article titled “Was ist modern?” (What Is Modern?) by Munich music critic Arthur Seidl, who summarized the modern as “a remarkable stage of alarming uncertainty . . . and a very discomfiting moment of transition from the old to the new.”19 Contemporaries found evidence for this uncertainty and dissatisfaction at many levels, and, in increasingly dramatic tones, they connected the observable facts of musical life with the notion of social crisis. Observers found the general crisis to be mirrored in the concert halls, and they believed that the current practices of concert-going would only exacerbate it. They picked up on Nietzsche’s notion of crisis and pointed out the missing link between art and life, diag nosed a decline in the social meaning of music, and complained about structures of con cert life that did not seem appropriate in times of increasing social tensions. In their view, symptoms of the crisis could be found in every facet of listening culture. They pointed to a number of conflicting and often contradictory pressures: the need to allow new social groups into the concert hall in order to integrate them into society, a feeling that common standards of listening had gone, the “end of the monopoly of the exclusive society con cert,” the ruling power of the market, and the decline of music education and musical knowledge.20 The universal claims of music’s role in society could no longer be brought in line with everyday experiences. Reviewing the accounts of crisis shows that there was no single coherent narrative but, rather, a crisis perceived at different levels, detected at various instances, and diagnosed Page 4 of 28
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The Crisis of Listening in Interwar Germany with several explanations. Music critics pointed, for example, to the “industrieller Charakter” (industrial character) of concerts and diagnosed a state of “musikalische Verarmung” (musical impoverishment).21 They noted that audiences had become habitu ated to “Effekthäufungen, an Massenwirkungen, an scharfen Reizungen” (accumulations of effects, to mass impacts, to acute stimuli)22 and that listeners had lost the skill needed to share “feine Zeichnungen und innere Erlebnisse” (an inner experience of subtle delin eations).23 The critic Edgar Istel wrote in 1913 that an alienation of concert life from the social needs of the people had taken place and that it had turned concert halls into “wahre Folterkammern” (true torture chambers).24 When observers looked back to the nineteenth century, they saw the concert hall as an ideal place with the power to repre sent and influence society. The twentieth-century concert (p. 101) hall, in contrast, no longer seemed to them to fulfill its function as a unifying space. Claims of social cohesion and artistic superiority made on behalf of the concert hall by nineteenth-century intellec tuals such as Eduard Hanslick could not be maintained in light of a growing competition with new art forms.25 “We will have to accept that the mystique surrounding the term ‘music’ will gradually fade away,” one observer noted in 1929.26 This discourse had local variants in places such as Frankfurt, where the social embedded ness of music was especially visible. Observations about the dominance of bourgeois habits in the concert hall were frequently exchanged and critiqued; they only increased after the arrival of Paul Bekker as music critic of the renowned and liberal Frankfurter Zeitung in 1911 and acute observer of the social role of music.27 It seems that the annual series of regular subscription concerts remained one of the major social events in the city, despite calls for reform. Hermann Scherchen, an avant-gardist member of the so-called Novembergruppe and an anti-bourgeois protagonist of Neue Musik, was hired, not with out controversy, in 1922 as the conductor of the symphony concerts of the MuseumsGesellschaft (Museum Society), the leading concert society in Frankfurt and already in the 1880s possessing a reputation for an elitist and socially disposed audience. Scherchen would later remark that these concerts were “gesellschaftliche Einführungsabende” (social debutante evenings) to which members of “respectable soci ety, the regular concert-goers, brought their marriageable daughters. The girls were pa raded during the intermission.”28 In Scherchen’s interpretation, the concert hall had be come a “sacrosanct” institution, still celebrated but not fulfilling its proper social function anymore.29 It was perhaps no accident that Paul Hindemith, who was still a member of the Orchestra of the Museums-Gesellschaft at that time, was motivated by the experience of these concerts to set up his own reformist concert hall society in 1922. He famously ex claimed in the same year, while announcing the founding of the Gemeinschaft für Musik (Community for Music) project, that the concert hall was no longer bringing listeners and musicians together: “We are convinced that the concert in its present-day form is an insti tution that must be combated, and we will seek to rebuild the almost lost community be tween performers and listeners.”30 Reports from the Museums-Gesellschaft symphony concerts provide an image of an at mosphere in which listeners seem to have ranked the social benefits of attendance higher than the aesthetic benefits. Silent listening and undivided attention were not always pri Page 5 of 28
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The Crisis of Listening in Interwar Germany orities. We find regular complaints in the 1920s about noise levels and disturbances dur ing performances, including the “rustling of sandwich wrappers and candy bags.”31 Scherchen complained bitterly about the ignorance of his listeners. He caused a scandal when, during the performance of Max Reger’s Hiller-Variationen, op. 100, in response to a few ladies who said farewell to their friends and left before the final fugue, he interrupt ed his performance to exclaim: “I am extremely sorry, but I won’t finish conducting, be cause if the audience leaves, then we musicians will leave as well,” and refused to com plete the performance.32 Leaving early was apparently not a rare occurrence, as other re ports indicate. Max Meisterbernd, a journalist for the politically conservative and highly circulated Frankfurter Nachrichten, reported in 1918 that (p. 102) “the number of audi ence members who get up and leave during a lengthy work is still comparatively large.”33 Karl Holl wrote that a “minority” dominated the event “by arbitrarily extending the inter missions, chattering, and coming and going during the performance without the least em barrassment” and that steps needed to be taken to restore orderly manners in the con cert hall.34 Reports can be found in National Socialist papers well into the 1930s about chatting during performances, coughing, and clearing one’s throat. Exchanges of news about one’s family, the wearing of large hats, and getting up during the performance to get a better view of the stage were apparently still issues.35 For many observers such disturbances and fragmentations were signs of an underlying crisis of concert life. This perception was fused with observations of manifest crisis such as the decreasing number of listeners in concert halls and the financial troubles of or chestras. The loss of audience members was felt with particular severity when the Muse ums-Gesellschaft celebrated its 125th anniversary in 1933. Its centenary celebration in 1908 had been a major and widely noted social event in the city that culminated in the an nouncement of plans to build a new concert hall for fifteen thousand listeners. Twentyfive years later, celebrations were held in the shadow of the association’s struggle for sur vival. For the first time in its history, the Museums-Gesellschaft had to advertise to sell subscriptions in order to counteract the “gradually decreasing number of listeners at our events,” as one member of the board explained.36 Adorno remarked: “Only those who knew the old exclusivity will realize what that means and what a transformation is hap pening here.”37 The Museums-Gesellschaft was thrown into deep financial trouble be cause subscription concerts faced competition from a second symphony orchestra and be cause the city had doubled the price for hiring the orchestra. The optimistic view at the beginning of the 1920s that “three-quarters to four-fifths of Frankfurt’s whole popula tion” were interested in attending symphony concerts turned out to be wishful thinking.38 Other researched cases such as Berlin, Düsseldorf, and Munich illustrate that the crisis of the institution of the concert was by no means particular to Frankfurt am Main but was a general phenomenon at the end of the Weimar Republic.39 The fusion of these two modes of crisis—perceived and manifest—rested on two main premises. The first was that music’s effects could be understood universally; the second was that the ultimate goal of the act of listening was to create a social unity. The Berlin music critic Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, for example, criticized the fact that there had been multiple studies of the effects of music but few studies of the “ethical and social Page 6 of 28
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The Crisis of Listening in Interwar Germany obligations” arising from the listening experience.40 Stuckenschmidt repeated the convic tion that music, more than any other art, had the power to trigger specific emotions, to convey ideas, and to be potentially dangerous if not used correctly. Even though this dis course was separate from the popular psychological quest to discover how music worked on the individual and to explain musicality,41 both discussions appeared to have the same ideal in mind: the social nature of the listening experience. According to Hilmar Höckner, the reigning attitude toward music as mere pleasure-seeking could not create an inner unity among listeners and could not function as a community-building force. “The ‘audi ence,’ ” Höckner noted, “is the incoherent mass of individuals.”42 Even if the listener was in a state to receive the intellectual values of music, it would only lead to (p. 103) “Selb stverhätschelung des Individuums” (self-pampering of the individual) and not strengthen ing of the community.43 In sum, observers of audiences in the 1920s thought they were witnessing a social decomposition in the concert hall, or, as Karl Holl put it in 1934, the “Zerfall des Allerwelts-Publikums” (disintegration of the catch-all audience).44 The discourse reached its climax toward the end of the 1920s, when metaphors of ending and dying became a standard vocabulary for describing the decay in the concert hall. Paul Hindemith noted in 1929: “What concerns all of us is this: the old audience is dying out.”45 This rhetoric was already firmly established in 1928, when Adolf Weißmann, a leading music journalist from Berlin, published his monograph Die Entgötterung der Musik (The De-deification of Music), in which he argued that the very existence of the concert hall as the quintessential venue for listening was said to be at stake. Weißmann surveyed the musical world of his day and came to the conclusion that his generation was witnessing the end of concert-hall listening: “In what has happened we already see the symptoms of decay in a form of listening that, all in all, has existed for no more than 150 years.”46 He established a chronology of the history of listening that called the period 1870–1920 the peak of the art of listening and saw only decline from that point onward. He argued that new technological innovations, added to existing management failures, fi nancial problems, and commercialization, were the last and probably fatal challenge to concert-hall listening. For many contemporaries, the radio was clearly the main cause of the decline. In 1929, for example, another observer wondered: “Are these ‘cultural insti tutions’ in the process of dying out; does the future belong to radio?”47 Still, new tech nologies could not be held entirely responsible for the disintegration of concert-hall audi ences, a trend that had been visible before the introduction of the radio and its massive distribution. Weißmann viewed listeners themselves as a source of decay because of their apparent snobbery and indifference toward art and inspiration. Like others, Weißmann observed an “aging” of listening (“listening to music in the form of the concert is already showing signs of aging”) that would inevitably end in its death.48 Such comparisons and metaphors not only show to what extent the notion of crisis had intensified but also re flect the immediacy and concreteness that the crisis of listening meant for the contempo raries and which urgently demanded a response.
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The Crisis of Listening in Interwar Germany
Reform and Resistance The 1920s saw a range of attempts to experiment with reforms of concert-going prac tices. The most visible sign of these was the founding of a number of new institutions in Frankfurt such as the Verein für Musik- und Theaterkultur (1917), the Gemeinschaft für Musik (1922), the Frankfurter Symphonie Orchester (1923), the Kammermusikgemeinde (1926), and the Musikstudio (1928). These societies and initiatives, often short-lived, or ganized concerts that experimented with new frames for the listening experience, includ ing concerts without conductors, concerts without applause, concerts that focused (p. 104) on new music or early music, concerts for workers, concerts in oversized halls such as the Festhalle, and even concerts that attempted to revive the exclusivity of the bourgeois salon. Yet these reform activities were not welcomed by all, and they often led to conflicts between reformers and listeners. For the reformers, the foremost concern was to find ways to sustain audiences and inte grate different social groups. Where could the future listener for the symphony concert be found? How could listening be organized in a way that would lead to community build ing? The reformers soon found themselves in a paradoxical situation: on one hand, they believed that saving the music required a certain kind of listener; on the other, saving the audience and the concert hall required outreach to new listeners from different classes, educational backgrounds, and listening sensibilities. The 1920s witnessed a search for an institutional solution to these problems. Large audience organizations such as the Vereini gung zur Förderung deutscher Theaterkultur (Association for the Promotion of German Theater Culture) were established in an attempt to democratize attendance at concerts in general and to structure access in a way that allowed lower-income groups to enjoy the benefits of symphonic music. It soon became obvious, though, that lowering ticket prices was not sufficient to attract workers, who were the actual target group. These opportuni ties were instead used by the lower middle class. Although the inclusion of social groups that had gained visibility in the city only a few decades ago was the main goal of such attempts, at the same time there was hope of ex cluding the parts of the audience who seemed to be responsible for the decline of listen ing habits and the rise of superficial listening styles. Having attended a concert by the Verein für Musik- und Theaterkultur, Heinrich Simon—editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung and one of the most influential concert reformers in Frankfurt who, after his exile from Germany, became orchestra manager of the Palestine Orchestra—asked Paul Bekker the following question in a letter: “Most generally, the problem seems to be: how to avoid ex cessive popularity among the people for whom these events are not really designed?”49 This intrinsic tension was also apparent in the Gemeinschaft für Musik (Community for Music), founded by Paul Hindemith and Reinhold Merten, whose goal to create a new uni ty between musicians and listeners was achieved by excluding the typical bourgeois lis tener. After one performance Hindemith happily proclaimed: “And, best of all, they don’t let in all the Frankfurters,” by which he meant the upper class.50 Many of these initiatives were directed at a certain well-known group of listeners who turned to the exclusion of music lovers from other social strata in order to achieve their own artistic goals. But such Page 8 of 28
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The Crisis of Listening in Interwar Germany efforts soon ran into the long-standing liberal dilemma described by the historian James Sheehan: the conflict between the “wish to proclaim a value system applicable to all hu man beings and the tendency to identify such values only with those who satisfied certain social and moral criteria.”51 While the goal of social unity was often expressed (as contradictory as it was), the under lying concept of the art of listening remained controversial. In Hindemith’s Gemeinschaft, the traditional conventions of concert-going were changed in order to reach the ideal of a new social unity: no honoraria were paid, programs and the names of performers were only announced at the beginning of each performance, only (p. 105) unknown works were performed, and no journalists were allowed to attend. The audience received more power over the performed work when—as the painter Emil Betzler reported—listeners could in terrupt the performance if they did not enjoy the music or had difficulties in following the composition. In such cases, Hindemith would get up and explain the music.52 Comparing Hindemith’s initiative with Schönberg’s Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen in Vi enna (Society for Private Musical Performances, founded in 1918) makes it clear how dif ferently the art of listening could be seen: Schönberg’s romantic and esoteric understand ing of listening was based on ideas such as education, quality, and immersion, and thus meant a continuation and strengthening of the traditions of listening by excluding ap plause and putting more emphasis on education, whereas Hindemith hoped to achieve a harmonious conjunction between listeners and musicians by excluding commercialism and elitism and by lowering the entrance standards in order to allow a new way of ap proaching the music. In direct contrast to Schönberg’s concerts, the performances of the Gemeinschaft für Musik were spontaneous, experimental, and informal. These two initia tives associated very different goals with the act of listening: celebrating art versus re flecting, protecting the concert hall from “wrong” listening versus opening up perfor mances to discussion, creating a canon versus introducing new music. Despite their dif fering aesthetic, social, and political agendas, both efforts were reactions to the percep tion of crisis and efforts to cultivate new ways of listening. Both of them also remained highly exclusive, despite claims about inclusion. When it came to reforming the staging of concerts, listeners often remained skeptical about changes. In 1926 the Museums-Gesellschaft ended the common practice of allow ing the general public to attend the rehearsals of symphony concerts for a small fee. This move was motivated by concerns of the conductor, Clemens Krauss, who argued that in order to increase the professional quality of the concerts he needed absolute silence and no interruptions by the public. Moreover, since the beginning of the century musicians had complained that they did not want to be critiqued during a rehearsal in front of an audience. Ending this practice, however, caused protests by listeners who claimed that visiting rehearsals was often the only way to get access to concerts and to be present when the conductor added the finishing touches to a musical work.53 Attempts were made to change other conditions of listening as well. For instance, concert-goers complained when, contrary to custom, lights were dimmed during the Volkskonzerte and the music was heard in the dark. Paul Hirsch, one of Frankfurt’s most admired music philan thropists and music collectors, complained bitterly to Paul Bekker that these concerts Page 9 of 28
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The Crisis of Listening in Interwar Germany could no longer bring him joy and satisfaction when he could not see his fellow listeners anymore. For Hirsch, concert-going remained a crucial element of his own identity, and the intrusion of politics into the experience of art disappointed him: “As for myself, . . . I remain what I always was: a ‘bourgeois.’ ”54 Such close association of the act of listening with one’s identity was one reason why it was difficult for concert organizers to change the immediate context of the listening experience. According to Hermann Scherchen, it was the particular bourgeois lifestyle in Frankfurt that was responsible for these habits in local concert halls. While phenomena such as these were certainly not exclusive to Frankfurt, it is noteworthy that Frankfurters themselves insisted on the traditions of their city and their lifestyles when it came to defending the practice of concert-going. Criticisms of audience behavior by journalists were rejected and critiqued. In a letter to the editor addressed to Karl Holl in 1928, the female listener “E. G.” argued for a correction of all the errors and confusions in descriptions of Frankfurt audiences: She herself had gone to the symphony concerts for more than fifty years, and only such experience could qualify a person to make statements about audience behavior. We can only assume that “E. G.” was not alone in her sense of belonging to a “serious music audience,” since complaints about audience (p. 106)
behavior and the dominance of traditions that seemed to indicate a lack of education and cultivation were widespread in the 1920s. We can find dozens of other letters to Karl Holl and Paul Bekker written by regular concert-goers in defense of audience habits.55 The 1920s proved to be a time for the interplay between such adherence to traditions and belief in innovation. This explains the back-and-forth policy of the Museums-Gesellschaft in organizing the listening experience and meeting the expectations of attendees. In 1924 the Museums-Gesellschaft returned to the pre-war practice of turning the lights on dur ing performances, and one observer noted that the return of the “old times”—the brightly lit concert hall—brought with it the revival of the Erfrischungsecke, a place for food and drinks that may have been consumed during the performance.56 At about the same time, though, the society invested resources in imposing new disciplinary rules that attempted to improve the concert hall experience: To enable a punctual start, as is desired in the general interest, . . . from now on there will be bells and light signals in the coatrooms and the banquet hall request ing the honored audience to take their seats on time, as follows: 8 minutes to 7 [11]: one ring, yellow light; 4 minutes to 7 [11]: two rings, green light; 7 [11] sharp: three rings, red light, after which all entrance doors will be closed. Apart from the side entrance to the large auditorium, previously the only one left open, from now on the middle door leading directly from the staircase to the auditorium will be opened to allow entry, but only before the concert begins. The distin guished concert-goers are earnestly requested to support the Board in its efforts to achieve a punctual start by arriving in good time.57 In 1928 we find a reminder of this new door policy in the collection of program sheets, ac companied by instructions that people should not stand in the aisles. Page 10 of 28
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The Crisis of Listening in Interwar Germany These instructions can be read in two ways. They, of course, illustrate the attempt made by the Museums-Gesellschaft to enforce rules, but they also make apparent the need to do so in the first place. They reflect the significance that was given to the beginning of the performance as part of the listening experience: the introduction of silence, the ef forts that were necessary to encourage punctuality and to reinforce it by spatial arrange ments and sound and light signals, and the appeal for a consensus between organizers and concert-goers. These attempts were complemented by a search for the best time to begin (p. 107) a concert in general: the Museums-Gesellschaft moved the starting time from 7:30 P.M. to 7 P.M. From the season of 1934–1935 onward the concerts started at 8 P.M., as they still do today. One music critic remarked in that context that “idiosyncrasies of the general public cannot simply be ignored without doing damage,” and, indeed, Scherchen had pointed out that the concerts were traditionally followed by banquets at the large family homes throughout the city, and this determined the beginning time of the concerts.58 The beginning of the concert was apparently the crucial moment that defined how listening should take place, but organizers also had to take into account how the con cert-goers incorporated the listening experiences into their lives. If, as Tia DeNora has pointed out, music is a “device or resource to which people turn in order to regulate themselves,” these attempts at reform, and the resistance to them by listeners, expose the constructedness of the listening experience and reveal the concert hall as a site where perceptions of crisis—that often went far beyond the immediate musical experi ences—were negotiated.59
Emotions and Sounds In his 1928 article “Das neue Hören” (The New Listening), the young music historian Kurt Westphal noted the difficulty in coming to terms with change: “We have not yet mastered the nineteenth century; for the greatest part it still masters us.”60 Westphal had reviewed the dominant listening methods in the concert halls and had detected two main direc tions. The first was the old way of listening, originating in the nineteenth century, which was characterized by a close identification of the listener with the artist and composer. In this subjective orientation, the hearer found a soul revealed in the music and listened to it as an expression of something deeper. Westphal defined this as the predominant nine teenth-century method. The newer method revealed an interest not in the meaning of sound but in its immediate sensation. It was concerned with clarity and objectivity, not with a particular feeling. Given the diversity of approaches that were available and ac ceptable to contemporary listeners, it is no surprise to find a variety of narratives, im ages, and metaphors with which they attempted to give meaning to their listening experi ences.61 Westphal’s language, especially his description of the “new” mode of listening, reflected current aesthetic debates about the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Sobriety).62 He brought these two modes of listening into direct opposition and wrote clearly in defense of the new “objective” way. In his eyes, listeners did not have the skills to recognize and per ceive the modern period. He lamented the predominance of traditional approaches to lis Page 11 of 28
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The Crisis of Listening in Interwar Germany tening that searched for the artist’s interiority and inner values while ignoring objective values. From his perspective, the subjectivity of the human being was too dominant in the act of listening, and a rational clarity of sound perception still had to be achieved. Accord ing to his concept of “new listening,” audience members would listen without inner sym pathy and keep an “inner distance”; they should not search for the (p. 108) subjective na ture of music. Such a phenomenological approach found followers, and the philosopher Günther Stern (pseudonym Günther Anders) also pushed for change but questioned whether “a single route of access” could ever do justice to a historical object and whether music would always allow multiple ways of listening.63 This was certainly an apt descrip tion of common practices of listening during the Weimar Republic, in which the older tra dition of romantic and hermeneutical methods, newly advanced by Hermann Kretzschmar before World War I, had so little in common with the newly established methods that it seemed more accurate to refer to this time as an “un-Romantic epoch.”64 Many observers shared such a view and affiliated specific listening styles with specific pe riods. Paul Hindemith used the same device to critique the approaches of concert-goers, especially those hearing new music. According to him, contemporaries listened to music as if they were using methods “from the days of the stagecoach” to judge the “progress of automobile manufacture.”65 In this situation of conflicting genres and alternative meth ods, it was uncertain what the best approach might be. Hindemith had already voiced this question to his friend Emily Ronnefeldt in a letter from 1917: But what is to be preferred: an audience that is moved, that weeps and rolls its eyes without knowing why, that may be transported by horrendous trash in seri ous garb just as much as it is by serious works of art, or a so-called expert audi ence that now insists on hearing only harmonies, forms, and goodness knows what?66 Hindemith used a technique of dividing the audience into romantics and rationales that had been in use since the eighteenth century.67 In the context of the general crisis of so cial identity of the 1920s, such techniques of establishing typologies of listeners could function as knowledge-gathering tools to bring order to a seemingly chaotic scene: Could one listen socially or only individually? Did men hear music in the same way as women? How was a concert-hall listener different from a listener of popular music? Were there dif ferences between listeners in provincial towns and those in metropoles? Questions such as these (and many more) were asked by the concert-hall reformers with various goals and agendas in mind. Authors such as Hindemith, Westphal, and Bekker argued that the crisis of listening could be solved only by an objectivization and de-psychologization of the act. Others argued for a return to the traditional roots of listening.68 Instructions in contemporary program notes can offer us a glimpse into attempts to pro mote more traditionally emotional approaches to listening. In the new Volkskonzerte in Frankfurt, for example, the organizers argued that the emotional value of music was the best point of entry into listening, especially for people who had not yet been exposed to its power. “Following these changes of mood, experiencing them emotionally, is what real Page 12 of 28
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The Crisis of Listening in Interwar Germany ly makes up the art of listening,” explained one program of the Frankfurter Bund für Volksbildung (Frankfurt League for Popular Education).69 Such a form of listening promised a better understanding of music through initial emotional contact. Some people defended this approach to music and warned of what would happen if emotions (p. 109) disappeared from the concert hall. Max Meisterbernd, for one, reported more than once to his readers how the emotionality of music was still felt during live performances. Re flecting on a performance of Tchaikovsky’s sixth symphony, he wrote that the audience re acted “in a very cultivated way” at first, but during the third movement “the struggle of the march theme for dominance, culminating in the radiantly celebratory finale, was in between greeted with spirited acclaim.”70 Spontaneous applause during the performance was interpreted by Meisterbernd as evidence that music could still overwhelm its listen ers. The observation of such romanticized approaches to music, both in theory and in prac tice, was seen by others as a reason to invest in fostering alternative approaches. An in stitutional attempt to do so was made when the Hoch’sches Konservatorium, Frankfurt’s renowned music school, opened a Conservatorium für Musikhörende (Conservatory for Music Listeners) in 1926. This “conservatory” upheld the tradition of explaining symphon ic music to workers and the lower middle class while also attempting to reach a new level of instruction: “Following a carefully thought-out plan, always based on clarity and acces sibility, the music lover’s capacity for musical listening will be extended and deepened.”71 According to the prospectus announcing the founding of this institution, the participants would attend lectures about the musical works performed during the season and would receive an introduction to music aesthetics, music history, and formal analysis. The open ing lecture was given by Heinrich Simon, who stated that listeners were in a “crisis of ed ucation” that could only be solved by means of a “New Sobriety.” He diagnosed a sharp division between artists and music lovers. The latter, he said, should be directed “away from an exaggeratedly technical-practical and national-theoretical form of education and toward an education based on unmediated experience.”72 Simon called this a “democracy of the ear,” locating its foundations in the training of memory and of “pure psychophysi cal receptivity, rejecting all obviously artistic and associative explanations.”73 We can ob serve in this a move away from a traditional, technical understanding of listening and the traditions of hermeneutics toward a more phenomenological understanding that informed much of the aesthetic debate about contemporary music in the 1920s.74 Such reform projects relied on music lovers such as Simon and on often self-taught journalists such as Bekker, and not on professionalized academics. Bekker criticized the older approach on a more theoretical level, associating it with an aesthetic that he thought should vanish along with the bourgeois ways of life. Concepts of taste and judgment no longer seemed sufficient to him. Neither the superficial perception of emotional content nor the understanding of structures was adequate in his eyes, since musical performances had the potential to support very different sensations that should be seen as fundamental revelations of the human spirit.75 He did not approach the music as if it were an expression of the soul; he approached it in its own right. “Music is not there to be understood,” Bekker advised, “but to be felt through listening.”76 This prac Page 13 of 28
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The Crisis of Listening in Interwar Germany tice, he argued, distinguished concert-goers of the modern period from those of the Ro mantic era. Bekker advised listeners not to attempt to understand music in technical (p. 110) terms but instead to capture the naked sounds.77 This project was further elabo rated and substantiated by scholars such as Hans Mersmann and Heinrich Besseler.78 Reports from the concert hall reveal a changing perception of sound as its own entity. De scriptions of sound were connected to ideas of objectivity.79 Early experiences with the ra dio certainly played a major role; many articles from this period reflect its part in a new development: attention to sound itself. “Sound alone rules,” wrote Guido Bagier in a 1927 article on the emergence of a new world of sound.80 Bagier also noted that listening to sound, as such, was much more widespread than watching gestures in the concert hall. It is interesting to see how his contemporaries discussed this change as if it were an anthro pological change in the ear. In the words of Hans Redlich, a composer, musicologist, and writer: “Distillates of sounds, abbreviations of great sound experiences, ‘microscopically’ automatized sounds—everything is desirable for our ear, which has discovered in itself a tremendous capacity for supplementing sound.”81 Hindemith himself began to focus on mechanically produced sounds, which were, in his view, to be preferred because they are “absolutely unambiguous, clear, clean, and capable of the greatest precision.”82 New technologies of sound reproduction did not oust the older ideals entirely, but they influ enced concert-hall listening as they offered new ways to perceive sound.83
Some Conclusions: The Crisis of Music Listen ing and Its Contexts Observers of music listening in interwar Germany were concerned with a variety of is sues. As they studied the meanings and practices of listening, they detected symptoms of a larger crisis, and they posed questions at many different levels. No aspect was too triv ial to be taken into consideration as they attempted to reflect on and reform concert life, both institutionally and culturally. Their goal was nothing less than saving the art of lis tening and putting it at the service of a modernized society. What distinguished the 1920s from previous periods was the newly urgent tone in the search for listeners and the awareness of the fragility of audiences. Listeners had to be educated, organized, and en dowed with cultural significance if the art of listening in the concert hall was to survive the rise of competing alternatives both in and outside the musical world. The historian Reinhart Koselleck described historical time as a constant allocation of ex perience and expectation. In light of this description, we can see how the 1920s was a pe riod of heightened awareness and self-reflection about the role that listening and music ought to play in society. The dominant discourse of crisis and the necessity of change should not be allowed to conceal the persistence of everyday practices among interwar concert-goers. The traditional symphony concert remained a center of gravity in the musi cal world and a focal point of listening culture. In the 1930s National Socialism brought a radical break in crisis talk, along with a series of dictatorial and (p. 111) violent institu tional answers to cultural issues. The symphony concert was saved, but the dramatic dis Page 14 of 28
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The Crisis of Listening in Interwar Germany paragement of the public sphere ended this specific public reflection on the role of listen ing and also obstructed the social nature of concert-going and journalistic engagement with social issues. The National Socialists fostered an interiorization of listening since, as Franz Calvelli-Adorno pointed out, they could not hinder the inner retreat to the great music of the past.84 The forces of pluralization, though, could not be stopped in the course of the twentieth century, and they ultimately led to further fragmentation and di versification of listening communities. The authors of the journalistic observations that form the backbone of this chapter drew different conclusions from contemporary political changes and the failure to realize their own ideals. Often these journalists entered academia in order to pursue their interests in listening culture. Some engaged in research, especially in music psychology, music peda gogy, and comparative musicology; some focused on philosophy and history; and others— as in Adorno’s case—established themselves as sociologists. Rob Wegman depicts the 1920s as the beginning of writing about the history of listening. We can add that it was al so the beginning of the sociological search for the listener. This search was conducted in the feuilleton sections and music journals as well as at the various discussions on music reform during the Weimar Republic, and it was Adorno who was the most prominent and outspoken protagonist of this search.85 For Adorno, this search still remained within the normative framework established in the nineteenth century. He was slow to acknowledge a certain pluralization of listening, although he gradually came to accept it at a later stage (see Chapter 17 in this volume by Volmar). From Adorno’s point of view, this plural ization was a regression. It might be seen from our perspective as more a matter of frag mentation, redefinition of practices that were always in flux, and the attempt to culturally integrate listening into the lives of concert-goers at a specific time in history. Adorno himself advanced sociological analysis of this situation in order to explain the cri sis and foster an understanding of listening in the modern world. In his writings from the 1930s he established the concert hall as a place for social critique, and music’s function acquired a status that could be perceived—in his eyes—as a kind of social theory. This cul minated in his famous (and perhaps by now infamous) typology of listeners, published in 1962 but written in 1939.86 In becoming a sociological and psychological subject, listen ing was elevated to a level of significance that went far beyond the perception of musical works. Adorno used it to explain what was wrong in society in general. Adorno’s theory was not without its own bias. He relied on an underlying and constructed ideal of the listener that drew on nineteenth-century predecessors such as Hanslick, who favored interest in music as an artistic object and focused on musical structures. Such an ideal depended on a “stimulus-response model” of listening that put the musical work in the center, rather than focusing on the experience of interactions between sounds and the engaged listener as a reciprocal process.87 The historian David Gramit is, indeed, right in pointing out that Adorno was an “ultimate example of a reflective and cultivated life in which music was a vital element” (p. 112) and that he represented a group of bourgeois music lovers who sensed a general decay in listening culture.88 In a way, he was describ ing his own sense of crisis, in which the ideals of his youth could no longer be reached. In Page 15 of 28
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The Crisis of Listening in Interwar Germany a short article titled “Playing Piano Four Hands,” Adorno described what seemed to him to be the perfect model, listening and playing at the same time, a way of fully owning the music. By the time he wrote down those memories in 1933, though, this bourgeois musicmaking practice had disappeared; it only existed as a “gesture of remembrance.”89 His sense of nostalgia foreshadowed a period of memory that would be most keenly felt in Germany’s listening culture during the decades after World War II and would have to come to terms with—again—a new social, political, and cultural context of loss and devas tation.90
Archives Archive of the Museums-Gesellschaft, Institut für Stadtgeschichte, Frankfurt am Main Bethmann-Archive, Institut für Stadtgeschichte, Frankfurt am Main Karl Holl Nachlass, Musik, Theater, Film Abteilung, Universitätsbibliothek der JohannWolfgang von Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main Paul Bekker Collection, Yale University, New Haven Program Collection, Konzert des Frankfurter Bundes für Volksbildung, Universitätsbiblio thek der Johann-Wolfgang von Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main Program Collection, Museums-Gesellschaft, Universitätsbibliothek der Johann-Wolfgang von Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main Program Collection, Werbeprospekt für ein Conservatorium für Musikhörende, MuseumsGesellschaft, Universitätsbibliothek der Johann-Wolfgang von Goethe Universität, Frank furt am Main
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The Crisis of Listening in Interwar Germany Adorno, Theodor W. (1962) 1996. Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie: Zwölf theoretische Vorlesungen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Bagier, Guido. 1927. “Die Entstehung einer neuen Klangwelt.” Frankfurter Zeitung, Octo ber 15. Baum, Richard. 1921. “Der genussreiche Theaterabend.” Neue Blätter für Kunst und Lit eratur 3 (3–4): 36–37. Becker, Judith. 2010. “Exploring the Habitus of Listening: Anthropological Perspectives.” In Handbook of Music and Emotion: Theory, Research, Applications, edited by Partik N. Juslin and John A. Sloboda, 127–157. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bekker, Paul. 1916. Das deutsche Musikleben. Berlin: Schuster und Loeffler. Bekker, Paul. 1919. Kunst und Revolution: Ein Vortrag. Frankfurt am Main: SozietätsDruckerei. Bekker, Paul. 1922. “Physiologische Musik.” Frankfurter Zeitung, December 2. Birdsall, Carolyn. 2012. Nazi Soundscapes: Sound, Technology and Urban Space in Ger many, 1933–1945. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Bork, Camilla. 2006. Im Zeichen des Expressionismus: Kompositionen Paul Hindemiths im Kontext des Frankfurter Kulturlebens um 1920. Mainz: Schott. Calvelli-Adorno, Franz. 1958. “Im Museum—damals und heute: Erinnerungen eines alten Frankfurter Konzertbesuchers.” In Das “Museum”: Einhundertfünfzig Jahre Frankfurter Konzertleben, 1808–1958, edited by Hildegard Weber, 86–97. Frankfurt am Main: W. Kramer. Crary, Jonathan. 1999. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Cul ture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. DeNora, Tia. 2000. Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DeNora, Tia. 2003. After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. “Die Öffentlichkeit der Museumsproben aufgehoben?” 1926. Frankfurter Zeitung, September 11. Ehrenreich, Nathan. 1929. “Hermann Scherchen und sein Königsberger Orchester.” Volksstimme, November 19. Föllmer, Moritz. 2012. “Which Crisis? Which Modernity? New Perspectives on Weimar Re search.” In Beyond Glitter and Doom: The Contingency of the Weimar Republic, edited by Jochen Hung, Godela Weiss-Sussex, and Geoff Wilkes, 19–30. Munich: Iudicium.
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The Crisis of Listening in Interwar Germany Fritzsche, Peter. 1994. “Landscape of Danger, Landscape of Design: Crisis and Mod ernism in Weimar Germany.” In Dancing on the Volcano: Essays on the Culture of the Weimar (p. 119) Republic, edited by Thomas W. Kniesche and Stephan Brockmann, 29–47. Columbia, SC: Camden House. Goehr, Lydia. 2004. “Dissonant Works and the Listening Public.” In The Cambridge Com panion to Adorno, edited by Thomas Huhn, 222–247. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gramit, David. 2002. Cultivating Music: The Aspirations, Interests, and Limits of German Musical Culture, 1770–1848. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gregor, Neil. 2014. “Music, Memory, Emotion: Richard Strauss and the Legacies of War.” Music and Letters 95 (4): 1–22. Grosch, Nil. 1999. Die Musik der Neuen Sachlichkeit. Stuttgart: Metzler. Hailey, Christopher. 1994. “Rethinking Sound: Music and Radio in Weimar Germany.” In Music and Performance During the Weimar Republic, edited by Bryan Gilliam, 14–37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hanslick, Eduard. 1869. Geschichte des Concertwesens in Wien. Vienna: W. Braumüller. Hausegger, Siegmund von. (1907–1908) 1921. “Sind klassisch und modern Gegensätze?” In Betrachtungen zur Kunst, 42–60. Leipzig: Siegel. Hindemith, Paul. 1927. “Mechanische Musik.” Frankfurter Nachrichten, July 24. Hindemith, Paul. 1929a. “Über Musikkritik.” In Aufsätze, Vorträge, Reden, edited by Giselher Schubert, 37–42. Mainz: Schott. Hindemith, Paul. 1929b. “Über Musikkritik.” Melos 8 (3): 106–110. Hindemith, Paul. 1972. “Jugendbriefe von Paul Hindemith aus den Jahren 1916–1919.” Hindemith-Jahrbuch 2:181–206. Hindemith, Paul. 1982. Briefe, edited by Dieter Rexroth. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag. Hindemith, Paul, and Reinhold Merten. 1922. Gemeinschaft für Musik [Prospekt 1922]. PBCY. Hinton, Stephen. 2002. “Wider das bürgerliche Konzertwesen.” In Europäische Musikgeschichte, edited by S. Ehrmann-Herfort et al., 1051–1079. Kassel: Bärenreiter. Höckner, Hilmar. 1925. “Musik und Gemeinschaft.” In Deutsche Musikpflege, edited by Ludwig Fischer and Ludwig Lade, 1–8. Frankfurt am Main: Bühnenvolksbund. Holl, Karl. 1920. “Neue Kammermusik.” Frankfurter Zeitung, April 22. Page 18 of 28
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The Crisis of Listening in Interwar Germany Holl, Karl. 1923. “Frankfurter Konzerte.” Frankfurter Zeitung, February 3. Holl, Karl. 1926a. “Museumsproben.” Frankfurter Zeitung, September 16. Holl, Karl. 1926b. “Die Erziehung des Hörers.” Frankfurter Zeitung, November 6. Holl, Karl. 1934. “Musik in Frankfurt.” Frankfurter Zeitung, November 8. Istel, Edgar. 1913. “Die moderne Folterkammer: Auch ein Beitrag zur ‘Konzertreform.’” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 80 (40): 549. Johnson, James H. 1995. Listening in Paris: A Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Koselleck, Reinhart. 1998. Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kretzschmar, Hermann. 1903. Musikalische Zeitfragen: Zehn Vorträge. Leipzig: C. F. Pe ters. Laqua, Daniel. 2014. “Exhibiting, Encountering and Studying Music in Interwar Europe: Between National and International Community.” European Studies 32:207–223. M. V. 1938. “Nebengeräusche: Randbemerkungen zu einem Konzert!” Frankfurter Volks blatt, February 19. Meisterbernd, Max. 1918. “Museumsgesellschaft.” Frankfurter Nachrichten, December 9. Meisterbernd, Max. 1921. “Frankfurter Sinfonie-Orchester.” Frankfurter Nachrichten, January 25. Meisterbernd, Max. 1924. “Drittes Freitagskonzert.” Frankfurter Nachrichten, November 1. (p. 120)
Meisterbernd, Max. 1928. “Erstes Freitagskonzert.” Frankfurter Nachrichten, October 13. Mersmann, Hans. 1925. “Zur Phänomenologie der Musik.” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 19 (4): 372–388. Morat, Daniel, ed. 2014. Sound of Modern History: Auditory Cultures in 19th- and 20thCentury Europe. New York: Berghahn. Müller-Dohm, Stefan. 2005. Adorno: A Biography. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Nagel, Wilibald. 1907. Die Musik im täglichen Leben. Langensalza, Germany: H. Beyer. Ochs, Siegfried. 1928. Über die Art, Musik zu hören: Ein Vortrag, gehalten in der “Deutschen Gesellschaft 1914” zu Berlin. Berlin: Werk-Verlag.
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The Crisis of Listening in Interwar Germany Peukert, Detlev. 1992. Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity. New York: Hill and Wang. Potter, Pamela M. 1995. “The Nazi ‘Seizure’ of the Berlin Philharmonic, or the Decline of a Bourgeois Musical Institution.” In National Socialist Cultural Policy, edited by Glenn R. Cuomo, 39–67. New York: St. Martin’s. Pritchard, Matthew. 2011. “Who Killed the Concert? Heinrich Besseler and the Interwar Politics of Gebrauchsmusik.” Twentieth-Century Music 8 (1): 29–48. Redlich, Hans. 1927. “Klang als Traum und Wirklichkeit.” Pult und Taktstock 4:55–61. Reimer, Erich. 1972. “Kenner—Liebhaber—Dilettant.” In Handwörterbuch der musikalis chen Terminologie, edited by Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, 1–17. Stuttgart: Steiner. Sachs, Curt. 1930. “Wandel des Klangideals.” Melos 9 (3): 114–115. Scherchen, Hermann. 1984. Aus meinem Leben: Rußland in jenen Jahr; Erinnerungen. Berlin: Henschelverlag. Scherchen, Hermann. 1991. “Mein erstes Leben (1891–1950).” In Hermann Scherchen: Werke und Briefe, edited by Joachim Luccesi, 1:149–197. Berlin: Peter Lang. Seidl, Arthur. 1901. “Was ist modern?” In Moderner Geist in der deutschen Tonkunst, edited by Arthur Seidl, 9–43. Regensburg: Harmonie Verlagsgesellschaft für Literatur und Kunst. Sheehan, James. 1988. “Wie bürgerlich war der deutsche Liberalismus.” In Liberalismus im 19. Jahrhundert: Deutschland im europäischen Vergleich, edited by Dieter Langewi esche, 28–44. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht. Small, Christopher. 1998. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Middle town, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Spitz, Lotte. 1931. “Schichtwechsel im Publikum: Konzertsaal 1930.” Musik und Gesellschaft: Arbeitsblätter für soziale Musikpflege und Musikpolitik 7 (1): 214–216. Stein, Erwin. 1929. “Utopien.” Pult und Taktstock 6:25–30. Stern, Günther. 1927. “Zur Phänomenologie des Zuhörens.” Zeitschrift für Musikwis senschaft 9:610–619. Sterne, Jonathan. 2003. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke University Press. Storck, Karl. 1911. Musik-Politik: Beiträge zur Reform unseres Musikleben. Stuttgart: Greiner and Pfeiffer.
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The Crisis of Listening in Interwar Germany Stuckenschmidt, Hans Heinz. 1929. “Musik und Publikum.” Europäische Revue 5:186– 197. Thelen-Frölich, Andrea Therese. 2000. Die Institution Konzert zwischen 1918 und 1945 am Beispiel der Stadt Düsseldorf. Kassel: Merseburger Verlag. Thrun, Martin. 2015. “Der Sturz ins Jetzt des Augenblicks: Macht und Ohnmacht ‘äs thetischer Polizei’ im Konzert nach 1900.” In Kommunikation im Musikleben: Harmonien und Dissonanzen im 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Sven Oliver Müller, Jürgen Osterhammel, and Martin Rempe, 42–68. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht. Wegman, Rob C. 1998. “‘Das musikalische Hören’ in the Middle Ages and Renais sance: Perspectives from Pre-War Germany.” Musical Quarterly 82 (3–4): 434–455. (p. 121)
Weißmann, Adolf. 1928. Die Entgötterung der Musik. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt. Westphal, Kurt. 1928. “Das neue Hören.” Melos 7:352–354. Ziemer, Hansjakob. 2008. Die Moderne hören: Das Konzert als urbanes Forum, 1890– 1940. Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Ziemer, Hansjakob. 2017. “Konzerthörer unter Beobachtung: Skizze für eine Geschichte journalistischer Hörertypologien zwischen 1870–1940.” In Wissensgeschichte des Hörens in der Moderne, edited by Hör-Wissen im Wandel, 183–207. Berlin: De Gruyter. (p. 122)
Notes: (1.) Adorno, Theodor W. (1930) 2003. “Bewußtsein des Konzerthörers.” In Musikalische Schriften V. Gesammelte Schriften 18, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, 815–818. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 817. Here and throughout, all translations are my own unless otherwise attributed. This chapter uses some of the themes and materials I elaborated in my book: Ziemer, Hansjakob. 2008. Die Moderne hören: Das Konzert als urbanes Forum, 1890– 1940. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, esp. chap. 5. (2.) Adorno ([1930] 2003). (3.) “Die Abdichtung des Konzertsaales gegen die Wirklichkeit zerbröckelt.” Adorno ([1930] 2003): 815. (4.) Adorno ([1930] 2003): 818. (5.) Crary, Jonathan. 1999. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 14. (6.) Peukert, Detlev. 1992. Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity. New York: Hill and Wang. (7.) Koselleck, Reinhart. 1998. Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 127. Page 21 of 28
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The Crisis of Listening in Interwar Germany (8.) Föllmer, Moritz. 2012. “Which Crisis? Which Modernity? New Perspectives on Weimar Research.” In Beyond Glitter and Doom: The Contingency of the Weimar Republic, edited by Jochen Hung, Godela Weiss-Sussex, and Geoff Wilkes, 19–30. Munich: Iudicium, 20. See also Fritzsche, Peter. 1994. “Landscape of Danger, Landscape of Design: Crisis and Modernism in Weimar Germany.” In Dancing on the Volcano: Essays on the Culture of the Weimar Republic, edited by Thomas W. Kniesche and Stephan Brockmann, 29–47. Colum bia, SC: Camden House. (9.) A notable exception is the pioneering article by Wegman, Rob C. 1998. “‘Das musikalische Hören’ in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Perspectives from Pre-War Ger many.” Musical Quarterly 82 (3–4): 434–455. (10.) Sterne, Jonathan. 2003. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke University Press, 7. Only recently were new attempts made, e.g., Thrun, Martin. 2015. “Der Sturz ins Jetzt des Augenblicks: Macht und Ohnmacht ‘ästhetischer Polizei’ im Konzert nach 1900.” In Kommunikation im Musikleben: Harmonien und Disso nanzen im 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Sven Oliver Müller, Jürgen Osterhammel, and Mar tin Rempe, 42–68. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht. See also Chapter 16 by Alexan dra Hui in this handbook and Birdsall, Carolyn. 2012. Nazi Soundscapes: Sound, Technol ogy and Urban Space in Germany, 1933–1945. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. (11.) Morat, Daniel. 2014. Introduction to Sound of Modern History: Auditory Cultures in 19th- and 20th-Century Europe, edited by Daniel Morat, 1–13. New York: Berghahn; John son, James H. 1995. Listening in Paris: A Cultural History. Berkeley: University of Califor nia Press. See also, for a general reframing of the 1920s from the perspective of sound studies, Birdsall (2012): esp. 14–18. (12.) Small, Christopher. 1998. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, esp. 13. (13.) For a more thorough treatment of this issue, see Ziemer, Hansjakob. 2017. “Konz erthörer unter Beobachtung: Skizze für eine Geschichte journalistischer Hörertypologien zwischen 1870–1940.” In Wissensgeschichte des Hörens in der Moderne, edited by HörWissen im Wandel, 183–207. Berlin: De Gruyter. (14.) See Laqua, Daniel. 2014. “Exhibiting, Encountering and Studying Music in Interwar Europe: Between National and International Community.” European Studies 32:207–223. (15.) Adorno (2003): 43. (16.) For inspiring work on this period, see mainly Wegman (1998): 434–455. For a recent approach for discussions among Besseler and others see Pritchard, Matthew. 2011. “Who Killed the Concert? Heinrich Besseler and the Interwar-Politics of Gebrauchsmusik.” Twentieth-Century Music 8 (1): 29–48.
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The Crisis of Listening in Interwar Germany (17.) For a discussion of the “gold standard” of listening in the nineteenth-century con cert-listening culture see Chapter 1 by Katherine Ellis, and for the long-term perspective Chapter 21 by Christiane Tewinkel, both in this handbook. (18.) Hausegger, Siegmund von. (1907–1908) 1921. “Sind klassisch und modern Gegen sätze?” In Betrachtungen zur Kunst, 42–60. Leipzig: Siegel, 43. (19.) “Ein bemerkenswertes Stadium beängstigender Unsicherheit . . . und ein sehr un heimlicher Moment des Übergangs vom Alten zum Neuen.” Seidl, Arthur. 1901. “Was ist modern?” In Moderner Geist in der deutschen Tonkunst, edited by Arthur Seidl, 9–43. Re gensburg: Harmonie Verlagsgesellschaft für Literatur und Kunst, 10. (20.) Spitz, Lotte. 1931. “Schichtwechsel im Publikum: Konzertsaal 1930.” Musik und Gesellschaft: Arbeitsblätter für soziale Musikpflege und Musikpolitik 7 (1): 214–216, here 216. (21.) Kretzschmar, Hermann. 1903. Musikalische Zeitfragen: Zehn Vorträge. Leipzig: C. F. Peters, 4. (22.) Nagel, Wilibald. 1907. Die Musik im täglichen Leben. Langensalza, Germany: H. Beyer, 9. (23.) Storck, Karl. 1911. Musik-Politik: Beiträge zur Reform unseres Musiklebens. Stuttgart: Greiner and Pfeiffer, 106. (24.) Istel, Edgar. 1913. “Die moderne Folterkammer: Auch ein Beitrag zur ‘Konzertre form.’” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 80 (40): 549. (25.) Hanslick, Eduard. 1869. Geschichte des Concertwesens in Wien. Vienna: W. Braumüller, ix. (26.) “Wir werden uns damit abfinden müssen, dass der Nimbus, der den Begriff Musik umgibt, allmählich schwinden wird.” Stein, Erwin. 1929. “Utopien.” Pult und Taktstock 6:25–30, 25. (27.) See his groundbreaking analysis of concert life: Bekker, Paul. 1916. Das deutsche Musikleben. Berlin: Schuster und Loeffler. (28.) “Die gute Gesellschaft, das Stammpublikum, brachte da die heiratsfähigen Töchter hin. Die wurden in der Pause vorprommeniert.” Scherchen, Hermann. 1984. Aus meinem Leben: Rußland in jenen Jahr; Erinnerungen. Berlin: Henschelverlag, 43. (29.) Scherchen, Hermann. 1991. “Mein erstes Leben (1891–1950).” In Hermann Scherchen: Werke und Briefe, edited by Joachim Luccesi, 1:149–197. Berlin: Peter Lang, 1:181. (30.) “Wir sind überzeugt, dass das Konzert in seiner heutigen Form eine Einrichtung ist, die bekämpft werden muss und wollen versuchen, die fast verloren gegangene Gemein Page 23 of 28
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The Crisis of Listening in Interwar Germany schaft zwischen Ausführenden und Hörern wieder herzustellen.” Hindemith, Paul, and Reinhold Merten. 1922. Gemeinschaft für Musik [Prospekt 1922]. PBCY. (31.) Baum, Richard. 1921. “Der genussreiche Theaterabend.” Neue Blätter für Kunst und Literatur 3 (3–4): 36–37, here 37. (32.) “Es tut mir furchtbar leid, aber ich dirigiere nicht zu Ende, denn wenn man fortgeht, dann gehen auch wir Musiker fort.” Scherchen (1984): 43. (33.) Meisterbernd, Max. 1918. “Museumsgesellschaft.” Frankfurter Nachrichten, Decem ber 9. (34.) Holl, Karl. 1923. “Frankfurter Konzerte.” Frankfurter Zeitung, February 3. (35.) M. V. 1938. “Nebengeräusche: Randbemerkungen zu einem Konzert.” Frankfurter Volksblatt, February 19. (36.) Meeting minutes of the Frankfurter Museums-Gesellschaft, August 29, 1931: 2. Archive of the Museums-Gesellschaft, IfSg. (37.) “Nur wer die alte Exklusivität kennt, weiß, was das bedeutet und welche Umstel lung hier sich vollzieht.” Adorno, Theodor W. (1922–1934) 2003. “Frankfurter Opern- und Konzertkritiken.” In Musikalische Schriften VI. Gesammelte Schriften 19, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, 9–257. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 249. (38.) Moritz von Bethmann to former mayor Georg Voigt, June 13, 1924. BethmannArchive, IfSg. (39.) For Munich see Chapter 5 in this volume by Neil Gregor (especially also for the re covery in the 1930s) and Thelen-Frölich, Andrea Therese. 2000. Die Institution Konzert zwischen 1918 und 1945 am Beispiel der Stadt Düsseldorf. Kassel: Merseburger Verlag as well as Potter, Pamela M. 1995. “The Nazi ‘Seizure’ of the Berlin Philharmonic, or the De cline of a Bourgeois Musical Institution.” In National Socialist Cultural Policy, edited by Glenn R. Cuomo, 39–67. New York: St. Martin’s. (40.) Stuckenschmidt, Hans Heinz. 1929. “Musik und Publikum.” Europäische Revue 5:186–197, 187. (41.) For a popular version of this discourse see Ochs, Siegfried. 1928. Über die Art, Musik zu hören: Ein Vortrag, gehalten in der ‘Deutschen Gesellschaft 1914’ zu Berlin. Berlin: Werk-Verlag. For the scientific version see, e.g., the background in Hui’s chapter in this handbook (Chapter 16). (42.) “ ‘Publikum’, das ist die zusammenhanglose Masse einzelner.” Höckner, Hilmar. 1925. “Musik und Gemeinschaft.” In Deutsche Musikpflege, edited by Ludwig Fischer and Ludwig Lade, 1–8. Frankfurt am Main: Bühnenvolksbund, 2. (43.) Höckner (1925): 2. Page 24 of 28
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The Crisis of Listening in Interwar Germany (44.) Holl, Karl. 1934. “Musik in Frankfurt.” Frankfurter Zeitung, November 8. (45.) “Was uns alle angeht, ist dies: das alte Publikum stirbt ab.” Hindemith, Paul. 1929a. “Über Musikkritik.” In Aufsätze, Vorträge, Reden, edited by Giselher Schubert, 37–42. Mainz: Schott, 38. For Adorno’s comments see Adorno, Theodor W. ([1922–1934]) 2003. “Frankfurter Opern- und Konzertkritiken.” In Musikalische Schriften VI, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, 9–257. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, e.g., 249. (46.) “In dem, was vorgegangen ist, deuten sich die Verfallserscheinungen einer Hörform an, die alles in allem nicht länger als einhundertfünfzig Jahre besteht.” Weißmann, Adolf. 1928. Die Entgötterung der Musik. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 56. (47.) “Sind diese ‘Kulturinstitute’ im Absterben und gehört dem Rundfunk die Zukunft?” Ehrenreich, Nathan. 1929. “Hermann Scherchen und sein Königsberger Orchester.” Volksstimme, November 19. (48.) “Zur Zeit, da das Musikhören in der Form des Konzerts bereits Altersspuren zeigt, tritt mit grausamer Unerbittlichkeit die Forderung der Unmittelbarkeit der Eindruck sübertragung auf.” Weißmann (1928): 56. (49.) “Das scheint überhaupt das Problem: wie vermeidet man den allzu starken Zus pruch von solchen Leuten, für die eigentlich diese Veranstaltungen nicht geplant sind?” Heinrich Simon to Paul Bekker, March 15, 1918. PBCY. (50.) “Und, was das Allerschönste ist: die ganzen Frankfurter dürfen nicht hinein.” Paul Hindemith to Emmy Ronnefeldt, September 1922. Quoted in Hindemith, Paul. 1982. Briefe, edited by Dieter Rexroth. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 107. (51.) Sheehan, James. 1988. “Wie bürgerlich war der deutsche Liberalismus.” In Liberalis mus im 19. Jahrhundert: Deutschland im europäischen Vergleich, edited by Dieter Langewiesche, 28–44. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 43. (52.) Bork, Camilla. 2006. Im Zeichen des Expressionismus: Kompositionen Paul Hin demiths im Kontext des Frankfurter Kulturlebens um 1920. Mainz: Schott, 58. (53.) Holl, Karl. 1926a. “Museumsproben.” Frankfurter Zeitung, September 16; see also: “Die Öffentlichkeit der Museumsproben aufgehoben?” 1926. Frankfurter Zeitung, September 11. (54.) Paul Hirsch to Paul Bekker, May 28, 1919. PBCY. (55.) E. G. to Karl Holl, October 25, 1928. Karl Holl Nachlass, Musik, Theater, Film Abteilung, UB Ffm. (56.) Meisterbernd, Max. 1924. “Drittes Freitagskonzert.” Frankfurter Nachrichten, No vember 1.
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The Crisis of Listening in Interwar Germany (57.) “Um den allgemeinem Interesse erwünschten pünktlichen Anfang . . . zu er möglichen, wird von jetzt ab in den Garderoben und im Bankettsaal das geehrte Publikum durch Glockenzeichen und Lichtsignale zum rechtzeitigen Einnehmen der Plätze aufge fordert und zwar in folgender Weise: 8 min vor 7 Uhr [11]: ein Glockenzeichen, gelbes Lichtsignal; 4 Minuten vor 7 [11]: zwei Glockenzeichen, grünes Lichtsignal, Punkt 7 [11]: drei Glockenzeichen, rotes Lichtsignal, worauf sämtliche Eingänge geschlossen werden. Außer der bisher einzig geöffneten seitlichen Eingangstür zu dem großen Saale soll in der Folge die vom Treppenhaus direkt in den Saal führende Mitteltür, jedoch nur vor Be ginn des Konzerts zum Betreten des Saales geöffnet werden. Die geehrten Konzertbe sucher werden dringend ersucht, durch rechtzeitiges Erscheinen den Vorstand in seinen Bestrebungen um pünktlichen Anfang zu unterstützen.” Kapsel 26, Program Collection, Museums-Gesellschaft, UB Ffm. The number 11 in brackets refers to Sunday concerts that took place at 11 A.M. Emphasis in the original. (58.) Meisterbernd, Max. 1928. “Erstes Freitagskonzert.” Frankfurter Nachrichten, Octo ber 13. (59.) DeNora, Tia. 2000. Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 62. See also: Becker, Judith. 2010. “Exploring the Habitus of Listening: Anthropological Perspectives.” In Handbook of Music and Emotion: Theory, Research, Applications, edited by Partik N. Juslin and John A. Sloboda, 127–157. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (60.) “Wir beherrschen das 19. Jahrhundert noch nicht; es beherrscht zum großen Teil uns.” Westphal, Kurt. 1928. “Das neue Hören.” Melos 7:352–354, 354. (61.) For narrations and visual images used in the concert hall in the 1920s see Ziemer (2008): 282–310. (62.) Hinton, Stephen. 2002. “Wider das bürgerliche Konzertwesen.” In Europäische Musikgeschichte, edited by S. Ehrmann-Herfort et al., 1051–1079. Kassel: Bärenreiter. (63.) Stern, Günther. 1927. “Zur Phänomenologie des Zuhörens.” Zeitschrift für Musikwis senschaft 9:610–619, 610. (64.) Holl, Karl. 1920. “Neue Kammermusik.” Frankfurter Zeitung, April 22. (65.) Hindemith, Paul. 1929b. “Über Musikkritik.” Melos 8:106–110, here 107. (66.) “Was ist denn aber wünschenswerter: Ein gerührtes Publikum das heult u. die Au gen verdreht, ohne zu wissen, warum; das möglichkerweise von gräulichem Kitsch in ern ster Aufmachung ebenso entrück ist, wie von ernsthaften Kunstwerken. Ein so genanntes sachverständiges Publikum, das nun in Gottes Namen nur Harmonien, Formen u. allen möglichen Krempel hört?” Paul Hindemith to Emmy Ronnefeldt, June 1917, in Hindemith, Paul. 1972. “Jugendbriefe von Paul Hindemith aus den Jahren 1916–1919.” HindemithJahrbuch 2:181–206, here 187ff.
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The Crisis of Listening in Interwar Germany (67.) Reimer, Erich. 1972. “Kenner—Liebhaber—Dilettant.” In Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie, edited by Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, 1–17. Stuttgart: Stein er, here 1. (68.) See Ziemer (2017): 196–199. (69.) “Diesen Wechsel der Stimmungen zu verfolgen, gefühlmäßig mitzuerleben, darin besteht eigentlich die Kunst des Zuhörens.” From a program dated September 28, 1921. Kapsel 10, Program Collection, Konzert des Frankfurter Bundes für Volksbildung, UB Ffm. (70.) “Das Publikum verhielt sich sehr kultiviert, beim Scherzosatz aber, der das ja auch durchaus verträgt, wurde der Kampf des Marschthemas um die Vorherrschaft bis zum strahlend durchgesetzten Festklang, auch zwischendurch lebhaft begrüßt.” Meister bernd, Max. 1921. “Frankfurter Sinfonie-Orchester.” Frankfurter Nachrichten, January 25. (71.) “Nach einem wohldurchdachten, stets auf Anschaulichkeit basierenden Plane soll den Musikliebhabern die Fähigkeit des musikalischen Hörens erweitert und vertieft wer den.” Quoted from a promotional brochure for the conservatory of music listeners. Kapsel 66, Program Collection, Werbeprospekt für ein Conservatorium für Musikhörende, Muse ums-Gesellschaft, UB Ffm. (72.) Quoted in Holl, Karl. 1926b. “Die Erziehung des Hörers.” Frankfurter Zeitung, No vember 6. (73.) Quoted in Holl (1926b). (74.) Grosch, Nil. 1999. Die Musik der Neuen Sachlichkeit. Stuttgart: Metzler. (75.) Bekker, Paul. 1919. Kunst und Revolution: Ein Vortrag. Frankfurt am Main: Soci etäts-Druckerei, 28ff. (76.) “Musik ist nicht da, um verstanden, sondern um durch Hören erfühlt zu werden.” Bekker, Paul. 1922. “Physiologische Musik.” Frankfurter Zeitung, December 2. (77.) Bekker (1922). (78.) Mersmann, Hans. 1925. “Zur Phänomenologie der Musik.” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 19 (4): 372–388. On Besseler, see also Pritchard (2011). (79.) Hailey, Christopher. 1994. “Rethinking Sound: Music and Radio in Weimar Ger many.” In Music and Performance During the Weimar Republic, edited by Bryan Gilliam, 14–37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (80.) Bagier, Guido. 1927. “Die Entstehung einer neuen Klangwelt.” Frankfurter Zeitung, October 15. Page 27 of 28
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The Crisis of Listening in Interwar Germany (81.) “Destillate von Klängen, Abbreviaturen großer Klangerlebnisse, ‘mikroskopisch’ au tomatisierte Klänge—alles ist unserem Ohr, das eine ungeheure Fähigkeit der Klangergänzung in sich entdeckt hat, erwünscht.” Redlich, Hans. 1927. “Klang als Traum und Wirklichkeit.” Pult und Taktstock 4:55–61, here 55. (82.) Hindemith, Paul. 1927. “Mechanische Musik.” Frankfurter Nachrichten, July 24. (83.) Sachs, Curt. 1930. “Wandel des Klangideals.” Melos 9 (3): 114–115. (84.) Calvelli-Adorno, Franz. 1958. “Im Museum—damals und heute: Erinnerungen eines alten Frankfurter Konzertbesuchers.” In Das “Museum”: Einhundertfünfzig Jahre Frank furter Konzertleben, 1808–1958, edited by Hildegard Weber, 86–97. Frankfurt am Main: Kramer, 93. (85.) For a more detailed account, see Ziemer (2017): 195–199. (86.) Adorno, Theodor W. (1962) 1996. Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie: Zwölf theoretis che Vorlesungen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (87.) DeNora, Tia. 2003. After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology. Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press 2003, 88; see also Goehr, Lydia. 2004. “Dissonant Works and the Listening Public.” In The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, edited by Thomas Huhn, 222– 247. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (88.) Gramit, David. 2002. Cultivating Music: The Aspirations, Interests, and Limits of German Musical Culture, 1770–1848. Berkeley: University of California Press, 163. For a broad introduction, see Müller-Dohm, Stefan. 2005. Adorno: A Biography. Cambridge, UK: Polity. (89.) Adorno, Theodor W. (1933) 1982. “Vierhändig, noch einmal.” In Musikalische Schriften IV. Gesammelte Schriften 17, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, 303–307. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 305. (90.) Gregor, Neil. 2014. “Music, Memory, Emotion: Richard Strauss and the Legacies of War.” Music and Letters 95 (4): 1–22.
Hansjakob Ziemer
Hansjakob Ziemer, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin
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Listening as a Practice of Everyday Life: The Munich Philharmonic Orches tra and Its Audiences in the Second World War
Listening as a Practice of Everyday Life: The Munich Philharmonic Orchestra and Its Audiences in the Se cond World War Neil Gregor The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries Edited by Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer Print Publication Date: Jan 2019 Subject: Music, Musicology and Music History Online Publication Date: Nov 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190466961.013.5
Abstract and Keywords Why, and how, did Germans listen to symphonic music during the Second World War? This chapter focuses on wartime Munich, where there was a strong increase in performances owing to expanded demand by listeners. Most work on concert-hall life in this period echoes clichéd claims regarding the relation between culture and barbarism; this chapter seeks instead to explore the everydayness of the practice, which embodied a social habit that remained fundamentally unchanged from before the war and continued unchanged after it. One might speak in this context of the “regime of listening” that governed behav ioral norms in the Western concert hall more generally. In this sense, the chapter argues that it is easier to make sense of how and why Germans listened to music during the war if we worry less about their nationality and concentrate more on the connection of this phenomenon to sensory cultures in the period more broadly. Keywords: bourgeois identity, concert-hall listening, listening behavior, Munich, Second World War
ON the last day of July 1944 the management of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra wrote to the National Socialist mayor of the city, Karl Fiehler, to record that, despite the impact of Allied bombing raids—raids that had led to the destruction of the orchestra’s own concert hall, the Tonhalle, in April of that year—the orchestra had been able to re sume its concert series with a program of Beethoven and Bruckner in the city’s wellknown Löwenbräukeller. It underlined that “it is highly interesting that, despite the lunchtime air raids, the hall of the Löwenbräukeller was completely full. The public showed enthusiastic interest and applauded demonstratively. The incontrovertible impres sion was that the public was exceptionally grateful for the resumption of the concerts.”1 The image of German concert-goers picking their way through the rubble to listen to works by composers of the Austro-German canon is immediately recognizable as the stuff of endless cliché. But it is also a synecdoche for master narratives of both German history in general and the Third Reich in particular, narratives that are by turns interchangeable, interwoven, and, as often as not, ambiguously elided;2 it is a belletristic trope that evokes, Page 1 of 21
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Listening as a Practice of Everyday Life: The Munich Philharmonic Orches tra and Its Audiences in the Second World War reanimates, and reimports unspoken assumptions about Germans and music that critical thought repeatedly tells us to reject.3 Whether “culture” is taken to mean the “other” of violence, the site on which decent Germans could take refuge from the events of war and defend the values of civility against Nazi barbarism; whether it is taken as the progenitor of that violence, the justification for conceits of national superiority and thus the just and necessary cause for national self-defense; or whether it is taken as providing the script by which Germans could stage their own downfall and self-immolation—evoked easily enough here, should one wish to do so, in the playing of (p. 124) Beethoven and Bruckner in the birthplace of Nazism and on the site in which the events of the 1923 Putsch were commemorated during the war—the embedded nature of such assumptions continues to act as a barrier to historical thought and critical analysis.4 The ease with which we can reach for such stories about Germans and music is no doubt explained, in part, by the ease with which we can find such material in the archive. We can tell such stories about Germans because it seems to fit so obviously with the stories they told about themselves. The apparent density of the historical discourse seems to jus tify the conclusion that some of it just must have sunk in and become integral to Ger mans’ understanding of what it was they were doing when they listened to the symphonic canon of a Monday night. Yet what matters is what sense we make of the material we find. Accounts such as that offered by the orchestra’s management in July 1944 were more than simply interchangeable expressions of a wider discourse by which the “people of music” came to understand their own social practices. Following Michel de Certeau, I want to argue that “the drawback of this method, which is at the same time the condition of its success, is that it extracts the documents from their historical context and elimi nates the operations of speakers in particular circumstances of time, place and competi tion.”5 I want, by contrast, to take as my starting point the insight that these documents were highly situated rhetorical interventions by which self-interested historical actors sought particular outcomes, and that recognizing this opens up the social practices of music-making, concert-going, and symphonic listening in modern German history in rather more useful ways.6 To take a similar example: six weeks later, the management of the same orchestra wrote to the president of the Reich Chamber of Music, Peter Raabe, not only to note that the or chestra had resumed concerts but also to draw an explicit contrast with the opera: “While the Staatsoper’s performances of its repertory operas Tiefland and Bohème in the Prinzre gententheater were only 30% sold out in July, our concerts in both the Prinzregententhe ater and the Löwenbräukeller were sold out within hours even on the day of an attack.” This, it argued, demonstrated that “it is precisely in difficult times that the inner need for serious symphonic music is much greater than that for repertory opera. So if now, of all times, the proven concert orchestras fall victim to dissolution while the opera orchestras survive, then this is a measure for which not only we personally but also many others have no understanding.”7
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Listening as a Practice of Everyday Life: The Munich Philharmonic Orches tra and Its Audiences in the Second World War The context, of course, was the struggle for institutional survival against the background of national military collapse. In this instance, the struggle was being played out between the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, on one hand, and the orchestra of the Staatsoper (State Opera) and its conductor Clemens Krauss, on the other, for the allocation of substi tute performance space as concert hall after concert hall, and theater after theater, were destroyed by bombing, a process famously documented in the letters of Richard Strauss.8 The image of German concert-goers determined to make it through the rubble may thus have captured a prosaic truth of sorts, but here it was being mobilized rhetorically to jus tify the continued existence of the orchestra against the background of ongoing call-ups to the military, the closure of most cultural institutions in the pursuit of “total war,” and the probable absorbing of the remainder of the Munich (p. 125) Philharmonic’s players in to a residual Gau Orchestra destined to tour the field hospitals of the Wehrmacht to enter tain convalescing troops.9 There was nothing fundamentally different in this from the brutal competition played out between airplane or tank manufacturers for the allocation of production space in the lat ter phase of the war or from the desperate attempts of such companies to hold on to skilled workers whose conscription into the military or forced redeployment to other com panies would mean, literally, the disintegration of the firm. More to the point, in a context in which ceasing production—be it that of ball-bearings or of musical sound—would mean redeployment to the front, orchestra managers had a clear interest in reaching for such imagery.10 Methodologically speaking, they remind us, once again with de Certeau, that “the speech act cannot be parted from its circumstances” and underline the need to rec ognize at all times that we are dealing with “a social historicity in which systems of repre sentations or processes of fabrication no longer appear as normative frameworks but also as tools manipulated by users.”11 To put it more prosaically, one might say that as Munich burned, the violinists of the city had a pretty clear set of reasons to keep fiddling. What holds true for the producer in this case holds equally true for the consumer—in terms of writing a historical anthropology of the social practice of concert-going and the experience of musical listening, in seeking to locate the “social historicity” of that phe nomenon, one has to start by recognizing it for what it was: it was just another thing that people did, an example of de Certeau’s “practice of everyday life.” In what follows, I offer an outline of some of the ways in which that historicization both of concert-going and of the attendant experiences of musical listening might be pursued in this context.
The Concert Hall as a Site of Consumption Like its more famous counterpart in Berlin, the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra experi enced a very substantial increase in attendance at its concerts during the war.12 More or less at the outbreak of war it was forced to add a repeat performance to each subscrip tion concert to cater to increased demand.13 In its retrospective on the concert season 1941–1942 the management noted that “in the third winter of the war the expansion of concert-going has increased yet again compared to the first two years of war” and that it Page 3 of 21
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Listening as a Practice of Everyday Life: The Munich Philharmonic Orches tra and Its Audiences in the Second World War had been necessary to add a third performance for the subscription series concerts, as “the seats for the Sunday and Monday performances were already totally sold out via sub scription over the summer.”14 As a result, thirty-six performances had been given in the subscription series in that season, compared to thirteen in the last pre-war season, seven teen in the first winter of war, and twenty-five in the second; attendance was 40 percent higher than in the previous years, and subscription purchases accounted for (p. 126) 52 percent of sales, compared to a mere 17 percent in 1938–1939. Toward the end of the war, apparently, a fourth performance had to be added. Yet rather than be tempted into seeing this (apparent) massive expansion of concert-go ing as evidence of a national proclivity to sublimate the violence of war in the contempla tion of high art, it is important to place the practice of concert-going firmly within a wider history of consumption in the Third Reich.15 First, the dynamic of expansion witnessed by the orchestra during the war continued one that had been set in motion during the eco nomic recovery. Between the 1935–1936 and the 1938–1939 seasons the number of visits to subscription concerts had risen from 7,629 to 12,779, and membership in the Konz ertverein (concert association) had already expanded approximately fivefold.16 Like all or chestras, the Munich Philharmonic had teetered on the brink of collapse during the De pression; with economic expansion in the 1930s came a modest renewed prosperity that had nothing to do with the war as such.17 That the largest increase of all during the pre-war period, in absolute and relative terms, occurred in the 1938–1939 season testified to an additional factor, namely, the replace ment of the long-standing chief conductor Siegmund von Hausegger—who had been in the post since 1920—with the younger Oswald Kabasta.18 Separating the precise impact of this change out from the effects of the general economic expansion is impossible: in the somewhat incestuous musical world of Munich, paeans of praise to the conducting tal ent of Kabasta mixed the work of rigorous judgment with not a little sycophancy and selfinterest. It is worth noting, however, that the great expansion of demand for tickets that came with Kabasta’s arrival occurred at the same time as a significant renewal of the orchestra’s concert repertoire. Kabasta programmed a wider range of music by foreign composers and contemporary composers. If, under Hausegger, the range of modern works performed regularly had largely been confined to those by figures such as Richard Strauss, Hans Pfitzner, and Max Reger or locally well-known composers such as Hauseg ger himself or Joseph Haas, under Kabasta it expanded significantly. While Kabasta’s pro gramming of contemporary music remained mostly within the confines of a conservative modernism, at least as far as Austro-German music was concerned, the programming of works by younger figures seeking to write within what they took to be a National Social ist idiom—an idiom as varied as it was vague, of course, and yet an idiom bound together by a basic set of tropes concerning nature, people, landscape, and nation—reminds us that the symphonic repertoire during the Third Reich was somewhat wider than more bel letristic accounts or popular representations might suggest. The increase in demand for tickets for Kabasta’s concerts similarly implies the presence of a public whose ear was
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Listening as a Practice of Everyday Life: The Munich Philharmonic Orches tra and Its Audiences in the Second World War more open to musical modernism than might be assumed, even in a city regarded as aes thetically conservative in its musical taste. Second, the increased uptake of tickets for the Munich Philharmonic reflected the fact that other concert series were closed down. Most notably, the concerts of the Musikalis che Akademie, which was the subscription series of the orchestra’s main local rival, the Staatsorchester, were stopped on the outbreak of war.19 As the Philharmonic acknowl edged, concert-goers simply moved their custom elsewhere.20 Less prestigious orchestras in other areas were closed down as well; the town orchestra of Passau was one (p. 127) such example.21 The extent to which one dynamic counterbalanced the other is unclear. It is important to note, however, not only that the dynamics of orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic and the Munich Philharmonic are unlikely to have been typical but also that their expansion was in part related to highly contrasting effects of war on the opportuni ties for consumption elsewhere. This, again, cautions us against essentializing accounts of Germans and their musical listening experiences during the war. To this should be added a final, broader point: like all modern war economies, that of Ger many in the Second World War generated an expansion of consumer income and simulta neously produced a reduction in the supply of many everyday consumer commodities for purchase.22 The regime’s neuroses concerning the potential for domestic collapse, rooted as they were in the nationalist memory of 1918, were such that it was particularly suscep tible to fluctuations in civilian morale; partly for that reason, the regime proved very inef fective in absorbing the excess purchasing power in the civilian economy.23 In the long run, money found its true value on the black market, the presence of which testified to the inflationary pressures the war economy generated. In the short run, however, it found its home in whatever opportunities for consumption remained. Not all such money gravi tated toward orchestral concerts, of course, but the massive expansion of subscription sales for concerts of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra at the outbreak of war—they ex panded fourfold from 1939 to 1940—is doubtless to be read as a reflection of these more general shifts in consumer behavior rather than as something rooted in a mysterious rela tion between Germans, music, and violence.
Concert Experience in the Second World War Concert tickets were thus objects to be bought and sold, subject to the laws of supply and demand in the particular context of a war economy. But the experience of consumption is not limited to or concluded by the act of purchase. Once bought, a concert ticket was the means to an experience: that of participating in a social practice that had musical listen ing at its center. To what did concert-goers listen, and what did they hear? How, if at all, did the sensory experience of musical sound during the Second World War map onto wider orders and frameworks of belief, meaning, feeling, order, and power? It is impossible to recuperate the acoustic qualities of musical sound as it resonated through the concert halls of wartime Germany in a manner that would enable one to de scribe, even approximately, what audiences “actually heard.”24 The acoustic properties of Page 5 of 21
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Listening as a Practice of Everyday Life: The Munich Philharmonic Orches tra and Its Audiences in the Second World War individual concert halls varied from venue to venue; these ranged from the auratic phil harmonic concert hall sustained by prominent concert associations in major cities to mul ti-purpose event halls not designed for musical performance in particular. Of the latter, perhaps the most common was the civic theater, in which much of the sound produced by orchestras on stage disappeared into the roof. The character of (p. 128) sound varied greatly according to where one sat in the hall itself. The size of orchestras varied hugely —from professional symphony orchestras consisting of a hundred or so players to the or chestras of provincial towns in which, typically, around forty players worked on the boundary between professional and amateur, with the attendant general implications for playing standards. The number of musicians and the balance of parts in any given orches tra were also unstable during the war because outside the protected elite orchestras play er numbers tended to decline as a result of call-ups to the military; if they were replaced, then it was generally with less capable (often retired) musicians deemed unfit for military service. If such pressures suggest a tendency toward declining musical standards, espe cially when compounded by wartime exhaustion, there is tantalizing evidence to suggest that the peculiar context of National Socialist war generated countervailing tendencies: in August 1941, as the war of murder, destruction, and plunder was reaching its height, the Reich Ministry of Propaganda wrote to Clemens Krauss, the conductor of the Staat sorchester, to inform him that as part of a program to equip Germany’s leading orches tras with better instruments a violin made by Giuseppe Guarneri in 1735 “which was able to be bought for an unusually low price and is worth roughly twice that” had been lent by the regime to the incoming leader of the orchestra.25 It takes little fantasy to imagine the likely provenance of the violin in question. To what did the audiences of the Munich Philharmonic listen? In terms of programming, the outbreak of war witnessed a marked “re-nationalization” of the repertoire as a con cert season that originally had included works by Beethoven, Brahms, and Bruckner, along with works by Debussy, Ravel, and Respighi, by Mussorgsky, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, and Tchaikovsky, and by Béla Bartók and the Dutch composer Henk Badings was hastily reorganized to focus entirely on the Austro-German repertoire.26 Drawing on the Reich Propaganda Ministry’s proclamation of September 2, 1939, that “today more than ever music has the great task of uplifting our people and strengthening its spiritual power,” it noted that “the mayor of the Capital City of the Movement has therefore decreed that the concert season of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra should begin as soon as possible.”27 The opening concert was brought forward by five days; having originally been programmed as Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no. 6, Brahms’s Symphony no. 3, and Beethoven’s Symphony no. 5, it needed no recasting, but the subsequent concert, origi nally a Haydn symphony, Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, and Tchaikovsky’s Sym phony no. 6, was replaced by Beethoven’s Symphony no. 6 and Bruckner’s Symphony no. 4, setting a pattern for the first season of the war. What sense did audiences make of the music they heard? It is simultaneously a mark of the prevalence of particular methodologies in the writing of cultural history in the past twenty years and a gesture of scholarly frustration at the apparent absence of alterna tives that historians have tended to focus on the discursive construction of the musical art Page 6 of 21
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Listening as a Practice of Everyday Life: The Munich Philharmonic Orches tra and Its Audiences in the Second World War object in instructional literature produced for concert-goers prior to the act of listening— the popular concert guide and (though these remain comparatively under-researched) the program note—and in discussions of the performance afterwards—in the newspaper re view. As Christian Thorau has underlined, these highly (p. 129) didactic texts functioned, variously, to instruct listeners in the basics of what they were planning to hear, to prepare them for what they were about to hear, to guide them, indeed, even as they listened, and to help them “understand” what they had heard after the event.28 These literary attribu tions of meaning on the part of cultural authorities and arbiters sat, in turn, within a wider discourse on music, composers, and works contained in a wide range of journalis tic, belletristic, and educational literature that framed how audiences—who, in the words of Leon Botstein, were “listening through reading”—understood what they were consum ing and pursued their own Bildung, or cultural self-formation.29 Such literary preparation and reflection undoubtedly formed one part of the social prac tice of concert-going, and it demands that scholars give ongoing consideration to the pop ular textual commentary that surrounded any given performance. In the context of Ger many in the Second World War, the recognizably fascist elements in such a literature, which sit inside a wider discourse on culture that is equally recognizable as fascist, are, indeed, not hard to find. In his retrospective of the 1940–1941 concert season, published in the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra’s fortnightly “Concert Announcer,” for example, the Munich music critic Wilhelm Zentner wrote that the civic philharmonic concerts for 1940/41 have sounded their end with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, but they will sound on in the hearts of all listeners as a triumph of the German will to prevail [des deutschen Behauptungswillens] for which, in the days of the great struggle of fate [Schicksalskampf,] it remains clear at all times that not only land and people, race and the right to live but also the eternal values of German culture must be defended against the enemy. And just as the glorious deeds in arms and victories of our troops fill us with joyful, confident pride and elevating certainty, no less does our deep, heartfelt gratitude extend to those keepers and multipliers of our cultural goods, who are possessed with no less willing an enthusiasm to deploy [Einsatzfreudigkeit].30 Such examples can be multiplied at will. Yet this literature remained highly diverse and drew on a wide variety of ideological, literary, musicological, and critical conventions that give the lie to any sense that such cultural instruction of audiences as occurred in concert halls during the National Socialist era can be reduced to the effects of simple or homoge neous “Nazi propaganda.”31 As often as not, programs contained no elucidation of the musical material at all but confined themselves to announcing the list of works to be per formed; when they did contain commentary, it was often confined to simple descriptions of the musical grammar of the piece, with hermeneutic analysis conspicuous by its ab sence. If nothing else, the overtly nationalist ascriptions of meaning to music drew on a wide va riety of pre-existing discourses on nationhood and culture, many of which were not overt Page 7 of 21
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Listening as a Practice of Everyday Life: The Munich Philharmonic Orches tra and Its Audiences in the Second World War ly fascist or National Socialist but reflected the widely held sense of more banal national ist constructions of culture that both pre-dated the National Socialist era and, in some re spects, outlived it. It was, for example, Wilhelm Zentner who, in introducing the perfor mance of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony at the start of the 1939 season, noted (p. 130) that “like all true Germans Beethoven loved nature from his earliest youth onwards” before launching into a romantic hymn of praise to Germany’s rural landscapes that, if not en tirely incompatible with ideologies of blood and soil, drew on far older literary traditions that might as easily have surfaced in the context of discussions of Heimatkunst in 1900 as in the literature of the Second World War.32 Even composers who seemed to be most directly annexed to National Socialism’s project of expansion continued to be the objects of a wide variety of discourses—by turns compet ing, overlapping, and mutually affirming, but as often as not simply co-existing—that give the lie to the notion that a homogenizing instructional literature generated, of itself, a tendency toward shared listening experiences. In the case of Anton Bruckner, for exam ple, a composer whose induction into the Valhalla monument near Regensburg in 1937 symbolized his incorporation into an apparently obviously Nazi canon that erased the presence of multiple competing traditions of thinking about him, a wide variety of ac counts continued to circulate after 1933 and throughout the war.33 Discussions of Bruckn er in the literature produced and consumed by Munich’s musical world reflected, in turns, a “Greater German” nationalist imaginary,34 a variety of imaginaries rooted in South German and South German–Austrian cultural space,35 a (generally nonconfession al) religious imaginary,36 a Romantic poetics of nature,37 an ongoing tradition of mysti cism rooted in Schopenhauerian aesthetics,38 and, not least, a specifically municipal imaginary that drew on and constituted anew a sense of a civic performance and recep tion tradition anchored in the cultural life of Munich itself.39 Writing about music during the era of National Socialism, in other words, manifested exactly the same element of “contained plurality” that scholars working on other aspects of the cultural history of the Third Reich have discerned.40 Finally, it bears noting that despite the tendency towards re-nationalizing the repertoire during the war, the range of music listened to remained much broader than clichéd im ages of Germans listening to Beethoven might suggest. The 1940–1941 season, for exam ple, contained the Munich premieres of works by Kurt Hessenberg, Albéniz, De Falla, Egon Kornauth, Franz von Hoesslin, Prokofiev, Pfitzner, and Theodor Berger, alongside the choral premiere of a work by the music critic of the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, Oscar von Pander.41 This list testifies not only to the continued habit of performing for eign music, albeit that composed in allied or neutral territories only, and not only to Os wald Kabasta’s continued exploration of the conservative modernist repertoire, but also to the presence of distinct civic traditions of performing the works of composers associat ed with the city and the region. Indeed, for all that programs contained a significant element of the seemingly familiar, understanding the listening habits and experiences of ordinary concert-goers during the war demands acknowledging that, for the most part, audiences were listening to pieces Page 8 of 21
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Listening as a Practice of Everyday Life: The Munich Philharmonic Orches tra and Its Audiences in the Second World War with which they were likely to be only slightly acquainted. Even the most canonical pieces were performed at most once a season by each orchestra, and the city’s competing or chestras cooperated to the extent that they labored hard not to schedule identical works in close temporal proximity to one another. For sure, expert figures from the local musical world, acolytes of particular composers or the most committed, (p. 131) attentive mem bers of the subscription public may have been highly conversant with individual pieces, but these were not representative of the many concert-goers who bought tickets a hand ful of times per season. Moreover, while sound recordings were starting to circulate among middle-class consumers in the interwar years, providing new ways for listeners to familiarize themselves with the musical work, this culture was still in its infancy, only re ally establishing itself as a mass phenomenon in the postwar years: new listening habits were still being modeled rather than widely practiced. Indeed, even the most assiduous of collectors of sound recordings could only purchase a fraction of what was on offer, and what was on offer still represented only a small proportion of the repertoire performed in the concert hall. The blandly descriptive accounts that characterize most programs and concert reviews of the period reflect precisely the assumption that readers and listeners were not familiar with the piece in question and needed to be introduced to it, as much as a specifically Na tional Socialist insistence that all criticism be avoided as something divisive, intellectual, and ultimately “Jew-tainted,” and a concomitant drive toward a consensual, affirmative, and homogenized understanding of a highly familiar musical canon. Nor was it a simple process whereby ordinary German listeners constituted and perpetually reaffirmed the presence of national community through their acts of shared listening. Rather, the bland descriptiveness of many concert programs reflects the equally bland truth that, before as after, most ordinary listeners were probably hearing most pieces of music live for the first time.
A “Nazi” Musical Sensorium? The persistence of locally and regionally specific programming habits is significant not only for what it tells us about the many dimensions of variety that remained during the Third Reich, however, but also because it maps onto a continuity in the ways in which the social practice of concert-staging and concert-going was conceived and understood. It was precisely in 1938–1939 that the subscription series of the Munich Philharmonic Or chestra was renamed the Städtische Konzerte, or the Civic Concerts.42 In part, this repre sented a further stage in a longstanding history whereby the activities of a privately founded orchestra evolved, first, into one sustained by an Honoratioren-dominated “con cert association” supported by the city and then into a civic institution—a history played out in stages during the early twentieth century in response to successive financial crises. But it also reminds us that the symphonic concert hall remained a space in which a par ticularly urban form of sociability and display took place.43 Just as consideration of the processes whereby meaning was ascribed locally to cultural artifacts and acts though lit erary activity challenges outmoded assumptions regarding propaganda in the Third Re Page 9 of 21
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Listening as a Practice of Everyday Life: The Munich Philharmonic Orches tra and Its Audiences in the Second World War ich, so consideration of the profound continuities in the social practice of concert-going and musical listening that endured through National Socialism should help us dislodge simplistic assumptions about the locus of power during the era, and (p. 132) above all the ongoing tendency to return all such questions to discussion of the “Nazi state.”44 For all the current tendency in the literature about the Third Reich to stress the elements of consensus- and community-building generated by and for the regime’s pursuit of war, underlying social distinctions remained largely intact, and the symphonic concert hall was a site on which they were defended.45 The context of National Socialism and mobi lization for total war shaped the precise manner in which socioeconomic constraints pre sented themselves, but those constraints were neither created nor fundamentally altered by anything specific to National Socialism. Although the regime sought to project an im age of extending cultural consumption to sections of society which had hitherto largely been excluded on grounds of cost, what little evidence there is suggests that the social composition and degree of stratification of audiences remained largely unaltered during this era.46 The organization of concert series into Philharmonic subscription concerts, popular symphony concerts, and evenings of light music (the latter accompanied by food and drink), with pricing structures to match, a set of stratifications that had institutional ized itself in the early twentieth century in Munich, remained largely intact, minor modifi cations notwithstanding. This should not be taken to imply a reductionist account of the relations between economic capital, cultural capital, and taste, an excessive insistence on the exclusive qualities of symphonic concert-going, or an overly rigid assessment of the levels of social stratification within audiences.47 Participation was more varied, more open, and more fluid than such rigidities would imply, and it extended across social cate gories before, during, and after the National Socialist era. Yet the fundamental struc tures, cultures, and habits remained unchanged. These strong elements of continuity in the organization and social practice of concert-go ing suggest the need for a more overtly anthropological approach to the phenomenon, one that extends beyond examination of the literary epiphenomena generated by the practice to embrace study of the many routines associated with it. These range from the purchasing of tickets to the mode of transportation and the staging of the entrance, from the display of the self through one’s habits of dress and the simultaneous de-coding of the dress of others to the conversational transactions occurring in the foyer and the hall, from the organization and decoration of the concert hall to the dispensation of applause and the manner and mode of departure. This, in turn, demands moving firmly beyond a conception of “listening through reading” to understanding the act of listening as part of a wider experience of concert attendance in which “a way of thinking [is] invested in a way of acting,” a way of thinking whose truths are contained in the metaphorical spaces of knowledge that lie anterior to verbal ized language.48 As far as pursuing an anthropology of concert-going as an exercise in sensory history is concerned, one that draws attention to the exterior and interior archi tecture of the concert hall, the habits of dress of the audience and—most important of all —the spectacle of the conductor conducting and the orchestra playing, it would also seem Page 10 of 21
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Listening as a Practice of Everyday Life: The Munich Philharmonic Orches tra and Its Audiences in the Second World War most important to move beyond a discrete “history of listening” to a more integrated his tory of the senses as manifested in the concert hall. Such a study would focus (p. 133) most obviously on the experience of sight and sound but explore, perhaps, the varying tactile qualities of the material fabric of the concert hall and, mindful that many orches tral concerts were still accompanied by food service, consider gustatory taste too.49 Is it possible, these points notwithstanding, to locate a new “National Socialist” form of listening in the concert halls of the Third Reich? As Andrea Thelen-Frölich demonstrated in respect of concert life in Düsseldorf between the wars, the 1930s and 1940s witnessed attempts to model a new ideal listener. For such a concert-goer critical distance, calm contemplation, and concentration were to give way to listening as an act of submission, mystical immersion, and absorption thereby into the mass of a Hörergemeinschaft (listening community) that figured, in turn, as a microcosm of the Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community).50 Yet this remained a model, an ideological script that listeners were invited to follow, rather than a description of actual listening experiences in the con cert hall. Moreover, not only does the substitution of such a model for the lived experi ences of German concert-goers in the 1930s and 1940s rest on a sleight of hand, but it al so elides the considerable openness of arguments about the appropriateness of different sensory and emotional dispositions during the period. The challenge of relating such a history directly back to questions of power as still con ventionally understood by most historians of the Third Reich is exemplified, indeed, by debates among leading figures from Munich’s musical world concerning the relative mer its of the acoustics of different concert halls in the city. Asked just prior to the war for an affidavit on the acoustics of the Congress Hall in the Deutsches Museum, the recently de parted conductor-in-chief Siegmund von Hausegger opined that “the quality of sound is clear and without disruptive side effects, but dry and dead. The space does not allow the sound to unfold, and thus takes away its warmth and directness.” He continued: “All in all, however magnificent and festive the Congress Hall is as a space for the spoken word, an acoustic which supports and invigorates the sound is not present.”51 His successor, Os wald Kabasta, likewise argued, “The hall simply doesn’t ‘sound,’ the orchestra is dead, at particular points in the room the sound is distorted, and nowhere—this is for me the deci sive point!—does one get a round, blooming sound.”52 Such remarks both indicated the warm, rounded orchestral sound to which the conduc tors aspired as an ideal—essentially, the Mischklang—and embodied a simple privileging of the sonic when judging the merits of the various halls on offer. Somewhat more compli cated, perhaps, was the response of the city’s Musikbeauftragter (Music Commissioner), Carl Ehrenberg, who embedded his reflections on sound quality in a more overtly ideolog ical set of remarks. Rejecting the idea that symphonic concerts should have any form of “representational” quality, that is, that their function lay in the generation of social and political glamour, he insisted, like Hausegger and Kabasta, that just as an art exhibition in the most beautiful room in the world would totally fail in its purpose in the absence of good lighting, so would the performance of a musi Page 11 of 21
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Listening as a Practice of Everyday Life: The Munich Philharmonic Orches tra and Its Audiences in the Second World War cal work of art in an acoustically inappropriate space, in which only a small pro portion of the listeners get any kind of a full sound—while a Bruckner symphony, for (p. 134) example, played in an acoustically favourable barn can have an over powering effect that an unacoustic hall prevents from the outset.53 The purpose of music was not simply to “overwhelm,” however; it also had socially inte grative aims allied to the regime’s wider mission: “I believe that it is German and Nation al Socialist,” Ehrenberg wrote, “to place the content over the form and not to limit the ex perience of musical masterworks to the few listeners sat in the expensive seats, but rather to extend the same right to all those sit[ting] in the cheaper seats.” For him, the privileging of sound over sight was thus embedded in an allegedly more egalitarian, and thus National Socialist agenda combined with an aesthetic asceticism that rejected the in herited culture of decoration, splendor, and display embodied in the material fabric of many older buildings as unimportant, (implicitly) reactionary and outmoded. He contin ued: “Doing without a more resplendent and attractive setting such as that offered by the Congress Hall will not damage the preservation of music as one of the highest forms of culture, but dispensing with the sole form of communication available to music—the sound—will.”54 It would be wrong, however, to see in Ehrenberg’s argument the embodiment of a distinc tively National Socialist position which stood in opposition to those held by representa tives of an older cultural climate such as Siegmund von Hausegger, for whom the sound “in itself” was all that mattered.55 Arguments about aesthetics, the senses, or the emo tions did not map onto a simple divide between “Nazis” and “non-Nazis,” any more than arguments made a generation earlier mapped onto a clear schism between liberals and conservatives.56 Rather, they were conducted between Nazi-identifying individuals in what remained an open field of argument. Certainly no single set of authoritative posi tions on the subject, valorized as such by the regime, emerged by 1945. Consider, for ex ample, the arguments of Oswald Kabasta—a completely conformist supporter and benefi ciary of the National Socialist regime—proffered in the context of the competition over surrogate performance space in 1944 with which this chapter opened. Writing to the head of the city’s Culture Office, Max Reinhard, in the wake of the orchestra’s initial con certs in the Prinzregententheater—where the shape of the orchestra pit rendered the mu sicians invisible, as in Bayreuth—Kabasta noted that “it has become clear that symphony concerts can be given from the orchestra pit perhaps on a temporary basis out of need, but in no way can this be done on a permanent basis.” He requested not only that appro priate decoration for the stage be found from the supplies of the state theaters but also that the orchestra’s business manager—with whom he clearly enjoyed a tense relation ship—be given clearly to understand that this was to happen. In this context, he wrote, “After my concert he expressed himself, perhaps not entirely unintentionally, to the effect that for the majority of listeners the fact of the invisibility of the orchestra increases their concentration. . . . Such decisions are best left to the artistic director; it is doubtless also not a coincidence that orchestral concerts held in theatres have always been and always are given from the stage.”57 Page 12 of 21
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Listening as a Practice of Everyday Life: The Munich Philharmonic Orches tra and Its Audiences in the Second World War Again, such interventions reflect the pressures and needs of the particular moment in which they were written, alongside the human tensions ever present in (p. 135) a milieu rarely noted for its abundance of easy personalities. However, that leading cultural per sonalities could stand, figuratively if not literally, in the ruins of the Third Reich and ar gue about the correct placing of an orchestra in a theater—and thus, ultimately, about the correct disposition of the eye in relation to the ear—suggests the presence of a normative regime of the senses whose ordering proclivities and capacities as often as not transcend ed any questions of power that might be meaningfully connected back to something root ed in the politics of the Third Reich. Not only was there no single “Nazi” sensorium locat able in the pronouncements of leading arbiters of such matters at the time or visible in the uniform practices of concert audiences up and down Germany, but arguments be tween supporters of the regime about the appropriate disposition of the senses cut across anything that might be recognizable as representing “Nazi” or “non-Nazi” habits of thought. This reminds us that many facets of cultural experience in the modern era tran scended both national boundaries and the democratic-dictatorial divide and are not nec essarily best explored in those terms, or at least not in those terms only. For all that the literary culture of the National Socialist era may have instructed audiences to think and feel in particular ways, this suggests that we may come to a better understanding of how Germans listened to music, even at moments of hypernationalist excess, if we worry less about the fact that it was Germans doing the listening.
Archives Hauptstaatsarchiv München Stadtarchiv Augsburg Stadtarchiv München Stadtarchiv Passau
References Adorno, Theodor W. (1932) 2002. “On the Social Situation of Music.” In Essays on Music: Theodor W. Adorno, edited by Richard Leppert and Susan Gillespie, 391–436. Berkeley: University of California Press. Applegate, Celia, and Pamela Potter. 2002. “Germans as the ‘People of Music’: Genealogy of an Identity.” In Music and German National Identity, edited by Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter, 1–35. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. “Beethoven und Bruckner im zweiten Philharmonischen Konzert.” 1939. Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, October 9. “Beginn der Volkssymphoniekonzerte.” 1939. Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, October 2.
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Listening as a Practice of Everyday Life: The Munich Philharmonic Orches tra and Its Audiences in the Second World War Birdsall, Carolyn, Jan-Frieder Missfelder, Daniel Morat, and Corinne Schleif. 2014. “Fo rum: The Senses.” German History 32 (2): 256–273. Botstein, Leon. 1992. “Listening Through Reading: Musical Literacy and the Concert Au dience.” 19th-Century Music 16:129–145. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge, UK: Polity. “Bruckners Tragische Symphonie: Im 1. Jubiläumskonzert der Münchner Philhar moniker.” 1943. Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, September 20. Brüstle, Christa. 1998. Anton Bruckner und die Nachwelt: Zur Rezeptionsgeschichte des Komponisten in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart: M und P Verlag für Wissenschaft und Forschung. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven F. Rendell. Berkeley: University of California Press. Evans, Richard J. 2008. The Third Reich at War. London: Penguin. Exl, Engelbert M., and Michael Nagy, eds. 1995. ‟. . . mögen sie meiner still gedenken”: Die Beiträge zum Oswald Kabasta-Symposion in Mistelbach vom 23. Bis 25. September 1994. Vienna: Pasqualatihaus Verlag. Fritzsche, Peter. 2009. Life and Death in the Third Reich. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni versity Press. Gregor, Neil. 1998. Daimler-Benz in the Third Reich. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gregor, Neil. 2017. “Die Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus und der Cultural-His torical Turn.” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 65 (2): 233–245. (p. 140)
Kroener, Bernhard R., Rolf-Dieter Müller, and Hans Umbreit, eds. 1988. Das Deutsche Re ich und der Zweite Weltkrieg: Organisation und Mobilisierung des Deutschen Machtbere ichs, Kriegsverwaltung, Wirtschaft und Personelle Ressourcen, 1939–1941, vol. 5.1. Stuttgart: DVA. Lepenies, Wolf. 2006. The Seduction of Culture in German History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Leppert, Richard. 1993. The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation and the History of the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mason, Tim. 1993. Social Policy in the Third Reich: The Working Class and the “National Community,” Oxford: Berg. Mayer, Otto. 1937. “Österreichfahrt der Münchner Philharmoniker (Oktober 1936).” Zeitschrift für Musik 104:68–70.
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Listening as a Practice of Everyday Life: The Munich Philharmonic Orches tra and Its Audiences in the Second World War Meyer, Gabriele E., ed. 1994. 100 Jahre Münchner Philharmoniker. Munich: Alois Knurr Verlag. Missfelder, Jan-Frieder. 2012. “Period Ear: Perspektiven einer Klanggeschichte der Neuzeit.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 38:21–47. Painter, Karen. 2007. Symphonic Aspirations: German Music and Politics, 1900–1945. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Propstmeier, Ludwig. 2009. “90 Jahre Passauer Konzertverein.” In Der Passauer Konz ertverein: Ein Streifzug durch seine 90-jährige Geschichte, edited by Markus Eberhardt and Ludwig Propstmeier, 35–140. Passau: Stutz. Quast-Benesch, Gertrud. 2006. Anton Bruckner in München. Tutzing: Hans Schneider. Raabe, Peter. 1939. “Über den Musikbetrieb während des Krieges.” Zeitschrift für Musik 106:1029–1030. Raphael, Lutz. 2001. “Radikales Ordnungsdenken und die Organisation totalitärer Herrschaft: Weltanschauungseliten und Humanwissenschaftler im NS-Regime.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 27:5–40. Raphael, Lutz. 2014. “Pluralities of National Socialist Ideology: New Perspectives on the Production and Diffusion of National Socialist Weltanschauung.” In Visions of Community in Nazi Germany: Social Engineering and Private Lives, edited by Bernhard Gotto and Martina Steber, 73–86. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Richard Strauss: Briefwechsel mit Willi Schuh. 1969. Zurich: Atlantis. Richard Strauss–Clemens Krauss: Briefwechsel. 1963. Munich: Beck. Schmidt, Michael. 2014. “Visual Music: Jazz, Synaesthesia, and the History of the Senses in the Weimar Republic.” German History 32 (2): 201–223. Schmoll, Regina gen. Eisenwerth, ed. 1985. Die Münchner Philharmoniker von der Grün dung bis heute. Munich: Wolf. Small, Christopher. 1998. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Middle town, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Steber, Martina. 2012. “Regions and National Socialist Ideology. Reflections on Contained Plurality.” In Heimat, Region and Empire: Spatial Identities Under National Socialism, edited by Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann and Maiken Umbach, 24–42. Basingstoke: Pal grave. Steiger, Martina, ed. 1999. Richard Strauss–Karl Böhm: Briefwechsel, 1921–1949. Mainz: Schott.
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Listening as a Practice of Everyday Life: The Munich Philharmonic Orches tra and Its Audiences in the Second World War Steuwer, Janosch, and Hanne Leßau. 2014. “‘Wer ist ein Nazi? Woran erkennt man ihn?’ Zur Unterscheidung von Nationalsozialisten und anderen Deutschen.” Mittelweg 36 (1): 30–51. Thelen-Frölich, Andrea Therese. 2000. Die Institution Konzert zwischen 1918 und 1945 am Beispiel der Stadt Düsseldorf. Kassel: Merseburger Verlag. Thorau, Christian. 2007. “Die Hörer und ihr Cicerone: Werkerläuterung in der bürgerlichen Musikrezeption.” In Musik—Bildung—Textualität, edited by Andreas Jacob, 207–220. Erlangen: Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. (p. 141)
Trümpi, Fritz. 2011. Politisierte Orchester: Die Wiener Philharmoniker und das Berliner Philharmonische Orchester im Nationalsozialismus. Vienna: Böhlau. Wegner, Bernd. 2000. “Hitler, der Zweite Weltkrieg und die Choreographie des Unter gangs.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 26:493–518. Wiesen, S. Jonathan. 2011. Creating the Nazi Marketplace: Commerce and Consumption in the Third Reich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zentner, Wilhelm. 1939. “Musik in München.” Zeitschrift für Musik 106:1106. Zentner, Wilhelm. 1941. “Die Städtischen Philharmonischen Konzert 1940/41.” In Konz ert-Anzeiger der Münchener Philharmoniker 1940/41, no. 14, April 26. Ziemer, Hansjakob. 2008. Die Moderne hören: Das Konzert als urbanes Forum, 1890– 1940. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag. Ziemer, Hansjakob. 2015. “Der Mengelbergskandal: Kommunikation, Emotion und Kon flikt im Konzertsaal vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg.” In Kommunikation im Musikleben: Har monien und Dissonanzen im 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Sven Oliver Müller, Jürgen Oster hammel, and Martin Rempe, 139–153. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht. (p. 142)
Notes: (1.) Memorandum concerning a concert at the Munich Philharmonic, July 31, 1944. Kul turamt 477, StadtAM. Unless otherwise noted, all translations were provided by the au thor. (2.) See, e.g., Lepenies, Wolf. 2006. The Seduction of Culture in German History. Prince ton: Princeton University Press; for the repetition of such narrative frameworks within general accounts of the Third Reich see, e.g., Evans, Richard J. 2008. The Third Reich at War. London: Penguin, 579–582. (3.) Still emblematic is the critique contained in Applegate, Celia, and Pamela Potter. 2002. “Germans as the ‘People of Music’: Genealogy of an Identity.” In Music and German
Page 16 of 21
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Listening as a Practice of Everyday Life: The Munich Philharmonic Orches tra and Its Audiences in the Second World War National Identity, edited by Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter, 1–35. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (4.) Wegner, Bernd. 2000. “Hitler, der Zweite Weltkrieg und die Choreographie des Unter gangs.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 26:493–518. (5.) De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven F. Ren dell. Berkeley: University of California Press, 20. (6.) Here I am drawing also on Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge, UK: Polity. (7.) Otto Mayer, Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, to Peter Raabe, president of the Reich Chamber of Music, September 6, 1944. Kulturamt 477, StadtAM. (8.) Richard Strauss–Clemens Krauss: Briefwechsel. 1963. Munich: Beck; Richard Strauss: Briefwechsel mit Willi Schuh. 1969. Zurich: Atlantis; Steiger, Martina, ed. 1999. Richard Strauss–Karl Böhm: Briefwechsel, 1921–1949. Mainz: Schott. (9.) Express Letter 348/44, September 28, 1944. Deutscher Gemeindetag, Bestand 49/1523/I, Stadtarchiv Augsburg; Munich Philharmonic Orchestra to the mayor via City Culture Office, January 30, 1945. Kulturamt 477, StadtAM. (10.) Here I am drawing on the thoughts I expressed in Gregor, Neil. 1998. Daimler-Benz in the Third Reich. New Haven: Yale University Press, 218–222. (11.) De Certeau (1984): 21. (12.) Trümpi, Fritz. 2011. Politisierte Orchester: Die Wiener Philharmoniker und das Berliner Philharmonische Orchester im Nationalsozialismus. Vienna: Böhlau, esp. 235– 253. (13.) Report on the Concert Year 1939/40, May 15, 1940. Kulturamt 177, StadtAM. (14.) Report on the Concert Year 1941/2. Kulturamt 477, StadtAM. (15.) See, e.g., Wiesen, S. Jonathan. 2011. Creating the Nazi Marketplace: Commerce and Consumption in the Third Reich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (16.) Report on the Civic Philharmonic Concerts, 1938/9. Kulturamt 170/2, StadtAM. (17.) For the general context of the development of the orchestra in the interwar and war years see Schmoll, Regina gen. Eisenwerth, ed. 1985. Die Münchner Philharmoniker von der Gründung bis heute. Munich: Wolf; Meyer, Gabriele E., ed. 1994. 100 Jahre Münchner Philharmoniker. Munich: Alois Knurr Verlag. (18.) On Kabasta see, in addition to the works cited above, the highly hagiographic but still usable Exl, Engelbert M., and Michael Nagy, eds. 1995. “. . . mögen sie meiner still
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Listening as a Practice of Everyday Life: The Munich Philharmonic Orches tra and Its Audiences in the Second World War gedenken”: Die Beiträge zum Oswald Kabasta-Symposion in Mistelbach vom 23. Bis 25. September 1994. Vienna: Pasqualatihaus Verlag. (19.) Musical Academy to the Highest Theatre Authorities of Bavaria, September 27, 1939. MK 50130, HStaAM. (20.) Report on the Concert Year 1939/40, May 15, 1940. Kulturamt 177, StadtAM; Musi cal Academy to the Highest Theatre Authorities of Bavaria, September 27, 1939. MK 50130, HStaAM. (21.) Propstmeier, Ludwig. 2009. “90 Jahre Passauer Konzertverein.” In Der Passauer Konzertverein: Ein Streifzug durch seine 90-jährige Geschichte, edited by Markus Eber hardt and Ludwig Propstmeier, 35–140. Passau: Stutz, 104; see also the limited material on the Passauer Konzertverein in the Stadtarchiv Passau: IV A 1d / 343, StadtAP. (22.) On the impact of the outbreak of war on the German economy see the magisterial overview provided in Kroener, Bernhard R., Rolf-Dieter Müller, and Hans Umbreit, eds. 1988. Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg: Organisation und Mobilisierung des Deutschen Machtbereichs, Kriegsverwaltung, Wirtschaft und Personelle Ressourcen, 1939–1941, vol. 5.1. Stuttgart: DVA. (23.) Mason, Tim. 1993. Social Policy in the Third Reich: The Working Class and the “Na tional Community.” Oxford: Berg. (24.) See Missfelder, Jan-Frieder. 2012. “Period Ear: Perspektiven einer Klanggeschichte der Neuzeit.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 38:21–47. (25.) Copy: Heinz Drewes, Reich Ministry of Propaganda and Enlightenment, to Theatre Director Clemens Krauss, Munich/Bavarian State Opera, August 16, 1941. MK 50386/I, HStaAM. (26.) For the original program see “Oswald Kabasta und die ‘Münchener Philharmoniker’ ” (n.d. [1939]). Kulturamt 177, StadtAM; for the revised version see “10 Städtische Philharmonische Konzerte 1939/40.” In Konzert-Anzeiger der Münchener Phil harmoniker 1939/40, September 4, 1939. (27.) “Wichtige Mitteilung!” In Konzert-Anzeiger der Münchener Philharmoniker 1939/40, September 4, 1939. For an example of the wider mobilization of nationalist cultural rhetoric on the outbreak of war see Raabe, Peter. 1939. “Über den Musikbetrieb während des Krieges.” Zeitschrift für Musik 106, 1029–1030. (28.) Thorau, Christian. 2007. “Die Hörer und ihr Cicerone: Werkerläuterung in der bürg erlichen Musikrezeption.” In Musik—Bildung—Textualität, edited by Andreas Jacob, 207– 220. Erlangen: Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. (29.) Botstein, Leon. 1992. “Listening Through Reading: Musical Literacy and the Concert Audience.” 19th-Century Music 16:129–145. Page 18 of 21
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Listening as a Practice of Everyday Life: The Munich Philharmonic Orches tra and Its Audiences in the Second World War (30.) Zentner, Wilhelm. 1941. “Die Städtischen Philharmonischen Konzert 1940/41.” In Konzert-Anzeiger der Münchener Philharmoniker 1940/41, no. 14, April 26. (31.) Here I am drawing on the pioneering discussions of how ideology worked in Nation al Socialist Germany in Raphael, Lutz. 2001. “Radikales Ordnungsdenken und die Organi sation totalitärer Herrschaft: Weltanschauungseliten und Humanwissenschaftler im NSRegime.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 27:5–40; more recently, in English, Raphael, Lutz. 2014. “Pluralities of National Socialist Ideology: New Perspectives on the Production and Diffusion of National Socialist Weltanschauung.” In Visions of Community in Nazi Ger many: Social Engineering and Private Lives, edited by Bernhard Gotto and Martina Ste ber, 73–86. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (32.) Zentner, Wilhelm. 1939. “2. Städtisches Philharmonisches Konzert.” In KonzertAnzeiger der Münchener Philharmoniker 1939/40, no. 18, October 8. (33.) On the reception history of Bruckner see Brüstle, Christa. 1998. Anton Bruckner und die Nachwelt: Zur Rezeptionsgeschichte des Komponisten in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart: M and P Verlag für Wissenschaft und Forschung; Painter, Karen. 2007. Symphonic Aspirations: German Music and Politics, 1900–1945. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. More specifically on Bruckner’s reception in Munich see the empirically dense but analytically limited Quast-Benesch, Gertrud. 2006. Anton Bruckner in München. Tutzing: Hans Schneider. (34.) “II. Bruckner-Fest der Internationalen Bruckner-Gesellschaft Sitz Wien: Eine Kundgebung deutschen Geistes.” (n.d. [1933]), Kulturamt 269, StadtAM; Zentner, Wil helm. 1939. “Musik in München.” Zeitschrift für Musik (November): 1106. (35.) See, e.g., Mayer, Otto. 1937. “Österreichfahrt der Münchner Philharmoniker (Okto ber 1936).” Zeitschrift für Musik 104 (January): 68–70. (36.) “Beginn der Volkssymphoniekonzerte.” Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, October 2, 1939; “9. Philharmonisches Konzert.” 22./23.3.41, Konzert-Anzeiger der Münchener Phil harmoniker 1940/41, no. 11, March 19, 1941. (37.) Zentner, Wilhelm. 1939. “2. Städtische Philharmonisches Konzert.” In KonzertAnzeiger der Münchener Philharmoniker 1939/40, no. 18, October 8. (38.) “Beethoven und Bruckner im zweiten Philharmonischen Konzert.” Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, October 9, 1939; “Bruckners Tragische Symphonie: Im 1. Jubiläum skonzert der Münchner Philharmoniker.” Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, September 20, 1943. (39.) Zentner, Wilhelm. 1939. “Die Philharmonischen Konzerte 1939/40.” In KonzertAnzeiger der Münchener Philharmoniker 1939/40, no. 15, June 30. (40.) Steber, Martina. 2012. “Regions and National Socialist Ideology: Reflections on Con tained Plurality.” In Heimat, Region and Empire: Spatial Identities Under National Social Page 19 of 21
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Listening as a Practice of Everyday Life: The Munich Philharmonic Orches tra and Its Audiences in the Second World War ism, edited by Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann and Maiken Umbach, 24–42. Basingstoke: Palgrave. (41.) “Vorschau für das Konzertjahr 1940/41.” In Konzert-Anzeiger der Münchener Phil harmoniker 1940/41, no. 32, September 15, 1940. (42.) “Rückschau.” In Konzert-Anzeiger der Münchener Philharmoniker 1939/40, no. 15, June 30, 1939. (43.) On this subject see in particular Ziemer, Hansjakob. 2008. Die Moderne hören: Das Konzert als urbanes Forum, 1890–1940. Frankfurt am Main: Campus. (44.) I have argued this at greater length in Gregor, Neil. 2017. “Die Geschichte des Na tionalsozialismus und der Cultural-Historical Turn.” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 65 (2): 233–245. (45.) Emblematic of this tendency is Fritzsche, Peter. 2009. Life and Death in the Third Reich. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (46.) See, e.g., the assessment in Concert Association to City Culture Office, May 20, 1936. Kulturamt 177, StadtAM. (47.) See the remarks of Adorno in Adorno, Theodor W. (1932) 2002. “On the Social Situa tion of Music.” In Essays on Music: Theodor W. Adorno, edited by Richard Leppert and Susan Gillespie, 391–436. Berkeley: University of California Press, esp. 420. (48.) De Certeau (1984): xv. (49.) The possibility of a historical anthropology of the symphony concert is suggested by the argument of Small, Christopher. 1998. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. On the multisensory qualities of musical experience see Leppert, Richard. 1993. The Sight of Sound: Music, Representa tion and the History of the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press; more recently, and focused more closely on the specific spatial and temporal context, see Schmidt, Michael. 2014. “Visual Music: Jazz, Synaesthesia, and the History of the Senses in the Weimar Republic.” German History 32 (2): 201–223; the wider opportunities afforded by the pursuit of a more integrated history of the senses are discussed in Birdsall, Carolyn et al. 2014. “Forum: The Senses.” German History 32 (2): 256–273. (50.) Thelen-Frölich, Andrea Therese. 2000. Die Institution Konzert zwischen 1918 und 1945 am Beispiel der Stadt Düsseldorf. Kassel: Merseburger Verlag, 421. (51.) Siegmund von Hausegger to Concert Association of Munich, November 7, 1938. Kul turamt 909, StadtAM. (52.) Oswald Kabasta to Concert Association of Munich, November 11, 1938. Kulturamt 909, StadtAM.
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Listening as a Practice of Everyday Life: The Munich Philharmonic Orches tra and Its Audiences in the Second World War (53.) Memorandum of Plenipotentiary for Music Carl Ehrenberg to Mayor Fiehler regard ing concerts in the Congress Hall, November 17, 1938, Kulturamt 909, StadtAM. (54.) Memorandum of Plenipotentiary for Music Carl Ehrenberg to Mayor Fiehler regard ing concerts in the Congress Hall, November 17, 1938, Kulturamt 909, StadtAM. (55.) On this issue see, in addition to the works referenced in n. 31, the perceptive argu ment in Steuwer, Janosch, and Hanne Leßau. 2014. “‘Wer ist ein Nazi? Woran erkennt man ihn?’ Zur Unterscheidung von Nationalsozialisten und anderen Deutschen.” Mittel weg 36 (1): 30–51. (56.) Ziemer, Hansjakob. 2015. “Der Mengelbergskandal: Kommunikation, Emotion und Konflikt im Konzertsaal vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg.” In Kommunikation im Musikleben: Harmonien und Dissonanzen im 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Sven Oliver Müller, Jürgen Os terhammel, and Martin Rempe, 139–153. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht. (57.) Oswald Kabasta to Max Reinhard, August 23, 1944. Kulturamt 477, StadtAM.
Neil Gregor
Neil Gregor, University of Southampton
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Turning Liebhaber into Kenner: Forkel’s Lectures on the Art of Listening, ca. 1780–1785
Turning Liebhaber into Kenner: Forkel’s Lectures on the Art of Listening, ca. 1780–1785 Mark Evan Bonds The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries Edited by Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer Print Publication Date: Jan 2019 Subject: Music, Musicology and Music History Online Publication Date: Nov 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190466961.013.6
Abstract and Keywords Johann Nikolaus Forkel’s Ueber die Theorie der Musik (1777) is one of the earliest music guides aimed specifically at listeners. Nature, he argues, is not the best guide for listen ing; only a thorough knowledge of the elements of music will help music lovers under stand what they hear. Forkel promises to elevate amateurs to the level of connoisseurs. An unpublished manuscript of Forkel’s university lectures based on Ueber die Theorie der Musik allows us to reconstruct his vision of the ideal listener in greater detail. These lec tures advocate a fundamental shift in the relationship between the listener and the musi cal work. Forkel speaks repeatedly of the demands made by music on its audiences and the listener’s responsibility to understand the work. The idea that a concert audience member might have a responsibility to develop a skill that can be refined and developed marks the beginning of a new and fundamentally modern attitude toward the art of listen ing. Keywords: ideal listening, instruction in listening, Johann Nikolaus Forkel, listening behavior, types of listener
SONATE, que me veux-tu? The French philosophe Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle was not alone among eighteenth-century listeners in his inability to make sense of the music he was hearing. “Worn out” by a concert of “endless symphonies,” as Rousseau told the story in 1768, Fontenelle “cried out quite loudly, in a transport of impatience: ‘Sonata, what do you want of me?’ ”1 Fontenelle’s outburst would be invoked repeatedly over the course of the next half century, in Germany and England as well as in France.2 It resonat ed for as long as it did because others shared his sense of bewilderment. Listening to mu sic—particularly instrumental music—posed a challenge to the uninitiated. Fontenelle’s question exposes the leading edge of a historically new attitude toward the act of listening to music: that listening itself might be an active process requiring a cer tain investment of energies on the part of listeners, and that a work of music might pose a challenge of some kind to its auditors. In order to feel overwhelmed by the music he was hearing, after all, Fontenelle had to be listening with some degree of attentiveness in the first place. While this may seem obvious today, the premise of attentive listening was by Page 1 of 18
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Turning Liebhaber into Kenner: Forkel’s Lectures on the Art of Listening, ca. 1780–1785 no means something to be taken for granted in the middle of the eighteenth century.3 Fontenelle, in his time, could just as easily—far more easily, in fact—have made the choice not to listen. Only gradually, over the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, did audiences across Europe begin to fall silent during performances and ex hibit the kind of decorum commonplace today; in the middle of the eighteenth century, members of almost any concert audience had the options of listening, chatting, or doing both at the same time. The iconographic evidence is overwhelming: images of concert or operatic performances from before 1800 routinely show a mixed audience of listeners and non-listeners.4 The very fact that Fontenelle became agitated by a performance of instru mental music suggests that for a moment, at least, he did not consider conversation an option but seems instead to have felt an obligation (p. 146) to listen, to try to understand the work at hand. Because he happened to be listening to a work of instrumental music, though, he had nothing outside of purely musical sound to which he could apply his imag ination, hence his bon mot. In this sense, Fontenelle’s question might well be said to mark the beginning of modern listening: the idea that members of a concert audience have an obligation to come to terms with what they are hearing. To whom might Fontenelle and other perplexed listeners of his time have turned? There was certainly no end of writings about music, but these were either philosophical-specu lative treatises (such as Charles Batteux’s Les beaux-arts réduits à un même principe, 1746) or technical manuals that taught composers how to write (such as Joseph Riepel’s Anfangsgründe zur musicalischen Setzkunst, 1752–1768) or performers how to play (such as C. P. E. Bach’s Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen, 1753–1762). Though listeners could certainly gain insight from such publications, the average music lover had no ready source of practical advice on—to use Aaron Copland’s happy phrase—what to listen for in music.5 Very few publications targeted amateur listeners. The general-inter est music periodicals that began to appear during the eighteenth century filled this gap to some degree, but the market remained soft for many decades. Journals such as Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg’s Kritische Briefe über die Tonkunst (3 vols., Berlin, 1759–1764) or Jo hann Adam Hiller’s Musikalische Nachrichten und Anmerkungen (4 vols., Leipzig, 1766– 1770) could not sustain themselves in the long run. They nevertheless reflect a growing awareness on the part of writers, editors, and publishers that there was a market of some kind among musical dilettantes for information about the art, and these publications coin cide with changing attitudes toward listening. Fontenelle was not alone. But journals are by their very nature miscellaneous in content: an issue of Marpurg’s Kri tische Briefe, for example, might begin with a letter about vocal pedagogy, followed by one about the expressive qualities of rhythmic meter, followed by yet another on the na ture of the full cadence, and so on. Thus, while journals were beginning to address the needs of the general music lover, readers still lacked any systematic guide to listening in general.
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Turning Liebhaber into Kenner: Forkel’s Lectures on the Art of Listening, ca. 1780–1785
Forkel’s Lectures The theorist, historian, and composer Johann Nikolaus Forkel (1749–1818) was the first to produce such a systematic approach to the art of listening. Ueber die Theorie der Musik, insofern sie Liebhabern und Kennern nothwendig und nützlich ist: Eine Ein ladungsschrift zu musikalischen Vorlesungen, published in Göttingen in 1777, broke en tirely new ground, for it represents the earliest attempt in any language to provide a sys tematic guide for general audiences to the art of listening to music. As such, it is the first work of what we would today call “music appreciation.” As its subtitle indicates, Ueber die Theorie der Musik is a prospectus for a series of public lectures whose goal was to elevate Liebhaber (musical dilettantes) to the level of Kenner (connoisseurs).6 Nature, as Forkel points out, is not the best guide for listening; only a thorough knowledge of the elements of music will help music lovers understand what they hear. The capacity to judge musical works positively or negatively, “with cer tainty and reliability,” is the principal goal of the enterprise.7 (p. 147)
As director of the university’s Collegium Musicum, Forkel was in an ideal position to car ry out this project: he could call on the resources of his orchestra to illustrate his lec tures, and Göttingen, a university town with a distinguished culture of both learning and music-making, was an ideal locale.8 His weekly university concerts during the winter con tinued an institution dating back to 1736 and would remain a fixture of musical life in Göttingen until he retired from his position as academic music director in 1815. Exactly how long Forkel continued to give public lectures on music is less clear from the histori cal record. At the very least, they were successful enough for him to offer them again in the season between Michaelmas 1779 and Easter 1780 and then again in 1780–1781.9 Forkel never published the texts of his public lectures, nor has any manuscript of them surfaced to date. We can get at least some idea of their content, however, from two later manuscript sources of lectures tailored toward a more academic audience. The close ad herence of these texts to the structural outlines of the original prospectus of 1777 strong ly suggests that these later lectures convey the basic substance of the earlier presenta tions directed toward the general public. Both sources transmit essentially the same text under the somewhat misleading title Commentar über die 1777 gedruckte Abhandlung über die Theorie der Musik, insofern sie Liebhabern und Kennern nothwendig und nüt zlich ist: Zum Gebrauch akademischer Vorlesungen entworfen (Commentary on the Trea tise published in 1777 on the Theory of Music, insofar as is Necessary and Useful: For Use in Academic Lectures). These are in fact not commentaries at all but, rather, the full text of these later lectures, probably held in the early to mid-1780s. In the tradition of German higher education, these were likely to have been public lectures, open not only to enrolled students at the university but also to paying members of the public. Neither manuscript is in Forkel’s hand. The exemplar preserved in the Staats- und Uni versitätsbibliothek Hamburg Carl von Ossietzky (Cod. Hans. V, 1:2) was given by Forkel to his student Carl Trummer (1792–1858) around 1815.10 The provenance of the exem Page 3 of 18
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Turning Liebhaber into Kenner: Forkel’s Lectures on the Art of Listening, ca. 1780–1785 plar preserved in the Sibley Music Library, Eastman School of Music, Rochester, New York (Vault ML95.F721S38), consisting of 168 unnumbered leaves, is unknown. It bears the otherwise unidentified name “G. Schubuhr” and was acquired from the antiquarian firm of Leo Liepmannssohn (Berlin) in December 1933 (see Figure 6.1).11 The deteriora tion of the handwriting after the first carefully written page or two suggests that it is not the work of a professional copyist. On the basis of published excerpts from the Hamburg exemplar, the text of the two manuscripts would appear to be virtually identical, though they are clearly the product of two different hands.12 (p. 148)
Figure 6.1. Forkel, Commentar [ca. 1780–1785]. Sib ley Music Library, Eastman School of Music, Vault ML95.F721S38, f. 156r, from the beginning of the section on musical criticism. Courtesy of the Ruth T. Watanabe Special Collections Department of the Sibley Music Library, Eastman School of Music, Rochester, NY.
These lectures, as noted, conform to the outline of Ueber die Theorie der Musik, with the text divided into five large sections: (p. 149)
[Introduction] fols. 1–16 I. Von der physikalischen Klanglehre (Acoustics), fols. 16v–31v II. Die mathematische Klanglehre (Canonics), fols. 31v–39v III. Die musikalische Grammatik (Musical Grammar), fols. 40–123 IV. Die musikalische Rhetorik (Musical Rhetoric), fols. 123–155v V. Die musikalische Kritik (Musical Criticism), fols. 156–168v Of particular interest for present purposes are the introduction and the two closing sec tions of these lectures, which recommend a desirable attitude of listeners to musical works. Forkel speaks repeatedly of the Forderungen (demands) made by music on its au Page 4 of 18
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Turning Liebhaber into Kenner: Forkel’s Lectures on the Art of Listening, ca. 1780–1785 diences and the listener’s responsibility to understand the work. The idea that a member of a concert audience might have a responsibility to develop a skill that can be refined and developed reflects the relatively new and fundamentally modern attitude toward the art of listening. Fontenelle may have been exasperated by the presumption of having to exert himself to understand a work of instrumental music, but Forkel insists that this is, in fact, the case. He goes so far as to personify works of fine art as entities with a will of their own: the will to be understood. We expect works of fine art to give us pleasure, but they, in turn, “with no less force and justification make their own counter-demands” on us; they do not want to “carry alone the burden that their friends so commonly place up on them, as it were,” but stipulate instead “mutual obligations” with us.13 If we want to derive pleasure and value from the fine arts, Forkel declares, we must first understand their nature, their individual means of expression, and their various forms: “You must know, in a word, what is appropriate to the nature of each and what each of them, accord ing to this nature, can and cannot accomplish.”14 This approach is typical of mid-eigh teenth-century aesthetics: Lessing’s Laokoön is merely the most famous of many attempts to delineate the capacities and limitations of the various fine arts. Forkel takes exception to those who think they can judge a work of music simply on the basis of having learned to sing or play an instrument. This would be the equivalent, he de clares, of making judgments about poetry on the basis of having read a few poems “and perhaps weeping a bit in the process.”15 Persons who pursue this sort of path tend to con centrate on the mechanical aspects of the arts and as a result “almost always believe that the artist is being too artificial,” for the dim light of a weak lamp has made us incapable of tolerating the bright light of the sun. We measure by too small a standard and thereby consider anything that goes beyond its limits a monstrosity. We are content with our limited knowl edge of the arts . . . and confine ourselves to our narrow circle to such an extent that we lose sight of what is great and sublime in the fine arts.16 To Forkel’s mind, everything depends on a correct understanding of the essence and nature of the fine arts. But of all the arts, such understanding is lacking most in mu sic: people recognize that oratorios, cantatas, and operas, for example, all use recitatives, arias, and choruses, but they do not in fact really understand the differences among these genres. Forkel promises his listeners that every hour of his lectures will reveal to them “neue Quellen des Vergnügens” (new sources of pleasure) and enable them to make cor rect judgments about the works of music they hear.17 (p. 150)
The first three sections of the lectures cover standard topics of music theory, including harmony and rhythm, which constitute the “grammar” of music. When Forkel moves on to the “rhetoric” of music, the orientation toward the listener becomes more evident. He ex pands on the standard trope of music as a “language of the heart” by comparing a work of music to an oration, and he draws close parallels between the obligation of the orator to make his verbal ideas comprehensible and persuasive and the corresponding obliga tion of the composer to make his musical ideas clear and moving. Like the orator, the Page 5 of 18
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Turning Liebhaber into Kenner: Forkel’s Lectures on the Art of Listening, ca. 1780–1785 composer must present his ideas in a logical and effective sequence, delineating his Hauptsatz (main idea) from Nebensätze (subsidiary ones) and following the general out lines of an oration, moving through Gegensätze (refutations) to a reiteration and Bekräfti gung (intensification) of the whole.18 By presenting the structural principles of large-scale form in the more familiar terms of conventional verbal rhetoric, Forkel is able to make vivid and comprehensible the abstract concept of large-scale musical form, a point rarely addressed in detail by any other writer of the time. The analogies are at times forced, but as a pedagogical strategy, the imagery is effective. Forkel acknowledges the earlier ef forts of Johann Mattheson in this direction, but unlike Mattheson, Forkel directs his com ments to listeners who seek to understand music, not aspiring composers who seek to create it.19 This is a remarkable development. Since antiquity, every manual about rhetoric had ad vised orators on how to structure a large-scale speech, but no manual had ever advised listeners on how to recognize those sections of an oration. A fundamental premise of rhetoric is that it should not call attention to itself in practice. A listener whose attention is drawn toward structure (“Aha! And now begins the narratio. . . . That was a brilliant refutatio. . . . The peroratio must be coming any moment now,” and so on) is necessarily distracted from the subject at hand. And if, from the listener’s perspective, form trumps content, then the orator has failed to achieve his goal. Yet this is precisely the model Forkel advocates for successful listening if the object is a work of music: We must attend to a work’s structural outlines in order to grasp it adequately.
How to Judge a Work of Music Forkel’s lectures culminate in his survey of musical criticism, which he equates with the faculty of judgment. Criticism addresses such qualities as beauty and the “inner charac ter” of a given work. He organizes his account around five broad points: (p. 151)
I. The innere Charakter (inner character) of the various keys. Each of the ancient Greek modes embodied a particular ethos, as do (to a more limited extent) the mod ern scales in major and minor. 20 II. The inner character of the various musical Schreibarten (styles), manifested in the kinds of character and thoughts that predominate in any given work. Forkel identi fies (and extols) a variety of styles, beginning with das Unerwartete (the unexpect ed): those who enjoy only works that proceed entirely as expected belong to a “very low class” of auditors. He also praises das Sonderbare (the extraordinary) and com positions that exhibit Laune (humor) in the eighteenth-century sense of the term. He lauds works that evoke a sense of das Wunderbare (wonder) and cites as an example of this C. P. E. Bach’s celebrated Heilig, H. 778, for soloist and double choir.21 The great and sublime are qualities that require a developed sense of Einbildungskraft (imagination) to be grasped. Das Angenehme (the agreeable), das Anmuthige (the graceful), and das Reizende (the pleasing) are less demanding but no less worthy. Page 6 of 18
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Turning Liebhaber into Kenner: Forkel’s Lectures on the Art of Listening, ca. 1780–1785 Forkel is especially impressed with music that incorporates Witz (wit), the connec tion of two seemingly unrelated ideas; for listeners, such works require an exception al Anstrengung der Kräfte (exertion of capacities).22 He goes on to identify five desir able qualities of any style: 1. Kürze der Gedanken (an economy of thought) that avoids the superfluous. 2. Ein gewisser Reichthum an Gedanken (a certain richness of thoughts) and a variety of expression. Physical greatness (in the guise of large forces) is not to be confused with metaphysical greatness (the sum of a work’s inner forces and their cumulative effect). 3. Lebhaftigkeit im Ausdrucke (a liveliness of expression), an inner “life and fire.” 4. Klare und natürliche Ausdrücke und Gedanken (clear and natural expressions and thoughts). 5. An ethical character that is good and beautiful, not bad or ugly. Music must arouse only those sentiments and affects whose experience is nützlich (beneficial) for the improvement of der sittlich gute Charakter (high moral char acter). III. The inner character of genres. Each genre establishes its own set of expecta tions, and composers should adhere to these without becoming overly predictable. IV. Musical taste. The tastes of different nations are shaped by their climate, form of government, and style of life. The tastes of different individuals, in turn, are shaped by their social status, style of life, inclinations, and temperament. V. Performance. The execution of any given piece of music. At this point, Forkel notes that because every musical dilettante wants to be a Richter (judge), one might easily be led to believe that nothing is easier to judge than music. Such verdicts, however, can be clouded by personal prejudices. Listeners often fail to devote the Aufmerksamkeit (attention) required to evaluate a work fairly. Judging a work of mu sic, moreover, requires the greatest degree of knowledge of the art: simply being able to sing or play an instrument does not make one qualified to judge. One must know the (p. 152) rules of the art, which are founded on good taste. In judging a work of music, one must weigh three factors, namely 1. the piece itself; 2. the performers of it; and 3. the listeners. Forkel concludes his lectures with a summary of the principal rules by which to judge a composition and its performance. In each instance, one should 1. Man höre ohne Vorurtheil und ohne Affekte (Listen without prejudice and without affectations). If a listener considers incidental factors—for example, whether the composer is an Italian, Frenchman, German, etc., whether he is the pupil of a great master or not, whether he has lived abroad or not, whether he is in the service of a
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Turning Liebhaber into Kenner: Forkel’s Lectures on the Art of Listening, ca. 1780–1785 great or minor lord, or in the service of none at all, whether he is young or old, etc.— then one’s judgment of a work can never be certain and correct. 2. Man urtheile bescheiden (Judge modestly). If one is not in a position to judge with insight the full range of musical matters, one should say merely that a work has pleased or has not pleased. Everyone has the right to do this. Anyone who says a piece is worthless, or that it is beautiful, must be in a position to justify his verdict. As this cannot be a simple matter for a dilettante, it is better to leave such judgments to those who truly understand music. 3. Man erforsche die Absicht eines Tonstücks (Consider the purpose of a musical work). The intent of musical works can vary quite widely, and each needs to be con sidered in relation to that specific intent and no other. 4. Man suche die Musikgattung zu erkennen, worunter ein Tonstück gehört (Try to recognize the genre to which a work belongs). A concerto does not do what an over ture does, and a fugue presents its expressions differently from an aria. 5. Man bemerke was für Wirkungen ein Tonstück auf eine ganze Versammlung macht (Observe the effect of the work on the entire audience). Are the majority of listeners moved by the work, have they listened attentively or not? 6. Man unterscheide den Nationalgeschmack (Discern the national taste). Every na tion has something in its music that pleases it more than the music of other nations. [This] must be taken into account, just as a fair judge would take into account mat ters of language, custom, style of life, etc. 7. Man unterscheide den Temperamentsgeschmack (Discern the temperament of taste). According to personal temperament, a composer might be especially suited to working in a particular genre or representing a particular passion. If this tempera ment happens not to coincide with that of the listener—say, someone more inclined to the fiery, lively, and brilliant—that listener should not therefore conclude that the composer has written a bad piece. There might be many another listener whose tem perament matches that of the composer and for whose heart these musical expres sions are therefore entirely compatible. (p. 153) 8. Man unterscheide in einem Tonstück die Ausführung von der Composition (Differentiate between the performance and composition of a musical work). A beau tiful piece can be ruined by a bad performance, and a composition full of errors can be elevated through a good performance. One must therefore be able to distinguish between the two and determine whether a piece is in fact good or bad. The location of a performance must also be taken into account. If one hears a work close-up today and from a distance tomorrow, it will sound different; a work for large orchestra per formed in a small space will lose many of its beautiful features. 9. Man urtheile weder über eine Composition noch über einen Ausführer entschei dend, wenn man sie erst einmal gehört hat (Refrain from passing decisive judgment on a work or on a performer if one has heard them only once). We might enjoy a piece today that we can barely tolerate on a later occasion, under different circum stances or in a different mood. Performers, in turn, can vary widely from day to day in their performances. And some performers have only a few pieces they can execute well. Page 8 of 18
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Turning Liebhaber into Kenner: Forkel’s Lectures on the Art of Listening, ca. 1780–1785 10. Man traue selten den Urtheilen praktischer Tonkünstler (Rely only rarely on the judgments of practical musicians). No practical musician is capable of judging surely because there is simply too much to take into account within the field of music. Some musicians praise only their own performances; others praise every performance by everyone in order to ingratiate themselves with others. 11. Consider the quality of a singer’s voice and technique. Is the voice good, pure, bright, and equal in quality from its lowest to highest range? Does the singer avoid common mistakes of tone production and know how to blend the chest voice with falsetto in such a way that one does not notice the transition from one to the other?23 12. Consider the nature and demands of an instrumental performer’s instrument. Different instruments place different demands on performers. Without knowing these, one can easily mistake the easy for the difficult and vice versa. In spite of the similarities among keyboard instruments, for example—clavichord, piano, organ— each must be approached in a different way. The differences among unrelated instru ments are even greater. This is the first systematic formulation of what would later be called “listening strate gies,” remarkable not only for its specificity but also for its generally prescriptive nature. The impersonal subjunctive form at the head of all but the last two points is the same used to this day in recipes (Man nehme . . .), and the similarity reflects Forkel’s concep tion of listening as an active process: a concert-goer actually does things while listening. Forkel’s recipe for listening sets a standard to which would-be Kenner could aspire. And it is a very high one, indeed: while everyone has a right to say whether or not a work has pleased, true judgment is reserved to those who have ascertained the work’s genre and function, listened to it on more than one occasion, are able to recognize its national style and the personal temperament of its composer, and are capable of distinguishing be tween the work itself and its realization in performance. These competencies (p. 154) are hallmarks of a broader effort on the part of the educated German-speaking public to ele vate itself and improve its capacities of judgment in all the arts, not only in music.24 The list is equally remarkable for what it does not include. Forkel says nothing about music’s meaning or emotional effect. Like many of his contemporaries, Forkel called mu sic the “language of the heart,” yet his inventory of listening techniques tilts decidedly to ward the rational and the objective. Nor does he distinguish in any way between listening to instrumental or vocal music; a sung text may or may not be present in any given work, but that does not change the basic ways in which we should listen.
Forkel’s Legacy It is difficult to evaluate the direct success of Forkel’s efforts to educate a broader public systematically in the art of listening. Johann Friedrich Reichardt’s review of Ueber die Theorie der Musik in the prestigious Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek took Forkel to task for outlining a series of topics too advanced for those who know nothing of music and too limited for those who do. Indeed, Reichardt remained unconvinced of both the utility and Page 9 of 18
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Turning Liebhaber into Kenner: Forkel’s Lectures on the Art of Listening, ca. 1780–1785 feasibility of Forkel’s entire enterprise. To his mind, there is an inevitable limit to every individual’s inborn musicality, and this limit can be extended by learning only if one’s course of education engages with the technical aspects of the art in a rigorous and sus tained manner. Reichardt valued the dilettante’s naïve and natural response to music pre cisely because it is naïve and natural. The kind of learning outlined in Ueber die Theorie der Musik, he argued, was worse than no learning at all, for it would rob the dilettante of his spontaneity without providing him the rigorous grounding in the technical aspects of music that would bring true understanding. To Reichardt’s way of thinking, such listeners would be better served by reading about the history and aesthetics of music.25 This resis tance to the conscious cultivation of listening skills is an attitude that would continue into the nineteenth century. Richard Wagner, for one, preferred listeners who came to music without the sorts of prejudices attendant to learning, or “durch Mitleid wissend,” one might well say: innocent and yet at the same time wise through the unmediated experi ence of the work at hand.26 Forkel’s plea for open-mindedness nevertheless raises one of the paradoxes of turning Liebhaber into Kenner: the very act of internalizing a set of pre scriptive listening techniques necessarily creates a framework by which new works are to be judged, a Vorurteil (pre-judgment) that shapes all subsequent listening experiences. In any event, Forkel’s efforts to educate the music-consuming public had no immediate model and no immediate imitators.27 More than a decade later, Charles Burney lamented the lack of any such guide for amateur music lovers in his “Essay on Musical Criti cism” (1789), noting that there have been many treatises published on the art of musical composition and performance, but none to instruct ignorant lovers of Music how to listen, or to judge for (p. 155) themselves. So various are musical styles, that it requires not on ly extensive knowledge, and long experience, but a liberal, enlarged, and candid mind, to discriminate and allow to each its due praise.28 Burney’s complaint sounds very much like Forkel’s own stated purpose.29 Burney goes so far as to propose a response to what he called Fontenelle’s “famous question,” putting these words into the mouth of the interrogated sonata: “I would have you listen with at tention and delight to the ingenuity of the composition, the neatness of the execution, sweetness of the melody, and the richness of the harmony, as well as to the charms of re fined tones, lengthened and polished into passion.”30 But these are ends, not means; Bur ney gives no specific advice on how to recognize the “ingenuity of the composition.” And in spite of a long tradition of public lectures on music in Britain, nothing comparable to Forkel’s Ueber die Theorie der Musik would appear in print either there or on the conti nent for several decades to come.31 Only in the second quarter of the nineteenth century did “how-to-listen” books begin to proliferate. The signal publication of this kind was François-Joseph Fétis’s La musique mise à la portée de tout le monde, exposé succinct de tout ce qui est nécessaire pour juger de cet art, et pour en parler, sans l’avoir étudié (1830), a wildly successful book that went through two later editions (in 1834 and 1847), appeared in a handful of pirated editions, and was translated into German (1830), Russ ian (1833), Spanish (1840), English (twice, in 1842 and 1846), and Italian (1858).32 Page 10 of 18
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Turning Liebhaber into Kenner: Forkel’s Lectures on the Art of Listening, ca. 1780–1785 Perhaps the success of this book encouraged William Crotch to publish in 1831 a digest of the lectures he had been giving in Oxford and London since 1798.33 The growing number and size of public concerts, along with the increasing complexity and individuality of new works being presented at those concerts, ensured the ongoing need for publications that could help answer Fontenelle’s enduring question, which by the early nineteenth century was being read rather differently. As Castil-Blaze put it in his Dictionnaire de musique moderne of 1821, Fontenelle’s Sonate, que me veux-tu? which so many repeat for no reason . . . says nothing against the genre [of the sonata]. It demonstrates merely that either the sonata that provoked Fontenelle’s impatience was bad or that this able man of let ters was, like so many others, a barbarian in music.34 By the second decade of the nineteenth century, basic assumptions about listening to mu sic had changed in fundamental ways. Fontenelle, had he lived so long, would have had an answer to his question, though he probably would not have liked it. Music of all kinds —not just sonatas—now wanted a great deal from its listeners.
References Auhagen, Wolfgang. 1984. “‘Meine Herren! Die Sympathie der Töne . . .’: Johann Nikolaus Forkels musiktheoretische Vorlesungen für Liebhaber und Kenner.” Concerto: Das Maga zin für alte Musik 2:32–38. Bachmann, Christoph Ludwig. 1785. Entwurf zu Vorlesungen über die Theorie der Musik, in so fern sie Liebhabern derselben nothwendig und nützlich ist. Erlangen: n.p. Bloom, Peter. 1986. “François-Joseph Fétis: La musique mise à la portée de tout le monde.” 19th-Century Music 10:84–88. Bonds, Mark Evan. 1991. Wordless Rhetoric: Musical Form and the Metaphor of the Ora tion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bonds, Mark Evan. 2014. Absolute Music: The History of an Idea. New York: Oxford Uni versity Press. Burney, Charles. 1789. “Essay on Music Criticism.” In A General History of Music, from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period. London: [self-published]. Castil-Blaze [François-Henri-Joseph Blaze]. 1826. “Sonate.” In Dictionnaire de musique moderne. 2 vols. Paris: Au Magasin de musique de la Lyre modern. Copland, Aaron. 1939. What to Listen for in Music. New York: McGraw-Hill. Crotch, William. 1831. Substance of Several Courses of Lectures on Music, Read in the University of Oxford and in the Metropolis. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green.
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Turning Liebhaber into Kenner: Forkel’s Lectures on the Art of Listening, ca. 1780–1785 d’Alembert, Jean Le Rond. 1758. “De la liberté de la musique.” In Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, 1821–1822: Oeuvres. 5 vols. Paris: Belin. Edelhoff, Heinrich. 1935. Johann Nikolaus Forkel. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht. Fischer, Axel. 2000. “Johann Nikolaus Forkels ‘Akademische Winter-Concerte’ und das Göttinger Musikleben um 1800.” In Niedersachsen in der Musikgeschichte: Zur Method ologie und Organisation musikalischer Regionalgeschichtsforschung; Internationales Symposium Wolfenbüttel 1997, edited by Arnfried Edler and Joachim Kremer, 197–209. Augsburg: Wissner. Fischer, Axel. 2008. “Les ‘Akademische Winter-Concerte’ à Göttingen à la fin du XVIIIe siècle: Organisation, public, répertoire.” In Organisateurs et formes d’organisation du concert (p. 160) en Europe, 1700–1920, edited by Hans Erich Bödeker, Patrice Veit, and Michael Werner, 111–132. Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag. Forkel, Johann Nikolaus. 1777. Ueber die Theorie der Musik, insofern sie Liebhabern und Kennern nothwendig und nützlich ist: Eine Einladungsschrift zu musikalischen Vorlesun gen. Göttingen: Wittwe Vandenhöck. Forkel, Johann Nikolaus. 1779. Johann Nikolaus Forkels . . . Ankündigung seines akademischen Winter-Concerts von Michaelis 1779 bis Ostern 1780: Nebst einer Anzeige seiner damit in Beziehung stehenden Vorlesungen über die Theorie der Musik. Göttingen: Dieterich. Forkel, Johann Nikolaus. 1780. Genauere Bestimmung einiger musikalischer Begriffe zur Ankündigung des akademischen Winter-Concerts von Michaelis 1780 bis Ostern 1781. Göttingen: n.p. Fuhrimann, Daniel. 2005. “Herzohren für die Tonkunst”: Opern- und Konzertpublikum in der deutschen Literatur des langen 19. Jahrhunderts. Freiburg: Rombach. Gramit, David. 2002. Cultivating Music: The Aspirations, Interests, and Limits of German Musical Culture, 1770–1848. Berkeley: University of California Press. Grant, Kerry S. 1983. Dr. Burney as Critic and Historian of Music. Ann Arbor: UMI Re search Press. Hortschansky, Klaus. 1993. “Die Academia Georgia Augusta zu Göttingen als Stätte der Musikvermittlung in der 2. Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts.” In Akademie und Musik: Er scheinungsweisen und Wirkungen des Akademiegedankens in Kultur- und Musikgeschichte; Institutionen, Veranstaltungen, Schriften. Festschrift für Werner Braun zum 65. Geburtstag, edited by Wolf Frobenius, 233–254. Saarbrücken: Saarbrücker Druckerei und Verlag. Johnson, James H. 1995. Listening in Paris: A Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Page 12 of 18
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Turning Liebhaber into Kenner: Forkel’s Lectures on the Art of Listening, ca. 1780–1785 Kassler, Jamie Croy. 1979. The Science of Music in Britain: A Catalogue of Writings, Lec tures, and Inventions. 2 vols. New York: Garland. Kassler, Jamie Croy. 1985. “The Royal Institution Music Lectures, 1800–1831: A Prelimi nary Study.” Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle 19:1–28. Liebert, Andreas. 1993. Die Bedeutung des Wertesystems der Rhetorik für das deutsche Musikdenken im 18. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Maniates, Maria Rika. 1969. “‘Sonate, que me veux-tu?’ The Enigma of French Musical Aesthetics in the 18th Century.” Current Musicology 9:117–140. Morrow, Mary Sue. 1997. German Music Criticism in the Late Eighteenth Century: Aes thetic Issues in Instrumental Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [ Reichardt, Johann Friedrich]. N.d. Review of Ueber die Theorie der Musik by J. N. Forkel. In Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek 25–26 (1779–1780), Abteilung 5, 3019–3024. Reimer, Erich. 1974. “Kenner—Liebhaber—Dilettant.” In Handwörterbuch der musikalis chen Terminologie, edited by Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht. Wiesbaden: Steiner. Riley, Matthew. 2004. Musical Listening in the German Enlightenment: Attention, Wonder and Astonishment. Aldershot: Ashgate. Rochlitz, Friedrich. 1799. “Die Verschiedenheit der Urtheile über Werke der Tonkunst.” Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung 1:497–506. Rousseau, Jean Jacques. 1768. “Sonate.” In Dictionnaire de musique. Paris: Veuve Duch esne. Schütz, Gundula. 2007. Vor dem Richterstuhl der Kritik: Die Musik in Friedrich Nicolais “Allgemeiner deutscher Bibliothek,” 1765–1806. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Staehelin, Martin. 1987. “Musikalische Wissenschaft und musikalische Praxis bei Johann Nikolaus Forkel.” In Musikwissenschaft und Musikpflege an der Georg-AugustUniversität Göttingen: Beiträge zu ihrer Geschichte, edited by Martin Staehelin, 9–26. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht. (p. 161)
Thorau, Christian. 2003. Semantisierte Sinnlichkeit: Studien zu Rezeption und Zeichen struktur der Leitmotivtechnik Richard Wagners. Stuttgart: Steiner. Trummer, Carl. 1856. Die Musik von Vormals und Jetzt, vom Diesseits und Jenseits. Frank furt am Main: H. L. Brönner. Weber, William. 1997. “Did People Listen in the 18th Century?” Early Music 25:678–691. Wiener, Oliver. 2009. Apolls musikalische Reisen: Zum Verhältnis von System, Text und Narration in Johann Nicolaus Forkels Allgemeiner Geschichte der Musik (1788–1801). Mainz: Are Editions. (p. 162) Page 13 of 18
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Turning Liebhaber into Kenner: Forkel’s Lectures on the Art of Listening, ca. 1780–1785
Notes: (1.) “Je n’oublierai jamais la saillie du célèbre Fontenelle, qui se trouvant excédé de ces éternelles Symphonies, s’écria tout haut dans un transport d’impatience: Sonate, que me veux-tu?” Rousseau, Jean Jacques. 1768. “Sonate.” In Dictionnaire de musique. Paris: Veuve Duchesne, 452. The story was first reported, less colorfully, by d’Alembert, Jean Le Rond. 1758. “De la liberté de la musique.” In Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, 1821–1822: Oeu vres. 5 vols. Paris: Belin, 1:544. For further commentary on these two texts, see Bonds, Mark Evan. 2014. Absolute Music: The History of an Idea. New York: Oxford University Press, 74–77. The date of Fontenelle’s outburst is unknown: he died a month short of his hundredth birthday in 1757. (2.) On this tradition in France, see Maniates, Maria Rika. 1969. “‘Sonate, que me veuxtu?’ The Enigma of French Musical Aesthetics in the 18th Century.” Current Musicology 9:117–140. On Germany, see Morrow, Mary Sue. 1997. German Music Criticism in the Late Eighteenth Century: Aesthetic Issues in Instrumental Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 4–18, see also n. 34. (3.) For an excellent account of the rise of attentive listening in the eighteenth century, see Riley, Matthew. 2004. Musical Listening in the German Enlightenment: Attention, Wonder and Astonishment. Aldershot: Ashgate. (4.) For a review of the evidence, both visual and verbal, see Weber, William. 1997. “Did People Listen in the 18th Century?” Early Music 25:678–691. See also Johnson, James H. 1995. Listening in Paris: A Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press. (5.) Copland, Aaron. 1939. What to Listen for in Music. New York: McGraw-Hill. (6.) On the long-standing dichotomy of Kenner and Liebhaber, see Reimer, Erich. 1974. “Kenner—Liebhaber—Dilettant.” In Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie, edited by Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht. Wiesbaden: Steiner. (7.) “Eine Theorie nach diesem Plan dem Liebhaber ordentlich und faßlich vorgetragen,— mit den dazu gehörigen praktischen Beyspielen und Beweisen begleitet und erläutert, muß ihn unstreitig in den Stand setzen, musikalische Kunstwerke mit Sicherheit und Zu verlässigkeit prüfen und beurtheilen zu können.” Forkel, Johann Nikolaus. 1777. Ueber die Theorie der Musik, insofern sie Liebhabern und Kennern nothwendig und nützlich ist: Eine Einladungsschrift zu musikalischen Vorlesungen. Göttingen: Wittwe Vandenhöck, 10. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are the author’s. (8.) On musical life in Göttingen in the second half of the eighteenth century, see Staehe lin, Martin. 1987. “Musikalische Wissenschaft und musikalische Praxis bei Johann Niko laus Forkel.” In Musikwissenschaft und Musikpflege an der Georg-August-Universität Göt tingen: Beiträge zu ihrer Geschichte, edited by Martin Staehelin, 9–26. Göttingen: Van denhoeck und Ruprecht; Hortschansky, Klaus. 1993. “Die Academia Georgia Augusta zu Göttingen als Stätte der Musikvermittlung in der 2. Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts.” In Akademie und Musik: Erscheinungsweisen und Wirkungen des Akademiegedankens in Page 14 of 18
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Turning Liebhaber into Kenner: Forkel’s Lectures on the Art of Listening, ca. 1780–1785 Kultur- und Musikgeschichte; Institutionen, Veranstaltungen, Schriften. Festschrift für Werner Braun zum 65. Geburtstag, edited by Wolf Frobenius, 233–254. Saarbrücken: Saarbrücker Druckerei und Verlag; Fischer, Axel. 2000. “Johann Nikolaus Forkels ‘Akademische Winter-Concerte’ und das Göttinger Musikleben um 1800.” In Niedersach sen in der Musikgeschichte: Zur Methodologie und Organisation musikalischer Region algeschichtsforschung; Internationales Symposium Wolfenbüttel 1997, edited by Arnfried Edler and Joachim Kremer, 197–209. Augsburg: Wissner; and Fischer, Axel. 2008. “Les ‘Akademische Winter-Concerte’ à Göttingen à la fin du XVIIIe siècle: Organisation, public, répertoire.” In Organisateurs et formes d’organisation du concert en Europe, 1700–1920, edited by Hans Erich Bödeker, Patrice Veit, and Michael Werner, 111–132. Berlin: Berlin er Wissenschafts-Verlag. (9.) See Forkel, Johann Nikolaus. 1779. Johann Nikolaus Forkels . . . Ankündigung seines akademischen Winter-Concerts von Michaelis 1779 bis Ostern 1780: Nebst einer Anzeige seiner damit in Beziehung stehenden Vorlesungen über die Theorie der Musik. Göttingen: Dieterich; and Forkel, Johann Nikolaus. 1780. Genauere Bestimmung einiger musikalisch er Begriffe zur Ankündigung des akademischen Winter-Concerts von Michaelis 1780 bis Ostern 1781. Göttingen: n.p. (10.) See Trummer, Carl. 1856. Die Musik von Vormals und Jetzt, vom Diesseits und Jen seits. Frankfurt am Main: H. L. Brönner, 108–109. (11.) The manuscript is listed as item 140a in Liepmannssohn’s Catalogue 234 (“Musiklit eratur”) and is described as being “apparently” in Forkel’s hand, though it is not. I am grateful to Sarah Adams (Harvard University), Philip Vandermeer (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Daniel Zager (Sibley Library, Eastman School of Music), and es pecially Susan Clermont, senior music specialist in the Music Division at the Library of Congress, for helping me locate a copy of this catalogue in the Library of Congress. (12.) The Sibley exemplar is available in its entirety in digitized form at https:// urresearch.rochester.edu/institutionalPublicationPublicView.action? institutionalItemId=13617&versionNumber=1 (accessed February 3, 2016). All citations in this essay to the Commentar are to the Sibley manuscript. A facsimile of the opening page of the Hamburg manuscript is reproduced in Auhagen, Wolfgang. 1984. “‘Meine Herren! Die Sympathie der Töne . . .’: Johann Nikolaus Forkels musiktheoretische Vor lesungen für Liebhaber und Kenner.” Concerto: Das Magazin für alte Musik 2:32–38. A third, much shorter manuscript of lectures, titled Vorlesungen über die Theorie der Musik, gehalten im Winter-Halbjahr 1772, also from Trummer’s estate and at one time in the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg, is described in general terms in Edel hoff, Heinrich. 1935. Johann Nikolaus Forkel. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht. This manuscript has been missing since 1945. (13.) “Mit nicht weniger Kraft und Billigkeit machen aber auch auf der andern Seite die schönen Künste und Wissenschaften an Sie [Forkel’s audience] ihre Gegenforderungen. Sie wollen gleichsam die Last so vieler und so großer Verbindlichkeiten, als ihnen gemeiniglich ihre Freunde auferlegen, nicht allein tragen; sie legen ihnen vielmehr Page 15 of 18
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Turning Liebhaber into Kenner: Forkel’s Lectures on the Art of Listening, ca. 1780–1785 gegenseitige Verbindlichkeiten auf, und wollen durchaus nicht, daß die gegenseitigen Forderungen anders als bedingungsweise erfüllt werden sollen.” Forkel, Johann Nikolaus. [ca. 1780–1785]. Commentar, fols. 1–1v. (14.) “Sie müssen mit einem Worte wissen, was der Natur einem jeden insbesondere angemessen ist, und was sie, eben dieser ihrer Natur zufolge, möglicherweise leisten oder nicht leisten können.” Forkel [ca. 1780–1785]: fols. 2v–3. (15.) “Man zeichnet und malt, man singt und spielt, man ließt Gedichte, weint sich leicht selbst ein wenig, und glaubt sich dadurch am sichersten den Weg zum wahren Genuß und Urtheil von diesen Künsten zu bahnen.” Forkel [ca. 1780–1785]: fol. 2. (16.) “Der lang gewohnte schwache Schein einer dunklen Lampe macht uns unfähig, das helle Sonnenlicht zu ertragen. Wir messen nach immer zu kleinem Maasstabe, und halten alles, was die Größte desselben übersteigt, für Ungeheuer. Wir begnügen uns mit dem geringen Grade unserer Kunstkenntniß . . . und schränken uns dergestalt auf unsere en gen Kreiß ein, daß wir darüber, alles was wirklich groß und erhaben in den schönen Kün sten . . . ist, aus den Augen verlieren.” Forkel [ca. 1780–1785]: fol. 2v. (17.) Forkel [ca. 1780–1785]: fols. 3–3v, 4. (18.) Forkel [ca. 1780–1785]: fols. 148v–150. Forkel made similar arguments in later pub lications as well; see Bonds, Mark Evan. 1991. Wordless Rhetoric: Musical Form and the Metaphor of the Oration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 120–126, and Liebert, Andreas.1993. Die Bedeutung des Wertesystems der Rhetorik für das deutsche Musikdenken im 18. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 251–313. (19.) On Mattheson’s rhetorical imagery, see Bonds (1991): 82–90. (20.) Forkel [ca. 1780–1785]: fols. 156–159v. (21.) Forkel was among those who subscribed to this work when it was first published (Hamburg: Author, 1779). (22.) Forkel [ca. 1780–1785]: fols. 160v–163. This and the remaining portion of Forkel’s account of musical rhetoric are transcribed in Liebert (1993): 303–313, which transmits the contents of the Hamburg exemplar of the Commentar, a source that differs, as noted, in no significant way from the text of the Sibley exemplar. (23.) Unlike points 1–10, points 11 and 12 do not begin with a summary instruction. (24.) On music’s place in the bourgeois ideology of Bildung, see Gramit, David. 2002. Cul tivating Music: The Aspirations, Interests, and Limits of German Musical Culture, 1770– 1848. Berkeley: University of California Press. (25.) ([) Reichardt, Johann Friedrich]. Review of Ueber die Theorie der Musik by J. N. Forkel. In Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek 25–26 (1779–1780), Abteilung 5, 3019–3024. The review, signed “Sk.,” is ascribed to Reichardt in Schütz, Gundula. 2007. Vor dem Page 16 of 18
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Turning Liebhaber into Kenner: Forkel’s Lectures on the Art of Listening, ca. 1780–1785 Richterstuhl der Kritik: Die Musik in Friedrich Nicolais “Allgemeiner deutscher Biblio thek,” 1765–1806. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 307. Such attitudes are also evident in Rochlitz, Friedrich. 1799. “Die Verschiedenheit der Urtheile über Werke der Tonkunst.” Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 1:497–506, and in other nineteenth-century writings surveyed in Fuhrimann, Daniel. 2005. “Herzohren für die Tonkunst”: Opern- und Konzertpublikum in der deutschen Literatur des langen 19. Jahrhunderts. Freiburg: Rombach. (26.) See Thorau, Christian. 2003. Semantisierte Sinnlichkeit: Studien zu Rezeption und Zeichenstruktur der Leitmotivtechnik Richard Wagners. Stuttgart: Steiner, 258–261; Wag ner, Parsifal, act 1. (27.) Bachmann, Christoph Ludwig. 1785. Entwurf zu Vorlesungen über die Theorie der Musik, in so fern sie Liebhabern derselben nothwendig und nützlich ist. Erlangen: n.p. is an obscure and curious exception, for all practical purposes a condensation of Forkel’s Ueber die Theorie der Musik. Bachmann (1763–1813), a medical student in Erlangen at the time, openly acknowledges his wholesale and often word-for-word borrowing from the earlier treatise. (28.) Burney, Charles. 1789. “Essay on Music Criticism.” In A General History of Music, from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period. London: [self-published], 3:vi. (29.) Indeed, by pointedly ignoring Forkel’s Ueber die Theorie der Musik—a treatise he would surely have known, given his knowledge of the musical scene in Germany—Burney may well have been exercising a subtle form of revenge, for we know that he was deeply upset by the plagiarisms of his own General History of Music in Forkel’s Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik, the first volume of which had been published the previous year. See Grant, Kerry S. 1983. Dr. Burney as Critic and Historian of Music. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 88, 290–293, and Wiener, Oliver. 2009. Apolls musikalische Reisen: Zum Verhältnis von System, Text und Narration in Johann Nicolaus Forkels Allgemeiner Geschichte der Musik (1788–1801). Mainz: Are Editions, 223–252. (30.) Burney (1789): xi. (31.) See Kassler, Jamie Croy. 1979. The Science of Music in Britain: A Catalogue of Writ ings, Lectures, and Inventions. 2 vols. New York: Garland; Kassler, Jamie Croy. 1985. “The Royal Institution Music Lectures, 1800–1831: A Preliminary Study.” Royal Musical Associ ation Research Chronicle 19:1–28. (32.) See Bloom, Peter. 1986. “François-Joseph Fétis: La musique mise à la portée de tout le monde.” 19th-Century Music 10:84–88. (33.) Crotch, William. 1831. Substance of Several Courses of Lectures on Music, Read in the University of Oxford and in the Metropolis. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green. Crotch’s lectures are summarized in Kassler (1979): 1:238–244. I am grateful to Tim Carter for pointing out to me the tradition of public lectures on music at such insti tutions as Gresham College and the Royal Institution. Page 17 of 18
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Turning Liebhaber into Kenner: Forkel’s Lectures on the Art of Listening, ca. 1780–1785 (34.) “Le mot de Fontenelle, Sonate, que me veux-tu? que tant de gens répètent sans rai son . . . ne prouve rien contre le genre; il prouve seulement que la sonate qui exita l’impatience de Fontenelle était mauvaise, ou que cet habile littérateur était, comme tant d’autres, un barbare en musique.” Castil-Blaze [François-Henri-Joseph Blaze]. 1826. “Sonate.” In Dictionnaire de musique moderne. 2 vols. Paris: Au Magasin de musique de la Lyre modern, 2:272.
Mark Evan Bonds
Mark Evan Bonds, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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Designated Attention: The Transformation of Music Announcements in Leipzig’s Concert Life, 1781–1850
Designated Attention: The Transformation of Music An nouncements in Leipzig’s Concert Life, 1781–1850 Anselma Lanzendörfer The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries Edited by Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer Print Publication Date: Jan 2019 Subject: Music, Musicology and Music History Online Publication Date: Nov 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190466961.013.11
Abstract and Keywords During the nineteenth century, new ideas about how to listen to music were developed. This chapter analyzes concert programs from the Leipzig Gewandhaus from the late eigh teenth century through the mid-nineteenth. It looks at one aspect that has been largely ignored: the actual form that the announcements of music in concert programs took. Des ignations of musical pieces began to provide more and more information, specifying de tails such as composers’ name, key, running number, tempo and mood markings, and pro grammatic titles. This development was asynchronous and uneven, encompassing some composers and genres much earlier and more thoroughly than others. This chapter ar gues that the designations of works of music in concert programs—for a long time the medium closest to the actual listening experience—can be studied as an important factor that shaped (and shapes) music perception (e.g., the prestige effect of “the Ninth” and aesthetic hierarchies). Keywords: aesthetic hierarchies, Beethoven’s symphonies, concert programs, Gewandhaus Leipzig, musical desig nations, musical titles, prestige effect
MUSIC psychological research suggests that there really is no such thing as “pure listen ing,” not even in the field of classical music, where the ideal of undistracted listeners con centrating solely on the music developed during the nineteenth century. In fact, whenever people listen to music, their perception is influenced by all kinds of outside factors. As a recent study has shown, even professional musicians rely more on visual than on auditory information when rating the performance of classical music.1 When it comes to the musi cal work itself, prestige suggestions such as the identity of the composer have been shown to influence the aesthetic value ascribed while listening.2 The studies concerning this phenomenon date back only to the 1970s,3 but, of course, this does not mean that in earlier eras listeners’ assumptions about and reactions to musical works were not influ enced by outside factors. Quite to the contrary, there is evidence suggesting that the identity of the composer and the associated prestige were closely linked with the aesthet ic reception of singular works in earlier periods of music history. As Katelijne Schiltz has shown on the basis of Gioseffo Zarlino’s writings, in the Renaissance the question of pres Page 1 of 24
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Designated Attention: The Transformation of Music Announcements in Leipzig’s Concert Life, 1781–1850 tige transfer not only existed but was already discussed critically.4 Overall, however, the findings of music psychology mentioned above have hardly been historicized, even though the question of the influence of contextual factors such as prestige suggestions is a sub stantial aspect of the history of music listening. This question seems to be especially promising against the background of the early nineteenth century, when many new nor mative ideas about how concert-goers should listen to music developed. Recent musico logical and historical research has shown the interdependence of these ideas with new musical practices such as changing concert repertoires and the establishment of a canon of musical works, new concert halls focusing the audience’s attention toward a stage, the concert audience’s (gradually) falling silent, and the introduction of analytical notes to concert programs, to name just a few. One factor intimately involved in the process of listening, however, has been largely ignored: the actual form of the announcements of music in concert programs. When in 1881, one hundred years after the opening of the concert series at the Gewand haus in Leipzig, Alfred Dörffel wrote its first chronicle, he focused on identifying the pieces performed in the concerts over the course of their history. But for the years before 1810, in particular, this task proved to be extremely difficult. In explaining this problem, Dörffel pointed to the incomplete designations of instrumental music in concert programs before that time. Not until the nineteenth century did announcements of musical pieces begin to provide more information, specifying details such as composers’ names, keys, running numbers (“Symphony no. 9”), and tempo and mood markings. By Dörffel’s time, as today, concert programs contained the final product of this development: a complete designation of the individual work. But it wasn’t until the beginning of the nineteenth century that such certainty seems to have been necessary; in Dörffel’s words, “One just didn’t set importance to knowing particulars. Later, this changed.”5 Dörffel’s (unsatisfied) expectations—that the Gewandhaus had provided clear identification of individual works —were very much those of his time and suggest the importance of this development. Yet one must also take into account the effects that these designations may have had on lis teners.6 In what follows I take a closer look at how exactly “this changed,” that is, how formal music designations in concert programs developed and what the consequences may have been for concert-goers. By analyzing the announcement of symphonies in the programs of subscription concerts at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig from 1781 to 1850, I ex plore how the particular forms of announcements and their development can be under stood as factors that shaped and changed the way those pieces were heard. (p. 164)
Until now, concert programs have mostly been analyzed in order to answer questions re lating to changing concert repertoires and canonical developments.7 The more or less ex plicit aesthetic implications of and explanations for these canonical developments have been analyzed by looking at how people wrote about them.8 I suggest that the question of how music was designated in concert programs is a missing link between those two ap proaches: Music designations are not merely symbolic representations of the actual mu sic, enabling us to identify what was performed when, as well as how repertoires changed. Despite their shortness, they are also texts about music that often were read by the audience while listening to that music’s performance and at the same time part of a Page 2 of 24
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Designated Attention: The Transformation of Music Announcements in Leipzig’s Concert Life, 1781–1850 musical discourse that they both reflect and advance. The analysis of the formal develop ment of announcements in concert programs will show that it was asynchronous and un even, encompassing the works of some composers much earlier and more thoroughly than others. I will therefore argue that the augmented designations had the potential to shape the way concert-goers perceived pieces and composers through the implicit aes thetic ideas about “higher” and “lower” music. At the same time, the analysis will show a tendency toward a more and more specific and detailed designation, which may also have enabled an intensified listening experience.
The Concert Programs of the Leipzig Gewandhaus (p. 165)
The Gewandhaus subscription series, which had been preceded by the Große Concert, founded in 1743, and the Musikübende Gesellschaft, founded in 1775, started in 1781 at the initiative of a so-called concert directory whose members were responsible for the or ganization and funding of the concerts.9 From the beginning, printed programs were dis tributed to the audience. A notice published by the concert directory shortly before the opening of the new series shows the great importance ascribed to these programs. Poten tial concert-goers were not only informed about when, where, and by whom the concerts were going to be played and how they could acquire tickets, but they also learned the ex act details pertaining to the printed programs: “Announcement of the future organization of the concert in Leipzig . . . §. 10. The printed concert programs cost one thaler, eight groschen for the whole year, and are delivered home the day before the concert.”10 This procedure is rather remarkable given that concert-goers had already paid their subscrip tion one year in advance.11 From a financial point of view there was no immediate need for the concert directory to advertise each individual concert.12 Rather, those who had al ready signed up for the concert series were informed about what they were going to lis ten to. As mentioned above, these early programs did not yet contain specific information about pieces, but even this limited amount of detail (usually the genre and the composer’s or soloist’s name) may well have been able to raise expectations and therefore initiate some kind of mental preparation. This idea of preparation was later spelled out by the French violinist Pierre Baillot (1771–1842) in his famous L’art du violon. In this violin method, published in 1834 and translated into German and English shortly thereafter, he dedicated an entire section to the concert program and its influence on the audience, stating: “It doesn’t suffice that the artist be prepared for the audience; the audience also has to be prepared for what one will make it hear.”13 Baillot’s further explanations show that, to him, this preparation primarily consisted exactly of specific designations I will lat er discuss (i.e. key, programmatic titles, tempo markings etc.).14 The practice of delivering the concert programs in advance to subscribers was main tained until the 1850s.15 It seems to have been abandoned in 1855 along with the person al subscription; with the season’s tickets now being transferable, personal delivery of the programs may simply have been considered impractical. From this point on, the pro Page 3 of 24
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Designated Attention: The Transformation of Music Announcements in Leipzig’s Concert Life, 1781–1850 grams were no longer mentioned in the annual invitations to the concert series, which suggests that they were now distributed to all concert-goers at the venue.16 In addition to the form of distribution, the question of authorship is vital when it comes to analyzing concert programs. Who was responsible for designing them? From 1785 until the middle of the nineteenth century, this task fell mainly to music directors, starting with Johann Gottfried Schicht (1785–1810) and Johann Philipp Christian Schulz (1810–1827).17 Dörffel does not mention writing the concert programs as one (p. 166) of the duties of the next director, Christian August Pohlenz (1827–1835),18 but one can assume that he also performed this task. When the concert directory appointed Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy as the new music director, he took over the drafting and the corrections of the programs “wie bisher” (as before).19 In a letter to Clara Schumann about her next appearance as pi anist at a Gewandhaus concert in 1843, Mendelssohn even described himself as a “Concertprogrammenfabricant” (concert-program manufacturer).20 A letter from the fol lowing day shows that this peculiar, probably ironic term not only described his making of concert programs in the sense of putting together the repertoire list; the task of having that repertoire printed was just as important: I have now sent the program to the printer in this form; but if it should be possible for you to choose a different Lied instead of mine, you would do me a favor. . . . [E]specially in a concert where I take up the entire second part, I would rather not be mentioned with a composition in the first part. If it is all the same to you, and you could think of a different piece instead of this one, I would change the pro gram in the corrections.21 Mendelssohn’s letter is not only telling as to his function as Concertprogrammenfabri cant; probably more important is his understanding of the impact of printed music desig nations on the audience’s perception. He does not express concern about having too many of his works performed at one concert;22 what really worries him is being “erwäh nt,” or mentioned, too often in the concert program and the potentially negative impres sion this might have on concert-goers. These circumstances of authorship and distribu tion suggest a special awareness of the importance of printed concert programs and must be kept in mind when taking a closer look at their formal development.23
Music Designations Before 1800 From the beginning of the concert series, symphonies were regularly performed. But as mentioned above, the identity of these pieces remains unclear in most cases owing to the limited information in the designations.24 The only detail concert-goers were informed about regularly besides the genre was the name of the composer: “Symphony, by Haydn” was the usual way symphonies were announced during the first twenty-five years of the concert series’s existence.25 Even at this early stage, however, sporadic attempts to de scribe pieces more clearly can be noted. The program for December 26, 1781, featured a “Sinfonie für zwey Orchester, von J. C. Bach” (Symphony for two orchestras by J. C. Bach), and in the following years this announcement was repeated several times.26 On February Page 4 of 24
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Designated Attention: The Transformation of Music Announcements in Leipzig’s Concert Life, 1781–1850 2, 1788, the program specified the instrumentation of a symphony by Stamitz as “mit Klarinetten” (with clarinets). Instrumentation thus was used to say more about a particu lar piece than the habitually used “symphony.” Apart from causing a certain sensation (two orchestras, not just one; a symphony that features the relatively new (p. 167) clar inet), these announcements may well have encouraged and enabled concert-goers to lis ten more attentively to (and look out for) certain aspects of the pieces; such details would later become regular elements of program notes (for instance, “notice the use of the clar inets in bar . . .”). The phrases “for two orchestras” and “with clarinets” are details that can be easily verified by listeners and that direct their aural as well as their visual atten tion to a particular aspect of the composition.
Key Special instrumentation continued to be widely used for commenting on vocal music until the middle of the nineteenth century.27 For instrumental music and particularly the sym phony, however, this kind of announcement was soon to be replaced by other distinguish ing marks that still form an integral part of today’s concert programs. On April 27, 1806, for the first time in the history of the Gewandhaus concerts, a piece was announced with its key: “Sinfonie, von Haydn (aus C dur)” (Symphony by Haydn [in C major]).28 Over the course of the following decades, more and more pieces were announced with their keys, most of them symphonies.29 On one hand, the key may have been used as the designation feature most easily avail able. The works by many composers had not yet been numbered, and generally accepted catalogs of works did not exist. On the other, it seems likely that the key itself was regard ed as valuable information for listeners. In the eighteenth century the characters of the various tonalities had been discussed in both France and Germany, and the reason Baillot gave for announcing pieces with their key in concert programs suggests that the idea that a particular character was expressed by a particular key still lingered on in the first half of the nineteenth century. He argued that “a great number of pieces could be designated by the key they have been composed in. Sometimes even this indication suffices to evoke the memory of a work and to arouse suddenly and as if by magic the sensations which it has created.”30 But in order to do so, the key must be indicated to the audience in writ ing. As Baillot suggested, it is not the talent of absolute pitch that enables the listener to revive former sensations; rather, it is a form of knowledge that is imparted by the an nouncement in the concert program.31 Both—the first, rather pragmatic explanation and the notion that the key was, indeed, indicated for its own sake—reveal a change in the lis tening attitude that starts to become apparent in those concert programs: The increasing interest in identifying the individual piece one heard and the related desire for more, and more precise, information.
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Designated Attention: The Transformation of Music Announcements in Leipzig’s Concert Life, 1781–1850
Running Number The next step in this development was taken in the 1819–20 season, when another desig nation feature that had so far only played a minor role in the Gewandhaus programs (p. 168) became important: the running number for pieces of a common genre within the œuvre of a composer. From 1781 until 1818, the running number had been mentioned on ly five times altogether in programs still available.32 Now, two symphonies by Ferdinand Ries, two by Alexander Feska, one by Anton Eberl, one by Andreas Romberg, and one by Beethoven were announced with their number, those of the latter two also with their key. Just as with the announcement of key a few years earlier, the proportion of symphonies announced with their number gradually increased. During the next twenty years or so, the number of a symphony was very often substituted for the key, especially for contem porary composers such as Ries, Johann Wenzel Kalliwoda, George Onslow, or Romberg. Symphonies were rarely announced with both their key and their number.33 The season of 1849–50 was the first in which more than half the symphonies (55 percent, to be exact) were announced with their key and number at the same time. By the beginning of the 1860s, this type of announcement was widely used; by the beginning of the 1890s, with very few exceptions, it had become standard. But what impact might the introduction of this new feature have had on the way concertgoers listened to the music? The running number has the advantage of identifying a piece exactly (once an order has been agreed on). Under certain circumstances, the running number may also help the audience remember and recognize a piece much more than would the key. Hanns-Werner Heister points to the great importance of names for musical pieces: “With a rather developed repertoire of which not everybody knows everything, the problem becomes more effectively noticeable that musical pieces without a name are im possible or at least harder to distinguish and to remember and can for their part become the topic of social communication.”34 For composers with a huge number of symphonies such as Haydn and Mozart, of course, the number may not be very helpful in this regard, and this might be one of the reasons why so many of their symphonies received charac teristic or other descriptive nicknames and why their symphonies were not announced with numbers for a very long time.35 But in the nineteenth century, when individual com posers wrote fewer symphonies, the running number seems to have been quite a useful designation that might have helped integrate newly heard pieces into one’s own “listen ing repertoire” and let them become the topic of communication. The fact that sym phonies with a characteristic title (for example, Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony or Haydn’s Military Symphony) were designated by their number much later than those with only a generic title supports the assumption that the number worked as a kind of substi tute to the obviously preferred programmatic title, taking over some of its functions. As Claude Dauphin suggests in his recent systematic approach to music titles, “[t]he enti tling of a work consists of giving it a symbolic identity that allows one to recognize it, to name it, to designate it among the myriad of artifacts by which the human civilizations are sprinkled.”36 “The Ninth” is probably the most impressive example of the substitute
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Designated Attention: The Transformation of Music Announcements in Leipzig’s Concert Life, 1781–1850 function that the running number developed for some symphonies during the nineteenth century,37 in some contexts making not only the genre but the composer’s name obsolete. (p. 169)
Movement Designations
In L’art du violon Pierre Baillot listed performance instructions initially aimed at musi cians as his first example of information that can be used to prepare the audience for the performance to come: “For this, the character of pieces can be indicated by the designa tion of their own movements, such as grave or serious . . . etc.”38 However, in the concert programs of the Gewandhaus, a strong preference for characteristic or programmatic names can also be observed when it comes to the announcement of single movements. Whereas non-programmatic movement headings were very rare until the middle of the nineteenth century,39 programmatic movement designations were indicated from the very beginning. Apart from symphonies such as Beethoven’s Pastorale, Spohr’s Weihe der Töne, Historische Sinfonie, and double symphony Irdisches und Göttliches im Menschen leben, and Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang, works like Beethoven’s incidental music for Goethe’s play Egmont or his Wellington’s Victory were announced with their movement headings, which guided listeners through the ideas or even the “action” of the work. Only from the 1850s on did non-programmatic movement headings such as tempo and mood markings start to be indicated more regularly, not only for symphonies but also for solo concertos, suites, and other genres,40 offering concert-goers a closer look “inside” in dividual pieces. Listeners were now also guided through non-programmatic pieces, and their attention was drawn to the different moods, tempos, and characters of each move ment.41
Canon and Prestige As suggested in the introduction, these changes in music designation cannot be explained solely as an attempt to supply listeners with valuable information, enabling them to follow concerts more attentively. There is a striking nonsimultaneity concerning the appearance of all designation features. At the beginning, each one only applied to a very narrow se lection of pieces, composers, and genres. A second look at the developments analyzed above suggests that this nonsimultaneity was not accidental but was strongly linked with the development of a classical performing canon.42 When first introduced, the announcement of the key concerned only a small variety of composers. From 1814 until 1819, thirty-one performances of symphonies were an nounced with their key: ten by Mozart, fifteen by Beethoven, and six by other composers (three by Anton Eberl, two by Andreas Romberg, and one by Peter von Winter).43 One might assume that these high numbers stem from the fact that despite the persistence of very miscellaneous programming,44 symphonies by Beethoven and Mozart were already being performed more often than those of other composers. Yet a closer look at the num ber of symphonies played by those composers shows that even if one takes into account the absolute number of symphonies performed—or, rather, (p. 170) announced—Beethoven Page 7 of 24
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Designated Attention: The Transformation of Music Announcements in Leipzig’s Concert Life, 1781–1850 and Mozart were strikingly overrepresented when it came to key announcements at the beginning of the nineteenth century.45 This started to change only after 1820, when the symphonies of a larger variety of composers including Spohr, Bernhard Romberg, and Ries began to be regularly announced with their key. Chart 7.1 illustrates this change by showing the percentage of symphonies announced with their key. One can see clearly that, at first, the announcement of the key affected symphonies by Beethoven and Mozart much more than those of other composers. During the 1816–17 and 1817–18 seasons, no symphony by Mozart had been announced with its key, but in 1820 all of them were, and this level lasted a long time. Those of other composers nar rowed the gap but never quite reached the percentages of Mozart or Beethoven. The sharp drop in key announcements for the category “other composers” after 1824 coin cides with the rise of running numbers, which initially—as mentioned above—were often used instead of rather than along with the key. Again, Beethoven’s symphonies differ no tably from those of his contemporaries, the running number being not a substitute but an addition to the key in most cases. As Chart 7.2 shows, his symphonies were announced with both their key and their number much earlier and more regularly than those of the others. Only at the end of the 1840s did the gap slowly begin to close.46
Chart 7.1. Percentage of symphonies announced along with their key in relation to the respective ab solute number of symphonies being performed
(p. 171)
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Designated Attention: The Transformation of Music Announcements in Leipzig’s Concert Life, 1781–1850
Chart 7.2. Percentage of symphonies announced with both their key and their running number in rela tion to the respective absolute number of sym phonies being performed
The Case of Beethoven In The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, Lydia Goehr describes Beethoven’s influ ence on the development of a musical work’s concept as paradigmatic: Ultimately, he changed and was believed to have changed so many things having to do with how musicians thought about composition, performance, and reception, that the subsequent Beethoven mania, or the Beethoven Myth as it has come to be called, is justified, if such a thing is ever justified, on much more than aesthetical grounds alone.47 Goehr shows how fundamental and all-embracing those changes were, extending as they did to such different topics as the social status of composers, the individualization of mu sical works, new copyright laws, composers’ influence on the publishing process, the dis solving of traditional compositional rules, scores that precisely defined tempo and instru mentation, the distinction between composers and performers, and all performance is sues that resulted from the ideal of Werktreue, to name just a few.48 Her examples show that this “Beethoven paradigm” was not only an abstract aesthetic ideal but also a prac tice encompassing all areas of musical life.49 Goehr also identifies new (p. 172) dedication and titling procedures among those new practices. Composers did not only start to choose the dedicatees of their works themselves; the same applie[d] to the way they took control of how their works were titled. Since 1800, works [were] titled in such a way as to indicate their status as inde pendent, self-sufficient works. Thus, some works [were] given titles indicating their status as completed, individuated works, inextricably connected to their
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Designated Attention: The Transformation of Music Announcements in Leipzig’s Concert Life, 1781–1850 composers, and devoted to purely musical matters. Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Opus 67 is an exemplary title.50 What Goehr misses in her extensive account of changing musical practices are music des ignations in concert programs. “Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Opus 67” might be exemplary for composers after 1800, but when it comes to the titles that actually reached a concert audience via the printed program, it was anything but usual for several decades to come. As the above charts and the following examples show, although Beethoven’s exceptional status was mirrored in concert programs in the first half of the nineteenth century, most other composers were treated quite differently. Only in the sec ond half of the century would music designations in the Gewandhaus programs slowly take the standardized and “complete” form. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, Beethoven’s symphonies had played an im portant role in the Gewandhaus concerts. The first performance of the Eroica had taken place in 1807, only two years after the Viennese premiere, and it had “had long-term con sequences for the subscription concerts” and their programming: “The scale of the sym phony . . . reshaped the miscellaneous concert program significantly. A new practice was established for granting a privileged place on a program to an unusually important work”—that of the only piece played after intermission.51 The important role of Beethoven’s Third Symphony—and, not much later, his subsequent symphonies—was re flected in the concert programs. Attentive concert-goers did not have to wait until the ac tual performance to learn that the Eroica was a significant masterwork that required spe cial attention; this fact was already signaled to them by the program, which they had re ceived a day in advance (see Figure 7.1). In its discussion of the premiere, the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung pointed emphati cally to the purpose and effect of this announcement: The audience had been made aware and as far as possible prepared to expect pre cisely what was offered to it, not merely by a special notice on the usual concert programs but also by a short characterization of every movement, primarily with attention to the emotional reaction intended by the composer. This purpose was reached completely.52 But not only the attempt to characterize the different movements, offering a miniature version of the program notes, is remarkable. The mere fact that they are announced at all at this early stage is quite exceptional, given how concert programs usually looked at (p. 173) that time. As mentioned above, movement designations for instrumental music were usually restricted to programmatic works. The only real exception was Beethoven.53 Until the end of the 1820s not only the Eroica but also his symphonies no. 5 to no. 9 re ceived the apparent honor of announcement with movement designations.54 This coin cides with another remarkable event: After the 1825–26 and 1826–27 seasons all nine symphonies were performed again in 1828–29, this time in their proper order, starting with the first and ending with the ninth. Not only was this order new, but so was the (p. 174) announcement: For the first time, all nine symphonies were designated with their Page 10 of 24
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Designated Attention: The Transformation of Music Announcements in Leipzig’s Concert Life, 1781–1850 number.55 The moment was probably no coincidence; just one year after Beethoven’s death, his symphonies were presented as a cycle of associated and serially numbered works to concert-goers. By means of the running numbers, the concert programs led the listener through the development of Beethoven’s symphonic style, culminating in the Ninth Symphony (see Figure 7.2).
Figure 7.1. Gewandhaus program, January 29, 1807. Gewandhaus, Druckschriften Nr. 326, Bl. 16. Courtesy of the Stadtarchiv Leipzig.
By comparing with another symphony announcement from the same season, one gets an idea what the above announcement might have told concert-goers apart from the facts listed on this program (see Figure 7.3). It seems possible that listeners already read in such announcements what they would be told explicitly later in the century in the program notes. Without spelling it out, the an nouncement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony suggests that it must be a very special and important work to be designated with such effort and precision. In comparison, the un numbered symphony of the (apparently not quite so unknown) Abt Vogler must be a rather unimportant work. Not only has it been placed at the beginning of the program, taking the former position of the overture and not the newly established position of the meaningful symphony that Weber describes, but the short and nonspecific announcement also suggests that the work does not require very much attention.56
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Designated Attention: The Transformation of Music Announcements in Leipzig’s Concert Life, 1781–1850
Concert Programs as Part of the Musical Dis course To deduce listening habits of past centuries from such formal sources as concert pro grams may at first glance seem daring: We do not have many contemporary accounts that tell us about a connection between music designation in concert programs and music re ception in the nineteenth century. What we do have, besides the huge corpus of concert programs, is the psychological research concerning various influences on music recep tion. Those findings, despite the distance in time, agree strikingly with the rare contem porary sources that are available.57 Considered jointly with the broader context of nine teenth-century musical life, they allow hypotheses about an interdependence between music designation in concert programs and music listening. Owing to the lack of contemporary sources, there is no direct evidence that concert-goers received those music designations in the way suggested and that it influenced the way they listened to the pieces concerned. Nonetheless, there are several reasons why (at least some of them) might have done so. As shown above, the asynchronous nature of changes in the announcements followed a certain pattern For every developing designa tion feature there were usually “pioneers” (certain pieces, composers, or genres) that form the very center of the classical performing canon. As emphasized above, concert programs contain written information about the music that is often received by the audi ence at the very moment of the performance. Later, program notes and concert guides (p. 175) would point the attention of listeners directly to the great masters.58 But even without such explicitness, one can assume that the extensive formal music designations analyzed above—far ahead of their time and repeatedly applied only to selected com posers and pieces—implied special prestige. During the nineteenth century, when canoni cal (p. 176) development was still in full swing, the impact of these implications was prob ably more momentous than can be observed today. They may not only have confirmed aesthetic assumptions but actually have shaped and enforced them.
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Designated Attention: The Transformation of Music Announcements in Leipzig’s Concert Life, 1781–1850
Figure 7.2. Gewandhaus program, April 2, 1829. Gewandhaus, Druckschriften Nr. 332, Bl. 127v. Courtesy of the Stadtarchiv Leipzig.
Figure 7.3. Gewandhaus program, January 22, 1829. Gewandhaus, Druckschriften Nr. 332, Bl. 105. Courtesy of the Stadtarchiv Leipzig.
It is once more Baillot who points to the power of music designations: “One has seen mas terworks producing no effect and passing disregarded because the audience (p. 177) had not at all been sufficiently informed. Similarly, one has witnessed the popularity of mediocre works because one has shown them to the public over the prism of imagina Page 13 of 24
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Designated Attention: The Transformation of Music Announcements in Leipzig’s Concert Life, 1781–1850 tion.”59 This quotation comes from the last section of his book, where he suggested that presenters “make the public attentive through some narrative or other discourse,” as François-Joseph Fétis did in his concerts historiques. Baillot, however, stressed that this third means of catching public attention is “not less effective” than the first—the reputa tion of the artist—and the second—a concert program that includes movement and key designations or programmatic titles.60 While making oral music announcements, at least in the field of classical music, remained an exception, music designations in concert pro grams are still a central feature of music listening in the classical concert. Such designa tions must therefore not only be studied as valuable information about developing reper toire but also as one of the many contextual factors that shaped (and indeed still shape) the reception of music.
Archives Stadtarchiv Leipzig
References Baillot, Pierre. 1835. L’art du violon: Nouvelle méthode. Mayence: Schott. Bashford, Christina. 2003. “Not just ‘G.’: Towards a History of the Programme Note.” In George Grove, Music and Victorian Culture, edited by Michael Musgrave, 115–142. Bas ingstoke: Macmillan. Bashford, Christina. 2007. The Pursuit of High Culture: John Ella and Chamber Music in Victorian Culture. Woodbridge: Boydell. Bernard, Yvonne, and Jean Chaguiboff. 1979. “L’œuvre d’art pictorale.” In Psychologie de l’art et de l’esthetique, edited by Robert Francès, 99–138. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Botstein, Leon. 1992. “Listening Through Reading: Musical Literacy and the Concert Au dience.” 19th-Century Music 16 (2): 129–145. Crozier, W. Ray, and Antony Chapman. 1981. “Aesthetic Preferences: Prestige and Social Class.” In Psychology and the Arts, edited by David O’Hare, 242–278. Brighton, UK: Har vester. Dauphin, Claude. 2008. “Poétique et sémiotique du titre musical.” Protée 36 (3): 11–22. De Bary, Helene. 1937. Geschichte der Museumsgesellschaft zu Frankfurt am Main. Frankfurt: Brönner. de la Motte-Haber, Helga. 1972a. “Der Einfluss psychologischer Variablen auf das äs thetische Urteil.” In Jahrbuch des Staatlichen Instituts für Musikforschung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, edited by Dagmar Droysen, 163–174. Kassel: Merseburger.
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Designated Attention: The Transformation of Music Announcements in Leipzig’s Concert Life, 1781–1850 de la Motte-Haber, Helga. 1972b. “Die Schwierigkeit, Trivialität in der Musik zu bestimmen.” In Das Triviale in Literatur, Musik und Bildender Kunst, edited by Helga de la Motte-Haber, 171–183. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. (p. 184)
de la Motte-Haber, Helga. 1984. Musikpsychologie. Laaber: Laaber-Verlag. Dörffel, Alfred. 1980. Die Gewandhausconcerte zu Leipzig, 1781–1881. Leipzig: Deutsch er Verlag für Musik. Erb-Szymanski, Markus. 2006. “Friedrich Rochlitz als Promoter Mozarts: Über die An fänge musikalischer Kanonbildung und Hagiographie.” Musiktheorie 21 (1): 13–26. Goehr, Lydia. 2007. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hagels, Bert. 2005. Konzerte in Leipzig, 1779/80–1847/48: Eine Statistik. Berlin: Ries & Erler, PDF on CD-Rom. Heister, Hanns-Werner. 1983. Das Konzert: Theorie einer Kulturform. 2 vols. Wil helmshaven: Heinrichshofen. Heister, Hanns-Werner. 1996. “Programmzettel und Pausenzeichen: Einige formale As pekte der Musik/Informations-Vermittlung.” In Musik befragt—Musik vermittelt: Peter Rummenhöller zum 60. Geburtstag, edited by Thomas Ott and Heinz von Loesch, 65–74. Augsburg: Wißner-Verlag. Jappe, Michael, and Dorothea Jappe. 1997. Viola d’amore: Bibliographie. Winterthur: Amadeus Verlag. Klassen, Janina. 2006. “Beethoven und etwas von Schumann: Zur Methodik der Reper toire- und Kanonforschung.” Musiktheorie 21 (1): 57–68. Krahe, Kristin R. M., Katrin Reyersbach, and Thomas Synofzik, eds. 2009. Schumann Briefedition. Serie 2. Band 1. Robert und Clara Schumann im Briefwechsel mit der Fami lie Mendelssohn. Cologne: Dohr. Lanzendörfer, Anselma. 2017. Name—Nummer—Titel. Ankündigungsformen im Konzert programm und bürgerliche Musikrezeption im 19. Jahrhundert. Hildesheim: Olms. Menninger, Margaret Eleanor. 2004. “The Serious Matter of True Joy: Music and Cultural Philanthropy in Leipzig, 1781–1933.” In Philanthropy, Patronage, and Civil Society: Expe riences from Germany, Great Britain, and North America, edited by Thomas Adam, 120– 137. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pieper, Antje. 2008. Music and the Making of Middle-Class Culture: A Comparative Histo ry of Nineteenth-Century Leipzig and Birmingham. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Reimer, Erich. 1986. “Repertoirebildung und Kanonisierung: Zur Vorgeschichte des Klas sikbegriffs (1800–1835).” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 43 (4): 241–260. Page 15 of 24
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Designated Attention: The Transformation of Music Announcements in Leipzig’s Concert Life, 1781–1850 Rittelmeyer, Christian. 1971. “Zur Auswirkung der Prestigesuggestion auf die Beurteilung der Neuen Musik.” Musik und Bildung 3 (2): 72–74. Rochlitz, Friedrich, ed. 1807. Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 31, col. 497. Schiltz, Katelijne. 2013. “‘Perché l’opera lauda la perfezion del auttore’: Die Macht der Namen aus der Perspektive Gioseffo Zarlinos.” In Der Kanon der Musik: Theorie und Geschichte; Ein Handbuch, edited by Klaus Pietschman and Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann, 790–803. Munich: Text und Kritik. Schmitt, Theo, and Anne Penesco. 1999. “Baillot, Pierre.” In Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 2nd ed., edited by Ludwig Finscher, Personenteil, vol. 2, cols. 20–22. Kassel: Bärenreiter. Seidel, Katrin. 1998. Carl Reinecke und das Leipziger Gewandhaus. Hamburg: von Bock el. Seidel, Wilhelm. 2006. “Musikalische Publizistik und Kanonbildung: Über Franz Brendels Entwurf einer neuen Musikkritik.” Musiktheorie 21 (1): 27–36. (p. 185)
Thorau, Christian. 2013. “Werk, Wissen und touristisches Hören: Popularisierende Kanon bildung in Programmheften und Konzertführern.” In Der Kanon der Musik: Theorie und Geschichte; Ein Handbuch, edited by Klaus Pietschmann and Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann, 535–561. Munich: Text und Kritik. Tsay, Chia-Jung. 2013. “Sight over Sound in the Judgement of Music Performance.” PNAS 110 (36): 14580–14585. Weber, William. 1997. “The History of Musical Canon.” In Rethinking Music, edited by Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist, 336–355. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weber, William. 2008. The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (p. 186)
Notes: (1.) See Tsay, Chia-Jung. 2013. “Sight over Sound in the Judgment of Music Performance.” PNAS 110 (36): 14580–14585. “People reliably select the actual winners of live music competitions based on silent video recordings, but neither musical novices nor profes sional musicians were able to identify the winners based on sound recordings or record ings with both video and sound.” Tsay (2013): 14580. (2.) In one study, musicologists with a PhD rated a piece by Schubert more “trivial” and “kitschy” when they believed it to be “Salonmusik.” See de la Motte-Haber, Helga. 1972b. “Die Schwierigkeit, Trivialität in der Musik zu bestimmen.” In Das Triviale in Literatur, Musik und Bildender Kunst, edited by Helga de la Motte-Haber, 171–183. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 178–180; de la Motte-Haber, Helga. 1972a. “Der Einfluss psychologis cher Variablen auf das ästhetische Urteil.” In Jahrbuch des Staatlichen Instituts für Page 16 of 24
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Designated Attention: The Transformation of Music Announcements in Leipzig’s Concert Life, 1781–1850 Musikforschung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, edited by Dagmar Droysen, 163–174. Kassel: Merseburger, 166. In another study, college lecturers in music education rated music samples taken from Pierre Boulez’s piano sonata no. 2 significantly more “bedeutungsvoll” (meaningful) and more “originell” (inventive) when they were told the composer’s name in advance (instead of playing the samples without information about the composer’s identity). See de la Motte-Haber (1972a): 166–167. See also Rittelmeyer, Christian. 1971. “Zur Auswirkung der Prestigesuggestion auf die Beurteilung der Neuen Musik.” Musik und Bildung 3 (2): 72–74. (3.) It is also known as “halo effect” and is, of course, not confined to music but also af fects literature and art. See de la Motte-Haber, Helga. 1984. Musikpsychologie. Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 79–80; Bernard, Yvonne, and Jean Chaguiboff. 1979. “L’œuvre d’art pic torale.” In Psychologie de l’art et de l’esthetique, edited by Robert Francès, 99–138. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 117–118. In 1981 Crozier and Chapman concluded in their summary of the current state of research that the influence of prestige suggestions needed to be examined in broader and more differentiated studies. See Crozier, W. Ray, and Antony Chapman. 1981. “Aesthetic Preferences: Prestige and Social Class.” In Psy chology and the Arts, edited by David O’Hare, 242–278. Brighton, UK: Harvester. (4.) See Schiltz, Katelijne. 2013. “‘Perché l’opera lauda la perfezion del auttore’: Die Macht der Namen aus der Perspektive Gioseffo Zarlinos.” In Der Kanon der Musik: Theo rie und Geschichte; Ein Handbuch, edited by Klaus Pietschman and Melanie WaldFuhrmann, 790–803. Munich: Text und Kritik. (5.) “Man legte eben keinen Werth darauf, Näheres davon zu wissen: Später wurde das anders.” Dörffel, Alfred. 1980. Die Gewandhausconcerte zu Leipzig, 1781–1881. Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 29. Unless otherwise noted, all translations were provided by the author. (6.) These meticulous and over-identifying designations already indicate that identifica tion of pieces most likely was not the only purpose of this development. (7.) See Weber, William. 2008. The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Pro gramming from Haydn to Brahms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Klassen, Jani na. 2006. “Beethoven und etwas von Schumann: Zur Methodik der Repertoire- und Kanonforschung.” Musiktheorie 21 (1): 57–68. (8.) See, e.g., Erb-Szymanski, Markus. 2006. “Friedrich Rochlitz als Promoter Mozarts: Über die Anfänge musikalischer Kanonbildung und Hagiographie.” Musiktheorie 21 (1): 13–26; Seidel, Wilhelm. 2006. “Musikalische Publizistik und Kanonbildung: Über Franz Brendels Entwurf einer neuen Musikkritik.” Musiktheorie 21 (1): 27–36; Reimer, Erich. 1986. “Repertoirebildung und Kanonisierung: Zur Vorgeschichte des Klassikbegriffs (1800–1835).” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 43 (4): 241–260. (9.) For the history of the Gewandhaus, see, e.g., Dörffel (1980); Seidel, Katrin. 1998. Carl Reinecke und das Leipziger Gewandhaus. Hamburg: von Bockel; Menninger, Margaret Page 17 of 24
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Designated Attention: The Transformation of Music Announcements in Leipzig’s Concert Life, 1781–1850 Eleanor. 2004. “The Serious Matter of True Joy: Music and Cultural Philanthropy in Leipzig, 1781–1933.” In Philanthropy, Patronage, and Civil Society: Experiences from Ger many, Great Britain, and North America, edited by Thomas Adam, 120–137. Bloomington: Indiana University Press; Pieper, Antje. 2008. Music and the Making of Middle-Class Cul ture: A Comparative History of Nineteenth-Century Leipzig and Birmingham. Bas ingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. (10.) “Nachricht von der künftigen Einrichtung des Leipziger Concerts . . . §. 10. Die gedruckten Concertzettel werden für das ganze Jahr mit Einem Thaler, acht Groschen bezahlt, und den Tag vor dem Concerte ins Haus gebracht.” Dörffel (1980): 16–17. The concert programs did not serve as entry tickets; those were distributed separately, as an nounced in §8. (11.) The only exception was for Fremde (foreigners), who were allowed to buy single tickets if they were staying in town for less than three months. See Dörffel (1980): 17. (12.) Despite this fact, there seems to be a strong link between the public concert as a commercial enterprise and concert programs. Hanns-Werner Heister describes the pro gram of a public concert as an agreement between musician and audience that the writ ten concert program articulates. See Heister, Hanns-Werner. 1983. Das Konzert: Theorie einer Kulturform. 2 vols. Wilhelmshaven: Heinrichshofen, 2:399. (13.) “Il ne suffit pas que l’artiste soit bien préparé pour le public, il faut aussi que le pub lic soit à ce qu’on va lui faire entendre.” Baillot, Pierre. 1835. L’art du violon: Nouvelle méthode. Mayence: Schott, 259. The concert manager John Ella had this quotation reprinted in French in every concert program of his Musical Union from 1845 to 1881. See Bashford, Christina. 2007. The Pursuit of High Culture: John Ella and Chamber Music in Victorian Culture. Woodbridge: Boydell, 138–139. See also Schmitt, Theo, and Anne Pe nesco. 1999. “Baillot, Pierre.” In Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 2nd ed., edited by Ludwig Finscher, Personenteil, vol. 2, cols. 20–22. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 22. (14.) See Baillot (1835): 259–260. Only later does he also suggest the use of program notes, which, in his opinion, are “non moins efficace” (not less effective) than the designa tions mentioned above. See Baillot (1835): 260. (15.) This practice of informing the audience of the pieces in advance was also estab lished by other concert series based on subscription. In Frankfurt am Main, the programs of the so-called Museum (an interdisciplinary art association of Bildungsbürger founded in 1807) were regularly announced in newspapers, though only members (and later exter nal subscribers) were allowed to participate in the weekly meetings. (For the history and organizational structure of the Museum, see De Bary, Helene. 1937. Geschichte der Muse umsgesellschaft zu Frankfurt am Main. Frankfurt am Main: Brönner, 5–53.) John Ella be gan to send out concert programs for his Musical Union presumably in 1851 “with the ex press intention that subscribers prepare in advance—by studying the notes at home . . . rather than trying to read the words during (or immediately before) the performance” (Bashford [2007]: 139). Because Ella had already included analytical notes Page 18 of 24
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Designated Attention: The Transformation of Music Announcements in Leipzig’s Concert Life, 1781–1850 in his concert programs, the degree of preliminary information and preparation was high er than in the Gewandhaus programs, which normally did not feature program notes dur ing the nineteenth century. (16.) See the invitation to the subscription concerts for 1855–56: “Einladung zu den Abon nement-Concerten im Saale des Gewandhauses zu Leipzig im Winter 1855 bis 1856.” Ge whaus/D Nr. 469, Stadtarchiv Leipzig; see the invitations for the years 1860 to 1874: Ge whaus/D Nr. 338–352, Stadtarchiv Leipzig. However, the practice of announcing the con cert programs in advance was maintained via the daily newspapers Leipziger Tageblatt and Leipziger Nachrichten, both preserved at the Stadtarchiv Leipzig, to whose staff I owe this information. (17.) See Dörffel (1980): 25, 47. For the time when Johann Adam Hiller was musical direc tor of the Gewandhaus (1781–1785), no evidence concerning this matter has so far been found, meaning that his responsibility for the concert programs can only be assumed. (18.) See Dörffel (1980): 67. (19.) See Dörffel (1980): 84. (20.) Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy to Clara Schumann, January 30, 1843. Krahe, Kristin R. M., Katrin Reyersbach, and Thomas Synofzik, eds. 2009. Schumann Briefedition. Serie 2. Band 1. Robert und Clara Schumann im Briefwechsel mit der Familie Mendelssohn. Cologne: Dohr, 195. (21.) “Ich habe das Programm nun so in die Druckerei geschickt; aber wenn es Ihnen möglich wäre, statt meines Liedes ein andres zu wählen, so thäten Sie mir einen Gefall en. . . . [G]rade in einem Concert wo ich den ganzen 2ten Theil einnehme, wäre ich im er sten Theil gern nicht mit einer Composition erwähnt. Ist es Ihnen ganz einerlei, u. fällt Ih nen ein andres Stück statt dessen ein, so würde ich . . . das Programm in der Correctur noch ändern.” Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy to Clara Schumann, January 31, 1843. Krahe (2009): 197. (22.) In a letter to Heinrich Dörrien, however, Mendelssohn also declines the repeated performances of one of his pieces on the grounds that he likes to have his own composi tions performed “lieber einmal zu wenig, als einmal zu viel” (rather once too little than once too often). Krahe (2009): 197, n3. (23.) For the time after Mendelssohns’s death the evidence is rather fragmentary, but it seems that in the second half of the century, too, the music directors were responsible for designing the concert programs of the Gewandhaus. Dörffel does not give any direct evi dence about this matter for Julius Rietz’s tenure (1848–1860). Yet when Carl Reinecke took over the position in 1860, his duties—presumably still, rather than again—included drafting and correcting the concert programs. See Seidel (1998): 45, 170.
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Designated Attention: The Transformation of Music Announcements in Leipzig’s Concert Life, 1781–1850 (24.) Indeed, it is unclear whether all of these pieces actually were symphonies in the modern sense. That the symphony was a relatively new genre developed from other forms of music and that terms for genres were not yet completely defined might be mirrored in the concert programs. On one hand, the “Introduzzione from the oratorio S. Magdalena, by Hasse” as well as the “Ouverture, by Graun” that were announced in 1782 (Gewand haus program, February 21, 1782, Stadtarchiv Leipzig) suggest that the term “symphony” was most of the time already being given the classical meaning and no longer meant “overture.” On the other hand, some (very rare) announcements indicate that it might still have been used for other genres. For example, the Gewandhaus program on Febru ary 5, 1789, featured a “Symphony (with obligatory viole d’amour) by Hoffmeister,” and on January 1, 1791, a “Symphony, by Haydn. (With an Andante by the viold’amour and vi olin”) was announced. According to bibliographies of the repertoire of the viola d’amore, no such symphonies exist (or, at least, are known today). See, e.g., Jappe, Michael, and Dorothea Jappe. 1997. Viola d’amore: Bibliographie. Winterthur: Amadeus Verlag. Michael and Dorothea Jappe do list a trio for violin, viola d’amore, and cello by Haydn and three string quartets and a flute quartet (with viola d’amore instead of viola, most of them also with two horns ad libitum) by Hoffmeister, which could match the announced “sym phonies.” See Jappe and Jappe (1997): 107–108, 114–116. (25.) In contrast, solo concertos were initially announced only with the name of the soloist, for example, “Concert on the violin. (Mr Berger.)” (Gewandhaus program, September 29, 1784, Stadtarchiv Leipzig). Elsewhere I argue in detail that this unequal treatment of different genres is closely linked with different functions ascribed to those pieces as well as their performance. See Lanzendörfer, Anselma. 2017. Name—Nummer— Titel: Ankündigungsformen im Konzertprogramm und bürgerliche Musikrezeption im 19. Jahrhundert. Hildesheim: Olms. (26.) See Gewandhaus programs dated October 28, 1784; October 26, 1786; February 22, 1787; and January 1, 1788, Stadtarchiv Leipzig. (27.) In particular, arias and scenes were often announced alongside “obligatory” instru ments. (28.) See Dörffel (1980): 29; Gewandhaus program dated April 27, 1806, Stadtarchiv Leipzig. (29.) From 1807 to 1819, on extant programs, piano concertos by Mozart (1), Beethoven (5), Cramer (1), Dussek (1), and Ries (1), a piano fantasy composed and played by music director Müller, an overture by Andreas Romberg, and an orchestra fantasy by Neukomm were announced with their key. In the following years, the solo (especially piano) concer to started to catch up with the symphony. (30.) “[U]n grand nombre de morceaux peuvent être désignés par le ton dans lequel ils ont été composés. Cette indication suffit même quelquefois pour rappeler le souvenir d’un ouvrage et pour réveiller tout-à-coup et comme par enchantement les sensations qu’il a fait naître.” Baillot (1835): 260. Baillot points out the important fact that printed pro Page 20 of 24
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Designated Attention: The Transformation of Music Announcements in Leipzig’s Concert Life, 1781–1850 grams help concert-goers not only prepare for the performance in advance but also process it in retrospect. (31.) At the same time, it also induces and heavily relies on elementary music theoretical knowledge such as the existence and the meaning of keys in music. In accordance with Leon Botstein’s analysis of changing notions of musical literacy during the nineteenth century, one might assume that this knowledge was more widespread among concert au diences during the first half of the century, when “musical literacy was centered on an ac tive command of pitch hearing and the aural command of pitch linked to the symbolic no tation of music.” Botstein, Leon. 1992. “Listening Through Reading: Musical Literacy and the Concert Audience.” 19th-Century Music 16 (2): 129–145, here 135. (32.) Piano fantasy no. 4 by Müller (May 8, 1808), Orchestra fantasies no. 1 (September 29, 1812, and February 29, 1816) and no. 2 (May 12, 1816) by Neukomm, and “second hymn” by Beethoven (March 2, 1815), all in the Stadtarchiv Leipzig. (33.) This might explain the dropping of the key as a designator at about that time (see Chart 7.1). (34.) “Bei einem einigermaßen entwickelten Repertoire, von dem nicht alle alles kennen, macht sich das Problem nachhaltiger bemerkbar, daß Musikstücke ohne Namen sich nicht oder doch schwerer auseinanderhalten und merken lassen und ihrerseits Gegen stand sozialer Kommunikation werden können.” Heister, Hanns-Werner. 1996. “Program mzettel und Pausenzeichen: Einige formale Aspekte der Musik/Informations-Vermittlung.” In Musik befragt—Musik vermittelt: Peter Rummenhöller zum 60. Geburtstag, edited by Thomas Ott and Heinz von Loesch, 65–74. Augsburg: Wißner-Verlag, here 67. (35.) Very few exceptions exist in the concert programs of the Gewandhaus. Mozart’s symphony in D major, K. 504 (see Hagels, Bert. 2005. Konzerte in Leipzig 1779/80– 1847/48: Eine Statistik. Berlin: Ries & Erler, PDF on CD-Rom 720, 732, 754, 769) was an nounced four times as “Symphony (No. 1, D major)” between 1822 and 1826 (see Gewandhaus programs dated October 15, 1822; April 27, 1823; January 13, 1825; and January 12, 1826, Stadtarchiv Leipzig). Apart from that, the usual designation “Sym phonie D major, without minuet” was kept throughout the century. Running numbers of Haydn’s symphonies were even rarer: they only occurred twice before 1855; from then on, they were included along with the key. (36.) “L’intitulation d’une oeuvre consisterait . . . à lui assigner une identité symbolique permettant de la reconnaître, de l’appeler, de la désigner parmi la myriade d’artéfacts dont les civilisations humaines sont parsemées.” Dauphin, Claude. 2008. “Poétique et sémiotique du titre musical.” Protée 36 (3): 11–22, here 15. (37.) The concert programs of the Gewandhaus mirror the changing parlance. Whereas at the beginning, the Ninth was usually announced as shown in Figure 7.2, starting in the 1870s it was changed to “Neunte Symphonie” (see, e.g., Gewandhaus programs dated De cember 15, 1870; March 4, 1880; and March 27, 1890, Stadtarchiv Leipzig). Page 21 of 24
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Designated Attention: The Transformation of Music Announcements in Leipzig’s Concert Life, 1781–1850 (38.) “A cet effet, le caratère des morceaux peut être indiqué par le nom même des mou vemenes [sic] qui les determinent, tels que grave, ou sérieux, allegro, ou gai, mesto, ou triste, adagio ou lent, vivace, ou animé, presto, ou vif etc.” Baillot (1835): 259–260. (39.) The only regular exceptions were Beethoven’s symphonies; see also the section “The Case of Beethoven” in this chapter. (40.) As with keys and running numbers, the introduction of movement headings into the concert programs of the Gewandhaus took several decades until it was completed. In the 1886–87 season, all symphonies were announced with their movement headings for the first time, and one season later the same happened to the solo concertos. (41.) Apart from that, the designation of single movements also provides an overview of the whole piece, it facilitates structural and temporal orientation for the listener (in the fashion of “just one more movement”), and it enables more precise communication for laymen (in the fashion of “the scherzo didn’t convince me, but I loved the adagio”). (42.) Such a classical performing canon is distinct from a scholarly or a pedagogical canon. See Weber, William. 1997. “The History of Musical Canon.” In Rethinking Music, edited by Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist, 336–355. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 339–340. (43.) For the period 1807 to 1813 several concert programs are missing (see Hagels [2005]: 497–582), and the 1813–14 season was omitted completely owing to the war and the use of the Gewandhaus as a military hospital. This is why this detailed analysis of the programs only starts with the year 1814. (44.) See Weber (2008): 181–182. (45.) For this analysis of printed programs it is not important whether every concert pro gram was performed as indicated. In fact, every now and then there are notifications in the concert directory announcing changes in program owing to circumstance (usually ill ness of a performer, most often a singer). These addenda have been taken into account for the analysis if they announced an additional or alternative piece that does not appear on the original program. (46.) The most frequent exceptions were the third and sixth symphonies, which were an nounced as “Grosse heroische Symphonie,” “Heroische Symphonie,” or “Sinfonia eroica” and “Pastoral-Symphonie” or “Sinfonia pastorale,” sometimes with their number. (47.) Goehr, Lydia. 2007. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Phi losophy of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 208. (48.) See Goehr (2007): 205–242. (49.) It is also the title of the relevant chapter; see Goehr (2007). (50.) Goehr (2007): 228. Page 22 of 24
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Designated Attention: The Transformation of Music Announcements in Leipzig’s Concert Life, 1781–1850 (51.) Weber (2008): 180, 181. (52.) “Man hatte das Auditorium nicht nur durch eine besondere Anzeige auf den gewöhnlichen Konzertzetteln, sondern auch durch eine kurze Charakteristik jedes Satzes, vornähmlich in Ansehung der vom Komponisten beabsichtigten Wirkung aufs Gefühl, aufmerksam gemacht, und es, so viel möglich, vorbereitet, gerade das zu erwarten, was ihm geboten wurde. Damit erreichte man seinen Zweck vollkommen.” Rochlitz, Friedrich, ed. 1807. Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 31, col. 497. (53.) Apart from Beethoven’s symphonies, Louis Spohr’s Notturno for sixteen wind instru ments was the only work of absolute music regularly announced with movement designa tions from the 1820s (but it was only performed every three to five seasons.) In 1820, Fer dinand Ries’s Symphony no. 2 was (uniquely) announced with movement headings; see the Gewandhaus program, November 30, 1820, Stadtarchiv Leipzig. Mendelssohn’s fond ness for the music of Johann Sebastian Bach might be reflected in the regular announce ment of his suite for orchestra (in D major, BWV 1068; see Hagels [2005]: 984, 1035, 1106, 1184) with movement designations, see Gewandhaus programs dated February 2, 1838; March 3, 1840; April 23, 1843; and February 2, 1847, Stadtarchiv Leipzig. (54.) However, this outstanding appearance of the Eroica was not to be repeated in later programs because those only contained the “real” movement headings of the score. In the middle of the 1850s, when tempo markings slowly began to be announced more regularly, the symphonies of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy and Robert Schumann stood out numeri cally as well. (55.) Apart from the first, second, and sixth symphonies, they were also announced with their key. (56.) “[V]om Abt Vogler” suggests that the composer was well known, in contrast with the symphony. The placement of the work in the program is telling as well; see Weber (2008): 181. (57.) Another source that stands out besides Baillot’s L’art du violon is Forkel’s Ueber die Theorie der Musik, which Mark Evan Bonds analyzes in Chapter 6 of this handbook. The very first rule that Forkel notes in this summary concerns the topic of prestige informa tion and music listening: “Man höre ohne Vorurtheil und ohne Affekte (Listen without prejudice and without affectations). If a listener considers incidental factors—for exam ple, whether the composer . . . is the pupil of a great master or not, . . . whether he is in the service of a great or minor lord, . . . whether he is young or old, etc.—then one’s judg ment of a work can never be certain and correct” (cited in Bonds in this handbook). The fact that Forkel’s treatise was written in the eighteenth century does not lessen its rele vance for the analysis of the Gewandhaus programs. Quite the contrary: in the first half of the nineteenth century, when composers played a more prominent role than ever before, the problem that Forkel sought to critique was probably even more apparent.
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Designated Attention: The Transformation of Music Announcements in Leipzig’s Concert Life, 1781–1850 (58.) See, e.g., Botstein (1992): 140–145; Bashford, Christina. 2003. “Not just ‘G.’: To wards a History of the Programme Note.” In George Grove, Music and Victorian Culture, edited by Michael Musgrave, 115–142. Basingstoke: Macmillan; Thorau, Christian. 2013. “Werk, Wissen und touristisches Hören: Popularisierende Kanonbildung in Pro grammheften und Konzertführern.” In Der Kanon der Musik: Theorie und Geschichte; Ein Handbuch, edited by Klaus Pietschmann and Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann, 535–561. Munich: Text und Kritik. (59.) “On a vu des chefs-d’œuvres ne produire aucun effet et passer innaperҫus parce que l’auditoire n’avait point été suffisamment averti. On a été également témoin de la vogue d’ouvrages médiocres parce qu’on les avait fait voir au public à travers le prisme de l’imagination.” Baillot (1835): 261. (60.) “De rendre le public attentive par quelque récit ou quelque discours.” Baillot (1835): 260.
Anselma Lanzendörfer
Anselma Lanzendörfer, Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Frankfurt am Main Fred Everett Maus, University of Virginia
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Concert Listening the British Way?: Program Notes and Victorian Culture
Concert Listening the British Way?: Program Notes and Victorian Culture Christina Bashford The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries Edited by Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer Print Publication Date: Jan 2019 Subject: Music, Musicology and Music History Online Publication Date: Nov 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190466961.013.8
Abstract and Keywords It is a well-known fact that the provision of printed program notes at concerts of classical music was a nineteenth-century phenomenon aimed at guiding listener experiences. This chapter discusses why those notes first proliferated in Britain and whether there was any thing peculiarly British about them. Program notes took root in 1840s Britain, initially at highly serious chamber concerts. They explained the formal structure by aural sign-post ings and embodied a significant attempt to shape listening practices in Victorian Britain in a distinctive way. Underpinning their successful spread were several interlocking eco nomic, cultural, and musical factors. These included the rapid development of a sizeable public concert culture, the growth of audiences eager for the elucidation of high art, the Victorian desire to educate and guide (related to notions of tourism, industry, rationality, progress, and religious reverence), and the absence of a tradition of publishing in-depth reviews of music in British journals. Keywords: chamber concerts, George Grove, guided listening, John Ella, John Murray, Karl Baedeker, program notes, tourism, travel guidebooks, Victorian concert culture
IN any history of listening, the spread of public concerts of art music in the nineteenth century is always likely to loom large. This is partly because the growth of concerts ush ered in changing modes of social etiquette during performances, new requirements for si lence in the concert hall (creating conventions that are still in force in the twenty-first century), and even fresh expectations for how audiences should listen to music, especially autonomous instrumental music. Such expectations were tangled with the increasingly popular custom of distributing reading material to audiences to help guide and shape their listening experiences. Today we call that literature—which is still provided in many of the world’s concert halls—program notes. Although it is well established that the practice of providing listeners with printed pro gram notes came about in the nineteenth century, musicological research into its history —as well as that history’s intersections with the phenomenon of listening—is remarkably limited.1 Much of the historiography has dwelt somewhat myopically on the question of Page 1 of 22
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Concert Listening the British Way?: Program Notes and Victorian Culture who invented the program note and when, with a range of contenders including J. F. Re ichardt (for his Concerts Spirituels in Potsdam, 1783), Hector Berlioz (the program for Symphonie Fantastique, Paris, 1834), and John Thomson (for concerts in Edinburgh, 1838–1841).2 While an insistence on “firsts” and one-off exemplars has value in tradition al musicology, there are arguably more fruitful avenues to explore concerning the pro gram note as cultural phenomenon and the significance of its adoption to a nuanced his tory of listening. In any such study the variables of time and place are likely to be crucial; this is true of the early history of the program note, since that mode of writing for listen ers flourished to a significant extent in Britain three or four decades before becoming similarly established in other countries in the Northern Hemisphere. As this essay will show, program notes took root at concerts of high art music in Britain in the 1840s and 1850s and typically placed emphasis on explaining how instrumental (p. 188) music “worked” (in simple formalist terms) and what audiences should listen for. Often printing the main themes of the work in question in music notation, these program notes are sig nificant for their attempts to shape listening experiences in a distinctive way. Indeed, the genre of music writing was remarked on, even commended, by contemporary visitors from mainland Europe. Eduard Hanslick (1825–1904), the eminent Austrian music critic and Brahms advocate, was one such commentator. In a dispatch about London’s musical life for the Viennese press of 1862, he wrote of what he heard and saw, and with the distanced perspective of the foreigner, drew attention to habits and customs that seemed different from his own.3 What struck him was the conduct of what he termed “the English concert public,” and he remarked with a mix of humor, mockery, and admiration on the extraordinary business of providing printed analytical guides to the music, to be read during or before concerts— what we today call program notes. He also reflected on English audiences’ diligent atten tion to them: Let’s look at the English concert public. The attention and quiet of the listeners is exemplary. They are supported by the reading of little booklets which the ladies and gentlemen eagerly look through. These are the critical explanations, which are handed over politely to the audience, with the infallibility that Orders of Dances are distributed at a ball. These musical signposts were, in our opinion, first introduced by Ella under the atrocious title “Synopses Analytiques” and con tain along with biography and historical notes, an analysis, with musical examples, of the larger works to be performed. Apart from the comical verbosity of such guides (regularly they have the impudence to praise Beethoven!), we should not reject the whole idea. There is an apposite quotation from Baillot, which Ella’s programmes carry at their head: “Il ne suffit pas que l’artiste soit bien préparé pour le public, il faut que le public le soit à ce qu’on va lui faire entendre.” Pieces that are difficult to grasp and are not yet common property—like the later works of Beethoven, Bach, Schumann, can be explained and made easier by analyses with music examples, and they can be set in the memory more quickly. 4
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Concert Listening the British Way?: Program Notes and Victorian Culture Hanslick made these remarks in regard to the audience at the Musical Union, a London chamber music society of the highest seriousness, run by John Ella (1802–1888), and he was not alone in doing so. Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, Onslow, and Berlioz had already had similar, even more admiring, things to say about what appeared to Hanslick to be a pecu liarly English practice.5 The extent to which any of these writers understood how wide spread “analytical” program notes were in English culture is highly questionable, and tak en at face value, their evidence indicates little more than the habits of one listening pub lic in the largest, if least musically typical, of England’s cities. Yet as historical investiga tion shows, similar developments were occurring in other urban centers, with programnote provision starting to constitute a distinctively British phenomenon. George Grove (1820–1900), himself a distinguished program-note writer, was aware of this trend when he noted in his celebrated Dictionary (1878) that “[a]nalytical programmes do not appear to have been yet introduced into the concert-rooms (p. 189) abroad.”6 He was right. Not until the 1890s did this sort of program note appear regularly at concerts in, for instance, Vienna, Paris, Boston, and New York, and while there are scattered instances of analytical notes outside Britain earlier than this, the general picture is of a trend that developed in Britain and spread beyond it only toward the end of the century.7 In this chapter I tackle the interrelated questions of why the program note was an almost uniquely British (or English) phenomenon in the mid-nineteenth century,8 why, conversely, the program note was not found in other countries until later on, and whether there was anything quintessentially British about program notes or the mindsets and habits (includ ing listening habits) of the people who promoted, produced, and read them. In taking the discussion in this direction, I use a definition of Britishness based on the historian Paul Langford’s study of national manners and character.9 I am mostly concerned with the cir cumstances, values, and behaviors that were identified as distinctive elements of a shared British culture in the nineteenth century and with applying them to the phenomenon of the program note. The focus throughout is on the reading matter and listening practices at the major, high-serious concert institutions of Victorian Britain, with reference to the program notes that were provided for substantial instrumental works.
Historical Contexts The practice of regularly providing listeners with booklets of program notes emerged in London in the mid-1840s—a time when concert life was growing, audiences were consoli dating, and the culture of silent listening was emerging, at least within the world of high art music—and it gathered pace in the following decades.10 The notes written for the Mu sical Union in London by its director John Ella, a former journalist, date from 1845 and seem to have acted as significant prototypes (see Figure 8.1).11 Enduring initiatives that followed include the notes for the Crystal Palace orchestral concerts written by the con ductor August Manns, George Grove, and others; those for the Philharmonic Society by George A. Macfarren and Joseph Bennett; and those for the famous Monday and Saturday “Pops”—chamber music concerts—authored by J. W. Davison and (later) Bennett. By the mid-1870s program notes were in evidence at concert series that purveyed the “best mu Page 3 of 22
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Concert Listening the British Way?: Program Notes and Victorian Culture sic” in cities outside London—Liverpool, Manchester, Cambridge, and Glasgow in particu lar—with a style of writing that was becoming more systematic and technically oriented; between about 1890 and the outbreak of World War I they were proliferating across the country.12 They showed surprising homogeneity, too, since notes were extensively recy cled, sometimes officially, with permission, and sometimes not.13 Listeners typically pur chased program booklets at the door, on top of the price of admission. Although Ella cannot be credited with the introduction of program notes to Britain, nor with a high point in terms of their intellectual content, he was the first to use (p. 190) (p. 191) them for a sustained period (thirty-six years). Ella’s concert institution, like those that followed his lead, was concerned with presenting performances of serious, often new, instrumental works to Victorians who were eager for music and its elucidation.14 That it was chamber music (especially that of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven) that spawned the program note is instructive: this repertoire was establishing itself as the apex of all art music genres, and it self-evidently demanded close listening for a meaningful apprecia tion of its concentrated musical arguments, quicksilver changes of texture, and intense expressivity. Orchestral music (especially the symphony, the public face of high serious ness and compositional complexity) became equally associated with the provision of pro gram notes. Symphonies by composers from Beethoven to Brahms were central to the repertoire and to program-note writing. Plus, there were attempts to explain the program music of Berlioz, Liszt, and Strauss, orchestral excerpts from Wagner operas, and so on. Writers were usually explicating music that was symphonic in its construction (regardless of genre), for lengthy movements presented immense challenges to listeners, who were often new to concert music and would likely find it hard to grasp. Songs, arias, and choral works, by contrast, were rarely treated to technical (or historical) explanation, and in most instances only the poetic text was printed in the program. The words (even if pre sented in a European language, without translation) were deemed to speak for them selves.15
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Concert Listening the British Way?: Program Notes and Victorian Culture
Figure 8.1. Extract from Ella’s analytical notes for the Musical Union, May 19, 1846. Published in the Record of the Musical Union. 1846. Edited by J. Ella. London: Cramer, Beale. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz (Mus. B 4700, 19. Mai 1846).
By the late nineteenth century, the program notes for most serious concert series treated large instrumental works at length. At the Crystal Palace Saturday Concerts an essay of up to two thousand words for a symphony was common, not to mention appropriate, for listeners in a culture that placed reading at its center. At the same time, the amount of verbiage allotted to works in relation to one another (even among the symphonies of Beethoven) had the effect of assigning critical value to them and thus contributed to the processes of canonization for classical music that were under way.16 The prose was often complemented by quotations of the main themes in music notation, and most essays bal anced introductory information about the composer, the music, and its genesis with help ful aural guidance.17 The latter typically traced sequences of themes, outlined formal structures, and characterized melodies, instruments, and distinctive harmonic moments descriptively (see Figure 8.2). This gave rise to the descriptors “analytical” or “historical and analytical” for the program notes.18 Sometimes note writers employed a descriptive, emotionally subjective interpretation (shades of Berlioz) instead of a quasi-formalist one or overlaid a formalist discussion with subjective interpretation—a practice that was particularly germane to works deemed to carry pictorial or narrative meanings (symphonic poems, and so on), although it was also used to “unlock” absolute music.19 At the same time, the majority of British program notes were akin to aural roadmaps, intended to help audiences follow the sequence of thematic and tonal events as they heard them, and they were poised to encourage a dis tinctive type of structure-oriented, linear listening.
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Concert Listening the British Way?: Program Notes and Victorian Culture Writers assumed familiarity with basic technical terminology or counted on the reader’s capacity to self-educate. Terms such as “first subject,” “modulation,” and “augmentation” were part of most note-writers’ vocabularies—though relatively rare in (p. 192) British program notes today.20 Quoted themes in music notation, sometimes shown as short (pi ano) score—a striking feature for the modern reader—reflected a culture in which musi cal literacy was becoming widespread and where pianos were to be found in most upperand middle-class households. The instrument, along with the piles of piano transcriptions of Beethoven symphonies, quartets, and so on, played a big part in addressing the limita tions arising from what, in spite of the growth of concerts, was still few opportunities to hear multiple good-quality performances of any piece. In the days before the player piano and gramophone provided the chance of real familiarity with music through repeated en counters at will, the piano transcription offered the main means of getting to know pieces heard in the concert hall, even if those works were altered somewhat in the process.21 Program notes slotted easily into this culture, and some concert-goers retained them for use at home, either to trigger the musical memory or as the basis for study alongside pi ano transcriptions or miniature scores, even ahead of a concert. Many bound sets of through-paginated programs survive today, with handmade or printed indexes to the works covered. They provide evidence of the strength (p. 193) of the Victorian hobby of collecting, as well as the quest for enlightenment and self-improvement by accessing “au thoritative” knowledge. Learning how music worked and how to listen to it was deemed a major step on the road to appreciation, and being able to demonstrate comprehension could eventually confirm aficionado status and cultural distinction.
Figure 8.2. Extract from the program booklet for a Crystal Palace Saturday Concert, March 26, 1881, showing part of the note by George Grove for Schubert’s Symphony no. 9. Author’s private collec tion.
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Concert Listening the British Way?: Program Notes and Victorian Culture
A British Phenomenon? So why was the program note a purely British phenomenon for most of the century? And was there at root anything quintessentially British about it and the listening practices it encouraged? These are questions only a detailed comparative history across nations could properly address; but in the absence of such work, we can usefully consider a se ries of explanatory factors relating not only to the prevailing musical and cultural mind sets in Victorian Britain but to the social and economic conditions of its concert life as well. Musical activity in British towns and cities was underpinned by an almost entirely mar ket-driven modus operandi that lacked subsidies from state, court, or civic finance (as op posed to elsewhere in Europe). In London an oversupply of professional musicians fos tered the proliferation of concerts for which the city is famous; as early as the 1830s, con cert life appears to have been far more extensive than on the continent. The open market, in turn, spawned a diversity of concerts and a culture of competition to an extent not found abroad until much later, and the provision of program notes was directly related to these circumstances. Quite simply, looking out for new opportunities to build and main tain audiences, while keeping a wary eye on competitors and avoiding falling behind the game, was a way of life for British concert-givers. When John Ella inaugurated the Musi cal Union and introduced analytical program notes, he was trying to do something not on ly erudite but also different, new, and likely to build a strong subscription base. And when, a few years later, rival chamber music societies were founded in London, likewise promoting high seriousness, they provided program notes, too, in a seeming attempt to lure the same sort of concert-goer.22 Similar developments can be observed among the major orchestral organizations.23 In other words, Britain seems to have developed pro gram notes earlier than other countries because its concert life was much more extensive and commercially driven at that point in time. And yet profits from program notes were not easily had. Although printed matter, includ ing music type, was becoming cheaper and more easily procured, it still came a cost; al so, there was a note-writer to be paid, a constraint on the print run (given the capacity of the concert hall), and no guarantee that the entire audience would buy programs. Break ing even was hard.24 However, it seems that the broader goals of elucidation and statusbuilding won out, with many institutions offsetting losses on programs elsewhere in their budgets, though few absorbed the cost in the admission charge and provided them for everyone, as Ella had done and as happens sometimes today.25 Another characteristic of the British system was the importance of social net works in sustaining commercial concert life, which may have played a supporting role in the take-off of program notes, particularly in the relatively rapid spread and syndication of material around the country. Musicians active in the regions—for example, Charles Hallé, Julius Benedict, and Charles Stanford—seem to have capitalized on their metropoli tan links (and on modernizing modes of communication) to use London such writers as El la, Macfarren, and Grove as sources for notes in Manchester, Liverpool, and Cambridge.26 (p. 194)
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Concert Listening the British Way?: Program Notes and Victorian Culture Practices forged in the capital city thus circulated quickly, though sometimes notes were reprinted without the writer’s authorization. It is also possible that a political agenda lurked behind the genesis of the program note in Britain. Faced with a historic absence of government and court financial support for the training and employment of musicians, along with what was starting to look like a fragile native tradition of composition, at mid-century some figures in Britain campaigned, albeit informally, for music to be treated on a par with the other arts and for substantial public or private investment to be made in it, along the lines of European practice. Yet a core problem with any move to raise music’s status within British culture was its temporal, and largely invisible, presence within the culture—the lack of material trace that made music unlike the other arts and the sciences. But by examining music structurally, giving it the permanence of print, and delivering it to a captive audience, program-note writers may have sought for music a larger, more serious stake in the argument. If this sugges tion seems fanciful, it may help to note that Ella was a perspicacious critic of the national state of affairs, and though he preferred background lobbying to proactive efforts, his ul terior aim for the Musical Union was to target a group of people, including several aristo crats, to bring about long-term change.27 Further sustaining the program-note phenomenon were less tangible elements relating to British cultural-intellectual values and practices. Of the several factors that may explain the strength of the supply and demand sides of the provision of notes, perhaps the most essential is the Victorians’ urge to educate and be educated, which ties into general ambi tions for upward social mobility as well as into commercial agendas. Undoubtedly concert institutions saw the use of program notes to foster music appreciation as a way of both creating satisfied audiences and securing income streams. As for the listeners, being well-read and informed was a sine qua non in the middle and upper tranches of society and constituted the essence of civilized community: thus it was an aspirational goal with an affordable price tag. Many such people read literature, classics in translation, philoso phy, history, science, sermons, and so on, all of which provided channels to edification and learning. Adding music to the range of subjects they could read about in depth, in rela tion to their experience of music in performance, was an inspired extension of such think ing, and it seems to have had real appeal. Most of the concerts that provided substantial program notes were attended by the re spectable or would-be respectable literate classes—people for whom the act of reading and rereading a serious text many times privately would have been a commonplace activi ty.28 Hence, similarities between the contemporary cultures of reading and concert-going, the latter with its program notes and invitation to repeated literary-aural study, (p. 195) are striking. In addition, some learning was socialized; discussing reading matter with other people promised further enrichment. Victorian culture boasted many formal soci eties for intellectual discussion, and among the several models Ella might have had in mind for the Musical Union was the Literary and Philosophical Society in his hometown, Leicester.29
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Concert Listening the British Way?: Program Notes and Victorian Culture Another line of explanation can be related to the dominance of the Bible in Victorian cul ture and the conviction among swathes of society that Christian teachings constituted an important design for living and that religious observance was a necessity.30 Parallels be tween the rituals of the concert hall and the ceremonies and silent worship of the Christ ian church are not new to concert history, and they can be applied to most of the institu tions discussed here.31 But they played out most dramatically at Ella’s Musical Union, where the sacralization of the musical experience was achieved by various means. Perfor mances were given in the round, with the musicians on a raised dais to create an intimate communion between players, music, and audience. Ella also made use of reverential, qua si-religious language in his program notes, insisted on silence throughout the music mak ing, and encouraged listeners not, in fact, to read his commentary during the concert but, rather, to maintain a focused concentration on the sounds, perhaps following the music with a pocket score, much in the spirit of following Bible passages during a church ser vice (see Figure 8.3).32 We might note, too, that Bible study or sermon reading had a do mestic dimension, occurring regularly in households as a means of backing up the spiritu al enlightenment of the Sunday service, and was not unlike the practice of reinforcing the concert experience by studying the program booklet or a score at home.33 What is more, the mode of listening encouraged at Ella’s Musical Union can be usefully contrasted with practices at the concerts of the Beethoven Quartett Society. Established for a small group of enthusiasts in 1845, this institution ran for a few seasons, presenting annual Beethoven quartet cycles and supplying program notes for its members; its mater ial placed little emphasis on structural listening, instead presenting a selection of literary quotations alongside musical incipits of the main themes of each quartet movement in or der to stimulate devotional contemplation. Deification of Beethoven and religious imagery were threaded through these programs; the note for the quartet op.127 opened, for ex ample, with the words: “Every angel of joy and of sorrow swept over the chords as he passed, but the melody always breathed of Heaven.”34 (Such linkage of Beethoven to the idea of the divine and its entanglement with the processes of music’s sacralization in the nineteenth century is well established, and can be seen to have played out not only in Vic torian Britain but well beyond its shores. What is interesting, though, from the viewpoint of listening history, is that the experience of listening to music seriously may have already carried religious and transcendental connotations.35) Meanwhile, Musical Union audi ences seem to have been coaxed to approach their listening by either flitting between a mindfulness of a work’s structure (from following the score during performance, having already used the program note to study it) and an absorption of musical sound in a tran scendental state of communion, or by combining the two processes simultaneously. (p. 196)
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Concert Listening the British Way?: Program Notes and Victorian Culture
Figure 8.3. Quartet Party at the Musical Union (1846), engraving. Published in the Record of the Musical Union. 1846. Edited by J. Ella. London: Cramer, Beale. Reprinted from the Illustrated Lon don News, vol. 8, no. 217, June 27: 420. Staatsbiblio thek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz (Mus. B 4700, 19. Mai 1846).
Other explanations of the program note’s Britishness may also be identified. In his 1862 dispatch Hanslick noted, with some amusement, the assiduousness with which Ella’s au dience read its programs and suggested that desire for closely directed instruction was peculiarly English, not something German audiences, with greater musical sophistication, needed. Just as the Englishman visiting the Rhine would not be without his Murray travel guide to the region, so he could not enjoy his Beethoven without an annotated program.36 Hanslick’s reference to the Victorian vogue for touring vacations and his analogy with the publisher John Murray’s extensive series of travel books (begun 1836) is provocative. The books were hugely successful, much reprinted, and became like Bibles to Victorians abroad (the typographical layout even aped the look of a Bible; see Figures 8.4a–b). Aimed at intelligent travelers (as program notes targeted intelligent listeners), they com bined practical information with authoritative facts about an area’s history and customs. But mostly they guided visitors along the roads between towns by describing notable landmarks to look for, much in the way program annotators described the journey through music by highlighting what to listen for.37 The popularity of Murray’s guides in Britain lessened only when Karl Baedeker’s famous tourist guides for Germans were is sued in English translation decades later.38 Baedeker’s series took off shortly after Murray’s first handbook appeared. It was inspired by the English model, as Baedeker admitted, and initially there was some collaboration between the firms.39 Yet Hanslick showed no awareness of Baedeker’s contribution to the travel book or to its hold on German culture, and he intimated that (p. 197) (p. 198) the guidebook’s pedigree was strongly English. There is some truth in this: the historian Jack Simmons has pointed to the genre’s origins in late eighteenth-century British culture and romanticism.40 But there are also exemplars in France and Germany that pre-date Murray’s, and it is, in any case, hard to imagine that Hanslick was unaware of Baedeker’s contribution to the guidebook industry.41 Meanwhile, further parallels might be drawn with the many Victorian etiquette books that were sold to aspirants to upward mobility— Page 10 of 22
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Concert Listening the British Way?: Program Notes and Victorian Culture people who sought to navigate successfully alien social worlds (though again, Britain did not have a monopoly on such material).
Figures 8.4a–b. Bound copy and opening of John Murray’s 1879 Handbook for Travellers in Switzer land. 16th ed. London: J. Murray. Author’s private collection.
As noted above, in the hands of British writers the program note was characterized by its quasi-scientific explanation of how a piece of music worked, with emphasis on thematic development and tonal design. In the mid-nineteenth century this approach to writing about music was a new thing in Britain, which had few of the traditions of theory and analysis that had developed on the continent, but it was distinct from European analytical discourse because program-note writing was aimed at general listeners, not scholars or composition students. Moreover, the fascination with structure and process can be plausi bly pinned to a broader zeitgeist. Britain was, after all, a country whose wealth, industrial success, and self-conscious sense of progress were built on scientific and technological Page 11 of 22
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Concert Listening the British Way?: Program Notes and Victorian Culture prowess. It was also a nation that celebrated, in the Great Exhibition of 1851, the processes that could, via machinery and manufacture, turn raw materials into the fine arts. In this respect George Grove, once a civil engineer, was a man of his time, writing his program notes as he did because (in his own words) “it added so much to my own pleasure in listening to observe how the subjects came back and were treated, and were related to one another, or were like those in other pieces.”42 Grove was genuinely fasci nated by process and found the way music was manufactured from its constituent raw el ements irresistible. He also identified with the listener. In any case, by approaching music rationally and empirically, the Victorians (whether writers or readers) may have been con tinuing the clearheaded, if unimaginative, mentality that—as Langford shows—had be come associated with their English forebears.43 Whether these explanations add up to a British style of music listening is, of course, an impossible question to answer. At best we can say that program notes encouraged shared, quasi-disciplined modes of perception, which may sometimes have been attained. Certain ly, the British listener and aficionado of “symphonic” music was often constructed as someone cerebrally engaged with the processes of the composer and as an almost antiemotional being. (And it is more than possible that some concert-goers did aspire and train themselves to listen in that way.) Still, the picture etched in E. M. Forster’s novel Howards End (1910) of a variety of listener types at a performance of Beethoven’s Sym phony no. 5 in the Queen’s Hall in London seems ultimately more compelling, even if the likelihood of a kaleidoscope of different modes of listening (including the aural mapping that program notes encouraged) within one person’s experience is likely most realistic.44 In any case, not all Britons were signed up to the desirability of program notes as a means of enhancing the concert experience. The Musical Times in 1881 decried many notes for being “too technical for the general reader,” for example, while George Bernard Shaw lampooned their self-conscious seriousness in The World in (p. 199) 1893.45 Furthermore, some voices advocated emotional engagement with music because in their belief it transcended the cerebral.46
Final Observations I argue above that the main reason why program notes were not found in countries other than Britain until the late nineteenth century relates to the size, nature, and diversity of the British market for concerts, and I go on to suggest a series of contributory factors that may have given the genre of writing particular appeal in Victorian life. But are there further explanations embedded in contemporaneous cultural norms abroad? To explore this question we might revisit Hanslick and his mocking of the English need for directed guidance on music, with its implication that German music appreciation functioned on an inherently superior level. Perhaps it was a journalistic conceit, a way for Hanslick to flat ter his readers back home by asserting national superiority, as well as a way of assuring them that their own culture was not deficient. Or it may have been bound up with person al agendas on Hanslick’s part.47 But it was an unusual position to take, since most foreign observers looked on the British program-note practice with admiration and a little envy: Page 12 of 22
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Concert Listening the British Way?: Program Notes and Victorian Culture as something, ideally, to be emulated. The Wiener Zeitung, for example, was prepared to suggest that “even in Musical Germany [program notes] might be imitated with advan tage,” and Meyerbeer considered them a powerful aid to noting the music’s “severer beauties,” which would have otherwise “escaped [the listener] at a first hearing.”48 On the other hand, although program notes were unknown in Austria and Germany, the concert listener’s need for in-depth guides to instrumental works could have been met for some time—right from the early nineteenth century—by the tradition of formalist review ing of musical scores in periodicals. This practice also existed in France, though it was largely absent from British music periodicals of the same period such as the Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review and the Musical World. Both the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung and the Revue Musicale offered amateur music lovers a similar sort of instruction about new music (including musical extracts) that program notes did in Britain.49 British music journalism, by comparison, traditionally treated music in a literary, humanistic manner and did not embrace this sort of technical essay until the end of the century.50 This might further explain the advent of the program note a generation ahead of its ap pearance in these European countries. Eventually, the program note became an international phenomenon. By the year 1900 notes and repertory guides similar to the British examples were becoming commonplace at concerts of symphonic music in Austria, Germany, France, and the United States, as audiences expanded well beyond those who read music journals and as newcomers re quired help in their music appreciation.51 Indeed, underneath the uptake of program notes there may have been shared cross-national concerns about educating listeners, old as well as new. In truth, though, the conditions surrounding the advent of (p. 200) such foreign traditions need exploring and explaining—in the way Leon Botstein has done for Vienna—before we can adequately correlate them with British ones and establish any na tional idiosyncrasies in program-note style. Equally important, though, is what this case study of the Victorian program note might of fer to a broader history of listening. As posited above, by the end of the century, many concert audiences in Britain were being encouraged to listen to instrumental music in a structurally oriented, linear fashion. Regardless of how many of them may have actually listened in this way, the program note established an exemplar of aural perception that had the potential to shape the habits of many British listeners across generations, while also offering them a means to mark themselves as having a superior sensibility to music— a way of accruing and displaying what Bourdieu would term “cultural capital.” That being so, what ramifications for listening history might flow from other geographically focused studies of program notes? What is to be learned about how listeners in Europe and the United States were encouraged to approach their listening once they, too, started to adopt reading matter in the concert hall? And what changes in listening practices and music appreciation lay ahead in the early twentieth century, with the advent of the player piano and sound recording? The program note seems to have morphed into a new type of listener literature in the wake of these innovative technologies, which provided easy op portunities for close, repetitive listening that would have been unimaginable fifty years Page 13 of 22
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Concert Listening the British Way?: Program Notes and Victorian Culture earlier. Finally, to return to the British context, we might ponder whether, in creating a learnable way of aural perception that put emphasis on hearing surface symphonic processes, Victorian Britain was inadvertently developing in its concert-goers (not to mention its note writers and critics) a horizon of expectation for new instrumental music that would hinder appreciation of the modernisms of Schönberg and Stravinsky in the early twentieth century.
References “Annotated Programmes.” 1938. In The Oxford Companion to Music, edited by Percy A. Scholes, 36–37. London: Oxford University Press. Baedeker, Karl, ed. 1828. Rheinreise von Mainz bis Köln. Coblenz: F. Röhling. “Baedeker History.” 2015. Accessed January 17, 2015. www.bdkr.com/history.php. Bashford, Christina. 1999. “Learning to Listen: Audiences for Chamber Music in EarlyVictorian London.” Journal of Victorian Culture 4 (1): 25–51. Bashford, Christina. 2000. “The Late Beethoven Quartets and the London Press, 1836–ca. 1850.” Musical Quarterly 84 (1): 84–122. Bashford, Christina. 2003. “Not Just ‘G.’: Towards a History of the Programme Note.” In George Grove, Music and Victorian Culture, edited by Michael Musgrave, 115–142, 301– 318. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Bashford, Christina. 2007a. “Educating England: Networks of Programme-Note Provision in the Nineteenth Century.” In Music in the British Provinces, 1690–1914, edit ed by Rachel Cowgill and Peter Holman, 349–376. Aldershot: Ashgate. (p. 205)
Bashford, Christina. 2007b. The Pursuit of High Culture: John Ella and Chamber Music in Victorian London. Woodbridge: Boydell. Botstein, Leon. 1985. “Music and Its Public: Habits of Listening and the Crisis of Musical Modernism in Vienna, 1870–1914.” PhD diss., Harvard University. Bower, Bruno. 2016. “The Crystal Palace Saturday Concerts, 1865–1879: A Case Study of Nineteenth-Century Analytical Programme Notes.” PhD diss., Royal College of Music. Brewer, John. 1996. “Reconstructing the Reader: Prescriptions, Texts and Strategies in Anna Larpent’s Reading.” In The Practice and Representation of Reading in England, edited by James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor, 226–245. Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press. Bruce, David M. 2010. “Baedeker: The Perceived ‘Inventor’ of the Formal Guidebook—a Bible for Travellers in the 19th Century.” In Giants of Tourism, edited by Richard W. But ler and Roslyn A. Russell, 93–110. Wallingford, UK: CAB International.
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Concert Listening the British Way?: Program Notes and Victorian Culture Christensen, Thomas. 1999. “Four-Hand Piano Transcription and Geographies of Nine teenth-Century Musical Reception.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 52 (2): 255–298. C[olles], H. C. 1954. “Programme Notes.” In Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 5th ed., edited by Eric Blom, 6:941–944. London: Macmillan. Dale, Catherine. 1999. “Towards a Tradition of Music Analysis in Britain in the Nine teenth Century.” In Nineteenth-Century British Music Studies, Vol. 1, edited by Bennett Zon, 269–302. Aldershot: Ashgate. Dell’Antonio, Andrew. 2001. Listening as Spiritual Practice in Early Modern Italy. Berke ley: University of California Press. Ehrlich, Cyril, Simon McVeigh, and Michael Musgrave. 2001. “London, VI, 2 (i): Concert Life: 1800–1850.” In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., edited by Stanley Sadie, 15:137–141. London: Macmillan. Forster, E. M. 1989. Howards End. London: Penguin. Graves, Charles L. 1903. The Life & Letters of Sir George Grove, C.B. London: Macmillan. Grove, George. (1878) 1890. “Analysis.” In A Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by George Grove, 1:62–63. London: Macmillan. Grove, George. 1884. Beethoven’s Nine Symphonies: Analytical Essays. Boston: G. H. El lis. Grove, George, ed. 1896. Beethoven and His Nine Symphonies. London: Novello. Haine, Malou. 2001. “Les Concerts d’Hiver du chef d’orchestre Franz Servais à Bruxelles (1887–1889).” Revue belge de Musicologie / Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Muziekwetenschap 55:255–281. Hanslick, Eduard. 1870. Aus dem Concertsaal. Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller. Hanslick, Eduard. 1989. Aus dem Tagebuch eines Rezensenten: Gesammelte Musikkri tiken. Edited by Peter Wapnewski. Kassel: Bärenreiter. Hill, Henry, ed. [1846]. Honor to Beethoven: The Five Programmes of the Beethoven Quartett Society. London: R. Cocks. Kretzschmar, Hermann. 1887. Führer durch den Concertsaal. Leipzig: A. G. Liebeskind. Kunze, Stefan, Theodor Schmid, Andreas Traub, and Gerda Burkhard, eds. 1987. Ludwig van Beethoven: Die Werke im Spiegel seiner Zeit; Gesammelte Konzertberichte und Rezensionen bis 1830. Laaber: Laaber-Verlag.
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Concert Listening the British Way?: Program Notes and Victorian Culture Landow, George P. 1980. Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows: Biblical Typology in Victori an Literature, Art and Thought. Boston: Routledge and Keegan Paul. Langford, Paul. 2000. Englishness Identified: Manners and Character, 1650–1850. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (p. 206)
Langley, Leanne. 1983. “The English Musical Journal in the Early Nineteenth Century.” PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Langley, Leanne. 2001. “Criticism, II, 3 (i): Britain: To 1890.” In The New Grove Dictio nary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., edited by Stanley Sadie, 6:680–683. London: Macmillan. Larsen, Timothy. 2011. A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians. Oxford: Ox ford University Press. Mitchell, Sally. 2009. Daily Life in Victorian England. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Mueller, John H. 1958. The American Symphony Orchestra: A Social History of Musical Taste. London: John Calder. Mullen, Richard, and James Munson. 2009. “The Smell of the Continent”: The British Dis cover Europe, 1814–1914. London: Macmillan. New York Philharmonic Society. 1843. “Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Symphony,” Philharmonic So ciety: Analytical and Historical Programme, February 18. Accessed December 27, 2015. http://archives.nyphil.org/index.php/artifact/c7b2b95c-5e0b-431ca340-5b37fc860b34/fullview#page/1/mode/2up. Pasler, Jann. 2004. “Material Culture and Postmodern Positivism: Rethinking the ‘Popular’ in Late Nineteenth-Century French Music.” In Historical Musicology: Sources, Methods, Interpretations, edited by Stephen A. Crist and Roberta Montemorra Marvin, 356–387. Rochester: University of Rochester Press. Record of the Musical Union. 1845–1881. Shaw, Bernard. 1932. Music in London, 1890–94. London: Constable. Shedlock, J. S. 1897. “Analytical Programmes.” Musical Times 38:593–596. Simeone, Nigel. 2001. “Programme Note.” In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., edited by Stanley Sadie, 20:400–402. London: Macmillan Simmons, Jack, ed. 1970. Introduction to Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Switzer land, 1838, by John Murray, 9–11. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Small, Christopher. 1998. Musicking: The Meanings of Performance and Listening. Mid dletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
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Concert Listening the British Way?: Program Notes and Victorian Culture Thorau, Christian. 2009. “Guides for Wagnerites: Leitmotifs and Wagnerian Listening.” In Richard Wagner and His World, edited by Thomas S. Grey, 133–150. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wannenwetsch, Bernd. 2010. “‘Take Heed What Ye Hear’: Listening as a Moral, Transcen dental and Sacramental Act.” Special issue, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 135:91–102. Zachs, William, Peter Isaac, Angus Fraser, and William Lister. 2004. “Murray Family (per. 1768–1967), Publishers.” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian H. Harrison, 39:845–854. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Notes: (1.) Notable sources are Dale, Catherine. 1999. “Towards a Tradition of Music Analysis in Britain in the Nineteenth Century.” In Nineteenth-Century British Music Studies, vol. 1, edited by Bennett Zon, 269–302. Aldershot: Ashgate; Bashford, Christina. 2003. “Not Just ‘G.’: Towards a History of the Programme Note.” In George Grove, Music and Victorian Culture, edited by Michael Musgrave, 115–142, 301–318. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmil lan; Bashford, Christina. 2007a. “Educating England: Networks of Programme-Note Pro vision in the Nineteenth Century.” In Music in the British Provinces, 1690–1914, edited by Rachel Cowgill and Peter Holman, 349–376. Aldershot: Ashgate; Thorau, Christian. 2009. “Guides for Wagnerites: Leitmotifs and Wagnerian Listening.” In Richard Wagner and His World, edited by Thomas S. Grey, 133–150. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (2.) See Shedlock, J. S. 1897. “Analytical Programmes.” Musical Times 38:593–596, 760 (esp. regarding earlier precedents in Edinburgh); “Annotated Programmes.” 1938. In The Oxford Companion to Music, edited by Percy A. Scholes, 36–37. London: Oxford Universi ty Press, 1938; C[olles], H. C. 1954. “Programme Notes.” In Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 5th ed., edited by Eric Blom, 6:941–944. London: Macmillan; Simeone, Nigel.2001. “Programme Note.” In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., edited by Stanley Sadie [New Grove 2], 20:400–402. London: Macmillan. (3.) Hanslick, Eduard. 1870. Aus dem Concertsaal. Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller, 487–517, esp. 509–510, 513. See p. 5 for Hanslick’s account of the publications for which he wrote. (4.) Hanslick (1870): 513. Translation by John Wagstaff and Peter Franklin. Christian Thorau’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 9) gives an alternative translation and also cites the original in German. (5.) Onslow’s remarks are from a letter dated May 12, 1846, which was published on May 23, 1846 in Musical World 21 (21): 245–246. The other endorsements appear in the pre liminary matter to the Record of the Musical Union in 1875. (6.) Grove, George. (1878) 1890. “Analysis.” In A Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edit ed by George Grove, 1:62–63. London: Macmillan. Page 17 of 22
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Concert Listening the British Way?: Program Notes and Victorian Culture (7.) One example of the developments in Britain being paralleled abroad can be found in the archives of the New York Philharmonic Society; see the short program note for Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony, published in the program booklet for February 18, 1843. Accessed December 27, 2015. http://archives.nyphil.org/index.php/artifact/ c7b2b95c-5e0b-431c-a340-5b37fc860b34/fullview#page/1/mode/2up (8.) In this essay “British” is preferred to “English,” unless in relation to Hanslick’s usage. Program notes were by no means unique to English cities within the British Isles. Con certs in Scotland used them, too, but they are not differentiated stylistically. (9.) Langford, Paul. 2000. Englishness Identified: Manners and Character, 1650–1850. Ox ford: Oxford University Press. (10.) This section draws and expands on material published in Bashford (2007a). On de velopments in concert life see Ehrlich, Cyril, Simon McVeigh, and Michael Musgrave. 2001. “London, VI, 2 (i): Concert Life: 1800–1850.” In New Grove 2, edited by Stanley Sadie, 15:137–141. London: Macmillan. Also see Bashford, Christina. 1999. “Learning to Listen: Audiences for Chamber Music in Early-Victorian London.” Journal of Victorian Cul ture 4 (1): 25–51. (11.) As a point of record, the Beethoven Quartett Society, earlier that year, had provided its audience with program notes, albeit not analytical ones. See Bashford (1999): 37–39, and Bashford, Christina. 2000. “The Late Beethoven Quartets and the London Press, 1836–ca. 1850.” Musical Quarterly 84 (1): 84–122, esp. 111–112. The mode of listening these notes encouraged is discussed further in this chapter. (12.) For fuller discussion see Bashford (2003): 117–126. Many note-writers were free lance journalists. (13.) Bashford (2007a). (14.) A full history of the institution is in Bashford, Christina. 2007b. The Pursuit of High Culture: John Ella and Chamber Music in Victorian London. Woodbridge: Boydell, 115– 336. (15.) On exceptions at the Crystal Palace concerts, see Bashford (2003): 135, n10. For wide-ranging discussion of how oratorios, cantatas, and other liturgical works were treat ed by program-note writers, see Bower, Bruno. 2016. “The Crystal Palace Saturday Con certs, 1865–1879: A Case Study of Nineteenth-Century Analytical Programme Notes.” PhD diss., Royal College of Music. (16.) Grove’s notes on Beethoven symphonies were later developed into his book, Grove, George. 1884. Beethoven’s Nine Symphonies: Analytical Essays. Boston: G. H. Ellis; re vised and enlarged as Grove, George. 1896. Beethoven and His Nine Symphonies. Lon don: Novello.
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Concert Listening the British Way?: Program Notes and Victorian Culture (17.) Not all concerts provided music examples. Notably, concerts with inexpensive ticket prices or free admission, such as, in London, the Promenade Concerts at Queen’s Hall or the South Place Ethical Society’s chamber concerts, lacked them. (18.) Ella called his notes “Synopses Analytiques,” or “Analytical Synopses.” (19.) Bower’s analysis of the metaphors and tropes used in program note narratives from the 1860s and 1870s further reveals the general writing style to be deeply embedded in the social and cultural concerns of the mid-Victorian period (Bower 2016). (20.) Part of the target readership for music dictionaries published in the 1870s and 1880s (including Grove’s own) consisted of concert-goers seeking definitions of musical terms; see Bashford (2003): 129–131. (21.) See Christensen, Thomas. 1999. “Four-Hand Piano Transcription and Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Musical Reception.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 52 (2): 255–298. (22.) Program notes were hallmarks of both the Quartett Association (1852–1854) and Chappell’s “Pops” (1859–1902). (23.) Notably, London’s Philharmonic Society began issuing program notes in 1869, only after the practice had caught on at the Crystal Palace; Bashford (2003): 124. (24.) Bashford (2007a): 354–355. (25.) Building the cost into the subscription system was a canny solution, though one that became vulnerable as the selling of single tickets replaced the older practice of subscrip tion. (26.) See Bashford (2007a): 350, 355–358. Evidence also exists for the regions supplying notes to London (Bashford [2007a]: 358). (27.) Bashford (2007b): 154–157, 352–353. (28.) This group included women; on the diversity of reading modes in relation to the text being read, see Brewer, John. 1996. “Reconstructing the Reader: Prescriptions, Texts and Strategies in Anna Larpent’s Reading.” In The Practice and Representation of Reading in England, edited by James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor, 226–245. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, which is a useful study, albeit of the eighteenth-century con text. (29.) Bashford (2007b): 145. (30.) For a demonstration of the Bible’s central role within different religious and skepti cal traditions, see Larsen, Timothy. 2011. A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victori ans. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Concert Listening the British Way?: Program Notes and Victorian Culture (31.) For general discussion, see Small, Christopher. 1998. Musicking: The Meanings of Performance and Listening. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. (32.) On Ella’s practices and the modes of listening his concerts may have encouraged, see Bashford (2007b): 138–140, 190–191, 197, 232–234 (on scores used, see 141). (33.) Instructions in the Record of the Musical Union, 1846–1851, advised audiences to read the notes “previous to the performance of each piece of music”; around the same time, Ella started sending the notes to members’ homes, ahead of the concert day, so that listeners could prepare in advance. On devotion in the Victorian home more broadly, see Mitchell, Sally. 2009. Daily Life in Victorian England. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 148, 254– 256; and Landow, George P. 1980. Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows: Biblical Typology in Victorian Literature, Art and Thought. Boston: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 21–22. (34.) Hill, Henry, ed. [1846]. Honor to Beethoven: The Five Programmes of the Beethoven Quartett Society. London: R. Cocks; see also Bashford (2000): 111–113. (35.) As some scholars have recently suggested, the idea of listening had become closely bound up with religion for centuries. Biblical emphasis on listening to (and hearing) God instead of more visual and cognitive modes of engagement with him in Luther’s time, the parallels that may be found in music, and the essentially transcendental and communica tive nature of listening in the Christian setting are treated in Wannenwetsch, Bernd. 2010. “‘Take Heed What Ye Hear’: Listening as a Moral, Transcendental and Sacramental Act.” Special issue, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 135:91–102. Andrew Dell’Antonio, in his Listening as Spiritual Practice in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: Uni versity of California Press, 2011), proposes a shift from the passive to the active in the way people listened to music in the seventeenth century and relates the change to the centrality of Jesuit thought within the Italian ruling classes. He argues that it aimed to create a special, transcendent connection between listener and musical soundscape (pp. 9–10 and chap. 3). (36.) Hanslick (1870): 513. “The German does not seek this sort of leadership to the same extent as the Englishman; at least he does not want his opinion specified. Insecure in aes thetic matters, the Englishman loves directed learning. Just as when going to the Rhine he would not be without his Murray, so too he cannot completely enjoy his Beethoven without a ‘synoptical analysis’ ” (translation by John Wagstaff and Peter Franklin). Christ ian Thorau, in Chapter 9 in this handbook, develops the analogy between the program note and tourism. (37.) On the reach and success of Murray’s publications, see Mullen, Richard, and James Munson. 2009. “The Smell of the Continent”: The British Discover Europe, 1814–1914. London: Macmillan, 114–119. Note that Mariana Starke’s earlier Information and Direc tions for Travellers on the Continent (1824), an important source, was published by Mur ray (Mullen and Munson [2009]: 110).
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Concert Listening the British Way?: Program Notes and Victorian Culture (38.) On Baedeker’s guides as competition, see Mullen and Munson (2009): 122–125. See also Bruce, David M. 2010. “Baedeker: The Perceived ‘Inventor’ of the Formal Guidebook —a Bible for Travellers in the 19th Century.” In Giants of Tourism, edited by Richard W. Butler and Roslyn A. Russell, 93–110. Wallingford, UK: CAB International. (39.) On the relation between the two publishers’ handbooks, see the information on James Murray (1808–1892) in Zachs, William, Peter Isaac, Angus Fraser, and William Lis ter. 2004. “Murray Family (per. 1768–1967), Publishers.” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, 39:845–854. Oxford: Oxford University Press. See also Bruce (2010): 94–95. (40.) Simmons, Jack, ed. 1970. Introduction to a reprint edition of Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Switzerland, 1838, by John Murray, 9–11. Leicester: Leicester University Press. (41.) For example, Baedeker, Karl, ed. 1828. Rheinreise von Mainz bis Köln. Coblenz: F. Röhling (French translation also published by Baedeker, 1832). See also “Baedeker Histo ry.” 2015. Accessed January 17, 2015. www.bdkr.com/history.php. (42.) Graves, Charles L. 1903. The Life & Letters of Sir George Grove, C.B. London: Macmillan, 216–217. (43.) Langford (2000): 76–77. (44.) See Forster, E. M. 1989. Howards End. London: Penguin, 44–47. (45.) Musical Times 22 (1881): 241; Shaw’s attack is reprinted in Shaw, Bernard. 1932. Music in London, 1890–94. London: Constable, 2:321. Another writer observed (Musical Times 27 [1886]: 13) that “unfortunate amateurs may often be seen, with eyes glued to the book, struggling to keep pace with the orchestra, and deriving more bewilderment than enlightenment from the comments and musical illustrations of the analyst.” (46.) For fuller discussion of this issue, see Bashford (2003): 132–133. Even Ella could be circumspect about the ability of analysis to explain the essence of music (see Bashford [2007b]: 196). (47.) We should further allow for inconsistency or changes in his viewpoint, since Hanslick would later question the usefulness of English program notes, in their emphasis on themes, for understanding the music of Brahms (1889, reprinted in Hanslick, Eduard. 1989. Aus dem Tagebuch eines Rezensenten: Gesammelte Musikkritiken. Edited by Peter Wapnewski. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 41). (48.) These remarks are cited in the prefatory material to the 1875 Record of the Musical Union. (49.) Examples may be found in Kunze, Stefan et al., eds. 1987. Ludwig van Beethoven: Die Werke im Spiegel seiner Zeit; Gesammelte Konzertberichte und Rezensionen bis 1830. Laaber: Laaber-Verlag. Page 21 of 22
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Concert Listening the British Way?: Program Notes and Victorian Culture (50.) And then it did so mainly in the form of stand-alone analyses of works, as for in stance in the Monthly Musical Record (founded 1871). Analytically oriented reviews of new music in the early nineteenth century are rare (material in the Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review, 1818–1828, is a notable exception). For more on British journal ism, see Langley, Leanne. 2001. “Criticism, II, 3 (i): Britain: To 1890.” In New Grove 2, edited by Stanley Sadie, 6:680–683. London: Macmillan; and Langley, Leanne. 1983. “The English Musical Journal in the Early Nineteenth Century.” PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (51.) See, inter alia, Botstein, Leon. 1985. “Music and Its Public: Habits of Listening and the Crisis of Musical Modernism in Vienna, 1870–1914.” PhD diss., Harvard University; Pasler, Jann. 2004. “Material Culture and Postmodern Positivism: Rethinking the ‘Popular’ in Late Nineteenth-Century French Music.” In Historical Musicology: Sources, Methods, Interpretations, edited by Stephen A. Crist and Roberta Montemorra Marvin, 356–387. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 362; Haine, Malou. 2001. “Les Concerts d’Hiver du chef d’orchestre Franz Servais à Bruxelles (1887–1889).” Revue belge de Musicolo gie / Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Muziekwetenschap 55:255–281, esp. 258; and Mueller, John H. 1958. The American Symphony Orchestra: A Social History of Musical Taste. London: John Calder, 369–371. For the compilation of (German) notes, see also Kretzschmar, Her mann. 1887. Führer durch den Concertsaal. Leipzig: A. G. Liebeskind.
Christina Bashford
Christina Bashford, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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“What Ought to be Heard”: Touristic Listening and the Guided Ear
“What Ought to be Heard”: Touristic Listening and the Guided Ear Christian Thorau The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries Edited by Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer Print Publication Date: Jan 2019 Subject: Music, Musicology and Music History Online Publication Date: Nov 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190466961.013.9
Abstract and Keywords The emergence of program notes and concert guidebooks in the second half of the nine teenth century in Europe and North America are symptoms of a culture of listening that shows many structural similarities between the practice of concert-goers and tourists. This chapter develops the cultural-historical argument that the tourist’s mode of discover ing and appropriating the world established patterns of behavior that would soon enough make their entry into concert halls and opera houses. By analyzing the shared features between music listening and tourism, special focus has to be given to the markers that announce, promote, and explain the “musical sight.” Characteristic for the new auditory paradigm of “touristic listening” is a practical, work-focused knowledge that frames, guides, and canonizes the listening experience. Keywords: guided listening, instruction in listening, Karl Baedeker, John Murray, program notes, travel guide books, Eduard Hanslick, Dean MacCannell, Hermann Kretzschmar, tourism
IN the early twenty-first century, printed concert programs continue to be a routine part of the listening experience at musical performances. They announce the pieces played and the order in which they are presented, and they provide historical, structural, aes thetic, and biographical information about the music, the composers, and the performers. They have continued to function in this manner despite the alternatives for informed lis tening gradually introduced by newer media such as LP liner notes, CD booklets, and dig ital music apps.1 The persistence of the concert program has to do with, among other things, the fact that it is the most direct and handy device listeners can be equipped with during their auditive experience, something literally to keep in hand while the ungras pable units of sound and music fly by. Despite such connectedness to the listener, the con cert program, especially in its extended and annotated form, has remained a blind spot of musical scholarship, an area of neglect that has begun to change only in the past two decades. The same is true for the concert program’s sister genres, the concert guidebook and the book offering an introduction to music.2 The readers or users of such distributors of musical knowledge might be surprised to learn that what they hold in their hands at a Page 1 of 23
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“What Ought to be Heard”: Touristic Listening and the Guided Ear concert is, in its current format, hardly more than 150 years old—if we count from the time of its early beginnings in mid-nineteenth-century Great Britain. This chapter is closely connected to the preceding chapters on Forkel’s introductory mu sic lectures (Mark Evan Bonds, Chapter 6), on labeling and announcing pieces (Anselma Lanzendörfer, Chapter 7), and on the British origins of program notes (Christina Bash ford, Chapter 8). It looks at the phenomenon of listening instructions from a broader and more systematic angle: their technique of accompanying the auditive experience and the role of guided perception for the conception of music listening. (p. 208) For that purpose I extend the context in which listening instructions and ideologies can be placed and con nect them to the cultural history and theory of tourism.
Touristic Ears Around 1845, in the same period in which the first annotated concert programs appeared in British concert life, the German genre painter Carl Spitzweg created a depiction of English tourists visiting the Campagna Romana (see Figure 9.1). The painting, a carica ture, is an example of the ironic narrative style for which Spitzweg became famous. It can be read as an insightful document on the eve of modern tourism,3 yet, although it is ar guably a picture about seeing, it can also serve as a source for a history of listening.
Figure 9.1. Carl Spitzweg, English Tourists in the Roman Campagna (1835), oil on paper, mounted on board, inv. no. AII505. © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie/Fotograf: Jörg P. Anders.
A party of three tourists, unmistakably signified by their colorful travel costumes, have been escorted to a viewpoint by a coachman and a local tour guide. The so-called ci cerone explains the sights and makes a gesture of showing, perhaps pointing at some (p. 209) ancient remains on the ground and indicating the original size of a building. The woman in the back occupies herself in drawing; the man in the front is looking at a book, presumably a guidebook. Only the woman in the front seems to pay attention to the Page 2 of 23
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“What Ought to be Heard”: Touristic Listening and the Guided Ear guide, but her glance is skeptical. She holds rolled maps or drawings in her hand and car ries a red book under her arm, an unmistakable allusion to the guidebooks by John Mur ray that had become standard equipment for British travellers (later to be superseded by the Baedeker books).4 Spitzweg’s irony is not only that he makes the group itself the fo cus of the picture while the actual sight—the famous landscape—becomes the back ground. The punchline of the caricature seems to be that these well-equipped tourists do not even look.5 None of them looks at the Campagna unmediated; they all experience it through means of signification, be they the drawing techniques that are employed, the guidebooks that are silently read, or the human guide who provides information about what should be seen or how it should be seen. The only person who is not occupied with a representation of his environment and could enjoy the Italian landscape in an uninformed way is the coachman, but he ignores the scenic view and blends in with nature, leaning on a rock, obviously yawning. This painting is valuable for a history of seeing and listening because it shows how the gazes of the tourists are fabricated through media practices and formats that provide, so to speak, visual aids that are used on site, at the lo cation of the tourist attraction.6 We do not have to seek far to find parallels to listening: concert programs are, in this sense, “hearing aids” fabricating the listening experience in a concert hall. The Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick, writing in 1862, made a similar explicit link be tween the travel handbooks of tourists and the listening habits of concert-goers. Just as Spitzweg did, he characterized his observation as something peculiar to the English mid dle class, not without a sarcastic and slightly chauvinistic undertone. Reporting from Lon don on the second International Exhibition and on British musical life, he wrote under the heading “Curiosities”: The attentive silence of the English concert audience is impeccable. Enhancing it is the use of little brochures, which the ladies and gentlemen study assiduously. To those entering the concert room these critical explanations are handed out as po litely as the infallible order of dances in a ballroom. These musical signposts were, to the best of our knowledge, first introduced by Ella under the awful title “Synop tical Analysis,” and include, beside biographical and historical notes, an analysis (with musical examples) of the larger works to be performed.7 Hanslick’s comparison is highly informative. With the hint at ballroom etiquette, he ob served a listening habit at work: a behavior that organized and influenced the auditive ex perience and had acquired a socially obligatory, authoritative status. Although he scoffed at the original name of the notes (for an 1846 example of such “Synoptical Analysis,” see Figure 8.1 in Chapter 8), Hanslick did not reject the institution of annotated programs; in fact, their analytical character appealed to him, and he connected their influence directly to the “impeccable” silence in the concert hall. In the same passage, (p. 210) however, he went on to question the necessity of such means and to compare the aesthetic capacities of English listeners to those of their German contemporaries, closing with a direct allu sion to the Murray travel guides:
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“What Ought to be Heard”: Touristic Listening and the Guided Ear The German, of course, hardly needs guidance to such an extent as the English man seeks it; at least he does not want his opinion prescribed to him. Feeling usu ally uncertain about things aesthetic, the English listener loves direct instruction. Just as the Englishman cannot enjoy the Rhine without his Murray, neither can he quite enjoy Beethoven without his “Synoptical Analysis.”
The Emergence of Program Notes It is worth looking at this document more closely and contextualizing it. Hanslick’s judg ment can be recognized as a topos about British tourists. To complain about the “inva sion” of tourists from England and about their behavior was a stereotypical lament during these decades.8 Hanslick’s remarks may have built on such generalizations, yet he point ed specifically to the way of listening and the aids that were applied. By suggesting that the English were unable to experience a landscape or a Beethoven piece without their guidebooks, he took the same line as Spitzweg. He also suggested that program notes were specific to British culture, a statement that can be confirmed by recent musicologi cal research. We know today that the annotated concert program was, at least in its beginnings, a specifically British phenomenon (see Chapter 8, this volume). It emerged as a regular fea ture in concerts in Edinburgh and London in the 1840s, at around the same time travel guidebooks became standardized and obligatory equipment for tourists. In London, anno tated programs first appeared in chamber music concerts and were especially firmly root ed under the influence of the concert manager John Ella and his Musical Union, which he founded in 1845. The history of this chamber music society shows what efforts were needed to establish and sustain a set of conditions, means, and behaviors that enabled an art of listening.9 The introduction of a commentary provided at the concert venue was a central feature of this endeavor. Such a medium inserted between the music (and the per formers) on one side and the audience on the other was so new and peculiar in the 1840s that the Illustrated London News covered the scene at a Musical Union concert in 1846 (see Figure 8.3 in Chapter 8). The similarities with Spitzweg’s rendering of the tourists are striking. With the exception of the listener on the right, all other listeners in the first row, including Ella (fourth from the right), are occupied in a mode of listening while read ing (or vice versa). A table is provided to support the reading material (including pocket scores), adding to a situation that, as Christina Bashford has observed, reinforces the shift to quiet listening by resembling the concentrated atmosphere of a library reading room.10 The notes that had become a regular institution in Ella’s concerts became more and more common in symphony (p. 211) concerts in London and Manchester starting in the 1850s. These texts were written by, among others, George Grove. With his program notes for the Saturday Concerts at the Crystal Palace, Grove created a model for the con cert culture of the second half of the century in Britain and abroad. He personified what was considered a musical guide for his Victorian contemporaries.11
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“What Ought to be Heard”: Touristic Listening and the Guided Ear Hanslick was correct to say that such a form of guided listening had not yet entered con cert halls on the continent—at least not in 1862, when he encountered it in England—yet his nationalistically biased distinction between audiences in Britain and those in Germany not only contains an implicit discourse of German superiority in music but also is flawed in the specific statements it makes.12 First, he did not mention (or wanted to ignore) the fact that in the 1860s the Baedeker travel handbooks had already acquired the same sta tus for German-speaking tourists as the Murray handbooks had for the British. The need for guidance when travelling was by no means an especially British phenomenon. Second, his sweeping evaluation that “the German” would not need such guidance when listening was proved to be wrong during the following decades, to Hanslick’s dismay.
“Musical Baedekers” for Wagnerians Fourteen years later, Hanslick encountered a similar guidebook, now in the realm of opera. In 1876, on the occasion of the first performance of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen in Bayreuth, the Wagnerian Hans von Wolzogen published an extensive analy sis of the so-called leitmotifs, calling his work a Leitfaden (leading thread) through the huge fourteen-hour tetralogy of music dramas. Hanslick reacted in the same way he had in 1862. He poked fun at the booklet, which was offered for sale in Bayreuth and at the festival theater, by calling it “a musical ‘Baedeker,’ without which no decent tourist here dares leave home.”13 It was no accident that he applied the same touristic comparison on an occasion when the educational tour and the quasi-religious experience of art merged into the pilgrimage to Wagner’s Bühnenfestspiel (stage festival drama). Hanslick sensed clearly that, with the leitmotif guide, the British practice had found its way into German music listening, this time in the field of a new musico-dramatic genre that was extremely challenging for the audience. When George Grove wrote in 1878 that “analytical pro grammes do not appear to have been yet introduced into the concert-rooms abroad,”14 he was, in fact, right, but only with regard to concert venues (and even there the first signs of change had appeared, as we will see below). Wagner’s motivically structured music dramas had already triggered the introduction of a similar listening aid in the opera house. The Wagnerian mode of listening for “leading motives,” that is, for short, meaning ful, and semantically labeled musical phrases, played a crucial role in the rise of a guided “touristic” ear on the continent. While in Britain chamber music was a starting point for analytical descriptions to accompany the listening experience, in German-speaking coun tries it was a new form of opera that set off a new genre of (p. 212) commentary litera ture: the Leitfaden booklets, tailored to the individual Wagner work and promoted as an obligatory companion for the “perfect Wagnerite.”15 The educational ambition of the Wag nerians was a driving force in establishing an explanatory medium that mediated be tween the music and the listener.
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“What Ought to be Heard”: Touristic Listening and the Guided Ear
A Guide Through the Concert Hall Wolzogen made no reference to the British development of program notes when he intro duced his Leitfaden. The young conductor and musicologist Hermann Kretzschmar (born, like Wolzogen, in 1848) was nevertheless probably aware of both English concert room habits and the appearance of the new Wagnerian motive guide when he, as early as 1878, started to publish preparatory articles in the daily newspaper of Rostock one or two days ahead of his symphony concerts with the local Concertverein and Singakademie.16 These articles prepared the audience for the upcoming events and resembled program notes ex cept in their manner of distribution. They were arguably the first regular publications of this kind in Germany. As he himself reported, he wrote these articles in order to prepare listeners for the performance of “compositions that were unknown or difficult to under stand,” such as symphonies by Beethoven, Brahms, and Bruckner. 17 Kretzschmar had programmed these pieces in order to increase both the orchestra’s performing abilities and the audience’s listening competencies. He continued this practice for nearly a decade, and the texts became the foundation of a book he began to publish in 1887. This was another new literary genre that marked a further step in the development of a “touristic ear”: a musical guidebook covering practically all the repertoire that had been performed in the symphony hall up to that point. Kretzschmar titled it Führer durch den Konzertsaal (Guide Through the Concert Hall), drawing a parallel with travel or museum handbooks, which offer guidance through spaces, countries, and regions. Kretzschmar’s title was, of course, metonymical. The book was by no means a guide through a physical concert hall, nor was it a book of manners teaching readers how to behave in a music venue. It was a collection of articles on individual pieces in historical order, resembling a handbook of the history of instrumental music, starting with pieces by the Gabrielis and extending, in its third edition (1898), to Bruckner and Mahler. Kretzschmar later extend ed the compendium to oratorios and choral works, covering the symphonic concert reper toire of his time in a more or less comprehensive way. Forty years after the Murrays and the Baedekers had started to shape the touristic experience of the middle-class traveler, a similar handbook was now available for the middle-class concert-goer. Like Grove’s pro gram notes in Britain, Kretzschmar’s compendium became an educational institution in Germany. It was revised and updated until the 1930s. When Kretzschmar’s handbook appeared, the trend in German-speaking countries toward “listening through reading,” as Leon Botstein called it in reference to the late nineteenth century,18 was irreversible. In the same season, 1886–87, the Berlin (p. 213) Philharmonic Orchestra introduced a program booklet with extensive annotations, and in 1893 Robert Hirschfeld started the same undertaking for the philharmonic concerts at the Vienna Musikverein, right in Hanslick’s own workplace. Over the course of the next two decades, the market in explanatory musical literature boomed. Annotated programs and libretti compiled into concert and opera guides were published to cater to the expert, the enthu siast, and the musical novice alike. Around 1900 all concert halls in major cities in Europe and North America offered regular program notes. In the field of opera, guidebooks or booklets became common not only for Wagner’s works but also for the whole operatic Page 6 of 23
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“What Ought to be Heard”: Touristic Listening and the Guided Ear repertoire. The behavior that Hanslick had observed in 1862 was no longer a British cu riosity. Knowledge to accompany music listening became a ubiquitous feature of the con cert experience in the Western world. It was taken for granted and would, for a whole century, remain in place nearly unquestioned.
Listening for “Musical Sights” Hanslick’s hints at the parallels between program notes and travel guides and his bon mot about the “musical Baedeker” were meant to be polemical digs suggesting an al legedly superior German audience and, in the case of Bayreuth, poking fun at Wagner’s leitmotif technique. Yet his observations contain more. They can be rephrased into a cul tural-historical argument. A new perceptive practice entered the concert hall and the opera house between 1840 and 1890, first emerging in Britain and then spreading across the continent and North America. This practice had originated in the travel guide litera ture published to serve a growing market for tourism from the 1830s onward. The tourist’s mode of discovering and appropriating the world established patterns of behav ior and demand that would soon enough make their entry into music. By equipping con cert-goers with histories, narratives, and musical analyses, a new body of explanatory lit erature guided the audience safely through hitherto unknown territories of sound. The visit to a musical performance was somewhat like a Bildungsreise (an educational tour) on which one did not set out without a well-known travel book. I have suggested calling this auditory paradigm “touristic listening.”19 It contains cultural practices that link lis tening and traveling as two ways in which the bourgeoisie made the world its own. In order to support such a historical argument, it is worth looking at the parallels in a more systematic manner and in a time frame that spans over two centuries. The relation between touristic traveling and music listening is built on commonalities that can serve as heuristic instruments. From a linguistic point of view, we are dealing with a metaphori cal expression, not just a comparative analogy: calling a music listener a tourist was in Hanslick’s day, and still is, an unconventional description, one that builds on contrasts as well as similarities. The same is true of calling a way of listening “touristic.” It transports prototypical features and—important for Hanslick’s use—evaluations from the domain of tourism to the domain of musical culture. Of course, literally understood, a music (p. 214) listener is not a tourist, since touristic practice seems inseparable from the activity of traveling, of departing from home to a foreign country, region, or place. Yet if we think of the listener as a concert-goer who leaves home for an evening in the symphony hall or, more, as a Wagnerian on his or her pilgrimage to Bayreuth, this difference diminishes or disappears. In modern taxonomy we speak of “cultural tourists,” meaning people whose purpose for travel is to experience cultural sights, festivals, or events.20 And, of course, all tourists may become music listeners as part of their tour. Such connections between music and tourism have been omnipresent from the twentieth century onward and have already attracted research interest among ethnomusicologists.21
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“What Ought to be Heard”: Touristic Listening and the Guided Ear The evaluative aspect of Hanslick’s remark is still in place: To call someone a tourist—to say “they are tourists” while others, including the speaker, are not—can be a pejorative distinction that has been a topos of its own since the beginning of modern tourism. The tourist is typically someone who does not have much time and therefore rushes the route, looks at the sights in a superficial, standardized way, follows the crowd on its beaten path, and—the trigger for Hanslick’s remarks—uses a handbook that enables and fabri cates the touristic view. The construct of the stereotype of a tourist and the delineation of touristic behavior are nonetheless two sides of the same coin. Following James Buzard, we have to consider “the formation of modern tourism and the impulse to denigrate tourists as a single complex phenomenon with important socio-cultural conditions and consequences.”22 The dynamic of social distinction among tourists as well as among con cert or opera audiences is itself a feature that they share as a form of handling and nego tiating cultural capital. I do not focus on this aspect here. When I speak of a touristic lis tening paradigm I want to emphasize aspects that go beyond derogatory connotations to ways of informing and structuring the listener’s perception. Such a notion of “touristic” helps us see that the novice concert-goer who assiduously follows a program note de scription, the musical pilgrim for whom such aids would spoil the aesthetic experience, and the music critic who condemns the guide business in general are more connected than they are separated. A helpful systematic approach can be found in theories about tourism. If one follows Dean MacCannell’s classical approach, touristic behavior can be understood as a modern ritual of leisure activity and world-disclosure that is driven by the quest for authentic experi ence, for an authenticity that the tourist believes he or she grasps by visiting and experi encing a famous sight.23 MacCannell’s approach is especially fruitful for translation into the realm of music listening because he places a special emphasis on the signs that slide in between the person and the object and play a crucial role in constituting a tourist at traction. From a semiotic standpoint, a tourist attraction is created through the interplay of three things: the markers (the signs that refer to, represent, or point to the sight, whether by illustration, naming, or description), the tourist (the interpreter or user of such signs), and the sight (the physical locality, site, building, object, or event in the touristic semiosis to which markers refer). In such a typical Peircean triangular relation,24 a tourist attraction functions as a sign that represents (the role of the marker) something (the sight) to someone (the tourist).
(p. 215)
A building, a work of art, a place, a landscape, people and their lifestyles, basically any object can become a sight of interest to tourists thanks to the ensemble of markers that direct attention to the object in question by naming it, defining it, interpreting it, catego rizing it, and evaluating it. All media that transfer information about a sight may there fore be regarded as markers that guide the tourist to the attraction via a short or long chain of signs. Some signs are at or on the sight, for example, a commemorative plaque at a building, a “cicerone” whom one hires for a city tour, or the audio guide that is avail able at the museum only. Others are off-site markers such as a signpost, a city map, a travel or museum guidebook, a touristic marketing brochure, or an academic text that canonizes a work of art—not to forget the classic postcard sent home or private photo Page 8 of 23
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“What Ought to be Heard”: Touristic Listening and the Guided Ear shared after returning from a trip, nowadays uploaded as a selfie to a social network in real time while standing before the sight. We can try to define what a tourist attraction would be in the sphere of musical culture by relating the points of the semiotic triangle to aspects of musical production and reception (see Chart 9.1). At this point it is helpful to recall that the analytical notes which ap peared in Britain from the 1840s onward were something new in music culture at the time. What Hanslick reacted to so adversely was the sudden appearance of an informa tive and educative medium right inside the concert hall and in the midst of the listening experience. Such a phenomenon can be described using MacCannell’s terms: To the ex tent that the explanations slide into the space between the listeners and the works in question, the semiotic relationship increasingly resembles that triangle of marker, tourist, and sight within which the attraction is constructed and affirmed. The program notes handed out at the venue before the performance function as on-site markers, (p. 216) while the concert and opera guidebooks covering the repertoire are off-site markers with which one can prepare beforehand, as a travel guidebook can be studied before depart ing. A “sight” in this triangle is something auditory, usually a work of music as performed, heard, and seen at the concert (which is mainly what the musical guides help construct and affirm). Works of music become “musical monuments.”25 Yet the sight can also and at the same time be the artists and the orchestra, independent of what music is on the pro gram (photos and biographical information about the conductor and the soloists usually provide markers). Or, sometimes, the architectural and acoustic features of a famous con cert hall or opera house itself contribute to the sight. In this case a tourist attraction in its literal sense can merge with the musical (for instance, the classical ballet Coppélia shown in the Palais Garnier in Paris or Wagner’s Ring cycle performed in the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth). What is created by the interplay of the markers, the listeners, and the sight is what I suggest calling a “musico-touristic attraction” or a “musical sight,” a “thing worth hearing” (Hörenswürdigkeit, a neologism in parallel with the familiar Sehenswürdigkeit).26 For a popular, nonacademic reception of music, especially classical music, the concept of the musical sight does, indeed, seem more appropriate than the work-concept, which mu sicologists usually build on criteria of authorship, notation, and composition, and which they connect to a history of ideas.27 The musical sight is, to a certain extent, what a popu larized and popularizing way of appropriation makes of the work-concept. It allows us to describe the cultural practice with which actual listeners use the “imaginary museum of musical works.”28
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“What Ought to be Heard”: Touristic Listening and the Guided Ear
Chart 9.1. Semiotic model of a tourist attraction (based on MacCannell [(1976) 1999]). Italics indicate MacCannell’s model applied to the realm of music listening.
Musico-Touristic Markers How the listening visitors move about in this museum is determined to a great extent by markers of very diverse shapes and media. If the visible and audible performance of a work is regarded as a musical sight, the concept of the marker has to be interpreted more broadly. The program note and the concert guidebook are only two links in a long and di verse chain of brochures and advertisements that define, promote, and pre-evaluate the musical attraction. If we add musical renderings, replications, or representations to this chain, it casts musical practice in the latter half of the nineteenth century in a light that at first glance may seem rather unusual. Four-hand piano editions and all sorts of arrangements of symphonic works and operatic extracts may be regarded as markers that lead to the thing worth hearing. Such sounding markers do their job less by naming or describing the musical structure than by exemplifying it in a reduced or attenuated form as samples, excerpts, and potpourris.29 Moreover, the verbal as well as the sounding markers do not only lead to the musical sight; they also help recall it when the concert experience is over. The marker and the souvenir in touristic practice are often the very same thing but with differently directed sign functions. The postcard of the Eiffel Tower, purchased and sent as an on-site marker, turns into an off-site marker for the addressee, defining what one must (p. 217) have seen. The concert program booklet can build a souvenir practice that is similar to the handling of a touristic souvenir. The musical description of the pieces can function as a marker, preparing and heralding the upcoming event, and can afterwards turn into a souvenir commemorating the personal experience of the live performance. Collecting concert pro grams, especially ones with valuable analytical notes,30 was a typical private practice that shows the attempt to keep, document, and treasure the experience of a musical perfor mance that would otherwise be hard to document and materialize. Such a practice is not unfamiliar to music lovers up to the present day. In fact, a new type of subsidiary material Page 10 of 23
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“What Ought to be Heard”: Touristic Listening and the Guided Ear appeared at the end of the nineteenth century: the explicit “souvenir program” designed especially for the purpose of being collected and preserved.31 Such material documents of “musicking” (in Christopher Small’s sense) contribute to a powerful process of canonizing the listening experience that I discuss below. The double function is also true for the sounding markers of arrangements and potpour ris. Prominent melodies from Wagner’s Tannhäuser played by a military brass band in a promenade concert can be heard as souvenirs from a performance one has attended and at the same time as markers for attending a full performance at the opera house. Prior to the media revolution of recorded sound, the intermediary position of arrangements was especially strong. Piano excerpts of symphonies and operas offered reduced, “black-andwhite” versions that would make the players and listeners at home familiar with a piece and call for experiencing it in its “full-color,” orchestral shape performed in a proper lis tening space. In the nineteenth century, listening to a Beethoven symphony in concert was still a rare occasion one would enjoy only a few times during a year or a lifetime, not to speak of the exclusivity of attending a whole Ring cycle at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. The authenticity concert-goers sought by attending a live performance resulted not least from this shortage of orchestral events. Current research about concerts suggests that the experience of a live musical performance still has unique and indispensable qualities, despite the rise of the “digital concert hall”32 and an abundance of media that make recorded performances available at any moment.33 Research concerning tourism has dis cussed the highly problematic notion of authenticity and has analyzed the complex semi otic and social processes that make basically every touristic setting a partly “staged au thenticity.”34 In classical concert life of the twenty-first century we can see different lev els of genuineness. Vienna, a city that has music as the core of its touristic marketing, is a good example.35 Many parallel concert businesses exist that symbolize different levels of authenticity for the cultural tourist. At one end of the spectrum are the highly exclusive and sought-after subscription concerts of the Wiener Philharmoniker in the Musikvere inssaal, which grew out of a long bourgeois urban tradition; at the other end is a busy market of tourist-only concerts that showcase music from the golden era of Johann Strauss and provide all the features of a staged authenticity. Nevertheless, both forms of concert indisputably function as musical sights, and the credibility of their authenticity (or lack thereof) depends on the tourist’s own beliefs and judgments.
(p. 218)
Touristic Knowledge
When the touristic listening paradigm is used to describe a tradition of informed music listening, the analysis of the markers becomes a point of focus. If these markers are cru cial for constructing a musical sight, how are they structured, and how do they do their job? Again, the annotated program and the concert guidebook that emerged parallel to the travel guide are exemplary. Both formats are verbal markers in connection with ex cerpts of musical notation, constituting the musical sight by means of description and in formation or, more specifically, knowledge.36 The knowledge presented in such music guides has four characteristics that make it similar to what is collected in travel guides. Page 11 of 23
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“What Ought to be Heard”: Touristic Listening and the Guided Ear First, the knowledge is work-focused. It is tailored to the work that is about to be per formed and listened to. In a program booklet, these chunks of knowledge are bundled ac cording to the sequence of appearance in the concert. In a book such as Kretzschmar’s concert guide the units are in chronological order, but the user of the book (the concertgoer) bundles the knowledge according to the musical pieces he or she is going to en counter—as does the tourist following a tour description or retrieving the information when arriving at a tourist attraction. This object-focused structure seems trivial, but it shows that the explicit descriptive knowledge of a program note is a practical listening knowledge. At the same time, the cases of Grove and Kretzschmar show in an exemplary way that such analytical notes can have a proto-musicological status: They started as a form of popularized music analysis that, at the end of the nineteenth century, evolved into the typical work-centered approach of Western historical musicology.37 Second, it is a framing knowledge. Its basic elements include historical information about the compositional style, the making of the work, and the composer. This framing knowl edge is the most evident sign that the content conveyed has an educational and commu nicative character. To know something about the piece and its composer and to be able to place the music heard in a stylistic and historical landscape adds cognitive value to the music and the concert experience as symbolic capital. Third, it is a guiding knowledge. Step-by-step description of the music has been an inte gral part of program notes since their beginning. The listener is guided virtually through the music, whether in a detailed way that resembles a musical analysis or in the manner of a synopsis that summarizes the character of the piece or movement in question. The original title of John Ella’s notes, “Synoptical Analysis” (which Hanslick disparaged as too technical), indicates both the linear approach that describes the order of events in time and the synopsis in its literal sense of overviewing something as if on a map. The guiding function is closely connected to the work-focused structure. It is also a form of knowledge concerned with practical perception, as it helps guide the ear during the performance or when preparing or recalling the music alongside the description. Finally, it is a canonizing knowledge. All characteristics work together in select ing, classifying, and evaluating the music. The assessment-oriented character of such ob ject-focused, framing, and guiding knowledge is probably the aspect with the most direct influence on the constitution of an auditory musical sight. This type of text has origins specific to music. Evaluative descriptions of works were already characteristic of music criticism, reports on concert performances, and especially journalistic reviews of newly published compositions (Musikalienrezension). With the rise of the annotated program and the concert guidebook, descriptive and evaluative knowledge of music criticism was moved to a format that made it directly available to the listener in a concert hall. Thus it was not accidental that Hermann Kretzschmar published his first pre-concert notes as newspaper articles in 1878 before he gathered them in his concert guide. He also pointed to this critical element in his foreword: “As historiography and critique are inseparable, one should excuse the fact that the compositions and the composer are also evaluated.”38 It is typical of a touristic marker, however, that the assessments are more often affirma (p. 219)
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“What Ought to be Heard”: Touristic Listening and the Guided Ear tive and promotional than they are critical and that they are highly selective in what is described and highlighted.
Guiding and Canonizing the Musical Experi ence In conclusion, I will sketch aspects of these last two functions—canonizing and guiding— which are central to elaborating the analogy between touristic and auditory musical expe rience. One of George Grove’s most widely read and reprinted program notes can serve as an example. It opens as follows: We have now arrived at the fifth of Beethoven’s Symphonies. It forms, in a certain sense, the climax of them—not that it is so great or so profound as the Ninth, or even perhaps as the Eroica; but there is about it an energy, an audacity, an unex pectedness, which seem, perhaps, more directly typical of the man than anything else that he has left, and would probably cause most persons, when the name of Beethoven is mentioned, to think immediately of the C minor Symphony.39 The opening phrase “we have now arrived at” is already an example of the guiding func tion; it could just as easily be found in a travel guide or a museum guide. Using metaphors of space and transportation, it suggests a walk through a virtual museum of musical works. Grove kept this wording in the book version (Beethoven and His Nine Symphonies),40 where it corresponds to a passage through all nine symphonies. For the concert-goer, “we have arrived” is not a figure of speech of the sort that rhetorical termi nology might call pluralis modestiae or pluralis auctoris; rather, it is an actual collective (p. 220) “we” that includes everyone in the audience. It includes a group of hearers who are being guided by Grove, much as a tour guide addresses his tour group. The language of evaluation, which is typical of popular literature and whose rhetorical mode is fundamentally the superlative, is significant for the canonizing function. It mani fests itself particularly in such opening statements. The predicate “it forms . . . the cli max” represents this function here. The person who begins to read is already validated: it is important, necessary, and hence useful to know this music, to hear it, and—a self-af firming function of explanatory knowledge—also to acquire this knowledge about “the C minor Symphony.” Also typical of popular canonization is Grove’s statement that most people will think of the C minor symphony when Beethoven is mentioned. This statement shares something with the kind of touristic knowledge disseminated in travel guidebooks: the relation in which a musical sight stands metonymically for a person, an artist, a style, or a whole nation. Such conventional and topical metonymy is always accompanied by widespread general familiarity with the object and a sharply abbreviated canonization, as, for example, when the Eiffel Tower, as a “must-see” during a trip to Paris, at the same time stands in a symbolic way for the city or for France as a whole.
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“What Ought to be Heard”: Touristic Listening and the Guided Ear In the realm of music, the process of canonization already begins with the designation on the printed program. As Anselma Lanzendörfer has shown using the example of the con certs in the Leipziger Gewandhaus, Mozart and Beethoven were already being given pref erential treatment in this way at the beginning of the nineteenth century.41 Designating a symphony with its key and its running number announced and suggested a canonic value for the listener. Grove’s use of the short names “the C minor Symphony,” “the Ninth,” and “the Eroica” represents an advanced stage of this development, in which the already canonical list of the nine symphonies is abbreviated to the especially well-known three (no. 3, no. 5, and no. 9), and then shortened once again to the Fifth Symphony, which by itself represents Beethoven. This also applies in a similar way to annotations in the pro gram booklet. In the period between 1880 and 1914, annotation in itself already consti tuted an index of evaluation: overtures and solo concertos within an evening program of ten were not annotated, in contrast with the symphony. They did not receive the initial verbal markers of evaluation and classification that are required by canonization in the sense of touristic listening.42 At the level of the musical description, a form of canonizing can be detected in which can onizing and guiding coincide. Parallel to metonymic relationships (C minor Symphony standing for Beethoven), we can speak of synecdochical canonization. Not only a com plete work, but often a particular movement, an aria or melody, or even a certain motive can become musical sights that one should not miss. This pars pro toto canonization is es pecially effective in opera, where the dissemination of “what you need to have heard” tra ditionally takes place via arias and excerpts, captured in exemplary form in the potpourri overture, which in turn can already be an integral part of the work. The characterization as touristic listening in the strict sense may apply particularly well to such a practice of perception through musical highlights. This is also true, however, for the symphonic genre. The beginning of Grove’s program note of (p. 221) 1879–80 can serve once more as evidence in this case. His reference to the four-note opening motive of the C minor sym phony, “This distinct personality (if we may so style it) no doubt arises in great measure from the extraordinary nature of the opening subject,” reduces the metonymy to the rela tion between the motive and Beethoven’s personality. He continues: “Certain it is that to the mass of hearers [the initial motive] is the real subject—the germ, the animating soul of the whole movement.” The focus on “musical sights” can be this narrow, but it can also be quite broad. At the end of the book version of his article, Grove makes an attempt to sum up the role, the meaning, and the importance of the Fifth Symphony, as well as the individual physiognomy of each of Beethoven’s symphonies. It is here that he chooses a strong landscape metaphor that projects a prototypical touristic image—a panoramic view of the Swiss alps—onto Beethoven’s oeuvre: His Symphonies form a series of peaks, each with its characteristic features—its clefts, its glaciers, its descending torrents and majestic waterfalls, its sunny up lands and its shining lakes; and each of these great peaks has its own individual character as much as the great mountains of Switzerland have theirs, and is a world in itself—a world not made with hands, and eternal. 43 Page 14 of 23
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“What Ought to be Heard”: Touristic Listening and the Guided Ear The quotation is exemplary for the way the musical and the touristic view can intertwine. The mountain imagery orchestrates a popularized aesthetics of the sublime and, at the same time, amplifies the rank of canonization: Beethoven is a “must-hear” in the same way as the Swiss alps are a “must-see.” The “moral claim”44 of a must-see (or at least a “must-know”) that is connected with a canonic attraction has a long history. It dates back to the ancient Mediterranean world, where the list of the Seven Wonders of the World was widely distributed and evoked in travel writings by Pausanias and others.45 In mod ern tourism, it was John Murray in the 1830s who also introduced a system of marking with asterisks the sights that the tourist should by no means miss. His books would not describe, as he stated, “what may be seen” but instead “what ought to be seen.”46 In the globalized world of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, such lists of markers have become distinctly longer, yet the principle of selection and canonization is still indispens able, if only in view of the lifespan of the individual world traveler. Thus a best-selling American guidebook at the beginning of the twenty-first century proposes Murray’s “what ought to be seen” as a superlative: 1000 Places to See Before You Die.47 Such can onizing imperatives are characteristic of the touristic view and the popular reception of art and music, and they point to the fluid transitions between the two areas. It seems that, nowadays, the promotional language of cultural tourism and city marketing utilizes such transitions effectively. The campaign for Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie concert hall, opened in January 2017, with the catchphrase Klangweltwunder (sound wonder of the world; see Figure I.3 in the Introduction) advertises a spectacular architectural and—sup posedly—musico-acoustic attraction as the new town landmark by alluding to one of old est touristic myths. A cultural history of music listening should continue to observe such interlockings.
References Abel, Günter. 2004. Zeichen der Wirklichkeit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Applegate, Celia, and Pamela Maxine Potter, eds. 2002. Music and German National Iden tity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bashford, Christina. 2003. “Not Just ‘G.’: Towards a History of the Programme Note.” In George Grove, Music and Victorian Culture, edited by Michael Musgrave, 115–142, 301– 318. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bashford, Christina. 2007. The Pursuit of High Culture: John Ella and Chamber Music in Victorian London. Woodbridge: Boydell. Bijsterveld, Karin, and José van Dijck, eds. (2009). Sound Souvenirs: Audio Tech nologies, Memory and Cultural Practices. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. (p. 226)
Bohlman, Philip. 2001. “Pilgrimage.” In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musi cians, 2nd ed., edited by Stanley Sadie, 19:743–745. New York: Grove.
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“What Ought to be Heard”: Touristic Listening and the Guided Ear Botstein, Leon. 1992. “Listening Through Reading: Musical Literacy and the Concert Au dience.” 19th Century Music 16:129–145. Brodersen, Kai. 1996. Die sieben Weltwunder: Legendäre Kunst- und Bauwerke der An tike. Munich: Beck. Buzard, James. 1993. The Beaten Track. Oxford: Clarendon. Campos, Rémy, and Nicolas Donin. 2005. “La Musicographie à l’œuvre: Écriture du guide d’écoute et autorité de l’analyste à la fin du dix-neuvième siècle.” Acta Musicologica 77 (2): 151–204. Culler, Jonathan. 1988. Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions. Norman: Univer sity of Oklahoma Press. DeWitt, Mark F., ed. 1999. “Music, Travel and Tourism.” The World of Music 41 (3). https://www.jstor.org/stable/i40079784. Eco, Umberto. 1976. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Fischinger, Timo, Michaela Kaufmann, and Wolff Schlotz. [Submitted]. “If it’s Mozart, it must be good? The influence of textual information and age on musical appreciation.” Goehr, Lydia. 2007. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay on the Philoso phy of Music. Rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Großmann-Vendrey, Susanna. 1977. Bayreuth in der deutschen Presse: Beiträge zur Rezeptionsgeschichte Richard Wagners und seiner Festspiele. Regensburg: Bosse. Grove, George. (1878) 1890. “Analysis.” In A Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by George Grove, 1:62–63. London: Macmillan. Grove, George, ed. 1896. Beethoven and His Nine Symphonies. London: Novello. Hanslick, Eduard. 1870. Aus dem Concertsaal. Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller. Heister, Hanns-Werner. 1996. “Programmzettel und Pausenzeichen: Einige formale As pekte der Musik/Informationsvermittlung.” In Festschrift Peter Rummenhöller, edited by Thomas Ott and Heinz von Loesch, 65–74. Augsburg: Wißner. Heller, Karl. 1998. “Das Rostocker Jahrzehnt Kretzschmars.” In Hermann Kretzschmar: Konferenzbericht Olbernhau 1998, edited by Rainer Cadenbach and Helmut Loos, 57–77. Chemnitz: Schröder. Jules-Rosette, Bennetta. 2004. “Tourism.” In Semiotik/Semiotics. Handbücher zur Sprachund Kommunikationswissenschaft/Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science, vol. 13, no. 4, edited by Roland Posner, 3408–3421. Berlin: De Gruyter.
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“What Ought to be Heard”: Touristic Listening and the Guided Ear Koshar, Rudy. 1998. “‘What ought to be seen’: Tourists’ Guidebooks and National Identi ties in Modern Germany and Europe.” Journal of Contemporary History 33: 232–340. Kretzschmar, Hermann. 1878. “Die C-Moll-Sinfonie von Johannes Brahms.” Rostocker Zeitung (no. 47), February 24. Fourth Supplement. Kretzschmar, Hermann. 1887. Führer durch den Concertsaal: Sinfonie und Suite. Vol. 1. Leipzig: Liebeskind. Larkin, David. 2009. “Aus Italien: Retracing Strauss’s Journeys.” Musical Quarterly 92 (1– 2) (March): 70–117. MacCannell, Dean. (1976) 1999. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Berke ley: University of California Press. Margulis, Elizabeth Hellmuth. 2010. “When Program Notes Don’t Help: Music Descrip tions and Enjoyment.” Psychology of Music 38 (3) (July): 285–302. (p. 227)
Müller, Susanne. 2012. Die Welt des Baedeker. Frankfurt am Main: Campus.
Murray, John, ed. 1876. A Handbook for Travellers in Holland and Belgium. 19th ed., with maps and plans. London: Murray. Musgrave, Michael. 1995. The Musical Life of the Crystal Palace. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Musgrave, Michael, ed. 2003. George Grove, Music and Victorian Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Nußbaumer, Martina. 2007. Musikstadt Wien. Freiburg: Rombach. Parsons, Nicholas T. 2007. Worth the Detour: A History of the Guidebook. Stroud: Sutton. Raj, Razaq, Kevin Griffen, and Nigel Morpeth, eds. Cultural Tourism. Wallingford, UK: CAB International. Rehding, Alexander. 2009. Music and Monumentality: Commemoration and Wonderment in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reisinger, Yvette, and Carol J. Steiner. 2006. “Reconceptualizing Object Authenticity.” An nals of Tourism Research 33 (1) (January): 65–86. Ridgewell, Rupert. 2003. Concert Programmes in the UK and Ireland: A Preliminary Re port. London: IAML and the Music Libraries Trust. Schultz, Patricia. 2003. 1000 Places to See Before You Die. New York: Workman. Shaw, George Bernard. 1898. The Perfect Wagnerite. London: G. Richards.
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“What Ought to be Heard”: Touristic Listening and the Guided Ear Steinecke, Albrecht. 2007. Kulturtourismus: Marktstrukturen, Fallstudien, Perspektiven. Munich: Oldenbourg. Suppan, Wolfgang, ed. 1991. Schladminger Gespräche zum Thema Musik und Tourismus. Tutzing: Schneider. Tewinkel, Christiane. 2016. Muss ich das Programmheft lesen? Zur populärwis senschaftlichen Darstellung von Musik seit 1945. Kassel: Bärenreiter. Thorau, Christian. 1998. “Führer durch den Konzertsaal und durch das Bühnenfestspiel— Hermann Kretzschmar, Hans von Wolzogen und die Bewegung der Erläuterer.” In Her mann Kretzschmar: Konferenzbericht Olbernhau 1998, edited by Rainer Cadenbach and Helmut Loos, 93–107. Chemnitz: Schröder. Thorau, Christian. 2003. Semantisierte Sinnlichkeit: Rezeption und Zeichenstruktur der Leitmotivtechnik Richard Wagners. Stuttgart: Steiner. Thorau, Christian. 2009. “Guides for Wagnerites: Leitmotifs and Wagnerian Listening.” In Richard Wagner and His World, edited by Thomas S. Grey, 133–150. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Thorau, Christian. 2013. “Werk, Wissen und touristisches Hören: Popularisierende Kanon bildung in Programmheften und Konzertführern.” In Der Kanon der Musik: Theorie und Geschichte; Ein Handbuch, edited by Klaus Pietschmann and Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann, 535–561. Munich: Text und Kritik. Thorau, Christian. 2018. “Vom Programmzettel zur Listening App: Eine kurze Geschichte des geführten Hörens.” In Das Konzert II. Beiträge zum Forschungsfeld der Concert Stud ies, edited by Martin Tröndle, 165–196. Bielefeld: Transcript. Tröndle, Martin, ed. 2011. Das Konzert: Neue Aufführungskonzepte für eine klassische Form. 2nd ed. Bielefeld: Transcript. Wagner, Richard. 1898. Der Ring des Nibelungen: A Souvenir of Three Wagner Cycles at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. London, Rudolph B. Birnbaum. Women Com posers Collection at the University of Michigan Music Library, Hathi Trust Digital Library (003166515). Accessed November 23, 2016. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/ 101677206. Willke, Helmut. 2011. Einführung in das Wissensmanagement. 3rd edition. Heidelberg: Auer. (p. 228)
Notes: (1.) On the role of digital apps in the context of a guided listening see Thorau, Christian. 2018. “Vom Programmzettel zur Listening App: Eine kurze Geschichte des geführten
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“What Ought to be Heard”: Touristic Listening and the Guided Ear Hörens.” In Das Konzert II. Beiträge zum Forschungsfeld der Concert Studies, edited by Martin Tröndle, 165–196. Bielefeld: transcript. (2.) In his 2003 report, Ruppert Ridge called collections of concert programs in library archives “a potential gold mine of information for the researcher” (Ridgewell, Rupert. 2003. Concert Programmes in the UK and Ireland: A Preliminary Report. London: IAML and the Music Libraries Trust, 8). At about the same time Catherine Dale and Christina Bashford started to explore this potential regarding annotated programs in Britain (see Bashford, Chapter 8 in this handbook, nn. 1–2). Bashford’s pioneering article from 2003 holds copious suggestions for the historical and cultural contextualization of program notes in England. Bashford, Christina. 2003. “Not Just ‘G.’: Towards a History of the Pro gramme Note.” In George Grove, Music and Victorian Culture, edited by Michael Mus grave, 115–142, 301–318. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. The international scholarly exchange about the phenomenon, however, has been limited. Hanns-Werner Heister of fered a sociological perspective (Heister, Hanns-Werner. 1996. “Programmzettel und Pausenzeichen: Einige formale Aspekte der Musik/Informationsvermittlung.” In Festschrift Peter Rummenhöller, edited by Thomas Ott and Heinz von Loesch, 65–74. Augsburg: Wißner). My first study, in 1998, took as its starting point the explanatory liter ature on concert life and on Wagnerian opera in the Kaiserreich: Thorau, Christian. 1998. “Führer durch den Konzertsaal und durch das Bühnenfestspiel—Hermann Kretzschmar, Hans von Wolzogen und die Bewegung der Erläuterer.” In Hermann Kretzschmar: Kon ferenzbericht Olbernhau 1998, edited by Rainer Cadenbach and Helmut Loos, 93–107. Chemnitz: Schröder. I extended this approach with a focus on Wagner’s reception history in Thorau, Christian. 2003. Semantisierte Sinnlichkeit: Rezeption und Zeichenstruktur der Leitmotivtechnik Richard Wagners. Stuttgart: Steiner, and developed it in Thorau, Christ ian. 2013. “Werk, Wissen und touristisches Hören: Popularisierende Kanonbildung in Pro grammheften und Konzertführern.” In Der Kanon der Musik: Theorie und Geschichte; Ein Handbuch, edited by Klaus Pietschmann and Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann, 535–561. Munich: Text und Kritik. A crucial study of the Wagnerian approach in French listening guides was offered by Campos, Rémy, and Nicolas Donin. 2005. “La Musicographie à l’œuvre: Écrit ure du guide d’écoute et autorité de l’analyste à la fin du dix-neuvième siècle.” Acta Musi cologica 77 (2): 151–204. Christiane Tewinkel recently included introductory books in a study of German program notes: Tewinkel, Christiane. 2016. Muss ich das Programmheft lesen? Zur populärwissenschaftlichen Darstellung von Musik seit 1945. Kassel: Bärenreit er. For empirical studies of informed listening see Margulis, Elizabeth Hellmuth. 2010. “When Program Notes Don’t Help: Music Descriptions and Enjoyment.” Psychology of Music 38 (3) (July): 285–302, and a current research project at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, led by Timo Fischinger and Michaela Kaufmann: “Informed Listening. The Role of Framing Information For Music Ap preciation Processes.” A recent paper from this project is Fischinger, Timo, Michaela Kaufmann, and Wolff Schlotz. [Submitted]. “If it’s Mozart, it must be good? The influence of textual information and age on musical appreciation.”
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“What Ought to be Heard”: Touristic Listening and the Guided Ear (3.) For a recent account of the media cultural history of the travel guide, see Müller, Su sanne. 2012. Die Welt des Baedeker. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, and her interpretation of the Spitzweg painting on pp. 85–88. Nicholas Parsons offered a longue durée study of the history of the guidebook; see Parsons, Nicholas T. 2007. Worth the Detour: A History of the Guidebook. Stroud: Sutton. (4.) See Müller (2012): 34–48; Parsons (2007): 177–205, and Bashford, Chapter 8 in this handbook, nn. 38–40); see also, Koshar, Rudy. 1998. “‘What ought to be seen’: Tourists’ Guidebooks and National Identities in Modern Germany and Europe.” Journal of Contem porary History 33: 232–340. (5.) See Müller (2012): 85. (6.) See Müller (2012): 89–91. (7.) Hanslick, Eduard. 1870. Aus dem Concertsaal. Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller, 513. Un less otherwise noted, all translations were provided by the author. See Bashford in this handbook for a slightly different translation. The original reads: “Werfen wir einen Blick auf ein englisches Concert-Publicum. Die Aufmerksamkeit und Ruhe der Hörer ist musterhaft. Sie wird durch die Lectüre kleiner Broschüren unterstützt, in welchen Her ren und Damen emsig nachlesen. Dies sind die kritischen Erläuterungen, die den Eintre tenden mit der Unfehlbarkeit von Tanzordnungen höflich überreicht werden. Diese musikalischen Wegweiser sind, unseres Wissens, zuerst von [John] Ella unter dem schauderhaften Titel: ‘Synoptical Analysis’ eingeführt worden, und enthalten neben bi ographischen und historischen Notizen eine mit Notenbeispielen ausgestattete Zer gliederung der größeren vorzuführenden Werke. . . . Der Deutsche bedarf freilich der Führerschaft nicht in dem Grad, als der Engländer sie liebt, am wenigsten will er sich sein Urtheil vorschreiben lassen. Das ist Jenem gerade recht; unsicher, wie er sich in äs thetischen Dingen einmal fühlt, liebt der Engländer directe Belehrung. Wie er die Rheingegenden nicht ohne seinen Murray, so genießt er auch Beethoven nicht vollständig ohne ‘Synoptical Analysis.’ ” (8.) Müller (2012): 85–86; see also Buzard, James. 1993. The Beaten Track. Oxford: Clarendon, 83–97. (9.) See Bashford, Christina. 2007. The Pursuit of High Culture: John Ella and Chamber Music in Victorian London. Woodbridge: Boydell, esp. 127–163. (10.) See Bashford (2003): 132. (11.) See Bashford (2003): 199–227. For scholarship about Grove, see the collected vol ume Musgrave, Michael, ed. 2003. George Grove, Music and Victorian Culture. Bas ingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan; and Musgrave, Michael. 1995. The Musical Life of the Crystal Palace. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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“What Ought to be Heard”: Touristic Listening and the Guided Ear (12.) For the history of this superiority discourse see Applegate, Celia, and Pamela Max ine Potter, eds. 2002. Music and German National Identity. Chicago: University of Chica go Press. (13.) Großmann-Vendrey, Susanna. 1977. Bayreuth in der deutschen Presse: Beiträge zur Rezeptionsgeschichte Richard Wagners und seiner Festspiele. Regensburg: Bosse, 1:174. (14.) Grove, George. (1878) 1890. “Analysis.” In A Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by George Grove, 1:62–63. London: Macmillan. (15.) With the ironic and likewise serious title of his guidebook, George Bernard Shaw took on this new instructional genre (Shaw, George Bernard. 1898. The Perfect Wagnerite. London: G. Richards). Regarding the “Leitfaden”-literature see Thorau, Christ ian. 2009. “Guides for Wagnerites: Leitmotifs and Wagnerian Listening.” In Richard Wagn er and His World, edited by Thomas S. Grey, 133–150. Princeton: Princeton University Press, which is a summary of my full-length study Thorau (2003); for the influence on French opera analysis and listening guides see Campos and Donin (2005). (16.) See Kretzschmar’s 1878 newpaper article “Die C-Moll-Sinfonie von Johannes Brahms.” Rostocker Zeitung (no. 47), February 24, Fourth Supplement. (17.) Kretzschmar, Hermann. 1887. Führer durch den Concertsaal: Sinfonie und Suite, vol. 1. Leipzig: Liebeskind, iii; on Kretzschmar’s decade in Rostock (1877–1887) see Heller, Karl. 1998. “Das Rostocker Jahrzehnt Kretzschmars.” In Hermann Kretzschmar: Konferenzbericht Olbernhau 1998, edited by Rainer Cadenbach and Helmut Loos, 57–77. Chemnitz: Schröder, here 76. (18.) Botstein, Leon. 1992. “Listening Through Reading: Musical Literacy and the Concert Audience.” 19th Century Music 16:129–145. (19.) Thorau (2013): 555–557. (20.) See the definitions in Steinecke, Albrecht. 2007. Kulturtourismus: Marktstrukturen, Fallstudien, Perspektiven. Munich: Oldenbourg, 2–5; for contemporary case studies see Raj, Razaq, Kevin Griffen, and Nigel Morpeth, eds. Cultural Tourism. Wallingford, UK: CAB International. (21.) See the issue DeWitt, Mark. F., ed. 1999. “Music, Travel and Tourism.” The World of Music 41 (3); Suppan, Wolfgang, ed. 1991. Schladminger Gespräche zum Thema Musik und Tourismus. Tutzing: Schneider; for the music of and during pilgrimage, see Bohlman, Philip. 2001. “Pilgrimage.” In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., edited by Stanley Sadie. 19:743–745. New York: Grove; regarding the composer’s per spective see Larkin, David. 2009. “Aus Italien: Retracing Strauss’s Journeys.” Musical Quarterly 92 (1–2) (March): 70–117. (22.) Buzard (1993): 4; for the distinction between the “traveler” and the “tourist” see 4– 6, 18–79. Page 21 of 23
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“What Ought to be Heard”: Touristic Listening and the Guided Ear (23.) See MacCannell, Dean (1976) 1999. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Berkeley: University of California Press, 41–48, 109–133. For an overview of semiotic tourism research see Jules-Rosette, Bennetta. 2004. “Tourism.” In Semiotik/Semiotics. Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft/Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science, vol. 13, no. 4, edited by Roland Posner, 3408–3421. Berlin: De Gruyter. (24.) For a classical discussion of the semiotic triad, as described by Charles Sanders Peirce, see Eco, Umberto. 1976. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. (25.) See Rehding, Alexander. 2009. Music and Monumentality: Commemoration and Won derment in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (26.) See my introduction of the concept in Thorau (2013): 555–560. (27.) See Goehr, Lydia. 2007. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay on the Philosophy of Music. Rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (28.) Goehr (2007): 127–175. (29.) See the chapter “Sounding Souvenirs” from Rehding (2009) and Bijsterveld, Karin, and José van Dijck, eds. (2009). Sound Souvenirs: Audio Technologies, Memory and Cul tural Practices. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. (30.) Bashford (2003): 131. This points to the fact that the programs of the Crystal Palace and of the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester were issued with continuous pagination and with running heads, allowing the subscribers to have them bound and preserved for fu ture reference. (31.) The program booklet for Wagner’s Ring Cycle at Covent Garden in 1898 provides a good example. It is available via the Hathi Trust Digital Library: Wagner, Richard. 1898. Der Ring des Nibelungen: A Souvenir of Three Wagner Cycles at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. London, Rudolph B. Birnbaum. Women Composers Collection at the Uni versity of Michigan Music Library, Hathi Trust Digital Library (003166515). Accessed No vember 23, 2016. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/101677206. (32.) See the pioneer project launched by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in 2008: https://www.digitalconcerthall.com/. (33.) See Tröndle, Martin, ed. 2011. Das Konzert: Neue Aufführungskonzepte für eine klassische Form. 2nd ed. Bielefeld: Transcript. (34.) See the chapter “The Semiotics of Tourism” in Culler, Jonathan. 1988. Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 153–167; MacCannell ([1976] 1999): 91–107; Jules-Rosette (2004): 3408–3409; and also Reisinger,
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“What Ought to be Heard”: Touristic Listening and the Guided Ear Yvette, and Carol J. Steiner. 2006. “Reconceptualizing Object Authenticity.” Annals of Tourism Research 33 (1) (January): 65–86. (35.) See the study of Nußbaumer, Martina. 2007. Musikstadt Wien. Freiburg: Rombach. (36.) I use a traditional concept of knowledge as true and justified belief (see Abel, Gün ter. 2004. Zeichen der Wirklichkeit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 319–327). From a so ciological viewpoint, Grove’s and Kretzschmar’s texts would be considered rather as in formation, and the concept of knowledge would be reserved for “the refinement of infor mation by means of practice. Every knowledge requires practice.” (Willke, Helmut. 2011. Einführung in das Wissensmanagement. 3rd ed. Heidelberg: Auer, 37). In that case, infor mation provided by the commentary becomes knowledge via the listening practice of the concert-goers. (37.) Grove makes the connection clear in his dictionary article “Analysis”; see Grove ([1878] 1890). Kretzschmar’s book is not only a concert guide; it is also a proto-musico logical text that represents one of the first handbooks of a history of orchestral music. (38.) “Da Historie und Kritik unzertrennlich sind, wird man entschuldigen, dass die Com positionen und die Componisten auch beurtheilt werden.” Kretzschmar (1887): iii. (39.) Concert Program of the Nineteenth Saturday Concert of the Crystal Palace, Season 1879–80, pp. 569–576, here 569. Reprinted in Musgrave (2003): 320–327, here 320. (40.) Grove, George, ed. 1896. Beethoven and His Nine Symphonies. London: Novello: 136. (41.) See Lanzendörfer, Chapter 7 in this handbook. (42.) See Thorau (2013): 558–561. (43.) Grove (1896): 173. (44.) See MacCannell ([1976] 1999): 45. (45.) See Parsons (2007): 24–42, and Brodersen, Kai. 1996. Die sieben Weltwunder: Leg endäre Kunst- und Bauwerke der Antike. Munich: Beck. (46.) Murray, John, ed. 1876. A Handbook for Travellers in Holland and Belgium. 19th ed., with maps and plans. London: Murray, v. (47.) Schultz, Patricia. 2003. 1000 Places to See Before You Die. New York: Workman.
Christian Thorau
Christian Thorau, Universität Potsdam
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Architectural Acoustics and the Trained Ear in the Arts: A Journey from 1780 to 1830
Architectural Acoustics and the Trained Ear in the Arts: A Journey from 1780 to 1830 Viktoria Tkaczyk and Stefan Weinzierl The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries Edited by Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer Print Publication Date: Jan 2019 Subject: Music, Musicology and Music History Online Publication Date: Nov 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190466961.013.14
Abstract and Keywords This chapter shifts perspective from the history of architectural acoustics (as a branch of physics) to the history of architecture and practices of listening from around 1780 to 1830. In this period, operas, concerts, and spoken theater pieces, traditionally performed in the same venue, were increasingly regarded as separate genres, each related to a spe cific sonic reverberation time. As this chapter illustrates using acoustic data from major venues, this separation corresponded with ever-diverging concepts of acoustic design and the acoustic properties of new buildings. The shift occurred, first, because of the emer gence of a bourgeois theater and music culture and, second, due to a fundamental epis temic shift in acoustic theory when sound reflection began to be thought of as a phenom enon related to energy, time, and building materials. The audience was conceived of as a group of genre-specific listening experts who paid attention to sound dying away over time. Keywords: acoustics, audience composition, architecture, Berlin concert halls, science of listening, architectural acoustics, listening practices, Vienna concert halls
IN 1900 the American physicist Wallace Clement Sabine developed a definition of and for mula for the reverberation time of rooms and, consequently, the possibility of making pre dictions about the acoustic properties of a certain architectural design.1 These achieve ments earned Sabine the title of founding father of architectural acoustics. He was, how ever, well aware that the formula for reverberation was of limited use in the absence of reference values for acoustically optimal rooms. In order to identify these values Sabine conducted a series of pioneering experiments, described in the 1906 paper “The Accura cy of Musical Taste in Regard to Architectural Acoustics.” One of the trials took place in 1902 in the recently built New England Conservatory of Music, where Sabine invited a number of music experts to judge the acoustic quality of five piano instruction rooms. He asked the test subjects to listen to piano music while he constantly added seat cushions to the rooms in order to reduce their reverberation time. Sabine observed that the listeners judged all rooms to be acoustically optimal if the reverberation time was within a very narrow range of tolerance, 1.1 ± 0.1 seconds.2 From this, he concluded that there was a Page 1 of 25
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Architectural Acoustics and the Trained Ear in the Arts: A Journey from 1780 to 1830 common taste of “surprising accuracy” for the performance conditions of certain musical genres, about which he planned to extend his investigations.3 But these plans remained unrealized. Sabine did not scrutinize “musical taste” with respect to the psychological, cultural, or social causes of listening habits. In order to shed light on the cultural and historical preconditions of Sabine’s research, this chapter traces the topos of good sound back to the acoustic conditions of theater and concert-hall culture in European cities between 1780 and 1830. Looking at exemplary ar chitectural projects and the related debates in Vienna, London, Paris, and Berlin, we show that in this period, the opera, the concert, and the spoken drama, which (p. 232) for merly had often been presented in the same venue, began to be seen more and more as separate genres. These performance genres corresponded with increasingly divergent concepts of acoustic design and the acoustic properties of new buildings—a fact that also becomes apparent in architectural treatises of the period. The remarkably large number of texts about theater design and architectural acoustics that appeared from around 1780, as well as the architectural practices to which they refer, may be regarded as indi cating the development of a nuanced and increasingly differentiated taste for the sound of buildings all over Europe and subsequently in the United States—even if a scientific ap proach to controlled design was not available before Sabine’s achievements at the turn of the twentieth century.
Acoustic Tradition circa 1800: Beethoven’s Concert Venues We begin our examination of good sound in Vienna’s theater landscape circa 1800. As the capital of the Habsburg Empire, Vienna was a cultural center for theater, ballet, and mu sic throughout the eighteenth century, the First Viennese School of composers (Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven) being a point of reference for Western classical music well into the twentieth century. These cultural activities drew on resources for courtly representa tion, a wealthy and art-loving higher nobility whose baroque city palaces dominated the architectural appearance of the city center, and the first attempts by private musical en trepreneurs to organize concerts in public restaurants and ballrooms during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The most important venues for all genres of performing arts, however, were Vienna’s large theaters, with seating capacities of up to twenty-five hundred. These included the two court theaters (the Burgtheater and the Kärntnertortheater), as well as several pri vately managed theaters, among them the Freihaustheater, which was renamed Theater an der Wien after its relocation in 1801 to the spot where it can still be visited today (see Figure 10.1). All theaters had a permanent orchestra with thirty to thirty-five players for the accompa niment of opera and ballet, as well as for the overtures and entr’actes of theatrical pro ductions in general. The orchestra was also employed for purely musical productions. Page 2 of 25
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Architectural Acoustics and the Trained Ear in the Arts: A Journey from 1780 to 1830 These productions, called “academies,”4 were organized as a supplement to an opera that did not fill the entire evening or occasionally as an independent, full-length program on days when theatrical productions were not allowed.5 On such days the theaters, including their orchestras, were rented out to vocal or instrumental virtuosi or to composers acting as music entrepreneurs at their own risk, usually for the performance of their own com positions. It was during one such academy that the first performance of Beethoven’s Sym phony no. 1 took place on April 2, 1800, at the Burgtheater with the local orchestra. (p. 233)
Figure 10.1. Interior view of the Theater an der Wien. Photograph of an anonymous woodcut from the first half of the nineteenth century. Courtesy of Beethoven-Haus Bonn, NE 81, Band II, Nr. 350.
Between 1800 and 1808 almost all of Beethoven’s orchestral works had their public pre mieres in one of these theaters, sometimes after private performances for his aristocratic patrons. These included Symphonies 1–6, Piano Concertos 1–5, and the Violin Concerto. The Violin Concerto was performed at the Theater an der Wien on December 23, 1806, during an academy organized by the orchestral director Franz Clement, who was also the soloist. On these occasions, the theater curtain remained closed and the orchestra per formed in its usual place in front of the stage.6 The orchestra was not located at a lower level (as in the modern configuration) but at the parquet level, separated from the audi ence by a wooden partition (see Figure 10.1). The use of large theaters as the standard performance venues for public orchestral pro ductions in Vienna circa 1800 arose in part from the fact that there was no public concert hall available. Whereas purpose-built concert halls had been constructed in the late eigh teenth century in commercial cities shaped by a bourgeois middle class (such as London, Hamburg, and Leipzig), in Vienna the first concert hall opened only in 1831, four years af ter Beethoven’s death. Yet there is no indication that a theater, with its typical acoustic conditions, was considered inappropriate for the performance of orchestral music. The contemporary discourse about “favorable conditions”—reflected in concert reviews, in Beethoven’s personal correspondence, and in the conversation books that he kept from Page 3 of 25
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Architectural Acoustics and the Trained Ear in the Arts: A Journey from 1780 to 1830 1818 owing to his progressive deafness—focused instead on the question (p. 234) of the appropriate orchestra size and stage plan to meet the requirements of a particular occa sion and a particular room.7 This becomes evident from the varying orchestra sizes, which were carefully adapted to the size of the room. All theater orchestras until 1820 had a standard size for the string section of 6–6–4–3–3 (for Vl 1–Vl 2–Va–Vc–B). This was increased to 13–12–7–6–4 in the medium-size ceremonial hall of the university and to 20–20–12–10–8 with doubled wood winds in the large Redoutensaal of the Vienna Hofburg.8 At this time there was no stan dard format for musical performances with regard to concert programs, the time and du ration of concerts, ensemble sizes, or the architectural design of performance venues. This changed gradually after 1820, as newly founded music societies such as the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (1812) and the Concerts Spirituels (1819) took on a key role in public musical life. They eventually commissioned concert halls, of which the very first was opened in 1831 and the second was the existing Musikvereinssaal in 1870.9 Until well into the 1820s, the programs of theater academies usually included ten to fif teen pieces, with a mixture of single movements of a symphony, solo concertos, overtures, and declamatory or pantomime performances.10 Until the middle of the century, not only opera and ballet but also spoken-drama performances were always accompanied by an or chestra for the overture and for the intermezzi. Hence, at least in Vienna, the notion of the musical concert as a completely independent performance genre, with specific archi tectural and acoustic requirements, could not evolve before the second third of the nine teenth century.
Acoustic Innovation circa 1800: Pierre Patte’s and George Saunders’s Theater Designs Looking beyond Vienna, with its society and culture strongly dominated by courtly and aristocratic structures, the late eighteenth century saw a rising interest in acoustics that was reflected in an architectural discourse on “good sound” throughout the continent. Whereas the construction of theaters and music rooms had formerly taken up only a few pages in major surveys of architecture, after about 1780 a number of treatises appeared that were dedicated solely to these subjects. Some provided overviews of historical build ings; others promoted particular designs for theaters, opera houses, and concert halls. What is important in the present context is that most such treatises include explicit re flections on matters of acoustics. Although writings concerning theater acoustics can be traced back to the Roman scholar Marcus Vitruvius Pollio and his De architectura (30–25 BCE), which was widely read dur ing the Renaissance period,11 architects associated with seventeenth- and early eigh teenth-century European court culture such as the Galli-Bibiena brothers focused primar ily on the spatial and visual aspects of theater design. Architectural treatises of (p. 235)
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Architectural Acoustics and the Trained Ear in the Arts: A Journey from 1780 to 1830 this period contain extensive chapters on the art of perspective or on visual stage effects, whereas acoustics is hardly mentioned at all.12 Architects’ growing interest in acoustics in the late eighteenth century was driven first and foremost by a changing opera and concert culture. The first public concert halls were erected in London (Hanover Square Rooms, opened 1775), then in other cities with a strong bourgeois musical life such as Leipzig (Altes Gewandhaus, 1781), Hamburg (Konz ertsaal auf dem Valentinskamp, 1761), and Paris (Théâtre du Conservatoire, 1811). A pay ing audience expected to be able to hear from any seat in the auditorium, and people now had the opportunity to develop a connoisseur’s experience of music and correspondingly sophisticated listening habits, including attention to the effect of specific performance venues.13 At roughly the same time, a new literary genre emerged that was clearly distinct from all forms of musical theater, the bourgeois drama.14 This aimed to educate the audience through the spoken word so as to form language-based, morally uplifted national commu nities.15 The spoken word was considered to have great importance for the aesthetic edu cation of the audience, and acting theories of the period bear witness to the rise of both a new art of declamation and a new art of listening, in a theater that, as the German archi tect Friedrich Weinbrenner put it, “should be intended not only for spectators, but also for listeners; indeed hearing is by far the more important thing in our musical and spoken plays.”16 Up to this point, the spectators had tended to speak loudly during a perfor mance, laugh, applaud spontaneously, whistle, or call out, but such disturbances were now to be eliminated. Audience members were expected to sit still, pay attention to what was happening on stage, and train themselves in a new art of listening. Theater reform ers even called for a “theater police” to ensure silence in the auditorium—a task accom plished in part with the help of state officials.17 The new theater designs were intended to allow every nuance of a word spoken on stage to be heard, just as the new concert halls were supposed to present symphonic music to its best advantage. Among the first of several publications concerning theater design in this period were those of the French architect Pierre Patte (1723–1814) and the English architect George Saunders (1762–1839). Both writers faced the problem that the eighteenth-century physi cal theory of sound as formulated by scholars such as Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Daniel Bernoulli, Joseph Louis Lagrange, and Leonard Euler, who treated sound as a mechanical wave passing through an elastic medium and provided functional equations for its threedimensional propagation,18 was of limited benefit when it came to designing theaters and opera houses. Patte’s Essai sur l’Architecture Théatrale (1782) emphasized that in modern theaters “the eyes and the ears [of the audience] are the agents of all pleasures,” and in order to achieve the “double aim of seeing well and hearing well,” an auditorium must be de signed to obey the rules of both optics and acoustics.19 After paying his respects to con temporary knowledge about acoustics, however, Patte decides to limit himself to geomet ric rules, for which he even provides a philosophical argument, claiming that “God creat Page 5 of 25
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Architectural Acoustics and the Trained Ear in the Arts: A Journey from 1780 to 1830 ed the universe by mere geometry; thus, sound must also obey geometric (p. 236) rules.”20 Following scholars such as the seventeenth-century Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, Patte ap plied to acoustics the law of optical reflection, according to which the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection.21 This enabled him to visualize on paper the behavior of sound in enclosed spaces. With the help of sound ray drawings, Patte found the ideal shape of a theater auditorium to be elliptical, so that the actor’s voice would always be re flected perfectly towards the auditorium.22 Although he ignored the fact that in an ellipti cal theater the reflected sound will be unequally distributed because of the formation of focal points, his approach of shaping the boundary surfaces of a hall so as to control the direction of sound reflections has continued to influence architectural acoustics to the present day. In his Treatise on Theatres (1790), George Saunders argued against this rather abstract geometry-based approach. Openly contradicting Patte, he denied the existence—or, at least, the relevance—of sound reflections. Instead, he retreated into an empirical ap proach, conducting experiments in order to determine the distance at which a speaker was still audible. First, Saunders asked a test subject to declaim a play in an open square in London. He then walked in circles around this person, at ever greater distances, until he could no longer hear the speaker’s voice.23 Saunders found this distance to be ninetytwo feet in front, seventy-five feet on each side, and thirty-one feet behind the speaker, and concluded that the ideal shape of an auditorium would be a three-quarter circle with the stage front recessed seventeen feet from the center. According to the principle that “the direct force of the voice only can be depended on in a theatre,” he wrote, “this is planned upon the exact form in which the voice expands.”24 In order to define the perfect shape of an auditorium, Saunders thus relied more on his own ear than on geometry. In addition, he became interested in the sound-absorbing quality of materials such as wood, stone, plaster, woolen cloths, oil paintings, and metals, thereby drawing attention to what are today called secondary structures in architectural acoustics.25 From a modern point of view, the Paris-based Patte and the London-based Saunders rep resent complementary approaches to designing performance venues. Even if they ap peared contradictory to the authors, both these approaches provided tools for the han dling of direct sound and first-order sound reflections—tools that could be used by later generations of architects to adapt architectural designs to different acoustic require ments. With regard to theatrical genres, Saunders located such divergent requirements in the social composition of the audience rather than in the acoustic domain.26 Although he concluded that “what has already been said . . . for a theatre will equally well apply to this for an opera,” Saunders provided a separate design for a slightly larger opera house with four tiers of boxes but only one gallery, in order to “assist the voice in reaching those distant parts.”27 The designs of both Patte and Saunders remained unrealized, but they were not without influence. Many years later, architects became more sensitive to the different acoustic re quirements for theater and opera posed by the genre-specific modes of (p. 237) declama tion and the use of the voice. A distinction began to be made between buildings for spo Page 6 of 25
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Architectural Acoustics and the Trained Ear in the Arts: A Journey from 1780 to 1830 ken drama and buildings for musical theater, with reference to the need for different re verberation times. In this context, a new notion of reverberation was introduced. Until the late eighteenth century, the term “reverberation” (Lat. reverberare, “to beat or to bounce back”) still served primarily to describe optical and chemical phenomena such as the reflection and reinforcement of light or heat (for example, in burning mirrors). The term was also, though less frequently, used as a synonym for “echo.”28 Not until 1800 or so did theater architects start to distinguish more precisely between echo (as a sound de layed in time, often caused by a single reflection) and reverberation (as continuous sound, caused by multiple reflections). In his influential treatise on architectural acoustics, Theorie der Verbreitung des Schalles für Baukünstler (Theory of Sound Propagation for Architects, 1800), for example, the Ger man dramaturge Johann Gottlieb Rhode (1762–1827) explained that since we ask for a conversational tone from our actors, and not a forced effort— since he may speak anywhere on stage that the situation requires—the space of a theater in which the voices are to be audible must likewise become smaller.29 In particular, Rhode distinguished between early sound reflections, which are able to re inforce the direct sound, and late reflections, which tend to blur the human voice and cre ate reverberation.30 With explicit reference to Rhode, sometimes citing him verbatim, the physicist Ernst Flo rens Friedrich Chladni (1756–1827) expanded on this in his seminal work Die Akustik (1802): If one wishes to reinforce sound in a theater, or a meeting place where a speaker is to be heard, . . . this may well be more harmful than helpful for the clarity of speech due to the reverberation produced. . . . In contrast, for the effect of music some reverberation appears to be more advantageous than harmful, provided that it is not so strong and sustained that the notes become muddy or unclear.31 Summarizing his recommendations concerning architectural acoustics for a musical read ership, Chladni emphasized that no performance venue should be larger than actually re quired, not only because of the problems of reverberation but also because the sound power of voices or musical instruments would not be able to sufficiently excite the en closed air volume and generate enough sound strength.32 The growing awareness of the specific requirements of musical concerts, musical theater, and spoken drama that becomes obvious in the acoustic and architectural literature in the period around 1800 found its practical expression in some of the new performance venues built at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The varying success of the new buildings, however, indicates how little the science of acoustics was able to offer contem porary architects in terms of appropriate tools to achieve these well-specified design ob jectives.
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Architectural Acoustics and the Trained Ear in the Arts: A Journey from 1780 to 1830
The Schauspielhaus, Berlin: Different Venues for Different Genres (p. 238)
A venue that exemplifies the ongoing trial-and-error method in architectural acoustics in nineteenth-century Europe is Berlin’s Schauspielhaus, one of the first national theaters in Germany. When August Wilhelm Iffland took over the directorship of the Königliches Na tionaltheater in 1796, he convinced Frederick William III of Prussia to replace the rather simple theater at the Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin with a more prestigious building capable of fulfilling the requirements of a national theater.33 The contract was awarded to the ar chitect Carl Gotthard Langhans, who in 1802 realized the new Nationaltheater as a build ing containing both a theater for spoken drama and a concert hall. Langhans designed the theater auditorium as a half ellipsis and the concert hall as a full ellipsis, in both cas es explicitly citing Pierre Patte’s 1782 essay.34 Despite its initial purpose of ensuring good intelligibility of speech, however, the theater went down in history as a venue of excessive reverberation. The German architect Louis Catel, for example, pointed out in his 1802 work Vorschläge zur Verbesserung der Schauspielhäuser (Proposals for the Improvement of Theaters) that architects still needed to take more account of the specific performance genre when designing a theater.35 As regards Langhans’s building, he stressed that very large venues caused problems not only of audibility but also of reverberation. According to Catel, the walls and ceilings should, therefore, be covered with absorbent materials— among which he classed woolen blankets but also the audience members sitting in the boxes.36 Langhans’s son Carl Ferdinand examined his father’s failure in Ueber Theater, oder Be merkungen über Katakustik in Beziehung auf Theater (On Theater, or Remarks on Cata coustics in the Theater, 1810). He argued that modern drama—with all its fine nuances of language and the actors’ habit of speaking at different volumes—required the architect to shift his attention even more from the visual toward the acoustic design.37 As the refer ence to catacoustics in the book’s title suggests, reflected sound was thought to play a crucial role in this matter. Like his father, Langhans relied on drawings of sound rays to predict all types of sound reflection in enclosed spaces, but he claimed that only an archi tect with a well-trained ear and experience of theater would be able to apply this theoreti cal approach.38 Langhans particularly emphasized the importance of a sufficient diffusion of reflected sound by avoiding focal points and recommended keeping the “pleasant re verberation of a theater” by not fully draping the walls with highly absorbent material.39 “A non-reverberant building would be to sound what a completely dark room is for light,” he wrote, continuing the comparison by stating that just as a single flame in a dark room would not cause any effect of light, a single voice in a non-reverberant room would be condemned to remain unheard.40 When his father’s theater was destroyed by fire in 1817, Langhans junior did not recommend himself for the new building; he appears to have had little skill in self-promo tion. The same was not true of Karl Friedrich Schinkel, who, moreover, took a strong in terest in acoustics. He drew inspiration from the writings of his colleagues Catel and (p. 239)
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Architectural Acoustics and the Trained Ear in the Arts: A Journey from 1780 to 1830 Langhans, among other sources, and addressed various problems of acoustics in his own writings. As we learn from a letter to his teacher David Gilly, the young Schinkel had trav eled to the most famous theaters of Naples, Rome, and Milan on his tour of Italy in 1805, but he had found them too large and too reverberant.41 Schinkel had already written to Iffland in 1813 with suggestions for improvements to Langhans’s Nationaltheater, accompanied by two drawings.42 He recommended deepen ing the proscenium and flattening the ceilings of both the proscenium arch and the audi torium, in order to amplify the actor’s voice, and narrowing and lowering the orchestra so that “the voices of the instruments sound more concerted.”43 Finally, he suggested mak ing the auditorium less reflective by covering the back walls of the boxes with cloth, adding wood-pulp ornaments to the balustrades of the boxes and the columns, and replac ing the upper gallery of the auditorium with a fourth row of boxes. All of these suggestions for the acoustic improvement of the Nationaltheater remained unrealized, but when the theater burned down, Schinkel received the court’s commission to present a design for what would be called the Schauspielhaus. Like Langhans’s build ing, the new one was to unite a theater and a concert hall in one venue, which was de fined even more precisely as a venue for “higher drama, comedies, and small operas.”44 The large operas and ballets, by contrast, were intended to be performed in the Berlin court opera. Schinkel was further requested to make the stage as small as possible, “so that the actor’s voice could be heard all over the theater.”45 Schinkel’s final design was evocative of antique temple (prostylos) architecture, synthe sizing a modern type of balcony with an antique portico and ostentatious exterior en trance steps. The interior has a tripartite arrangement made up of the theater in the cen ter, the foyer and dressing rooms in the right wing of the building, and the concert hall in the left wing (see Figure 10.2). When Schinkel presented his design to the king in April 1818, he emphasized that it had been ruled primarily by questions of utility such as “good hearing and seeing.”46 Schinkel had decided in favor of a small theater with only sixteen hundred seats, a semicircular auditorium, and three tiers of boxes and balconies. The floor plan was a reference to the classical semicircular design, which he considered “the most advantageous for seeing and hearing, as can be demonstrated by the theaters of the ancients.”47 He was aware, however, that the auditorium form alone would not guarantee the desired acoustics. In his designs for the theater and the concert hall he thus opted for flat ceilings with thin, well-resonating wood paneling to augment the intelligibility and beauty of the stage sound.48 While Schinkel’s design divided opinions, a closer look at contemporary responses to the new building shows that the acoustics were widely considered to be excellent. In Decem ber 1821 Adolf Weissenburg judged the building ill-proportioned, impractical, (p. 240) and a potpourri of styles and forms, but he exempted the semicircular auditorium from his criticism, acknowledging that “one can look at the stage from all parts of the auditorium equally well and hear almost equally well.” Weissenburg found the theater to be most suitable for “comedies, tragedies, and plays that are dominated by a conversational Page 9 of 25
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Architectural Acoustics and the Trained Ear in the Arts: A Journey from 1780 to 1830 tone.”49 Another critic praised the concert hall (see Figure 10.3) as “probably the most beautiful venue on earth . . . enjoying great acoustic advantages and featuring not the slightest hint of a teasing echo.”50 In a letter to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the German composer and conductor Carl Friedrich Zelter also commented that “the music can even be heard clearly and distinctly in the lower and upper parts of the concert hall.”51
Figure 10.2. Floor plan of the main floor of the new Schauspielhaus in Berlin (1826), with the theater in the center, the foyer and the dressing rooms in the right wing, and the concert hall in the left wing. From Schinkel, Karl Friedrich. 1821. Sammlung ar chitektonischer Entwürfe von Schinkel, enthaltend theils Werke welche ausgeführt sind, theils Gegen stände deren Ausführung beabsichtigt wurde. Vol. 2, part 1. Berlin: L. W. Wittich, plate 9. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz (gr.2” Ny6016).
In fact, with a reverberation time (RT) of approximately 2.0 s for the unoccupied hall, the concert hall exhibited acoustic conditions similar to that of the Berliner (p. 241) Sin gakademie, which opened only a few years later, in 1827.52 Unlike the acoustics of earlier concert halls such as the Hanover Square Rooms (1775, RT = 1.0 s) and the Gewandhaus (1781, RT = 1.2 s),53 these values anticipated what would be considered the optimal re verberation for late nineteenth-century concert halls such as Vienna’s (p. 242) Großer Musikvereinssaal (1870), the Neues Gewandhaus in Leipzig (1884), the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam (1888), and Symphony Hall in Boston, designed in 1900 (see Figure 10.4).54
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Architectural Acoustics and the Trained Ear in the Arts: A Journey from 1780 to 1830
Figure 10.3. Concert hall of the Schauspielhaus in Berlin (1821). From Schinkel, Karl Friedrich. 1826. Sammlung architektonischer Entwürfe von Schinkel, enthaltend theils Werke welche ausgeführt sind, theils Gegenstände deren Ausführung beabsichtigt wurde. Vol. 2, part 2. Berlin: L. W. Wittich, plate 16. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz (gr.2” Ny6016).
Figure 10.4. Auditorium of Symphony Hall, Boston, MA (ca. 1901). Photographer unknown. Courtesy of the BSO Archives.
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Architectural Acoustics and the Trained Ear in the Arts: A Journey from 1780 to 1830
Architectural Design and Acoustic Control It is possible to observe within only a few decades, from about 1780 until 1830, the emer gence of a well-defined “musical taste” for the specific acoustic requirements of different performance genres. In the late eighteenth century (and in metropolises such as Vienna well into the nineteenth century), theaters were used as performance venues for spoken drama, opera, and ballet as well as for concerts, and there are no indications that the acoustic conditions were considered inappropriate for any of these genres. But the situa tion changed with the advent of public concerts and a canonical repertoire for this institu tion, and with the increased focus on the intelligibility and educational value of (p. 243) the spoken word for a modern bourgeois theater. Around 1820, architectural treatises and the design of new building complexes such as the Schauspielhaus in Berlin revealed a striking consensus that theater, opera, and concerts need to be performed in acoustically different venues. For spoken drama, a small room with a shape oriented on the reach and directivity of a speaker and little reverberation was believed to provide good speech intel ligibility and enough acoustic support to enable a “conversational tone.”55 The size of the room was considered less critical for opera and concerts, as long as there was sufficient acoustic support to allow every nuance of the music to be heard at any place in the audi ence, and with a longer reverberation regarded as beneficial for the musical effect. Whereas until the late eighteenth century architectural theory had mostly discussed questions of beauty and taste with regard to visual appearance, the period around 1800 marked a significant shift toward interest in the acoustic design and purpose of these venues. Yet however precise the ideas and expectations of “hearing well” appear to have become for theater and music circa 1820, the science of acoustics had little to contribute to their successful realization when it came to controlling reverberation times in the new ly designed auditoria. From all the architectural treatises cited above, it becomes appar ent that the authors not only had difficulty reconciling the long-accepted model of sound as a wave phenomenon with the notion of sound reflections following geometric rules, but also, and especially, lacked understanding of how the strength of individual reflections— and thus the strength and duration of reverberation as the sum of all reflections—was re lated to the properties of the reflecting surfaces. Throughout the nineteenth century, architectural writings were dominated by the idea that the intensity of sound reflections depended on the degree to which walls vibrated in reaction to the incident sound wave. The basic argument was formulated by Chladni, for example: The first way in which an artificial reinforcement of sound in a building can be produced is by resonating bodies. . . . If, in a theater or at a meeting place where a speaker is to be heard, one seeks to reinforce the sound by means of thin wooden boards, in which such resonance is most noticeable, this may be more harmful than helpful for the clarity of speech due to the reverberation produced; by reason
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Architectural Acoustics and the Trained Ear in the Arts: A Journey from 1780 to 1830 of which it would be advisable, in order to prevent reverberation, to use thick planks rather than thin boards for the boxes and seats.56 This point was picked up by, among others, the German architect Johannes Wetter, who compared the effect of vibrating walls with the soundboard of a violin emitting and ampli fying the sound of the strings in motion.57 The analogy of the performance venue as a res onating body for the musicians inside, the fascinating idea of the room as a musical in strument, was pervasive throughout the nineteenth century as an explanation for the acoustic qualities of wooden theaters and concert halls.58 In this context, the obvious vio lation of the principle of conservation of energy remained unnoticed—a vibrating system (the wall) can only extract energy from the system (the airborne sound field) by (p. 244) which it is excited; furthermore, the true relation between the vibrational properties of the wall and the intensity of its reflection was reversed.59 In conclusion, it was not until Sabine’s unprejudiced empirical investigation that a consis tent theory for sound propagation in rooms was formulated,60 providing architects and their acoustic consultants with a tool for the targeted planning of buildings according to the genre-specific aesthetic tastes of their time. One of the reasons for his investigation, and one of its first applications, was the building of Symphony Hall, Boston, inaugurated on October 15, 1900, for which Sabine was engaged as an acoustic consultant. The tools for predicting the acoustical properties of the hall were new, but its design could already be oriented on a common “taste”—a consensus on the appropriate listening conditions for both symphonic music and spoken drama that had begun to emerge one hundred years earlier. Although Beethoven’s concerts in tradition-steeped Vienna circa 1800 were still performed in conventional theater venues, more specific designs for spoken-word the aters, concert halls, and operas had emerged elsewhere several decades before that. These early designs by Patte, Saunders, and others remained unrealized, but from the early nineteenth century on, a series of buildings were erected that soon became cele brated, among them Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Königliches Schauspielhaus (1821) and Schinkel’s and Carl Theodor Ottmer’s Singakademie (1827) in Berlin, and later Martin Gropius’s Neues Gewandhaus in Leipzig (1884). Sabine used the Gewandhaus as a direct model for Symphony Hall in Boston. But its aesthetic concept sprang from a musical taste that evolved during a rather short historical period between 1780 and 1830, when the dif ferent performance genres assumed different cultural functions and, accordingly, differ ent listening attitudes, architecture, and acoustic designs.
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Architectural Acoustics and the Trained Ear in the Arts: A Journey from 1780 to 1830 Beranek, Leo L. 2004. Concert Halls and Opera Houses: Music, Acoustics, and Architec ture. New York: Springer. Beyer, Robert T. 1999. Sound of Our Times: Two Hundred Years of Acoustics. New York: Springer. Blondel, François. 1698. Cours d’architecture, enseigné dans l’Académie Royale d’Architecture. 2nd ed. 6 vols. Paris: Chez l’auteur. Catel, Louis. 1802. Vorschläge zur Verbesserung der Schauspielhäuser. Berlin: Gottlieb August Lange. Chambers, Ephraim, ed. 1728. Cyclopædia, or An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences. Vol. 2. London: Knapton. (p. 251)
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Architectural Acoustics and the Trained Ear in the Arts: A Journey from 1780 to 1830 Haider-Pregler, Hilde. 1980. Des sittlichen Bürgers Abendschule: Bildungsanspruch und Bildungsauftrag des Berufstheaters im 18. Jahrhundert. Vienna: Jugend und Volk. Hanslick, Eduard. 1869. Geschichte des Concertwesens in Wien. Vienna: Braumüller. Hecker, Max F., ed. 1915. Der Briefwechsel zwischen Goethe und Zelter. Vol. 2, 1819– 1827. Leipzig: Insel Verlag. Henry, Joseph. 1856. “On Acoustics Applied to Public Buildings.” Proceedings of the American Association of the Advancement of Science 10:119–135. Heßelmann, Peter. 2012. “Der Ruf nach der ‘Policey’ im Tempel der Kunst: Das Theater publikum des 18. Jahrhunderts zwischen Andacht und Vergnügen.” In “Das Theater glich einem Irrenhause”: Das Publikum im Theater des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts, edited by Hans-Joachim Jakob and Hermann Korte, 77–94. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. Holl, Susanne. 2001. “Strahl und Welle: Bilder des Schalls um 1800.” In Über Schall: Ernst Machs und Peter Salchers Geschoßfotografien, edited by Christoph Hoffmann and Peter Berz, 171–198. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag. Johnson, James H. 1995. Listening in Paris: A Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Langhans, Carl Ferdinand. 1810. Ueber Theater, oder Bemerkungen über Katakustik in Beziehung auf Theater. Berlin: Gottfr. Hayn. Langhans, Carl Gotthard. 1800. Vergleichung des neuen Schauspielhauses zu Berlin mit verschiedenen ältern und neuern Schauspielhäusern in Rücksicht auf Akustische und Op tische Grundsätze. Berlin: Unger. Lindsay, Robert Bruce. 1966. “The Story of Acoustics.” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 39 (4): 629–644. (p. 252)
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Architectural Acoustics and the Trained Ear in the Arts: A Journey from 1780 to 1830 Motta, Fabrizio Carini. 1676. Trattato sopra la struttura de’ teatri e scene. Guastalla: Per Alessandro Giavazzi Stampator Ducale. “Nachrichten.” 1821. Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung 12, col. 198. Nicholson, William. 1809. The British Encyclopedia or Dictionary of Arts and Sciences. 6 vols. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme. Patte, Pierre. 1782. Essai sur l’architecture théatrale, ou de l’ordonnance la plus avan tageuse à une salle de spectacles, relativement aux principes de l’optique & de l’acoustique. Paris: Moutard. Rave, Paul Ortwin. 1941. Karl Friedrich Schinkel: Berlin. Part I: Bauten für die Kunst, Kirchen, Denkmalpflege. Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag. Rhode, Johann Gottlieb. 1800. Theorie der Verbreitung des Schalles für Baukünstler. Berlin: Heinrich Frölich. Riemann, Gottfried, ed. 1979. Karl Friedrich Schinkel: Reisen nach Italien. Tagebücher, Briefe, Zeichnungen, Aquarelle. Berlin: Rütten und Loening. Sabine, Wallace Clement. 1900. “Reverberation.” American Architect and Building News 68:3–84. Sabine, Wallace Clement. 1906. “The Accuracy of Musical Taste in Regard to Architectur al Acoustics.” Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 42 (2): 53–58. Sabine, Wallace Clement. 1922. Collected Papers on Acoustics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Saunders, George. 1790. A Treatise on Theatres. London: I. and J. Taylor. Schinkel, Karl Friedrich. 1826. Sammlung architektonischer Entwürfe von Schinkel, en thaltend theils Werke welche ausgeführt sind, theils Gegenstände deren Ausführung be absichtigt wurde. Vol. 2, part 1. Berlin: L. W. Wittich. Schultz, Georg-Michael. 1999. “Der Krieg gegen das Publikum: Die Rolle des Publikums in den Konzepten der Theatermacher des 18. Jahrhunderts.” In Theater im Kulturwandel des 18. Jahrhunderts: Inszenierung und Wahrnehmung von Körper—Musik—Sprache, edited by Jörg Schönert and Erika Fischer-Lichte, 483–502. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag. Siegert, Bernhard. 2000. “Schüsse, Schocks und Schreie: Zur Undarstellbarkeit der Diskontinuität bei Euler, d’Alembert und Lessing.” In Das Laokoon-Paradigma: Zeichen regime im 18. Jahrhundert, edited by Inge Baymann, Michael Franz, and Wolfgang Schäffner, 291–305. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Skoda, Rudolf. 1985. Neues Gewandhaus Leipzig: Baugeschichte und Gegenwart eines Konzertgebäudes. Berlin: VEB Verlag für Bauwesen. Page 16 of 25
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Architectural Acoustics and the Trained Ear in the Arts: A Journey from 1780 to 1830 Tkaczyk, Viktoria. 2014. “Listening in Circles: Spoken Drama and the Architects of Sound, 1750–1850.” Annals of Science 71 (3): 299–334. (p. 253)
Truesdell, Clifford. 1960. The Rational Mechanics of Flexible or Elastic Bodies, 1638– 1788. 2nd ser. 10, 11. Zurich: Orell Füssli. Weinzierl, Stefan. 2002. Beethovens Konzerträume: Raumakustik und symphonische Auf führungspraxis an der Schwelle zum modernen Konzertwesen. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Erwin Bochinsky. Weinzierl, Stefan, Hagen Rosenheinrich, Johannes Blickensdorff, Michael Horn, and Alexander Lindau. 2010. “Die Akustik der Konzertsäle im Leipziger Gewandhaus: Geschichte, Rekonstruktion und Auralisation.” Fortschritte der Akustik: DAGA Berlin, on line proceedings. Accessed May 7, 2018. http://pub.dega-akustik.de/DAGA_2010/da ta/articles/000493.pdf. Weissenburg, Adolf. 1821. “Vorläufige Worte über das neue Schauspielhaus zu Berlin.” Kunst-Blatt 102: 405–408. Wetter, Johannes. 1829. Untersuchungen über die wichtigsten Gegenstaende der Theater baukunst, die vortheilhaftesten Formen des Auditoriums, und die zweckmässigste Anord nung der Bühne und des Prosceniums, in optischer und akustischer Hinsicht. Mainz: Joseph Stenz. (p. 254)
Notes: (1.) Sabine, Wallace Clement. 1900. “Reverberation.” American Architect and Building News 68:3–5, 19–22, 35–37, 43–45, 59–61, 75–76, 83–84. Reprinted with slight modifica tions in Sabine, Wallace Clement. 1922. Collected Papers on Acoustics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 3–68. (2.) Sabine, Wallace Clement. 1906. “The Accuracy of Musical Taste in Regard to Archi tectural Acoustics.” Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 42 (2): 53–58, reprinted in Sabine (1922): 71–77. It is interesting that a value of 1.1 s exactly cor responds to modern recommendations for music rooms of the size he used (V = 74–210 m3), such as those in the German standard DIN 18041:2016–03, Acoustic Quality in Rooms: Specifications and Instructions for the Room Acoustic Design. (3.) Sabine (1906): 76, 77. (4.) The term “academy,” which can be traced back to the literary and aesthetic acade mies of the Italian Renaissance, was used as a synonym for “concert” in Vienna until well into the nineteenth century. (5.) According to a court decree, theatrical productions were not allowed during religious holidays or the evenings preceding them, during Lent, or during the Advent period after December 16. This rule reduced the annual theater program by about fifty days. See Mor Page 17 of 25
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Architectural Acoustics and the Trained Ear in the Arts: A Journey from 1780 to 1830 row, Mary Sue. 1989. Concert Life in Haydn’s Vienna: Aspects of a Developing Musical and Social Institution. New York: Pendragon, 39. (6.) For oratorio productions with choir and orchestra the pit was too small, so the or chestra was moved to the stage and the choir to the orchestra area. This was the case at the premiere of the Ninth Symphony on May 7, 1824, in the Kärntnertortheater. See Weinzierl, Stefan. 2002. Beethovens Konzerträume: Raumakustik und symphonische Auf führungspraxis an der Schwelle zum modernen Konzertwesen. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Erwin Bochinsky, 126–131. (7.) Weinzierl (2002): 195–205. (8.) Weinzierl (2002): 117–124. (9.) Little is known about this first Musikvereinssaal except that with a capacity of about six hundred seats it was considered too small for symphonic concerts right from the start. See Hanslick, Eduard. 1869. Geschichte des Concertwesens in Wien. Vienna: Braumüller, 289. (10.) For a comprehensive list of concerts and concert programs in Vienna up to 1810, see Morrow (1989): appendix 1. (11.) In his De re aedificatoria (1443–1452, published 1485), for example, the Italian ar chitect Leon Battista Alberti refers explicitly to Vitruvius when addressing theater acoustics. Alberti, Leon Battista. (1485) 1988. On the Art of Building in Ten Books. Trans lated by Neil Leach, Joseph Rykwert, and Robert Tavernor. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 270–273. (12.) The seventeenth-century architect F. C. Motta, however, criticizing his contempo raries for their bell-shaped auditorium designs, advocated a reconsideration of the an cient semicircular form with its regularly staggered seating, so that “everyone will be able to see and hear comfortably.” Motta, Fabrizio Carini. 1676. Trattato sopra la strut tura de’ teatri e scene. Guastalla: Per Alessandro Giavazzi Stampator Ducale, 23–26. (13.) See Forsyth, Michael. 1985. Buildings for Music: The Architect, the Musician, and the Listener from the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Barron, Michael. 2010. Auditorium Acoustics and Architectural Design. 2nd ed. London: Spon, 276–332; Johnson, James H. 1995. Listening in Paris: A Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press; Weinzierl (2002); Gimpel, Lenard. 2008. “Zur Akustik früher Konzertstätten in Hamburg.” Master’s thesis, Technische Universität Berlin. Accessed January 1, 2016. http://www2.ak.tu-berlin.de/~akgroup/ak_pub/abschlus sarbeiten/2008/GimpelLenard_MagA.pdf. (14.) Meyer, Jochen. 1998. Theaterbautheorien zwischen Kunst und Wissenschaft: Die Diskussion über Theaterbau im deutschsprachigen Raum in der ersten Hälfte des 19.
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Architectural Acoustics and the Trained Ear in the Arts: A Journey from 1780 to 1830 Jahrhunderts. Zurich: GTA Verlag; Tkaczyk, Viktoria. 2014. “Listening in Circles: Spoken Drama and the Architects of Sound, 1750–1850.” Annals of Science 71 (3): 299–334. (15.) See Haider-Pregler, Hilde. 1980. Des sittlichen Bürgers Abendschule: Bil dungsanspruch und Bildungsauftrag des Berufstheaters im 18. Jahrhundert. Vienna: Ju gend und Volk. (16.) “[D]ass die Theater nicht bloss für Zuschauer, sondern auch für Zuhörer bestimmt seyn sollen, ja dass das Hören bei unsern Ton- und Redespielen bei weitem die wichtigere Sache sey.” Weinbrenner, Friedrich. 1817. “Einige Bemerkungen über den Bau und die Form unserer heutigen Theater. Vom Oberbaudirector Weinbrenner.” Abendzeitung, June 17. Reprinted in Elbert, Claudia. 1988. Die Theater Friedrich Weinbrenners: Bauten und Entwürfe. Karlsruhe: C.F. Müller, 182–183. On the history of declamation in eighteenthand nineteenth-century Europe, see Meyer-Kalkus, Reinhart. 2001. Stimme und Sprechkünste im 20. Jahrhundert. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 13–27; Chartier, Roger. 2003. Pratiques de la lecture. Paris: Payot, 7–113. All translations are the authors’ own unless otherwise attributed. (17.) On the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century theater police, see Heßelmann, Pe ter. 2012. “Der Ruf nach der ‘Policey’ im Tempel der Kunst: Das Theaterpublikum des 18. Jahrhunderts zwischen Andacht und Vergnügen.” In “Das Theater glich einem Irren hause”: Das Publikum im Theater des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts, edited by Hans-Joachim Jakob and Hermann Korte, 77–94. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter; Haider-Pregler (1980): 61–68; Schultz, Georg-Michael. 1999. “Der Krieg gegen das Publikum: Die Rolle des Publikums in den Konzepten der Theatermacher des 18. Jahrhunderts.” In Theater im Kulturwandel des 18. Jahrhunderts: Inszenierung und Wahrnehmung von Körper—Musik —Sprache, edited by Jörg Schönert and Erika Fischer-Lichte, 483–502. Göttingen: Wall stein Verlag. (18.) Euler, Leonhard. (presented 1759) 1766. “De la propagation du son.” Mémoires de l’Académie Royale des Sciences de l’Institut de France 15:185–209. For the history of sev enteenth- and eighteenth-century theoretical acoustics, see Euler, Leonhard. 1955. Leon hardi Euleri Commentationes mechanicae ad theoriam corporum fluidorum pertinentes. Leonhardi Euleri Opera Omnia 2nd ser., vol. 13, edited by Clifford Ambrose Truesdell. Zurich: Orell Füssli, 19–72; Truesdell, Clifford. 1960. The Rational Mechanics of Flexible or Elastic Bodies, 1638–1788, 2nd ser., 10, 11. Zurich: Orell Füssli, 118–315; Lindsay, Robert Bruce. 1966. “The Story of Acoustics.” Journal of the Acoustical Society of Ameri ca 39 (4): 629–644, here 631–638; Beyer, Robert T. 1999. Sound of Our Times: Two Hun dred Years of Acoustics. New York: Springer, 13–14, 32–40; Garber, Elizabeth. 1999. The Language of Physics: The Calculus and the Development of Theoretical Physics in Eu rope, 1750–1914. Boston: Birkhäuser, 31–62. For a culture-historical contextualization of the wave equation, see Siegert, Bernhard. 2000. “Schüsse, Schocks und Schreie: Zur Un darstellbarkeit der Diskontinuität bei Euler, d’Alembert und Lessing.” In Das LaokoonParadigma: Zeichenregime im 18. Jahrhundert, edited by Inge Baymann, Michael Franz, and Wolfgang Schäffner, 291–305. Berlin: Akademie Verlag; Holl, Susanne. 2001. “Strahl Page 19 of 25
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Architectural Acoustics and the Trained Ear in the Arts: A Journey from 1780 to 1830 und Welle: Bilder des Schalls um 1800.” In Über Schall: Ernst Machs und Peter Salchers Geschoßfotografien, edited by Christoph Hoffmann and Peter Berz, 171–198. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag. (19.) “Les yeux & les oreilles étant destinés à être les agens des plaisirs que nous nous y proposons, il résulte donc qu’il doit être disposé de façon à remplir essentiellement le double objet de bien voir & de bien entrendre; que sa figure doit être un composé de formes optiques & acoustiques les plus propres à favoriser ces organs.” Patte, Pierre. 1782. Essai sur l’architecture théatrale, ou de l’ordonnance la plus avantageuse à une salle de spectacles, relativement aux principes de l’optique & de l’acoustique. Paris: Moutard, 5. (20.) Patte (1782): 13. (21.) Patte followed his teacher François Blondel, who advocated a shift from the ancient theory of harmony to pure geometric calculation and the study of “catoptrics.” Blondel, François. 1698. Cours d’architecture, enseigné dans l’Académie Royale d’Architecture. 2nd ed. Paris: Chez l’auteur, 5:754–787. (22.) Before Patte, Vittone (1766) and Dumont (1772) had argued for an elliptical audito rium based on Euclidean geometry. See J. Meyer (1998): 117–123. (23.) Saunders, George. 1790. A Treatise on Theatres. London: I. and J. Taylor, 4–5. (24.) Saunders (1790): 85. Saunders’s experiment was later repeated by Joseph Henry with approximately the same results in an open square in front of the Smithsonian Institu tion in Washington. Henry, Joseph. 1856. “On Acoustics Applied to Public Buildings.” Pro ceedings of the American Association of the Advancement of Science 10:125. From a con temporary point of view, Saunders’s experiment on audience positioning almost corre sponds to the constant sound level profile for a single human speaker. (25.) Saunders (1790): 9, 15–23, 39–40. Rejecting the notion of sound reflections, Saun ders made “conduction” a theoretical explanation for the properties of different materials with regard to sound transmission. (26.) Saunders (1790): 33. (27.) Saunders (1790): 90. (28.) See Chambers, Ephraim, ed. 1728. Cyclopædia, or An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences. London: Knapton, 2:1012; Nicholson, William. 1809. The British Encyclope dia, or Dictionary of Arts and Sciences. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 5:n.p. One exception is the article “echo” in the Encyclopédie, which distinguished between echo and reverberation, whereas in the article “reflexion” echo and reverberation are again taken as synonyms. Diderot, Denis, and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, eds. 1751–1765. Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers par une so ciété de Gens de Lettres. Paris: Briasson, 5:263, 14:226. Page 20 of 25
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Architectural Acoustics and the Trained Ear in the Arts: A Journey from 1780 to 1830 (29.) “[D]a wir von dem Schauspieler Conversationston, und keine erzwungene Anstren gung fordern; da er überall auf der Bühne sprechen darf wo es die Situation erfordert— muss sich auch der Raum der Theater verkleinern, in welchen die Stimmen hörbar sind.” Rhode, Johann Gottlieb. 1800. Theorie der Verbreitung des Schalles für Baukünstler. Berlin: Heinrich Frölich, 35. (30.) “Verstärkt kann der Ton dadurch nicht werden, weil die Wirkung des ersten wirk lichen Tons im Ohr schon vorüber ist; wenn die Rückwirkung es erreicht. Der Ton wird al so nur verlängert, und schwindet, da auch die Rückwirkungen des Wiederhalls und Nach halls wieder bemerklich werden, nach und nach hin. Die Rede der Schauspieler muss durch diesen Umstand nothwendig unverständlich werden, da die Rückwirkung des er sten Tons mit dem zweiten Tone zu gleicher Zeit das Ohr erreicht, und sich folglich unter einander verwirren.” Rhode (1800): 50–51. (31.) “Wollte man in einem Schauspielhause, oder in einem Versammlungsorte, wo man einen Redner hören will . . . den Schall zu verstärken suchen, so möchte solches wohl we gen des dadurch entstehenden Nachhalls für die Deutlichkeit mehr schädlich als nützlich seyn. . . . Hingegen scheint einiger Nachhall für die Wirkung der Musik mehr vortheil haft, als schädlich zu seyn, vorausgesetzt, daß er nicht so stark und nicht so anhaltend ist, daß die Töne dadurch unrein oder undeutlich werden.” Chladni, Ernst Florens Friedrich. 1802. Die Akustik. Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 197–198. (32.) “In Hinsicht auf die Größe ist auch noch zu bemerken, dass es rathsam ist, einem zum Hören bestimmten Local nicht mehr Grösse zu geben, als für den Zweck erforderlich ist, weil eine sehr grosse Luftmasse weniger leicht wird stark genug zu erschüttern seyn, als eine weniger grosse.” Chladni, Ernst Florens Friedrich. 1826. “Ueber vortheilhafte Einrichtung eines Locals für gute Wirkung des Schalles.” Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung 35, col. 566. (33.) The theater opened its doors in 1787 as the Königliches Nationaltheater in the for mer Französisches Comödienhaus, designed by the architect Georg Christian Ungers and realized by the architect Johann Boumann. See J. Meyer (1998): 274–283; Rave, Paul Or twin. 1941. Karl Friedrich Schinkel: Berlin. Part I: Bauten für die Kunst, Kirchen, Denkmalpflege. Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 79–138; Behr, Adalbert, and Alfred Hoff mann. 1984. Das Schauspielhaus in Berlin. 2nd ed. Berlin: Verlag für Bauwesen, 31–126. (34.) Langhans, Carl Gotthard. 1800. Vergleichung des neuen Schauspielhauses zu Berlin mit verschiedenen ältern und neuern Schauspielhäusern in Rücksicht auf Akustische und Optische Grundsätze. Berlin: Unger, 3. (35.) “[D]ie laute pathetische Rede eines Predigers hört man weiter, als ein im Conversa tionston gehaltenes Gespräch. Der rhythmisch geordnete Dialog auf den alten Bühnen, muss weiter deutlich vernommen werden können, als das freie Gespräch auf unserer Bühne.” Catel, Louis. 1802. Vorschläge zur Verbesserung der Schauspielhäuser. Berlin: Gottlieb August Lange, 22.
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Architectural Acoustics and the Trained Ear in the Arts: A Journey from 1780 to 1830 (36.) “Da aber die Schallstrahlen über jene Punkte, in welchen die Worte noch ver ständlich sind, hinaus die Umfassungswände erreichen, dort gebrochen werden, und so zu gleicher Zeit mit den folgenden direct ausgesprochenen Worten an unser Ohr kom men, so werden diese durch die Vermischung undeutlich, und es erzeugt sich ein Wieder hall. Dieser wird in jedem grossen innern Raum, wo der Abstand der Umfassungswände von den Redenden bedeutend gross ist, dann ohnfehlbar vorhanden seyn, wenn der Rück prall der Schallstrahlen nicht durch gehörige Mittel vernichtet worden. . . . Damit von dieser Kuppel [Auditoriumdecke] aus den daran anprallenden Schappstrahlen das Vermö gen benommen werde, durch Rückprall in das Theater hinein zu wirken und Wiederhall zu verursachen, so müssen die zwischen den eisernen Graden befindlichen Flächen mit Zeug tapeziert werden, welche mit Wolle hinterfüttert ist, um dadurch den anprallenden Schallstrahl zu dämpfen. So müssen auch die aus der Menschen-Masse hervortretenden Brüstungen der beiden Abtheilungs-Mauern, durch welche die Eingänge zum Parterre und zu den Logen gehen, mit wirklichen Decken überhangen seyn.” Catel (1802): 22, 39– 40. (37.) Langhans, Carl Ferdinand. 1810. Ueber Theater, oder Bemerkungen über Katakustik in Beziehung auf Theater. Berlin: Gottfr. Hayn, 8. (38.) C. F. Langhans (1810): 22. (39.) C. F. Langhans (1810): 38. (40.) “Ein solches Gebäude, welches durchaus keiner Zurückwerfung des Schalles fähig ist, wäre meines Erachtens, das für den Schall, was ein ganz dunkler Raum mit schwarzen Wänden für das Licht ist.” C. F. Langhans (1810): 38. (41.) “Und es ist gewiß keins [der Theater], an dem man nicht etwas aussetzen könnte. Das wegen seiner Größe berühmte Theater San Carlo in Neapel tadle ich außer einer Menge anderer Mängel eben seiner Größe wegen; man sollte meiner Meinung nach nie so große Theater bauen. Auch wenn die Theorie des Schalls hinlänglich aufs reine ge braucht wäre, was bis jetzt noch nicht geschehn ist, halte ich’s für unmöglich, einen so großen Raum durch eine bloße Form für die vollkommen gute Aufführung einer Musik geschickt zu machen. Ich weiß wenigstens von diesen Theatern, daß auf einem vom The ater entfernten Platz von Musik unendlich viel verlorengeht und die Sprache im Rezitativ gänzlich unverständlich wird. . . . In dem großen Theater von Mailand bemerkte ich an gegenüberliegender Stelle des Parterre denselben Verstärkungshall, der in unserm neuen Berliner Theater bemerkt wird.” Karl Friedrich Schinkel to David Gilly (1805). In Rie mann, Gottfried, ed. 1979. Karl Friedrich Schinkel: Reisen nach Italien. Tagebücher, Briefe, Zeichnungen, Aquarelle. Berlin: Rütten und Loening, 120–121. (42.) “Entwurf zu einer schicklichen Auszierung des Theaters (Raumes der Zuschauer) mit den nötigen Vorrichtungen, um das Echo und Tönen zu vermeiden und überhaupt diesen Raum für den Schall vorteilhafter zu machen.” Karl F. Schinkel to August W. If fland, December 11, 1813 (held in the Schinkelmuseum). The letter is reproduced in Rave (1941): 86–87. The plans inserted in the letter can be viewed at http://ww2.smb.museum/ Page 22 of 25
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Architectural Acoustics and the Trained Ear in the Arts: A Journey from 1780 to 1830 schinkel/index.php?id=1504476. Accessed June 22, 2016; http://ww2.smb.museum/ schinkel/index.php?id=1504478. Accessed June 22, 2016. (43.) Rave (1941): 86. (44.) Schinkel, Karl Friedrich. 1826. Sammlung architektonischer Entwürfe von Schinkel, enthaltend theils Werke welche ausgeführt sind, theils Gegenstände deren Ausführung beabsichtigt wurde, vol. 2, part 1. Berlin: L. W. Wittich, n.p., [1]. (45.) “Daraus entstand nun der Wunsch: daß die Scene nur in einer mäßigen Größe gehal ten würde, um die Vortheile zu haben, die Stimme des Schauspielers überall gut zu ver stehen und von seiner Mimik nichts zu verlieren, ferner die Größe des Raums dem Charakter der Stücke angemessen zu sehen, und endlich Ersparungen für die TheaterOeconomie zu gewinnen, in Beziehung auf geringere Beleuchtung und geringere Masse der scenischen Ausstattung in aller Art.” Schinkel (1826): [1]. (46.) Karl F. Schinkel to Frederick William III, April 1818 (held in the Schinkelmuseum). The letter is reproduced in Rave (1941): 93–94. (47.) “Die Absicht war, im möglichst kleinen Raum möglichst viel Menschen gut hören und sehen zu lassen. . . . Die Einrichtung der Plätz ist, wie die Erfahrung gelehrt hat, so, daß man auf einem jeden vollkomme gut hört und sieht: ersteres ist der Vorteil des mäßig großen Raumes und einiger darauf berechneter Anlagen im Proszenio und an der Decke; letzteres ist der Vorteil der von mir neu angenommenen Form, die ich auch nie bei einem Theaterbau wieder verlassen würde.” Karl F. Schinkel to Carl F. Zelter, October 22, 1821. Reproduced in Rave (1941): 123. (48.) “Die Decke des Theatersaals ist flach, so wie ebenfalls die des Prosceniums gehal ten, beide sind mit einer dünnen Holztäfelung überzogen, die auf einem feinen Rostwerk am Holz befestigt ist, durch welches sie vor dem Reissen und Ziehen gesichert ist, und zugleich zur Resonanz geschickt gemacht wird, wodurch die Deutlichkeit und Schönheit der von der Bühne kommenden Töne sich merklich vermehrt.” Rave (1941): 123. (49.) Weissenburg, Adolf. 1821. “Vorläufige Worte über das neue Schauspielhaus zu Berlin.” Kunst-Blatt 102:407, December 20. (50.) “Vielleicht der schönste Saal auf der Erde . . . der auch in akustischer Hinsicht grosse Vorzüge hat, und nirgends auch die leiseste Spur einer neckenden Echo zeigt.” “Nachrichten.” 1821. Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung 12, col. 198. (51.) “Zwar klagen Musiker und Sänger über beschwerliche Exekution; ich traue ihnen darüber kein Urteil zu, weil im Saale selbst oben und unten und endlich sogar in den Vor plätzen und Treppen die Musik deutlich und frei herauskommt, was gut gespielt wird. Man ist viel zu sehr am Fingern und Klimpern gewöhnt, um ein freies Urteil zu haben, und auch dies und die unendlich kleinen Narreteien, Derbheiten und Tollheiten eines Bocher kannst Du noch auf den entfernten Stiegen deutlich vernehmen. Nur einmal erst habe das Händel’sche ‘Alexanderfest’ dirigiert und die Sache ordentlich befunden.” Karl Page 23 of 25
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Architectural Acoustics and the Trained Ear in the Arts: A Journey from 1780 to 1830 F. Zelter to Johann Wolfgang v. Goethe, October 21, 1821. In Hecker, Max F., ed. 1915. Der Briefwechsel zwischen Goethe und Zelter, vol. 2, 1819–1827. Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 138. (52.) Although there is no contemporary written documentation, the reverberation time was estimated during the reconstruction of the Berlin Schauspielhaus in 1984, using gramophone recordings made in the original auditorium. Skoda, Rudolf. 1985. Neues Gewandhaus Leipzig: Baugeschichte und Gegenwart eines Konzertgebäudes. Berlin: VEB Verlag für Bauwesen, 16. Reverberation times for the concert hall of the Berliner Sin gakademie were measured in 1933. See Meyer, Erwin, and Lothar Cremer. 1933. “Über die Hörsamkeit holzausgekleideter Räume.” Zeitschrift für technische Physik 14:500–506. (53.) Meyer, Jürgen. 1978. “Raumakustik und Orchesterklang in den Konzertsälen Joseph Haydns.” Acustica 41:145–162; Weinzierl, Stefan et al. 2010. “Die Akustik der Konzertsäle im Leipziger Gewandhaus: Geschichte, Rekonstruktion und Auralisation.” Fortschritte der Akustik: DAGA Berlin, 1045–1046. Both values were estimated on the basis of occupied rooms. (54.) On the acoustic properties of these spaces, see Beranek, Leo L. 2004. Concert Halls and Opera Houses: Music, Acoustics, and Architecture. New York: Springer. (55.) Rhode (1800): 35. See also n. 29 above. (56.) “Die erste Art, wie eine künstliche Verstärkung des Schalles in einem Gebäude kann hervorgebracht werden, ist durch Mitklingen anderer Körper. . . . Wollte man in einem Schauspielhause, oder in einem Versammlungsorte, wo man einen Redner hören will, et wa durch dünne Bretwände, bei welchen ein solches Mitklingen am meisten bemerkbar ist, den Schall zu verstärken suchen, so möchte solches wohl wegen des dadurch entste henden Nachhalls für die Deutlichkeit mehr schädlich als nützlich seyn; daher es auch wohl anzurathen wäre, zu dessen Verhütung die Logen oder Sitze nicht von dünnen Bretern, sondern von stärkern Bohlen zu erbauen.” Chladni (1802): 197–198. (57.) Wetter, Johannes. 1829. Untersuchungen über die wichtigsten Gegenstaende der Theaterbaukunst, die vortheilhaftesten Formen des Auditoriums, und die zweckmässigste Anordnung der Bühne und des Prosceniums, in optischer und akustischer Hinsicht. Mainz: Joseph Stenz, 67–70. (58.) See, e.g., Wetter (1829): 71; the undoubted qualities of many wood-paneled rooms are a result of the high absorption at their (usually low) resonance frequency rather than their reflectivity at this point. (59.) From today’s perspective, a proper treatment of reverberation, as Sabine would sug gest a hundred years later in his seminal publications, is the only—though crucial—miss ing link for the systematic design of performance venues in its modern form. (60.) Sabine (1922): 3–68.
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Architectural Acoustics and the Trained Ear in the Arts: A Journey from 1780 to 1830 Viktoria Tkaczyk
Viktoria Tkaczyk, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin Stefan Weinzierl
Stefan Weinzierl, Technische Universität Berlin
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Amateurs and Auditors: Listening to the British Musical Festival, 1810– 1835
Amateurs and Auditors: Listening to the British Musi cal Festival, 1810–1835 Charles Edward McGuire The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries Edited by Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer Print Publication Date: Jan 2019 Subject: Music, Musicology and Music History Online Publication Date: Nov 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190466961.013.10
Abstract and Keywords Between 1810 and 1835 the British musical audience expanded from the nobility and the gentry to include members of the middle classes. Using the contemporary musical festival as a case study, this chapter examines how the accommodation of this larger, more intel lectually diverse audience led to an early manifestation of the modern concert-listener. This development is explored in terms of factors that aided in the creation of a physical or intellectual “listening space.” These aspects include physical structures (stages, gal leries), educational structures (histories of musical festivals, commentaries for training listeners), and linguistic structures (new terms to describe listening processes). As this chapter reveals, these structures solidified a common listening experience for the larger audience, while reinforcing class distinctions within it. Keywords: architecture, music festival, bourgeois identity, historicity of listening, art of listening, listening types
ONE of the most important artistic institutions in Great Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the musical festival.1 Begun at the end of the seventeenth cen tury as a combination of musical performance and charitable undertaking, festivals grew throughout the eighteenth century to encompass and sometimes presage major shifts in musical taste and consumption in Britain.2 Initially, most festivals were created for and catered to the tastes of the nobility and the gentry. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, festivals were spectacles that included a large gathering of performers drawn from throughout Great Britain to raise money for a local charity, featuring contemporary stars of the opera and the best instrumental players available, presenting predominantly vocal music in multiple concerts over several days’ time. Between 1810 and 1835 the British festival audience increased greatly with the addition of members of the middle classes into its ranks. This expansion was required by festival organizers to increase the potential profits for charity. But this increase brought with it a great deal of tension. In some quarters there was a suspicion that the very spectacle that made the festival successful created a split between attendees who listened to the music performed there with knowledge and those without knowledge who might have listened Page 1 of 24
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Amateurs and Auditors: Listening to the British Musical Festival, 1810– 1835 for pleasure or status. This is clearly the case in a review of the performance of the sopra no and prima donna Angelica Catalani at the Leeds Musical Festival of 1812, where the reviewer treats the second type of audience member with contempt: Madame Catalani’s exertions delighted and astonished the auditors, but her unri valled powers have so often been the just theme of panegyric, that they require no comment from us.—Greatly as we appreciate her talents, and admire her taste and execution, yet in sacred music, we do not expect extraneous embellishments, nor do we wish for the introduction of Opera airs in a place of worship.—The Church performances should have been entirely sacred. The songs should also be sung in the keys, in which the great master of harmony, Handel, composed them. The ef fect of (p. 256) the accompaniments to the beautiful recitative and air “Comfort ye my People,” was considerably diminished by its being transposed.3 Although the anonymous writer of this review admits Catalani’s “unrivalled powers,” the writer undercuts these powers by identifying them with “panegyric,” implying high-flown rhetorical praise that may not be sincere or deserved. In criticizing the taste that Catalani showed in her execution, the writer establishes authority by expressing musical knowl edge and opinions about the proper style of sacred as opposed to secular compositions, among other things. The writer had some sort of musical training, which was displayed via the identification of Catalani’s transposition of the selections from Messiah, training that Leon Botstein has identified as a “pitch-centered endeavor” compared to a musical literacy of the second half of the nineteenth century that centered on “listening through reading.”4 Such knowledge aided the writer in presenting the possible ramifications for performance of placing a movement of a composition in another key without transposing others. According to the parlance of the time, this writer would have been called a musical ama teur. The word “amateur” likely came into use in English in the 1780s, borrowed from French.5 In contemporary British musical dictionaries and encyclopedias, an amateur was “one who loves and practices music, but not as a professor.”6 Frequently it was used as a replacement for—if not a displacement of—the word “connoisseur” in contemporary writ ings about music.7 The amateur, then, was not one who followed music as a profession but one who could perform it and had some knowledge of it.8 It is interesting that the writer of this review uses the knowledge and esteem of the amateur to imply a lesser cat egory of musical distinction: the “auditor,” mentioned in the first phrase of the quotation above.9 To this writer, the auditor is everything that the amateur is not: someone who was impressed by Catalani’s musical “exertions” but lacked the requisite knowledge to under stand that her festival performance promoted spectacle rather than correct musical taste. The auditor, then, was a hearer, present at the concert to listen but having more naiveté than the amateur. After all, this writer notes that Catalani “delighted and astonished the auditors,” but the individual with knowledge would perforce take a dimmer view of her “unrivaled powers.” The assumption is that the amateur would understand that in using such powers to embellish sacred music (or to sing sacred music with built-in embellish
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Amateurs and Auditors: Listening to the British Musical Festival, 1810– 1835 ments) was an aesthetic error made for artifice and show rather than the production of sincere musical art. The implied contrast of amateur with auditor speaks to the writer’s fear that the latter, looking for spectacle, would overwhelm the amateurs with the skills and knowledge to ap preciate music. In doing so, the auditors might force a change in musical taste to privi lege Catalani’s music of artifice and show. As a warning, the writer thus attempts to cre ate a linguistic-verbal distinction that implicitly opposes the auditor to the contemporary musical amateur.10 The purpose of this chapter is to explore the structures that defined the listener at the British musical festival between 1810 and 1835. I examine four inter linked aspects of who made up the British musical festival’s audience and how they lis tened: the social structure of the audiences, including use of the term “auditor” across (p. 257) class boundaries or to signify middle-class members of the audience; the physicalspatial structures (such as the elaborate seating arrangements); aesthetic-educational structures (including the publishing of musical festival histories); and linguistic-verbal structures, culminating in an examination of the growing use of the word “auditor” dur ing this period and its multivalent definitions. Together, the growth of these structures will show the early development of the idea of the listener in Great Britain. That the audi tor threatened the status quo should be evident from the types of information presented, in particular, educational materials largely meant for the middle-class audience members to bring them into the same musical and aesthetic plane as the amateur drawn from the gentry or the nobility. Because of limitations of space, discussion of these aspects is necessarily brief and asym metric, with evidence drawn mostly from festivals held in Yorkshire. Yet the development of listening in the context of a music festival was a nationwide phenomenon at this time. Similar evidence could be supplied from festivals in Edinburgh, Manchester, Liverpool, and London. This chapter, therefore, will show the origins of a new culture of the listener throughout Britain at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Social Structures: The British Musical Festival and the Middle Classes By 1810 the British musical festival had become regularized. Festivals tended to include a number of concerts given over a period of several days.11 Morning concerts were most frequently held in churches or cathedrals, and their programs were comprised of sacred music or works with sacred texts such as oratorios. The only large-scale work heard in its entirety at such morning concerts at this time was Handel’s Messiah; the other concerts would feature selections from Handel’s oratorios and sacred music as well as works by other composers.12 Evening concerts would be held in a local theater or hall and would feature secular music, including selections from operas, cantatas, ballads, concertos, and symphonies. Vocal music was the festival’s primary focus, but both morning and evening concerts included some instrumental pieces as well. The soloists would be professionals hired from throughout Great Britain, and the choristers—also predominantly professional Page 3 of 24
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Amateurs and Auditors: Listening to the British Musical Festival, 1810– 1835 musicians—would be drawn mainly from the immediate area, with a few traveling quite a distance to join the performing forces. Most of the major singers and instrumentalists working in Great Britain performed at festivals, be they temporary residents, like Cata lani, or individuals who made their careers there such as like the tenor John Braham, the cellist Robert Lindley, and the bass player Domenico Dragonetti. Festivals were frequent ly organized by the amateurs in a town in order to raise money for a specific charity. That charity might be a group of public hospitals, as was the case at the Yorkshire Grand Musi cal Festivals held between 1823 and 1835, or for a diocesan fund for widows and or phans, which was the charity supported by the (p. 258) Three Choirs festivals, held alter nately through the period in the cities of Gloucester, Worcester, and Hereford.13 During the years between 1810 and 1835, members of the middle classes became a sig nificant part of the festival audience.14 Although their exact numbers cannot be known, detailed newspaper reports from the 1820s can help calculate their approximate percent ages. These reports, like that for the Yorkshire Grand Musical Festival of 1828, often in clude both tables of the number of people who attended each festival concert and lists of members of the nobility and gentry who attended.15 Many such lists first delineate the no bility in rank order (both secular and ecclesiastical), including army and navy officers, clergy, and foreign visitors, and then list the gentry who attended the festival alphabeti cally by county. Subtracting the number of those listed in these categories from the num ber of total attendees reveals a number of other audience members. These percentages are approximate because the lists of members of the nobility and the gentry were designed to be somewhat incomplete. Entries on the list for the 1828 York shire Grand Musical Festival frequently included the sobriquet “and party” after identify ing individuals by name. Because in this list the longest entry without the designation “and party” included five people, each party was assumed to have referred to six individu als. Some might have included more, but likely many included fewer. With this assump tion in place, the projected number of nobles, ladies, and gentlemen at this festival was about 2,555. Even if they all attended each morning performance at York Minster (they likely did not), a significant number of members of other classes also attended these con certs. Given the ticket prices, which ranged from five to seven shillings for the cheapest seats, fifteen shillings for the intermediate seats, and a guinea (twenty-one shillings) for the most expensive and exclusive seats, the middle classes were the only groups besides the nobility and gentry who could have afforded to attend.16 Table 11.1 shows the approx imate number of middle-class attendees at each morning concert (September 23–26, 1828). Three of the four had percentages between 17 percent and 24 percent, which comes to about 541–820 people. The outlier concert was on the morning of Thursday, September 25. This concert had the largest projected middle-class audience, about 2,354 people, or 47 percent of those attending. The concert heard that day featured Handel’s Messiah, the composition that carried the British musical festival (p. 259) for much of its history and one that was a stalwart of this group.17 Although they are estimates based on incomplete data, the figures indicate that within this period a substantial portion of the festival audience came from the middle classes. Page 4 of 24
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Amateurs and Auditors: Listening to the British Musical Festival, 1810– 1835 Table 11.1 Middle-Class Attendees at the 1828 Yorkshire Grand Musi cal Festival Morning (Sacred) Concerts in York Minster Perfor mance date
Total audi ence in at tendance
Assumed mid dle-class audi ence atten dance
Estimated mid dle-class audi ence percent age
Tuesday, Sept. 23
3,375
820
24%
Wednes day, Sept. 24
3,096
541
17%
Thursday, Sept. 25
4,909
2,354
47%
Friday, Sept. 26
3,177
622
20%
The fact that there were numerically more individuals attending these concerts and that they were likely from the middle classes does not prove that they were auditors as distin guished from amateurs. Yet whether or not they were, contemporary festival officials and those writing about music assumed that this was the case, as the discussion below will demonstrate. These new audience members would have entered into long-established fes tival traditions, some of which reflected more active listening practices and some, more passive ones. The middle classes were more likely to attend morning concerts of sacred music at festivals. There were many more seats available for such concerts than at the evening ones. At the Yorkshire Grand Musical Festival of 1823, the morning concerts could seat as many as 4,900 people at a variety of prices. The evening concerts in the As sembly Rooms could only seat 1,500, and the ticket price for any seat at these concerts was fifteen shillings—three times the price of the cheapest seats at the morning concerts.18 At the morning concerts the middle classes could simply listen if they wished to do so. Al though the “reverential silence” that James H. Johnson cites regarding Parisian concerts in the early nineteenth century surprised critics there,19 silence was the expected behav ior for the audience at the morning concerts.20 In contrast, the evening concerts were much more socially active, and the upper-class audience felt free to interact directly with the performance, both in calling for encores and, on occasion, “resetting” the program. This was the case at the second evening concert of the 1823 festival. It was slated to open with Beethoven’s Symphony no. 5 in C minor. When it began instead with the third piece advertised in the program (Samuel Webbe’s glee “When Winds Breathe”), the audience Page 5 of 24
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Amateurs and Auditors: Listening to the British Musical Festival, 1810– 1835 reacted with “a loud and general call for the Symphony [which] at once evinced that the omission would not be endured.”21 Beethoven’s symphony was consequently performed. By design or by accident, the middle-class audience members at the morning sacred con certs were listening silently, and refraining from interacting was the norm at festivals in Britain. If they were, in fact, auditors in the sense of being just listeners who may be overwhelmed by the effects of the music, it is likely that such sacred concerts would be more comfortable for them than the evening concert, where specific and vocal expres sions of taste were demanded.
Physical-Spatial Structures: Interior Construc tions The increased number of middle-class individuals attending festivals corresponded to in creased audience sizes at the morning concerts, and this required most festivals in this period to create elaborate interior structures to seat them. Besides increasing the (p. 260) number of seats, these structures were designed to separate the nobility and the gentry from the middle classes and to ensure that the auditor had a decent listening experience. The structures of 1810–1835 followed a precedent established in those built for the morn ing concerts at Westminster Abbey for the Handel commemorations of 1784–1791 (see Figure 11.1). Designed by the architect and surveyor of the Abbey fabric, James (p. 261) Wyatt, they featured elaborate audience galleries on each side of the nave and a rear gallery with a “Gothic box” meant to seat royal visitors.22 The constructions’ purposes were both aesthetic and practical: aesthetic because they were meant to match the building’s architecture, and practical because they allowed one to seat more people in the building.
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Amateurs and Auditors: Listening to the British Musical Festival, 1810– 1835
Figure 11.1. View of the Magnificent Box Erected for Their Majesties in Westminster Abbey . . . at the Commemoration of Handel (1792–1803), engraving by John Walker after John Dixon (1784). Courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art.
The interior constructions for the Yorkshire Grand Musical Festivals held between 1823 and 1835 were more elaborate than the ones designed by Wyatt. A lithograph used as the frontispiece of An Account of the Grand Musical Festival, Held in September, 1823, in the Cathedral Church of York . . . by John Crosse (hereafter An Account) shows the audience and seating galleries for the 1823 festival (see Figure 11.2).The design recorded in this lithograph included seating directly in front of the orchestra, a rear gallery at a steep rake below the Heart of Yorkshire Window at the western end of the Minster, and side galleries in the aisles. This figure, originally in color, shows the large amount (p. 262) of decoration on the seating gallery, which included gothic touches such as the series of pointed arches along its bottom wall as well as the rich red fabric that backed them. The complexity of this structure is also visible in a detail in the middle portion of the gallery: two small towers that jut above the seated audience have similar decorations. These were staircases built under the structure that allowed entry into the rear gallery.
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Amateurs and Auditors: Listening to the British Musical Festival, 1810– 1835
Figure 11.2. The audience at the 1823 Yorkshire Grand Musical Festival (1825), hand-colored engrav ing. Frontispiece of John Crosse. 1825. An Account of the Grand Musical Festival, Held in September, 1823, in the Cathedral Church of York; For the Benefit of the York County Hospital, and the General Infir maries at Leeds, Hull, and Sheffield: To Which is Pre fixed, A Sketch of the Rise and Progress of Musical Festivals in Great Britain; With Biographical and His torical Notes. York: John Wolstenholme. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München (4 Mus.th. 2101, S. 6, urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb10528229-7).
The relatively complete financial and organizational records of the Yorkshire Grand Musi cal Festivals of 1823–1835 held at the York Minster Archives and the York City Archives reveal three important points regarding these constructions. First, they were costly. The total expenses for the 1828 festival—including the hire of the soloists, choir, and orches tra and musical scores—were £6,529 12s. 6d. Building the interior constructions cost more than half of that amount: £3,279 3s. 2d.23 Second, making these interior structures took a great deal of time. In his history of the 1823 festival John Crosse notes that work men began building the interior structures in the Minster on July 21, 1823. They were opened for viewing fifty-three days later, on September 15.24 Third, these interior structures were cast off at the end of every festival and sold to the highest bidder. Therefore, the structures were redesigned for each festival. This allowed for the possibility of acoustical improvement or experimentation. Crosse explicitly men tions what he saw as a construction defect in the structures built for the 1823 festival that he hoped would change at future ones: Although these skreens, between the two northern and the two southern pillars of the tower, were carried to the height of forty–five feet, it will probably be found necessary to raise them still higher, should the orchestra be continued in the same situation, in the event of another festival, and also to cover them in the interior with paper instead of crimson cloth, by which it is certain that the voices of the Page 8 of 24
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Amateurs and Auditors: Listening to the British Musical Festival, 1810– 1835 chorus singers stationed adjoining to them were partly deprived of their force and effect.25 Crosse discussed the perceived fault in the original construction in order to seek a change so that the singers’ voices could have their desired effect and the listener’s expe rience at the festival might be improved. This may be an example of acoustical learning, as the architectural firm of Atkinson and Sharp did, indeed, change the Minster seating gallery design for each successive festival.26 But the interior constructions had one other effect: in helping bring more people into the Minster, they also helped stratify the audience by social class. The side aisles—the same seats that Crosse wished to be partly redesigned—were not the best seats from which to see the performance or the rest of the audience. These were also the ones priced for the middle classes at five to seven shillings. Designs for the more expensive seats—priced at fifteen shillings for seats in front of the orchestra and one guinea for the rear gallery, re spectively—where the nobility and gentry would sit and where the sightlines were best, were barely redesigned. And as the architectural firm of Atkinson and Sharp advanced further designs for seating in York Minster, the ways to differentiate these sections in creased. A detail from the firm’s architectural plans for the 1835 Minster structure shows the construction of different entrances, flow paths, and even staircases for (p. 263) each area. (Figure 11.3). As this drawing indicates, audience members holding tickets for the rear gallery entered by the main doors in the middle of the west end of the Minster. Those seated in the orchestra section entered on the west-end side doors, and those holding tickets for the side-aisle seats entered by doors on the north and south sides of the Min ster.27 Those who paid for the most expensive seats also had access to two retiring rooms, built under the galleries.
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Amateurs and Auditors: Listening to the British Musical Festival, 1810– 1835
Figure 11.3. Detail of York Minster Interior Struc ture, Rear Gallery, Yorkshire Grand Musical Festival, Designed by Atkinson and Sharp (1835), hand-col ored drawing. Borthwick Institute for Archives, Uni versity of York, AB Fol. 7/190. Reproduced from an original in the Borthwick Insti tute, University of York.
These interior designs were the physical and spatial manifestations of the contemporary reaction to the larger listening audience at the British festivals. They greatly expanded the number of seats within York Minster so that more individuals—both amateurs and au ditors—could hear the morning concerts. They also provided a specific way for the festi val organizers to differentiate the audience based on class. The poorer sight lines of the side aisles also indicate a sense that those sitting in these seats did not necessarily need to look at the performers. Instead of being angled to face the risers that (p. 264) contained the soloists, choir, and orchestra at the east end of the nave, the five-to-seven-shilling seats were directed to the center of the nave. Those sitting in seats in the north aisle faced south, and those in the south aisle faced north; the corresponding sight lines would have directed viewpoints toward the audience in the nave. But the seats were positioned to ensure adequate sound quality, and they were redesigned for each festival to improve upon it. When combined with methods designed to educate the festival audiences and the contemporary discussion of the word “auditor” itself, these physical constructions point to a growing concern on the part of music critics and writers that the new auditors were in fact members of the middle class.
Educational Structures: Musically Enlighten ing the Auditor John Crosse, in addition to chronicling the York Minster Festival of 1823, was a musical amateur prominent in Yorkshire. He served on the managing committee of the 1823 and Page 10 of 24
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Amateurs and Auditors: Listening to the British Musical Festival, 1810– 1835 1825 Yorkshire Grand Musical Festivals and arranged an English translation of a text used in a composition by Franz Joseph Haydn performed at those festivals. In 1825 he published a 476-page history of the 1823 festival titled An Account, mentioned above. The work was a hybrid, mixing music criticism, festival history, and instruction in taste. At its heart, An Account was a work meant to contextualize the 1823 festival within the tradi tion of British musical festivals to that time; 120 pages of the volume provided a gazetteer-style list of festivals held in Britain between 1709 and 1823. Crosse usually gave the festival date and discussed one or two facts about it, such as the appearance of a prominent performer, an innovation in repertoire that occurred, or its success in raising money for a charity. But the book aspired to be much more than this: It was also a com pendious set of after-the-fact program notes giving biographical information and abbrevi ated performance history for all of the composers and compositions heard at the 1823 festival.28 It combined this information with a detailed critical review of the performances throughout which Crosse used an instructional tone while attempting to display a contem porary ideal of aesthetic objectivity. He designed the book as a lesson in proper musical taste, intended for the growing group of middle-class auditors. Crosse made this educational function explicit in the preface to the volume when stating one of its major goals, namely, that even the professional reader, who requires no guide in the formation of his opinions, will meet with matter illustrative of his art, with which he is not familiar —and that the taste and judgment of the amateur may be invigorated and in formed, by perusing and comparing the sentiments of the ablest critics upon some of the most distinguished productions of antient and modern times.29 In order to inform the tastes of the amateur—and by extension, the auditor— Crosse included copious and judicious quotations from acknowledged musical experts. (p. 265)
For the knowledgeable, this would increase Crosse’s authority when expressing his own aesthetic opinions within An Account. For the novice and the auditor, this would provide the tools they needed to have both knowledge about and advanced taste in music. A typical example is Crosse’s discussion of the Handel aria “Holy! Holy! Holy! Lord God Almighty!” from Redemption, performed by Catalani in the morning concert of September 23, 1823. The oratorio Redemption was a pastiche arranged by Samuel Arnold from a number of movements of Handel’s operas and other works.30 Crosse’s two-page discus sion of “Holy! Holy! Holy!” follows a trajectory he used throughout his discussions of the music performed at the 1823 festival: He provides the composition’s history, gives a short analysis predicated on an interesting musical or textual detail of the piece, relates the composition to a tenet discussed by a well-known musical authority, and discusses the ex ecution of the work in that concert. Crosse’s step-by-step approach was meant to introduce the auditor to the wider knowl edge base of the amateur. Crosse’s discussion of the reception history of “Holy, Holy, Holy” traces its origin to the aria “Dove sei? Amato bene!” from Handel’s opera Rodelinda (1725) and moves through a brief discussion of its success as rearranged for Arnold’s pas Page 11 of 24
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Amateurs and Auditors: Listening to the British Musical Festival, 1810– 1835 tiche oratorio. Once he has identified its transformation, Crosse points out a difficulty en countered with the assignment of a new text: The word “holy,” occurring no less than twenty-one times in the course of this short piece, demands all the powers of the cultivated mind, united with the dis crimination of a sound taste, to produce the desirable effect of a proper variety, without losing sight of the sublimity of the subject.31 These elements provide musical context for the work, and they give the reader an idea of its potential difficulties in performance. At the end of this introduction Crosse tries to correct an error in contemporary thought: that Handel set the sacred words himself, not Arnold. Crosse uses this point to start a short discussion of setting words to music, referring the reader to John Hawkins’s A Gen eral History of the Science and Practice of Music.32 This brings an acknowledged authori ty into the discussion, which lends credence to Crosse’s first major aesthetic claim about the movement itself: “Commencing with a subdued voice and manner characteristic of reverential awe, and gradually rising into an expression of fervid, but chastened adora tion, the most gifted singer will find ample scope for the display of the highest talent in this composition.”33 Crosse then turns to a critical discussion of the performance on that morning by Catalani: Consistently with the best opinion we can form, we cannot say, that Madame Cata lani was particularly happy in this her first appearance in Handel’s music at this time, when she was evidently not in possession of her usual powers; yet, the feel ings of devotion which she is known to entertain, were pleasingly evinced by her solemn (p. 266) enunciation; and her true conception of the general nature of the piece, by her abstinence from that ornamented style in which lies her peculiar and transcendent claim on our admiration.34 While Catalani’s technical facility may not have been complete, Crosse compliments her on her personal air of devotion as well as her tasteful restraint in singing this excerpt be cause she did not launch into the bravura-style ornamentation for which she was then fa mous—and for which the anonymous reviewer of the 1812 Leeds festival had faulted her. Within this brief discussion, then, Crosse outlines a short history of the composition, traces its present arrangement, providing an aesthetic judgment on it, uses it to guide the auditor to a larger discussion about the mechanics of music and word-setting by an ac knowledged “classic” (Hawkins), and comments specifically on the difficulties of the arrangement and the relative success of the performance at the 1823 festival. Such edu cational prose is an attempt to vividly remind readers of the performance that occurred there, but it is also to give the auditor enough guidance in knowledge and taste to be able to comment on the performance as if the auditor were an amateur. Thus, An Account functioned both as a souvenir, by drawing together documents like the wordbooks avail able at the festival concerts, and as an educational text, by granting the amateur and the
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Amateurs and Auditors: Listening to the British Musical Festival, 1810– 1835 auditor easy access to a comprehensive historical and contextual account of the festival, by way of authoritative musical opinions.
Linguistic Structures: Defining the Auditor The preceding sections of this chapter delineate the class composition of the musical festival’s growing audience, where listeners would sit at the festival, and how they would be introduced to contemporary ideals of musical taste and knowledge. The final part of this study concerns how the word “auditor” related to this audience. British music educa tion books of this period used “auditor” with some frequency. It is frustrating that these works provide no direct definition of the word. In explicitly educational sources, the word “auditor” simply followed Samuel Johnson’s eighteenth-century definition, that of “a hearer.”35 William Waring’s translation of JeanJacques Rousseau’s Dictionary of Music uses “auditor” in this way when defining “sensi bility”: “A disposition of the soul which inspires the composer with the lively ideas which he wants; the executant, with the lively idea of these same expressions; and the ‘auditor,’ with the lively impression of the beauties and errors of music which he is made to hear. (Vide Taste.)”36 In this case, Waring faithfully translates Rousseau to distinguish auditor (the person who listens to the final product, the music) from both the composer and the musician. This auditor may have some skill, given this ability to potentially discern the “errors” or “beauties” within the music, but since “sensibility” is (p. 267) being discussed, some of that discernment might also be considered an aspect of natural (inborn) taste. This is also the case in Thomas Busby’s three uses of the word in his Musical Manual, or Technical Directory of 1828. Initially, Busby uses “auditor” in the definition of a type of historical musician, the “Cantadour” (Busby’s word for “troubadour”), in a definition of the word “Effective” (“When a composition or performance makes a strong or deep im pression on its auditors, it is said to be Effective”), and to explicate an object, the “Up right Grand Piano-Forte” (noting that the player of this instrument “turns the back . . . on the auditors”).37 In these cases, “auditor” has neither a requisite skill set nor a value judgment placed upon it, nor does it need one. It is more or less a direct substitute for “listener” as understood today. In histories of musical festivals written between 1810 and 1835, the definition of “audi tor” is expanded to mean a crowd of listeners.38 George Farquhar Graham uses the word this way twice in his history of an 1815 festival held in Edinburgh to generally describe the “many auditors” listening to a morning concert and the powerful performance of a se lection from Don Giovanni.39 Crosse frequently uses the word in An Account in this way, as well. An example is found in a discussion of two performances: one by Gertrud Elisa beth Mara, the first major prima donna to appear at British musical festivals, with Eliza beth Billington, one of the great singers of English oratorio, as well as a performance by Catalani. Crosse describes these concerts as being heard by so many (“thousands,” in the case of Catalani) that the stage itself “was crowded with auditors.”40 An extension of this use of “auditor” is the way Crosse employs the word when discussing how performed mu Page 13 of 24
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Amateurs and Auditors: Listening to the British Musical Festival, 1810– 1835 sic sounded to a great mass of people within a larger space. But in this example, Crosse also uses the term in a positive sense regarding sound in a particular space, noting that when the soprano Catherine Stephens sang “Pious Orgies” from Judas Maccabaeus, “the most delicate gradations of sound were distinctly conveyed to those auditors who were situated at the remotest distance from the orchestra.”41 In these examples, the auditors are multitudes of listeners within vast spaces. This use of the word links the large crowd of auditors with the idea of the singer as part of a spectacle. In all of these cases, the au ditor as listener may or may not necessarily have any particular talent for music or be long to a particular class. The auditor is only required to listen. This changes with Crosse’s final use of “auditor,” where he employs the word to implicitly denote an individual who might not necessarily be able to distinguish aspects of excellent music from ordinary music—someone with less skill and perhaps less taste than the British amateur and therefore fewer of the monetary and temporal resources required to acquire such taste. Crosse blatantly challenges the knowledge of the auditor when he notes that “the chorus in [Handel’s Alexander’s Feast], ‘Let Old Timotheus’, is another in stance of adaptation; its first shape being that of an Italian trio, ‘Quel’ fior’, though most auditors took it for an original composition.”42 The use of “most auditors” is meant to dif ferentiate those with some musical knowledge from those who have none. Similarly, in discussing reactions to the music of Henry Bishop, Cross writes: “It has been somewhere observed, that the compositions of Mr. B. frequently impress the auditor with a belief that he has heard them before, though he may be unable to trace their resemblance to a par ticular prototype.”43 In each of these two cases, the fact that the auditor has been de ceived by the music creates a situation that implies a value judgment (p. 268) concerning the music and the listener, as well as the listener’s lack of knowledge and perhaps skill with music. Crosse uses “auditor” similarly in discussing the taste of the crowd, when he tries to un tangle the relative aesthetic worth of a movement from Haydn’s Die Schöpfung (The Cre ation) from the way that movement was received by the audience. The movement in ques tion was the climactic chorus at the end of the first part, “Die Himmel erzählen die Ehre Gottes” (The Heavens Are Telling the Glory of God). Crosse disparages the movement as inappropriate and frivolous in comparison to the rest of the oratorio: The subject of this chorus is rather too light and dramatic for its present situa tion. . . . Yet, if success be the test of merit, and permanent success assuredly is so, this chorus must be allowed to take the highest rank amongst sublime compo sitions; and, if we are to regard the intensity of the feelings which were excited in the breasts of the auditors this morning, as indicative of the excellence of the per formance, we need not hesitate to pronounce it to have been one of the most im pressive of all the numerous pieces that were brought forward at the festival.44 Crosse’s opinion—that of an accomplished musical amateur—is clear. He believes that the movement is inferior and derivative. But he was convinced of its aesthetic value because of the experience of the mass of “auditors” in listening to it that morning in 1823 at the Page 14 of 24
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Amateurs and Auditors: Listening to the British Musical Festival, 1810– 1835 Yorkshire Grand Musical Festival: the “intensity of feeling” caused by its excellent execu tion made it, temporarily at least, a composition worth of some veneration. Crosse uses the purported opinion of the auditor to make a case for the aesthetic worth of the piece. Contemporary use of the word “auditor,” therefore, had multivalent meanings. Most fre quently, writers used it to mean a generic listener—generic, because there was no im plied judgment of the listener’s musical abilities or taste. But “auditor” was frequently used in ways that explicitly corresponded to members of the growing middle-class audi ence as well, and in order to describe an especially large and crowded audience of listen ers and to imply a potential lapse of taste or judgment among that crowd. This last use of the term is the most similar to that employed by the anonymous reviewer of Catalani’s performance at the 1812 Leeds musical festival. This use of “auditor” is particularly evi dent when combined with the word “amateur” or in a context that assumes amateur knowledge of a level typical for the time. In this instance, Crosse implies that the word “auditor” means one who listens without having taste, though he never directly says so.
Conclusion: The Auditor from Cathedral to Concert Hall The British musical festival was in a period of transition between 1810 and 1835. The tra ditional audiences of the festivals throughout the eighteenth century—members of the (p. 269) nobility and the gentry—expanded to include a significant number of members from outside these classes. At the morning concerts, they might constitute anywhere be tween one-fifth to almost half of the audience, depending on the repertoire performed. Al though this new audience might not have consisted entirely of auditors in the sense of lis teners from the middle classes, those managing and writing about festivals acted as if they did. They created linguistic, educational, and physical structures to contain and in form them. But the interior structures and educational literature created for this new audience mere ly spurred on their desire for more musical opportunities, which increasingly catered to the middle classes. In a print created sometime between 1855 and 1863, the interior of Birmingham’s Town Hall is depicted from the perspective of an individual standing in the upstairs gallery at the back of the hall, looking toward the chorus and orchestra (Figure 11.4). While it was used for other functions including a regular organ recital, the Town Hall was proposed and built specifically for the Birmingham Triennial Musical Festival, which was intended to present morning sacred and evening secular concerts.45 The Town Hall opened in 1834. One can see in the figure that the seating plan is much simpler and more egalitarian than were the festival constructions of 1810–1835 discussed above. Even (p. 270) though there are two levels with different pricing schemes, the interior con struction of the building meant that all of the audience could hear and see the perfor mance well. The building of similarly constructed concert halls that hosted regular musi cal festivals from Bradford and Leeds to Bristol followed throughout the rest of the nine teenth century. Such halls catered to a listener who could concentrate on the perfor Page 15 of 24
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Amateurs and Auditors: Listening to the British Musical Festival, 1810– 1835 mance, with less regard to class and more regard to the listening experience itself. The education of the middle-class auditor, seating arrangements for the middle classes, and the shaping of the listening spaces at British festivals between 1810 and 1835 were thus early manifestations of the development of the modern concert listener.
Figure 11.4. Interior of Birmingham Town Hall (ca. 1855–1863), print. Photo © Birmingham Museums Trust.
Archives Records of Atkinson Brierley 1753–1960. The Borthwick Institute for Archives, University of York York City Archives
References Botstein, Leon. 1992. “Listening Through Reading: Musical Literacy and the Concert Au dience.” 19th-Century Music 16 (2): 129–145. Brown, John. 1789. Letters upon the Poetry and Music of the Italian Opera. Edinburgh: Bell & Bradfute; London: C. Elliot & T. Kay. Burney, Charles. 1785. An Account of the Musical Performances in Westminster-Abbey and the Pantheon, May 26th, 27th, and 29th; and June the 3d and 5th, 1784, in Commem oration of Handel. London: T. Payne and Son; G. Robinson. Busby, Thomas. 1828. A Musical Manual, or Technical Directory. London: Goulding & D’Almaine. Clark, Gregory. 2011. “Average Earnings and Retail Prices, UK 1209–2010.” Accessed De cember 9, 2015. http://www.measuringworth.com/datasets/ukearncpi/ earnstudynew.pdf.
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Amateurs and Auditors: Listening to the British Musical Festival, 1810– 1835 Cobb, Henry. 1823. A Description of the Grand Musical Festival Held in the City of York, September the 23d, 24th, 25th, and 26th, 1823; with the Words of the Selections for the Whole of the Performances. York: Henry Cobb. Crosse, John. 1825. An Account of the Grand Musical Festival, Held in September, 1823, in the Cathedral Church of York; For the Benefit of the York County Hospital, and the General Infirmaries at Leeds, Hull, and Sheffield: To Which is Prefixed, A Sketch of the Rise and Progress of Musical Festivals in Great Britain; With Biographical and Historical Notes. York: John Wolstenholme. Danneley, John Feltham. 1825. An Encyclopædia, or Dictionary of Music. London: Preston. (p. 275)
Drummond, Pippa. 2011. The Provincial Music Festival in England, 1784–1914. Farnham: Ashgate. Fuller Maitland, John Alexander. 1902. English Music of the XIXth Century. New York: Dutton. Graham, George Farquhar. 1816. An Account of the First Edinburgh Musical Festival, Held between the 30th October and 5th November, 1815, to which is Added an Essay, Containing Some General Observations on Music. Edinburgh: James Ballantyne. Hall-Witt, Jennifer. 2007. Fashionable Acts: Opera and Elite Culture in London, 1780– 1880. Lebanon: University of New Hampshire Press. Handel, George Frederic. 1786. The Redemption: A Sacred Oratorio. Arranged by Samuel Arnold. London: R. Birchall. Hawkins, John. 1776. A General History of the Science and Practice of Music. London: T. Payne & Sons. Johnson, James. 1995. Listening in Paris: A Cultural History. Berkeley: University of Cali fornia Press. Johnson, Samuel. 1755. A Dictionary of the English Language. London: J. Straham. Johnson, Samuel. 1820. Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language in Miniature. Lon don: J. Bumpus. Johnstone, H. Diack. 1984. “A Ringside Seat at the Handel Commemoration.” Musical Times 125 (1701): 632–636. Jousse, J. 1829. A Compendious Dictionary of Italian and Other Terms Used in Music. Lon don: Clementi. “Leeds Musical Festival.” 1812. Leeds Intelligencer, October 12: 3.
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Amateurs and Auditors: Listening to the British Musical Festival, 1810– 1835 McGuire, Charles Edward. 2002. Elgar’s Oratorios: The Creation of an Epic Narrative. Aldershot: Ashgate. McGuire, Charles Edward. 2014. “John Bull, Angelica Catalani, and Middle-Class Taste at the 1820s British Musical Festival.” Nineteenth-Century Music Review 11 (1): 3–31. Musical Festivals Database. 2016. Accessed March 9, 2016. www.musicalfestivals.org. OED Online. 2016 s.v. “amateur, n.” Accessed March 9, 2016. http://www.oed.com/view/ Entry/6041?redirectedFrom=amateur. Pritchard, Brian. 1968. “The Musical Festival and the Choral Society in England in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: A Social History.” PhD diss., University of Birming ham. Pritchard, Brian. 1969. “The Provincial Festivals of the Ashley Family.” Galpin Society Journal 22:58–77. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1768. Dictionnaire de Musique. Paris: Veuve Duchense. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1779. A Dictionary of Music. 2nd ed. Translated by William War ing. London: J. French. Sisman, Elaine. 2005. “Haydn’s Career and the Idea of the Multiple Audience.” In The Cambridge Companion to Haydn, edited by Cayrl Clark, 3–16. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weber, William. 1989. “The 1784 Handel Commemoration as Political Ritual.” Journal of British Studies 28 (1): 43–69. Weber, William. 1997. “Did People Listen in the 18th Century?” Early Music 25 (4): 678– 691. “Yorkshire Musical Festival, 1828.” 1828. York: Printed at the Offices of the York Gazette: 49–64. (p. 276)
Notes: (1.) The most complete history of the British music festival remains Pritchard, Brian. 1968. “The Musical Festival and the Choral Society in England in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: A Social History.” PhD diss., University of Birmingham. A more compact introduction can be found in Drummond, Pippa. 2011. The Provincial Music Fes tival in England, 1784–1914. Farnham: Ashgate. (2.) See, e.g., William Weber’s discussion of harnessing George Frederic Handel’s music for nationalistic aims. Weber, William. 1989. “The 1784 Handel Commemoration as Politi cal Ritual.” Journal of British Studies 28 (1): 43–69.
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Amateurs and Auditors: Listening to the British Musical Festival, 1810– 1835 (3.) “Leeds Musical Festival.” 1812. Leeds Intelligencer, October 12: 3. The operatic piece Catalani sang at a sacred music concert was Niccolò Antonio Zingarelli’s “Ombra adora ta,” from Giulietta e Romeo. For a discussion of the criticism of Catalani singing pieces from George Frederic Handel’s Messiah, see McGuire, Charles Edward. 2014. “John Bull, Angelica Catalani, and Middle-Class Taste at the 1820s British Musical Festival.” Nine teenth-Century Music Review 11 (1): 3–31. (4.) Botstein, Leon. 1992. “Listening Through Reading: Musical Literacy and the Concert Audience.” 19th-Century Music 26 (2): 129–145, here 135–136. (5.) See OED Online. 2016. S.v. “amateur, n.” Accessed March 9, 2016. http:// www.oed.com/view/Entry/6041?redirectedFrom=amateur. This definition states that vari ous definitions of “amateur” first came into use in the English language between 1784 and 1786 in the European Magazine. “Amateur” does not appear in comprehensive dictio naries of the English language until 1820 (see Johnson, Samuel. 1820. Johnson’s Dictio nary of the English Language in Miniature. London: J. Bumpus, 9, where it is spelled “am ature”). The word does, however, appear in writings about music in the 1780s, particular ly in Burney, Charles. 1785. An Account of the Musical Performances in WestminsterAbbey and the Pantheon, May 26th, 27th, and 29th; and June the 3d and 5th, 1784, in Commemoration of Handel. London: T. Payne and Son; G. Robinson, xiv, 56. As will be made clear throughout the rest of this discussion, Burney and those after him follow parts of the definition set down by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Dictionnaire de Musique (Paris: Veuve Duchense, 1768), 31: “AMATEUR, Celui qui, sans être Musicien de profession, fait sa Partie dans un Concert pour son plaisir & par amour la Musique.” William Waring translated Rousseau’s Dictionnaire into English in 1779 but omitted defining the word “amateur.” See Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1779. A Dictionary of Music. Translated by William Waring. 2nd ed. London: J. French, 20. (6.) This definition, a version of the one by Rousseau cited in the note above, is taken from Busby, Thomas. 1828. A Musical Manual, or Technical Directory. London: Goulding & D’Almaine, 8. Similar definitions can be found in Jousse, J. 1829. A Compendious Dictio nary of Italian and Other Terms Used in Music. London: Clementi, 9; and Danneley, John Feltham. 1825. An Encyclopædia, or Dictionary of Music. London: Preston, n.p.. In these dictionaries, the “amateur” was usually contrasted with the “professor,” which, in Jousse’s definition, is “one who, being conversant in the theory and practice of the sci ence [of music], gives lessons or lectures on the same.” (Jousse [1829]: 9). And though all three dictionaries mention the “professional” musician, that category is not defined. The myriad contemporary differences between the “professor” and the “professional musi cian” are beyond the scope of this chapter. (7.) For instance, contemporary British musical journals might use both “connoisseur” and “amateur” in their articles, but there is a marked tendency to use the latter more than the former. As an example, the 1818 volume of the Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review uses “connoisseur” twice and “amateur” thirty-eight times. The ratios are similar for 1821 (2:43), 1823 (9:72), 1825 (9:50), 1826 (3:24), and 1827 (13:36). This is also the Page 19 of 24
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Amateurs and Auditors: Listening to the British Musical Festival, 1810– 1835 case with The Harmonicon. In John Crosse’s 1825 Account of the Grand Musical Festival, Held in September, 1823, in the Cathedral Church of York; For the Benefit of the York County Hospital, and the General Infirmaries at Leeds, Hull, and Sheffield: To Which is Prefixed, A Sketch of the Rise and Progress of Musical Festivals in Great Britain; With Bi ographical and Historical Notes (York: John Wolstenholme), “connoisseur” is used twice, “amateur” twenty-two times, and when he uses “connoisseur,” he does so within quota tions from passages translated from French and German (see 312 and 314). Both times “connoisseur” is used in relation to the history of the score of Mozart’s Requiem in D mi nor, K. 626. “Amateur” also seems to have had the same multivalent meanings ascribed to “connoisseur” by Elaine Sisman, connoting one who might be a “socially powerful patron, composer, [or] judge, rather than merely designating someone who had studied or who had developed taste” (Sisman, Elaine. 2005. “Haydn’s Career and the Idea of the Multiple Audience.” In The Cambridge Companion to Haydn, edited by Cayrl Clark. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 3–16, here 5.) The difference in this case is that the ama teur, as understood by writers in Britain at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, could be “merely . . . someone who had studied or who had devel oped taste.” What is not present within most of these dictionaries is a helpful use of the word “dilettante” as a synonym for “amateur” or a pejorative apposite to it. Jousse (1829), for instance, defines it simply as “Italian for Amateur” (41). Waring’s translation of Rousseau (1779) notes the term as “those who frequented Concerts for pleasure on ly” (3), but in the context of a definition for the “Academy of Music, or Musical Academy.” And Danneley (1825) does not include the word at all. When used in contemporary jour nals, “dilettante” frequently had multiple, confused meanings. The two instances of it in the first volume of the Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review (1818) use it as a positive synonym for an amateur (70) and as an identification (“Un Dilettante”) of the author of a letter to the editor concerning “The Structure of the Italian Opera,” which is a long ab stract from Brown, John. 1789 Letters upon the Poetry and Music of the Italian Opera. Edinburgh: Bell & Bradfute; London: C. Elliot & T. Kay. The arrangement of this abstract implies someone who clearly had thought about opera for a great deal of time. (8.) This is clearly the case from Dannely’s definition of a musical “executant,” which in cludes the following: “a musician, professor, or amateur, who executes his part in a con cert, or in an orchestra.” See Dannely (1825): n.p. (9.) “Auditor” was in use in the English language by the end of the fourteenth century and was defined in the first edition (1755) of Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (London: J. Straham, Vol. I, n.p.) as “a hearer.” This definition is Johnson’s first of four for “auditor.” (10.) The pairing of “amateur” with “auditor” also reinforces the French origins of the for mer word and the frequent use of the latter to mean a listener or hearer, particularly in works like Rousseau’s 1768 Dictionnare de Musique. Although Rousseau does not define “auditeur,” he uses it thirteen times in his text to mean either a single listener or an audi ence or a group of listeners.
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Amateurs and Auditors: Listening to the British Musical Festival, 1810– 1835 (11.) For a brief introduction to the festival in this era, see Drummond (2011): 35–61. (12.) Sample programs for festivals of this era held at Birmingham, Derby, Gloucester, Hereford, Hull, Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle, Norwich, Oxford, Portsmouth, Worcester, and York, among other cities, may be viewed on Musical Festivals Database. 2016. Ac cessed March 9, 2016. www.musicalfestivals.org. (13.) Besides the large, spectacle-driven charity festivals described here, other types ex isted, including festivals to celebrate the opening of a new church or installation of a new organ within one and speculation festivals. There were small differences between such events. The opening festival might include one or two concerts on a single day, rather than multiple concerts over several days. The speculation festival might give a percent age of its profits to a local charity but would be organized by an impresario hoping to gar ner a profit instead of by a local committee. Such impresarios included the Ashley family. See Pritchard, Brian. 1969. “The Provincial Festivals of the Ashley Family.” Galpin Society Journal 22:58–77. Catalani and her husband Paul Valebrègue also organized such specula tive festivals in Britain shortly after 1810 and in 1824. (14.) See Pritchard (1968): 335ff. and McGuire (2014): 3–10. (15.) “Yorkshire Musical Festival, 1828.” 1828. York Gazette: 49, 50–64. (16.) Clark, Gregory. 2011 “Average Earnings and Retail Prices, UK, 1209–2010.” Ac cessed December 9, 2015. http://www.measuringworth.com/datasets/ukearncpi/ earnstudynew.pdf: esp. Table 2. The average wage for a male worker in Great Britain in 1810 was about £47 per year. That would be a working-class income, and a single fiveshilling ticket for a concert would comprise about 5.3 percent of that worker’s yearly salary. A minimal middle-class income from the time, whether from employment or invest ments alone, would amount to approximately £200 per year for a family of four. The same five-shilling ticket would comprise about 1.3 percent of household income. (17.) McGuire, Charles Edward. 2002. Elgar’s Oratorios: The Creation of an Epic Narra tive. Aldershot: Ashgate, esp. 17–30. (18.) See Cobb, Henry. 1823. A Description of the Grand Musical Festival Held in the City of York, September the 23rd, 24th, 25th, and 26th, 1823; with the Words of the Selections for the Whole of the Performances. York: Henry Cobb, x–xiv, 93. (19.) Johnson, James H. 1995. Listening in Paris: A Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 204. (20.) Crosse (1825): 299 notes that “ ‘expressive silence’ is universally felt to be the most appropriate substitute for applause . . .” for such a concert within a cathedral or other sa cred space, suggesting a sort of religious attitude when listening. William Weber notes that such silence did not necessarily indicate whether the audience was or was not listen
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Amateurs and Auditors: Listening to the British Musical Festival, 1810– 1835 ing. See Weber, William (1997). “Did People Listen in the 18th Century?” Early Music 25 (4): 678–691, here 689–690. (21.) Cobb (1823): 19. (22.) Johnstone, H. Diack. 1984. “A Ringside Seat at the Handel Commemoration.” Musi cal Times 125 (1701): 632–636, here 635. (23.) Yorkshire Musical Festival 1828: The Account of Robert Davies Treasurer to the Committee of Management, York City Archives, 150.29.1. (24.) Crosse (1825): 155–156, 162. (25.) Crosse (1825): 154. (26.) For the Yorkshire Grand Musical Festivals, the designs became increasingly more elaborate with each new festival iteration. A number of these images still exist in the Records of Atkinson Brierley, held in Borthwick Institute for Archives, University of York, shelfmark AB 1753–1960. (27.) The door on the south side of the Minster included an exterior staircase because the entrance was created by removing a window from the Minster’s first bay. The window was reinstalled at the conclusion of the festival. (28.) Because it was published long after the completion of the festival, Crosse’s Account was not a program of the festival per se. Even the wordbooks available for sale before the festival were not explanatory programs in the modern sense but simply the texts of the pieces to be sung. They were meant for an erudite audience; frequently these wordbooks did not include translations of texts in Latin or Italian. Yet because the 1825 festival fea tured a great deal of the same repertoire as the 1823 one, Crosse’s work could have per formed a function similar to that of the modern program note for the 1825 audience mem ber—so long as the reader put the work into locating the various musical discussions themselves. (29.) Crosse (1825): v. (30.) Handel, George Frederic. 1786. Redemption: A Sacred Oratorio. Arranged by Sa muel Arnold. London: R.Birchall. In his discussion, Crosse mistakenly states that “Holy! Holy! Holy!” comes from Arnold’s pastiche oratorio Omnipotence. By the 1820s, only parts of Arnold’s pastiche oratorios were being performed, and only selections—not com plete scores or texts—were published. Thus Crosse may not have been familiar with Arnold’s complete pastiches. (31.) Crosse (1825): 207. (32.) Hawkins, John. 1776. A General History of the Science and Practice of Music. Lon don: T. Payne & Sons. Crosse refers the reader specifically to 1:xxvii in this discussion.
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Amateurs and Auditors: Listening to the British Musical Festival, 1810– 1835 (33.) Crosse (1825): 207. (34.) Crosse (1825): 207–208. (35.) Johnson (1755). (36.) Rousseau (1779): 359. (37.) Busby (1828): 29, 67, 140. (38.) The first history of a British musical festival, Burney (1785), uses “auditor” as a translation of the French “assister” (p. 121). Burney’s meaning is similar to that of John son and Busby. (39.) Graham, George Farquhar. 1816. An Account of the First Edinburgh Musical Festi val, Held between the 30th October and 5th November, 1815, to which is Added an Essay, Containing Some General Observations on Music. Edinburgh: James Ballantyne, 50, 75. (40.) Crosse (1825): 63, 66. Crosse also uses “auditor” once to refer to an individual lis tener attending a concert within a crowd: Franz Joseph Haydn at the Handel commemo rations (p. 46). Jennifer Hall-Witt notes that during the first few decades of the nineteenth century in Britain, there was not the same sense of a barrier between the audience and the stage as there is today. Audience members frequently sat on the stage, as well as in the usual seats. See Hall-Witt, Jennifer 2007. Fashionable Acts: Opera and Elite Culture in London, 1780–1880. Lebanon: University of New Hampshire Press, 4. (41.) Crosse (1825): 183. (42.) Crosse (1825): 217. (43.) Crosse (1825): 244. That Crosse singles out Bishop’s music as an example is also telling. By the end of the nineteenth century there was a suspicion that Bishop was too popular to be considered a serious composer. As J. A. Fuller Maitland stated in 1902, Bish op “pandered” to the “low taste of the public” (Fuller Maitland, John Alexander. 1902. English Music of the XIXth Century. New York: Dutton, 103–104). Later, in 1843–1844, he conducted at several festivals (Edinburgh in 1843 and Manchester in 1843 and 1844) that, departing from usual practice, held all of their concerts in the evenings, rather than splitting them between morning and evening times. This made the concerts much more accessible to those who might have to regularly work during the day. Bishop, it seems, understood how to cater to the growing middle classes, which may explain the concert times. (44.) Crosse (1825): 337. (45.) McGuire (2002): 29.
Charles Edward McGuire
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Amateurs and Auditors: Listening to the British Musical Festival, 1810– 1835 Charles Edward McGuire, Oberlin College and Conservatory
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The Intimate Art of Listening: Music in the Private Sphere During the Nine teenth Century
The Intimate Art of Listening: Music in the Private Sphere During the Nineteenth Century Wolfgang Fuhrmann The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries Edited by Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer Print Publication Date: Jan 2019 Subject: Music, Musicology and Music History Online Publication Date: Nov 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190466961.013.3
Abstract and Keywords This chapter looks into the ways forms of domestic music making encouraged certain modes of listening. Musical intimacy develops and is nurtured among close friends or lovers in a social space of openness and trust. Such an intimate space unfolds in the phys ical staging of bourgeois private settings: in the typically cozy and cushioned interior of the nineteenth century, often enhanced by dimming lights, as witnessed by documents from the Mendelssohn family, among others. Such a setting allows musicians and listen ers alike to indulge freely in “true” musical values. Musicians shun outward virtuosity and listeners concentrate on the music, often developing emotions, associations, and so on in close interdependence with the music. Listening intensely to music arguably originated in such settings, and it was only later transferred to public audiences, such as in the cham ber concert. Musical intimacy could also encourage confidential discussion about music, as found in Johannes Brahms’s correspondence. Keywords: bourgeois private settings, Chamber music, domestic public sphere, Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, Fan ny Hensel, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, history of emotions, Johannes Brahms, musical intimacy, private sphere
NINETEENTH-CENTURY musical life was characterized by an extraordinarily wide spec trum of public and private music-making settings, all of which implied or encouraged cer tain modes of listening to the pieces performed.1 At one extreme were the great music festivals, the heirs of the English Handel Commemorations and the French Revolutionary Feasts, centering around grand oratorio productions with thousands of performers and listeners. Their choirs and audience spaces were open to all levels of society, regardless of gender or income, at least in theory, and they therefore represented the utmost in so cial inclusivity before the advent of mass media. In the German-speaking lands especially, there were also the smaller but nevertheless spectacular Sängerfeste and Turnerfeste, with their exclusively male participants and stronger nationalist or political agendas.2 Such mass performances afforded certain modes of listening or, more generally speaking, modes of reception. Audiences would focus not so much on the fine musical details and nuances but more on the social and political aspects of such an event: the awe caused by the sublime effect of thousands of skilled and unskilled musicians performing together, Page 1 of 39
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The Intimate Art of Listening: Music in the Private Sphere During the Nine teenth Century combined with a sense of community and unity with more or less explicit social, political, and nationalist undertones. Such instances of reception, though not the focus of this chapter, provide an illustrative comparison to a form of listening that was arguably the complete opposite of such public spectacles—I will focus here on the various ways of lis tening that took place in domestic settings and in the private sphere. Domestic music making among friends, family members, or simply for one’s own pleasure constitutes the other extreme of nineteenth-century listening practices. Such private mu sic making, dubbed Hausmusik in 1855 by the cultural historian, (p. 278) anthropologist, writer, and hobby composer Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl,3 is this chapter’s concern, although it cannot be studied independent of the development of a musical public sphere during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.4 In whatever way we conceive of what consti tutes a public sphere, we can hardly do so without also taking into account the binary op posite of the private sphere. In the present context, I focus on a specific aspect of private music making that has not, to my knowledge, been treated systematically before: the intimacy of private music per formance. The art of listening, if understood in a quite elitist but historically (I believe) appropriate sense as “close” or “intense” listening (in what follows both terms are treat ed as synonyms) cultivated by musical connoisseurs, seems to be deeply related to the concept and context of intimate music making. The nature of this relation is the subject of the following pages. I will also suggest that there are some musical genres and stylistic traits that afford or even encourage their being played in an intimate atmosphere, in con ditions encouraging close listening. No side of this triangle (music making, listening, the music itself) is entirely independent of the others. Nor is any side strictly the cause or re sult of any other, either. Rather, intimate music making, intense listening, and the reper toires performed constitute, if taken together, a quite specific musico-cultural practice or “frame” (to adopt Erving Goffman’s term) to be distinguished from other practices or frames.5 Because this happens in a socially defined environment, the parlor, or “salon,” I will call this a “social space.” This, of course, does not mean that the practice of close or intense listening could take place only in a social space of intimacy. In recent decades many historians of listening have demonstrated beyond doubt that to listen closely—or, at least, to pretend to do so— became the cultural ideal among audiences during the nineteenth century, and that the principal modes of consequent behavior (sitting still in solemn silence, neither chatting nor disrupting the sense of concentration with anything that may distract from the sound, such as tapping one’s feet) had become socially compulsory around 1900 at the latest.6 But there is, even today, something almost peculiar about a great mass of people sitting nearly motionless and silent in a concert hall, opera house, or theater. Such stillness was certainly not a natural response for audiences in the nineteenth century. Close listening had developed earlier (one may argue, if speculatively, that it has been practiced in the West at least since the development of complex polyphony in the late Middle Ages).7 In the nineteenth century, listening intensely to music arguably was cultivated mainly in pri vate, intimate settings and only later transferred to or imposed on larger audiences.8 At Page 2 of 39
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The Intimate Art of Listening: Music in the Private Sphere During the Nine teenth Century the moment, I can only offer a sketch of what is evidently a topic that is as vast as it is problematic to grasp with regard to contemporary reports and other sources.9 I hope that the ideas offered herewith stimulate further research and cause further refinement; the concept of “musical intimacy” is intended not so much as a fixed category to be applied to a determined number of phenomena but more as a way of seeing that allows us to look differently at familiar (and not-so-familiar) scenes of domestic music making and corre sponding ways of listening. I will proceed in three steps. In the first section I differentiate between public and private musical spheres, assessing the distinction. In the second section, some settings (p. 279) and performances of (as well as discourses on) musical intimacy and intense listening in the nineteenth century are discussed and analyzed, especially with regard to the Mendelssohn family and to the artistic exchange between Heinrich and Elisabeth von Herzogenberg and Johannes Brahms. And finally, I ask, in a speculative mode, whether there is a kind of musical correlate to or a compositional configuration of intimacy—are there specific (types of) musical works that afford or encourage close listening?10
Musical Public and Private Spheres Elsewhere, I have tried to distinguish between at least three different understandings of the term “musical public sphere” from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth cen turies.11 The most obvious meaning of that term refers to live performances in appropri ate performance venues (such as opera houses and concert halls, but also in gardens, public places, and temporary wooden stages at music festivals). However, the term “pub lic sphere” must comprise two other meanings with reference to the emergent modes of mass media: first, music made accessible to a wider public by print, especially by musicpublishing houses, and second, music criticism and other forms of written discourse pub lished in general and specialist journals or in newspapers. In the present context, in any case, it is the first meaning of the term that is of primary relevance. The term “public sphere” signifies an offer or an invitation to musical actions and experi ences addressed in principle to everybody irrespective of gender, class, or race. The term “private sphere” signifies an offer or an invitation to musical actions and experiences ad dressed in principle to a clearly defined small number of people who know each other well; taken to its extreme, it refers only to one’s own person. But to define the two terms in that way, as clear-cut distinctions in the manner of what Max Weber called “ideal types,” is, of course, highly problematic. Every scholar who has studied the notion of (mu sical) events in the public and private spheres from the eighteenth century onward will be well aware that there are manifold shades and intermediate steps between the extremes of, say, a Lower Rhine Music Festival, on one hand, and a Viennese bourgeois housewife at home playing the latest piano music on her own, on the other. In other words, a clearcut distinction between the private and the public sphere is impossible.
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The Intimate Art of Listening: Music in the Private Sphere During the Nine teenth Century A closer look at music making at home will reveal some of these ambivalences. It was not always a solitary activity but would often take place in the presence of others in greater or lesser numbers, in more formal or more relaxed situations. Such social circles might be characterized by closeness at one level and openness on another. For instance, a musi cal salon held regularly once a week guaranteed a certain openness: there was a pool of regular “members,” some attending every session, others once or twice per month. In small towns such attendees may have comprised the whole upper class, who regulated the town’s affairs and thus constituted a sort of public sphere en miniature. There was al so a strong gender bias to the salon, because the domestic sphere in the (p. 280) nine teenth century was considered the natural dominion of women. In general, the host of a salon where music was cultivated was likely to be a woman, while the guests would be of mixed gender. In addition, guests might introduce new guests or travelers to the circle, and sometimes an actor or musician who was passing through would show his or her art, often in preparation for a public concert.12 On the other hand, a salon tended to draw a sharp demarcation between upper and lower social strata. The educated, that is, the socially privileged, classes much preferred to re main among themselves. Thus, to a certain degree, the salon was public insofar as it was open to a wide group of people, at least in principle, consisting of local inhabitants who shared a certain education or a certain social standing. And while visitors of an even higher standing would be welcome, the salon remained (in most cases) closed to repre sentatives of the lower classes. This was true even for the famous Mendelssohn Son ntagsmusiken, concerts that otherwise were quite exceptional in that they not only en tailed performances by sometimes quite large ensembles playing for a considerable audi ence but also in that they demanded almost total silence from their listeners, an extreme if singular case more easily defined as concerts than salon performances.13 But even then, these musical demonstrations sat uneasily on the border between “public” and “pri vate.” In 1823, Lea Mendelssohn expressed anger after a journalist published an article about the Sonntagsmusiken: It was “an unheard-of indiscretion,” Lea fumed, “because they are strictly a private assembly.”14 But in 1846 Fanny Hensel, after having revived (and altered) the Mendelssohnian tradition of Sonntagsmusiken, had to confess: It has become by and by, and naturally without our promoting it, a strange middle case between private and public sphere, in such a way that there are 150 to 200 persons present at every concert and if an event has to be cancelled, nobody comes, even if I have not informed them, because it gets known just by itself.15 “Public” and “private” simultaneously combine here in a peculiar ratio, rather than being mutually exclusive concepts. And such a ratio is, historically speaking, rather the rule than the exception: it is also true, mutatis mutandis, for the societies of music or the court concerts in the nineteenth century.16 The ideal types of public and private musical spheres sketched out above with reference to music festivals and solitary music making may represent the pure form, but there are many in-between stages in the muddy and murky ways of history. The musical salon, the society of music, and the court concert were neither public nor private; in a sense they were both: Their place is somewhere be Page 4 of 39
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The Intimate Art of Listening: Music in the Private Sphere During the Nine teenth Century tween these two extremes. There is no established terminology for musical events hap pening somewhere between a strictly public or a strictly private sphere, except for some helpless fumbling around with terms like the “semi-public” or, worse, “private public sphere”—as if the many intermediary stages between “private” and “public” could be cov ered adequately by coining a self-contradictory term. When attempting to devise more refined terminology concerning domestic music making, it will certainly not do to call every form of collective music making in a private place a salon. This is even the case if we accept a very loose definition of the term as, (p. 281) let us say, “more or less informal social gatherings on a usually regular basis hosted by a pri vate person (usually a married woman) at his or her home that may include musical per formances of whatsoever kind.” Such a definition of the term “salon” would allow us to in clude social and musical events as diverse as a gathering in an aristocratic palais in Chopin’s Paris and in a petty bourgeois drawing room in an insignificant German town, events that otherwise would be almost incomparable with regard to the societal status of the participants, repertoire of music, quality of performance, and the cultivation of listen ing. But even by this liberal stretching of the term, we cannot take into account every kind of collective music making in a private place—for instance, making music in the fam ily circle certainly does not constitute a salon.17 My own interest is in defining the social space that formed a backdrop to such events (whether classified as salons or not), that is to say, the intensity and quality of the social relationships existing between the persons actually present.18 I claim that the social space is especially relevant to the art of listening. Of course, the physical or material space is also crucial: the interior and the pure spatial capacity as well as the number of persons in attendance. But these seemingly objectivist, positivist criteria seem sometimes more to veil or disguise than to disclose the real social relationships. It is this hard-tograsp configuration of social relationships—the rules of inclusion or exclusion, the norms of behavior and of expectation, the shared values and accepted modes of communication, the degree of mutual trust or distrust, codes of formality or informality between partici pants—that is at stake if we wish to map out the degrees of publicness and privateness in a more fruitful way. In order to do so, I propose a model of intermediate degrees moving between these spheres, from a more public context (related to a tendency toward institu tionalization) to a more private: • the musical association or society • the musical salon, soirée, or otherwise social gathering • sociable music making • intimate music making Except for the musical association, which tended to establish a set of rules valid for all its members and therefore provided a formal space that was very carefully defined, the re maining three categories are much more fuzzy and cannot be clearly separated; there are always some zones of mixing, overlapping, or crossover, especially because they all tend Page 5 of 39
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The Intimate Art of Listening: Music in the Private Sphere During the Nine teenth Century ed to happen in the same space, specifically, the private living rooms of one of their par ticipants. I suggest conceptualizing the musical salon, the sociable music making, and musical intimacy as being aggregate states that can freely merge into one another. In oth er words, these terms are offered as heuristic concepts.19 I have already tentatively defined a “musical salon” as “more or less informal social gath erings on a usually regular basis hosted by a private person (usually a married woman) at his or her home that include musical performances of whatsoever kind.” The task is now to look at the social configuration that is constituted by such a kind of gathering. Al though no formal rules were established (as in a society of music), there (p. 282) may have been informal (unwritten) rules that were so strict that their disregard may have led to exclusion from further conventions—an expulsion that need not be carried out in any for mal procedure but would be thoroughly effective nonetheless. The frame of such a gath ering, the way in which it was performed, may have presupposed a certain formal man ner, a restrained conversation, and a strict differentiation between the roles of host and of guest—although there was certainly a myriad of different “salon styles” on show, some stiff, some more familiar. Judging from Theodor Fontane’s dialogues, for instance, those in L’Adultera (1880), salon conversations in late nineteenth-century Berlin could be highly entertaining indeed. But the display of wit, levity, and education was also a way to main tain distance. Musically speaking, salon culture, especially in the uppermost strata of so ciety, had an inclination toward listening instead of participation: whenever possible, an invited virtuoso would demonstrate his or her art. But the salon could also have been a venue to show off one’s own musical proficiency, and not necessarily with strictly musical intentions.20 It was especially during the time of German Biedermeier that music publi cists routinely complained about the utilization of music for social ends, a utilization that had ramifications for the musical forms and styles themselves. One useful example comes from an acerbic essay by a Würzburg author published in the music journal Cäcilia in 1825. Remarking scathingly that “it is a testimony of eminent mastery of worldly wisdom to use anything in multiple functions,” he mocks the girls who practice music in order to attract a potential husband or the supplicants who try to enhance their cultural capital (as Bourdieu might say) through music in order to find a position and salary. But his main point is that all this is not without effect on the music: “For this and similar reasons and very rightly so music itself has had to adapt itself to the tone of the world, and there is no better sign that one is keeping up with the spirit of the times [than] to write or perform Musique à la mode.”21 Such complaints are similar to those made in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Kreisleriana, written a short while earlier. Such Musique à la mode, as exemplified, for instance, in “elegant” or “brilliant” variation sets, fits comfortably into a social context. The Goldberg Variations, however, offer a stark contrast, with Hoffmann’s chapel master Kreisler startling the guests at Geheimrat Röderlein’s musical salon. Such music making was not truly intended for an audience attuned to close listening. Rather, it was a form of showing off in bourgeois circles. A family may demonstrate that a daughter is educated enough to be a valuable commodity on the marriage market or that Page 6 of 39
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The Intimate Art of Listening: Music in the Private Sphere During the Nine teenth Century a talented son is deserving of a better social position. It must be noted that ideas about what constituted acceptable music for a salon changed considerably during the course of the century, and the cultivation of “serious” music, especially chamber music, and corre sponding ways of intense listening came to the fore late in the century.22 Yet we can never really know which performances came from a genuine musical interest and which were merely instances of social pretension. In contrast, the second category or aggregate state, sociable music making, is based more on the feelings of trust and intimacy, on friendship and on an at least partial (p. 283) abdication of social obligations. Music making is relatively relaxed, more spontaneous, done without any formality but is under certain circumstances more serious, more fo cused on the repertoire. Typically (though not necessarily), such sociable music making comes into being among persons who have something in common: a past, a profession, a passion for music. Such circles also may have tended, in contrast to the salon, to be of a more homosocial nature. In the case of the musicians themselves, their partners are often other musicians or at least other artists—poets, writers, or painters. For example, in 1842, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy visited the violinist Moritz Gotthold Klengel. Klengel’s son Julius had composed songs that could not be performed for lack of resources: [O]h if we just had an alto voice, they said. I offered myself to sing in falsetto, the scores were fetched, and good red wine also; we gathered around the table and sang all his songs, which pleased me from the bottom of my heart. . . . I had sever al plans for the next morning, but I stayed until half past one and could not get away.23 The focus is on the music itself, and the setting allows for close listening, but the empha sis is just as much (as is the very nature of part-song) on the joy of amicable music mak ing. The next example already sits on the borderline of what I call musical intimacy. Karl Emil von Webern reported from Mendelssohn’s time in Düsseldorf that he visited the composer often in the evenings in his garden room: [Sometimes] just the two of us, but more often together with two or three of his in timate acquaintances, sitting on sofas or comfortable armchairs, everybody talked freely over a glass of wine without any constraint. . . . When we all had our happy heart on our tongues, he would all of a sudden seat himself at his English pi ano . . . and [take] us all on his angels’ flights with him into another, celestial reign.24 The snug furnishing and the guests’ comfortable positions, the wine, the liberal talking without restraint, are all at variance with the more officious aspects of the salon, but also with the more exuberant sociability of other gatherings. As I emphasized previously, one cannot establish clear distinctions here: there are certainly zones of transition or trans formation between the formal soirée and the intimate private circle that cannot be easily categorized, and similarly, given the music performed, there seems to be a move from the Page 7 of 39
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The Intimate Art of Listening: Music in the Private Sphere During the Nine teenth Century “brilliant” and “elegant” to the more interiorized and expressive, what the German lan guage expresses in the untranslatable word gemüthvoll. Clearly, the music and its social context encompass a variety of ways of listening, none of which are forced on the audi ence, all differing in subtle degrees. Musical intimacy, the third aggregate state in this shifting field, is perhaps the least famil iar concept discussed thus far, although it turns up under other designations here and there in the literature, as “privacy” for instance.25 Appropriately, I should start discussing this concept by commenting on my choice of term.
(p. 284)
Musical Intimacy: Settings and Discourses
As far as I can see, the word “intimacy” (German, Intimität, derived from French intimité) and corresponding phrases such as “becoming intimate with” were widely used in the nineteenth century to denote knowing a person or a family closely. It was perfectly nor mal for any male member of bourgeois society to claim to have become intimate with a Monsieur or even Madame without giving any false impressions. The basic meaning was therefore a kind of interpersonal knowledge based on or bordering friendship and trust. A German encyclopedia from 1859 simply defines intim as vertraut (familiar, conversant) and Intimität as Vertraulichkeit (familiarity).26 Similarly, Brockhaus’ Kleines Konversa tions-Lexikon (1911 edition) gives innig, which can be understood as “dearly” or “heart felt,” and vertraut.27 An interesting and fuller definition is given by George Crabb in his English Synonymes of 1816. Crabb defines “intimacy” simply as “known to the innermost recesses of the heart” and explains the concept quite clearly, under the entry “Acquain tance”: Acquaintance springs from occasional intercourse; familiarity is produced by a dai ly intercourse, which wears off all constraint, and banishes all ceremony; intimacy arises not merely from frequent intercourse, but unreserved communication. An acquaintance will be occasionally a guest; but one that is on terms of familiarity has easy access to our table; and an intimate, likewise, lays claim to a share at least of our confidence. An acquaintance with a person affords but little opportuni ty for knowing his character; familiarity puts us in the way of seeing his foibles, rather than his virtues; but intimacy enables us to appreciate his worth.28 Crabb’s distinctions might be applied, with the necessary modifications, to our threefold scheme of salon membership (where one meets one’s acquaintances), sociability (which one enjoys with his familiars), and intimacy (shared only with the closest friends). Erotic and sexual connotations were not always excluded, but they did not have strong implications; for instance, extramarital affairs were sometimes tactfully alluded to by the formula “XY’s undue intimacy with Z.”29 Erotic intimacy induced by music would make a fascinating subject, one I can refer to but briefly here.30 Also, it is beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss the development of concepts of intimacy during the bourgeois
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The Intimate Art of Listening: Music in the Private Sphere During the Nine teenth Century era.31 Instead, I want to sketch out some historical events to which I think the concept of musical intimacy can be usefully applied and to draw some general conclusions. On January 8, 1829, Fanny Mendelssohn was called on by four friends and peers: In the evening Heydemänner, [Lewenhagen], Droysen, Hensel, Märker. . . . We played the Calm Sea, then the Midsummer Night’s Dream, with dimmed lighting, which was quite lovely, afterwards the Calm Sea once again, I felt the whole evening especially wistful, and the separation and the missing had come close be fore my mind’s eye. [Heydemann] told me yesterday he had felt the same way. This evening, we accomplished some things in an especially happy way, I don’t know, it was so peculiarly lovely. Hensel composed a picture, as he said, to Calm Sea, and we were all tuned.32 (p. 285) The following characteristics contribute to the sense of intimacy conveyed in this private music-making scenario: The first is the staging of mood.33 Dimmed lighting creates an at mosphere of blurred contours; jagged contrasts are softened. Semi-darkness engulfs the participants like a protective cover, as in a cave or the womb. Similar experiences are re lated by Berlioz with reference to Liszt performing the Moonlight Sonata.34 Looking at some well-known paintings with listening as a theme such as Fernand Khnopff’s On Lis tening to Schumann,35 Gustave De Jonghe’s Une mélodie de Schubert,36 and Lionello Balestrieri’s Beethoven,37 one notes not only the dim light but also the tendency to bury one’s face into the hands, to block out the sense of vision. We may note at once that paint ings striving to depict intense or close listening often show such private and obviously in timate behavior.38 A roughly contemporary picture (1838) seeming to show a person in a state of intent listening is Eugène Delacroix’s double portrait of George Sand listening to Frédéric Chopin playing the piano (see Figures 12.1–12.3).39
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The Intimate Art of Listening: Music in the Private Sphere During the Nine teenth Century
Figure 12.1. Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), study for the portrait of Frédéric Chopin and George Sand (1838), pencil on paper. Courtesy of the Louvre, Paris, France/Bridgeman Images.
The second is the social frame: in Fanny Mendelssohn’s report we find neither a Son ntagsmusik nor a salon. Close friends were paying a visit, and it seems that the evening proceeded entirely spontaneously—no one would have put Mendelssohn’s Calm Sea (a piece finished around May 1828 and known to at least some of the listeners) on a pro gram twice. Fanny did not need to put on a brave face and could fully surrender (p. 286) (p. 287) herself to her sad mood, caused by the upcoming separation from her brother Fe lix.40 Felix’s music was at the center of the evening.
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The Intimate Art of Listening: Music in the Private Sphere During the Nine teenth Century
Figure 12.2. Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), Frédéric Chopin (1838), oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Louvre, Paris, France/Bridgeman Images.
Figure 12.3. Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), George Sand (1838), oil on canvas. Courtesy of the De Agostini Picture Library/G. Dagli Orti/Bridgeman Images.
The third characteristic is that intense listening seems to be the adequate, or socially ac cepted, mode of reception in this setting. The very fact that Calm Sea was played twice seems to prove that the listeners focused on it quite intently. Is this supposed to mean Page 11 of 39
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The Intimate Art of Listening: Music in the Private Sphere During the Nine teenth Century that in intimate music making, at last, we might be able to find the social space of “ab solute music,”41 of music as an end in itself, shorn of all extramusical significance? Fanny’s diary entry hints that intense listening in an intimate setting would not necessari ly focus strictly on the music itself, in the manner of an Adorno-style “structural listener,” but would invite all sorts of “tuned” reveries such as the composition of a picture in the mind’s eye. What is relevant is that the music is used neither for any social ends nor for the sociable purpose of enjoying the company of others (though their presence was clear ly very relevant to Fanny). The music itself, two orchestral compositions, does not seem particularly suitable for chamber performance, let alone an intimate recital. But it is the medium of performance that must interest us in this respect. Without doubt, the perfor mance was arranged for the piano, probably one to four hands (Fanny and Felix?). Such arrangements did not raise claims to brilliance or virtuosity, which often were demanded of piano music for two hands performed in a salon or sociable context. (Four-voice arrangements would seldom be played on these occasions.)42 The piano arrangements would evoke the sound of an absent orchestra for those among the listeners who knew the original pieces, thus sonically reflecting the essentially Romantic concept of musical sound as an echo or trace, and they constituted two of Mendelssohn’s most “poetic” or “romantic” compositions, each with a program based on a Shakespeare play and a Goethe poem, respectively. The musical sound produced by twenty fingers on one piano would therefore extend into the virtual orchestral, as well as the extramusical theatrical-lyrical, space for those who knew how to listen. Intimacy, then, is not necessarily a question of the number of persons present, though one can hardly feel intimate among a mass audience. Intimacy, at least in the first half of the century and in Germany, was constituted by the collective withdrawal into sounding inte riority—what one called in contemporary usage gleichgestimmte Seelen (equally tuned souls). Intimacy is the sociocultural construction of a snug and protective space that pro tects one also from the contrary interests and intentions shown in full daylight such as Fanny’s sometimes severe conflicts with Wilhelm Hensel. The wide conceptual frame en compassed by the word “intimacy”—between platonic Friendship and love, to eroticism and sexuality—suggests how manifold and variegated the social spaces of intimacy could be.43 The emphasis on amicability, the retreat into the interior space instead of engaging in conversation or showing off, seems to belong to the cultural construction of musical inti macy, and likewise a certain distance from overt virtuosity. This is perhaps worth a short elaboration. However one wishes to define “virtuosity” in its nineteenth-century context, it always places the performer and the audience at a distance, the latter restricted to the reactions of admiration or bafflement, the former forced into a self-cultivation bordering on theatricality and exhibitionism quite contrary to behavior in (p. 288) intimate situa tions. Another example from the Mendelssohns can illustrate this point, this time drawn from Ferdinand Hiller’s memories of Felix:
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The Intimate Art of Listening: Music in the Private Sphere During the Nine teenth Century It was a peculiar habit of Mendelssohn to play his new compositions, whenever he let them hear in intimacy, with a restraint that was obviously rooted in the inten tion not to bedazzle through the performance and to let the work take its effect solely through its content.44 Intimacy, or Intimität, the very word used by Hiller, has, then, its effects not only on the repertoire chosen, the instruments used, or the attitude of the listeners, but also on the manner of performance. Again, Berlioz’s report on Liszt’s performance of the Moonlight Sonata shows striking parallels: In a concert given earlier, Liszt had ornamented (or dis torted) Beethoven’s work with trills and other embellishments; in the evening, he played it for a small assembly of friends, in total darkness, with absolute fidelity to the text.45 In intimacy, and this is especially relevant to the art of listening, music seems to be enjoyed for its own sake. Music does not serve as a means of self-representation, as a social “tone of the world,”46 and it is not the object of virtuosic brilliance. Music seems to be appreci ated, in intimate situations of listening, for its intrinsic worth. But at the same time, to en joy musical intimacy is to enjoy oneself through music and also to enjoy the social bonds established by experiencing music with others. There are other musicians and listeners of the later nineteenth century who demonstrate that intimacy could, instead of being part of the occasional experience of attending a performance, be cultured as a permanent kind of lifestyle or self-fashioning. Before I present the final example it is useful to reflect on how domesticity and intimacy were shaped by gender roles. Intimate music making, in the sense developed here, was bound to the domestic sphere and, therefore, a relation to nineteenth-century concep tions of gender roles may be surmised. For in the “official” discourse on the sexes from late in the Enlightenment era to World War I, the public sphere and its activities were seen as the natural domain of men, while the domestic, private sphere was the realm of women. To quote an early nineteenth-century encyclopedia: “(The man) belongs to the noisy public life, (the woman) to the quiet domestic circle.”47 There were, of course, dis senting voices, but for the present purpose, another point seems to be more directly rele vant. In the examples cited so far and in the ones that will follow, men and women alike participated in situations of intimate music making—indeed, it was suggested above that social music making tends to occur in homosocial circles and certainly several of the ex amples above suggest that there were only men present (as in Webern’s report on Mendelssohn). These observations serve to remind us that the social reality of men’s and women’s lives was far more complex than the simple dichotomy suggested by the official discourse. Moreover, even this discourse states clearly that the private sphere was re garded not only as the domain of women, but also as the retreat or refuge of men. Ac cording to authors such as Karl Biedermann, writing in 1856, the husband and father, fa tigued and frustrated by the struggle of everyday professional life, returns home to find a safe and harmonic haven, and his wife will soothe his troubled (p. 289) soul, cheer his mind, and console him.48 It would seem, then, that musical intimacy might also fulfill the need of a man active in the “realm of necessity” (as Marx put it) to relax in the “realm of freedom” that was constituted, by nineteenth-century standards, in the arts. But what about unmarried men or women and their music making? A much more contextualized Page 13 of 39
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The Intimate Art of Listening: Music in the Private Sphere During the Nine teenth Century and detailed analysis would be necessary to fully explore the gender-related agendas in each of the examples cited. To sum up, the issue of gender in intimate listening is of the utmost importance, but at the same time so fraught with paradoxes and open questions that I have thought it wise to restrict the discussion. The scope of this article is to estab lish a rough sketch of a potentially useful category in the social history of music—intima cy—rather than to disentangle the complex webs of gendered and also of social, cultural, aesthetic, and nationalist values, relations, and practices that are implicit in a single evening at the Mendelssohns’, for instance. Such disentanglement will be a necessary task for the future. For the time being, it may serve to remind us that easy generaliza tions such as a male public and a female private sphere, useful as they still may be for critical approaches, have been routinely criticized and refined by recent scholarship.49 The Herzogenbergs, my final example, constitute an extreme case in point. Elisabeth von Stockhausen (1847–1892), who married in 1868 the composer and conduc tor Heinrich von Herzogenberg (1843–1900), was a composer and an accomplished singer and pianist whose aesthetic judgments were appreciated highly by (among others) Johannes Brahms. The couple lived in Leipzig (where they had settled in 1872) and formed part of a musical circle that bears all the trademarks of musical intimacy hitherto discussed. In her pioneering study on Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, Antje Ruhbaum writes: [The Herzogenbergs] and their friends preferred meetings in a small circle of inti mates. Neither did they open their apartment to social events institutionalized in whatever way, nor did they give large parties or assemble a certain, more or less stable group of persons under their roof. Elisabeth von Herzogenberg’s musical patronage is thus not described adequately by a term like “salon,” so clearly refer ring to group sociality. Her musical patronage was rooted to a major part in the in timacy of single friendships.50 The Herzogenbergs, then, led an almost semi-reclusive life. Though Heinrich, as a com poser, would be more of a public figure than Elisabeth, it is also significant that his main public function in Leipzig musical life, as the choirmaster of the Leipziger Bach-Verein, was shared during rehearsals by his wife, who was characterized by Max Kalbeck as a kind of “sub-chapel master who would sometimes help the Tenor, sometimes the Alto and even set the Bassus straight.”51 It would be most interesting to speculate whether this distancing of the Herzogenbergs from the culture of the salon in favor of cultivating sin gle friendships has something to do with changing concepts of the private (or intimate) and the public sphere between the Biedermeier-Vormärz era and the age of the German Reich, of industrialization and colonialism. Suffice it to note that one among (p. 290) the Herzogenbergs’ friends, easily the most important, probably would have subscribed to their concept of musical intimacy. In April 1877 Johannes Brahms sent some songs to the Herzogenbergs, asking for their judgment but also requesting that they be sent on to Clara Schumann as soon as possible; this meant that they could only play and sing through all of them once. Antje Ruhbaum Page 14 of 39
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The Intimate Art of Listening: Music in the Private Sphere During the Nine teenth Century claims that these songs, all of them love songs, were composed following Brahms’s meet ing with Elisabeth von Herzogenberg (whom he had for a short time taught the piano when she was sixteen) and that he sent the songs to her husband as a token of a “ver schobenes, sublimiertes Begehren” (displaced, sublimated desire).52 A short time later, the Herzogenbergs took a trip to Berlin, where they met Clara Schumann, and Elisabeth von Herzogenberg wrote to Brahms on May 5, 1877: We celebrated a moving reunion with your songs, in Leipzig the acquaintance of them had caused as much pain as joy; for having such a beautiful series of songs without being able to become truly intimate with them, to caress them in a decent way, that is tantalizing. Here [in Berlin] I have caught up reasonably and devel oped a quite intimate friendship with some of them, so that they are always strolling with me and sound always in my inner ear.53 And she went on characterizing single songs and designating them as her “main dar lings.”54 In this wonderful quotation we can untangle a set of interweaving concepts: first, the internalization, the inner appropriation of the songs, in which the act of listening it self becomes an act of intimacy; second, the caressing (even if this is deliberately humor ous), implying a corporeal stroke to her “darlings” somewhere between the motherly and the erotic (if there is a difference, as some would deny); and third, a seemingly banal ob servation: intimacy always calls for another being; one cannot be intimate with oneself. This is not possible even if in the present case this “other” is a set of twenty songs with which a woman wishes to become intimate, and only by implication (if at all) with their composer. Musical intimacy, as intimacy in general, requires a minimal sociality (and this sociality can already be constructed with and through a piece of music), albeit one that does not separate the involved persons by means of social roles, conflicting intentions, and so on. But it is not necessary that the involved persons be present. The correspondence of Hein rich and (especially) Elisabeth von Herzogenberg with Brahms demonstrates that in abundance, for the protagonists spent only short amounts of time together in the summer vacations or when Brahms gave a concert at Leipzig. Occasionally, the correspondence documents misunderstandings and even disgruntlements. But the exchanges about mu sic, especially the private reviews of Brahms’s new compositions by Elisabeth von Herzo genberg, which show expertise as well as sensibility, are distinguished by the spirit of lib eral exchange; indeed, he suppressed the publication of songs she had not advocated for. Presenting new compositions prior to publication in an intimate circle of friends was a practice of Brahms (and other composers) that deserves a study of its own. (It must be pointed out that Brahms seemed to prefer the judgment (p. 291) of women regarding new compositions; it is significant that the Herzogenbergs had to forward the songs to Clara Schumann.) It seems that there is not only intimate music making, but also a kind of inti mate discourse about music, almost the opposite of any published music review. Signifi cant in this respect is Elisabeth’s outburst concerning a certain “Kritiker-Oberpriester in Dresden!” (critical high priest in Dresden), culminating in the proclamation: “[T]his pub lic music-making is actually disgusting—what kind of people are they?!”55 The Herzogen Page 15 of 39
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The Intimate Art of Listening: Music in the Private Sphere During the Nine teenth Century bergs’ withdrawal from the public sphere was decisive. Yet despite the solicitation of Elisabeth’s opinion of new pieces, the couple clung so firmly together with regard to mu sical issues that Heinrich could write to Philipp Spitta concerning discussions of music: “My wife does not count, for these are quasi-monologues—to such a degree we are one the product of the other.”56 The cost of such a symbiosis would become evident with Elisabeth’s untimely death in 1892 at the age of forty-four. After her passing, Heinrich went on to finish his piano quartet op. 75, “in which he came to terms with the painful last weeks and the loss of his wife,”57 and then the mourning cantata Todtenfeier op. 80. And in a letter to Clara Schumann, he described himself as the “traurigen Rest eines Zwillingspaares” (sad remainder of a twin).58
Composing Intimacy? Until now, I have discussed situations and arrangements of musical intimacy as reported (or idealized) in private documents such as letters and diaries. I have barely touched on the question whether there were specific styles or genres of music that represented or suggested somehow the ideas and feelings associated with musical intimacy: whether there was a way of composing intimacy, a way that enhanced or encouraged the act of in timate listening. In fact, if we consider the history of music as part of a general social and cultural history, and music itself a pertinent document of sociocultural change, we are almost forced to consider the tremendous and diverse developments in compositional approaches, tech niques, and expressivity in the nineteenth century as documents of changing concepts of public and private spheres in music; I would like to call this the sociocultural semantics of music.59 Also, certain ways of performing music in the chamber create their own social constellations: for instance, playing the piano four hands gives the opportunity for a cer tain kind of bodily closeness otherwise not usual in the bourgeois era except through dance.60 Music did not simply “reflect” or “double” what was at stake in ideas about the public and the private spheres and how they related to concepts of representation of class, gender, the body, and so on, but music actively formed and effected these concepts, as a social practice and as an art. We have already seen that a certain sort of brilliant and virtuoso music was thought by contemporaries to be especially apt for performance in the salon, and other sorts of music, especially part-song, arguably lend themselves to what I have called sociability. What about intimate performance (p. 292) situations? Can we read intimacy in a score, just as we can identify, say, an F-sharp major chord? Certainly not. Musical intimacy is something that is constructed in a performance situation, a certain shared social space, and not least the musical performance itself. But it is also something that can thrive on certain musical features. The concept of “affordance,” adapted by Tia DeNora in her studies of the sociology of music, is of value in this regard.61 Some musical works, styles, or genres can “afford” intimacy if the listener (or player) happens to be suf ficiently encultured in their modes of expression. Just as works (and not only orchestral works) can be too aggressive, monumental, or extravagant to suggest intimate listening,
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The Intimate Art of Listening: Music in the Private Sphere During the Nine teenth Century some works can, by their very structure, afford (or even invite the listener to) a closer and indeed more intimate way of perceiving and enjoying music. Such intimacy may be nurtured by music of a lyrical nature such as a Schumann song, a Chopin nocturne, or one of Mendelssohn’s Lieder ohne Worte. But there is also chamber music that performs, in its essence, the act of intimate communication by constituting a space of give and take, of mutual trust and understanding. Chamber music becomes an act of communication that is, of necessity, dependent on the quality of the performance, of the real-time communication of the musicians. This art of dialog, considered since the eighteenth century the very essence of chamber music, constitutes a closed space. The music seems to function as a self-sufficient discourse, as opposed to, say, a virtuoso con certo aimed at reaching out to a (sufficiently impressed) audience. Similarly, no opera or symphony performance makes sense without an audience, but in chamber music, listen ers can—or indeed, are invited to—immerse themselves precisely because their presence is not, in a strict sense, necessary. Many of the preceding ideas are indebted—to be sure, anachronistically—to a contempo rary voice, the writer of the weblog Chamber Music Today, a chamber musician or com poser who prefers to remain anonymous in his or her own private sphere. I am well aware how dangerous it is from a methodological point of view to quote a contemporary author as if he or she were a representative of nineteenth-century culture. The only excuse I can offer is that the sociocultural semantics embedded in musical compositions may, however prone to the vagaries of performance practice and the history of interpretation (or, in deed, of listening), serve as a document of understanding the past just as a novel or paint ing might, with all necessary precautions taken. And the fact that music can be per formed allows for a kind of tentative re-enactment of the past seldom possible in other media. The writer of the blog is clearly referring to the standard repertoire and the traditional discourse of chamber music (although some of the observations might be extended to, say, Elliott Carter’s quartets), and in any case, the following comments on musical intima cy seem to me particularly thought-provoking and worth quoting at some length. Even if the blog is not a historical document as such, other than serving as a source from the twenty-first century, it nevertheless reflects the way an intelligent and articulate musician understands the social meanings embedded in a musical style: (p. 293)
There are many aspects or facets of “intimacy,” of course. Some have to do with a spontaneity of “discourse” between the parts, and the fact that there is no “con ductor” imposing a singular will over the production. Other facets have to do with the intensity of affect, the solitariness/autonomy of gestures rendered by each part, or a certain “enclosedness” of ensemble such that the musical dialogue is amongst individuals addressing each other—as contrasted with broader exposito ry addresses in symphonic and other musical forms. Page 17 of 39
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The Intimate Art of Listening: Music in the Private Sphere During the Nine teenth Century Most chamber music manifests a strong connection/touch between the parts, or evokes a solidarity or “belonging” in ensemble—reveals inter-relationships that have social duties of continuing and maintaining continuity among the members; of promising to complete a coherent and satisfying musical statement; of exposing mutual secrets; and of maintaining parity in valuing and trusting each other. In chamber music, we see recursive/fractal generation of meaning through durative and enduring sequences of interactions that arise out of individual players’ dis charge of their “moral duty” in ensemble. The intimacy in chamber music also usually connotes a “protectedness” or securi ty, relative freedom from fear and uncertainty, and the relative absence of con flicts with regard to values. Microcosm.62 The author’s—and, indeed, my own—insistence on nineteenth-century chamber music’s “embodying” intimacy seems almost paradoxical, given that the public performance of chamber music became ever more widespread during that period and gained an increas ing audience. Circa 1900, chamber music was written almost primarily for ensembles giv ing public concerts.63 Brahms’s chamber music was very often performed in the concert hall, though it continued to be played by music-loving dilettantes and professionals in pri vate chambers. But it seems that it was precisely through such historical dialectics that Brahms’s music developed a particularly powerful sense of intimacy. I will try to show this in a rudimentary fashion by looking at a slow movement by Brahms. “Real” slow move ments occupied, at least since Beethoven’s later work, a special place for musicians and critics alike, especially if these movements were of the lofty, sublime type, presenting the common stereotypes of the German mind and German music alike, such as “inwardness” and “deepness.” A frequently evoked example was the Adagio of Beethoven’s Ninth Sym phony. To many listeners in the nineteenth century, Brahms was Beethoven’s heir in this respect and also the one composer who was able to write real adagios, something neither Schumann nor Mendelssohn had achieved.64 There are many valuable in-depth analyses of the Adagio affettuoso from Brahms’s Sona ta for Violoncello and Piano F major, op. 99, published in 1886.65 My own will be deliber ately superficial in describing the quite obvious exchanges of motivic cells between the vi oloncello and the piano as a kind of gradually intensified and, at the same time, almost meditatively relaxed, intimate communication. Such a musical structure affords the sense of intimacy. A straightforward analysis can show that the first four-measure phrase in Fsharp major characterized by a walking bass in the cello and a somewhat austere “melody” in the piano are answered by a voice exchange of the instruments in (p. 294) the following phrase, the cello taking over the line, but now in the subdominant B major (see Example 12.1).
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The Intimate Art of Listening: Music in the Private Sphere During the Nine teenth Century
Example 12.1. Brahms, Sonata for Violoncello and Piano in F major, op. 99, Adagio affettuoso, mm. 1– 19. Additional markings added by the author.
More subtle is the way a small motif of four notes that first appears only to be a filler on the dead time at the end of the second measure becomes gradually more and more (p. 295) integrated into the musical discourse (also by way of inversion, as in the cello in measures 3–4), first in the secondary voice, then taking over ever so gently the melodic lead, and in the process expanding the consequent to seven bars (as opposed to four in the antecedent). Note also how the motif and the whole melodic phrase developed from it are augmented in measures 10–11 in the cello, and how this augmentation is also applied to the bass line in the piano in measure 11 (as compared to measure 9). After this almost too condensed development, the closing phrase with its gentle exchange of two-measurephrases between the instruments comes as a relief, a slightly nostalgic Abgesang.66 One could greatly expand on these fleeting observations by taking into account the harmonic progression of the phrases and how the motif is both structured by and structuring the harmonies. This is evident especially when, after the middle section in F minor, the cello again takes up the walking-bass gesture, supplemented by the piano bass, though in an altogether different tonal context, and embarking on a simple circle-of-fifths modulation setting out from the harmony of D-flat major (that can be understood enharmonically as C-sharp major, thus providing common ground between the two remote keys) in measures 35–39 (Example 12.2).67
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The Intimate Art of Listening: Music in the Private Sphere During the Nine teenth Century
Example 12.2. Brahms, Sonata for Violoncello and Piano in F major, op. 99, Adagio affettuoso, mm. 31– 44.
It is undoubtedly this passage that elicited Elisabeth von Herzogenberg’s praise: “That we feasted in the comfortingly warm sounds of the Adagio and especially in the (p. 296) marvellous return to F sharp major, which sounds so wonderful, so absolutely special, I do not need to tell you.”68 But the main argument is that the gentle and subtle, if complex, exchange of the motif demonstrates an intimate communication, which is not so much a dialogue as a close liai son between the musical actors, engaging and listening to each other, with their ideas softly meshing together. The score suggests in its very structure a performance that real izes the ideal of two (or more) human beings acting in accordance with one another while preserving their individuality—the ideal of intimacy.69 In conclusion, I will try to summarize what making music and the act of listening inti mately could mean in the nineteenth century (with apologies for once again relying on ideal types): First, in musical intimacy, social relations develop in and through the making of music. It thus differs from pure self-enjoyment through solitary music- making. In a similar vein, musical intimacy abstains from all ideas of self-representation, let alone vir tuosity (as present in the salon), as well as from goals outside the artistic sphere (like showing off as a potential bride). Rather, it develops and is nurtured in the frame of close and familiar personal relationships between like minds. Such relationships can go from friendship to erotic love and marriage. They constitute a social space of openness, trust, and respectful exchange. Such an environment allows musicians and listeners alike to in dulge freely in “true” musical values. Close (or intense) listening is constituted here as an intimately shared social experience. The musicians concentrate on the substance of the work, the listeners on the music. This does not mean that they are listening analytically for the structures but that they develop their feelings, emotions, associations, and so on in close interdependence with what they hear.
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The Intimate Art of Listening: Music in the Private Sphere During the Nine teenth Century Second, this social space unfolds in a physical environment. This space is often character ized by a peculiar way of staging the private, with the dimming of the lights, in a typically cozy and cushioned nineteenth-century interior. It is a physical space of closure, safeness, and protection. Everything happens in (relative) darkness, one’s eyes may be closed, or listeners may bury their faces in their hands to allow for concentration on the acoustical moment alone. Close listening need not be achieved by blocking out one’s sense of see ing, of course, but the important thing is that the staging of the private tries to minimize any possible diversions. Third, this setting can also lead to a form of confidential discussion about music beyond the public sphere of music criticism and polemics and beyond positive and negative value judgments rooted in the party politics of the nineteenth (and twentieth) centuries, as at tested to by Brahms’s correspondence with the Herzogenbergs, Clara Schumann, and other friends. The last point is arguably more controversial. It is probably not by chance that most ex amples discussed hitherto stem from German-speaking territories. Although musical inti macy and close listening were by no means confined to German soil—as the paintings by Khnopff, Dejonghe, and Balestrieri make clear, though all three refer to German com posers—it seems that there was a certain affinity between close, interiorized listening and nineteenth-century German music culture. And there was, at (p. 297) least in some quar ters of Germany, discomfort concerning all things public, especially things popular and, worst of all, commercial.70 But even in the private space, the idea of a dichotomy between the “superficial” salon and “true” house music was considered valid, especially with re gard to the true art of listening. As an anonymous author—possibly the previously men tioned Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl—wrote in 1856: If a salon unites a circle that cultivates musical taste, and if music is made for its own sake in this circle, this must still be called Hausmusik, if not any longer in the strictest sense. The true salon music is that for which the audience has not to be grateful to the player, but the performer has to thank his listeners.71 Similar dichotomies also become relevant here. These include German interiority com pared to cosmopolitan sociability, true music versus superficial brilliance, community ver sus estrangement, and (German) Kultur versus (French) Zivilisation. These dichotomies embody long-standing issues in German cultural history. The concept of intimacy is close ly related to the concept of interiority, and nothing was considered more German in music than interiority.72 Dismissing all social complications in favor of inward truth was a typi cal German bourgeois stance, and one that had tremendous implications for the cultiva tion of music.
References Adorno, Theodor W. 1971. “Vierhändig, noch einmal.” In Musikalische Schriften IV. Gesammelte Schriften 17, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, 303–306. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,. Page 21 of 39
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The Intimate Art of Listening: Music in the Private Sphere During the Nine teenth Century Applegate, Celia. 1998. “How German Is It? Nationalism and the Idea of Serious Music in the Early Nineteenth Century.” 19th-Century Music 21:274–296. Applegate, Celia. 2005. Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn’s Re vival of the St. Matthew Passion. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. (p. 307)
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Notes: (1.) I thank the editors of this volume for many helpful discussions and comments. I also thank William Weber (Long Beach, CA) for his encouraging remarks and especially Phyllis Weliver (Saint Louis, MO) for her detailed comments and most helpful suggestions for the nearly finished chapter. All translations, if not indicated otherwise, are mine. (2.) The most comprehensive treatment of the music festivals in nineteenth-century Ger many is Weibel, Samuel. 2006. Die deutschen Musikfeste des 19. Jahrhunderts im Spiegel der zeitgenössischen musikalischen Fachpresse. Beiträge zur rheinischen Musikgeschichte 168. Kassel: Merseburger. See also Porter, Cecelia Hopkins. 1980. “The New Public and the Reordering of the Musical Establishment: The Lower Rhine Music Festivals, 1818–67.” 19th-Century Music 3:211–224, and Düding, Dieter. 1984. Organ isierter Nationalismus in Deutschland, 1808–1847. Munich: Oldenbourg, 258–265. (3.) See Riehl, Wilhelm Heinrich. (1855) 1859. Hausmusik. 2nd ed. Stuttgart: n.p.; Riehl, Wilhelm Heinrich. 1877. 35 Neue Lieder für das Haus componirt von W. H. Riehl (Zweite Folge der “Hausmusik” des Componisten). Leipzig: Leuckart. As innocuous as Riehl’s term seems to be, it is nonetheless heavy with ideological implications. See Hinrichsen, Hans-Joachim. 2005. Art. “Riehl, Wilhelm Heinrich (von).” In Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. 2nd ed., edited by Ludwig Finscher, Personenteil, vol. 14, cols. 60–61. Kassel: Bärenreiter, col. 60f; Kałążny, Jerzy. 2007. Unter dem “bürgerlichen Wertehimmel”: Un tersuchungen zur kulturgeschichtlichen Erzählprosa von Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl. Posener Beiträge zur Germanistik 13. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 116–133; Fuhrmann, Wolfgang. 2009. “Der Frühlingsverkünder der modernen Musik: Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl und das Haydn-Bild des 19. Jahrhunderts.” Die Tonkunst 3 (3): 303–314. (4.) This research interest grew from my interest in the origins of modern musical life during Haydn’s time; see Fuhrmann, Wolfgang. 2010. “Haydn und sein Publikum: Die Veröffentlichung eines Komponisten, ca. 1750–1815.” Habilitation diss., University of Berne (to be published by Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht Unipress, Göttingen, 2019.) I have sketched my concept of intermediate spheres between public and private also in my con tribution to the following: Hottmann, Katharina, and Wolfgang Fuhrmann. 2016. “Ein führung zum Symposion Musik zwischen Privatheit und Öffentlichkeit: Zur musikhis torischen Relevanz einer soziologischen Kategorisierung.” In Gesellschaft für Musik forschung Halle/Saale 2015—“Musikwissenschaft: Die Teildisziplinen im Dialog,” edited by Wolfgang Hirschmann and Wolfgang Auhagen. Mainz: Schott Campus (accessible via http://schott-campus.com/einfuehrung-zum-symposion-musik-zwischen-privatheit-und-oef fentlichkeit/). (5.) Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Page 28 of 39
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The Intimate Art of Listening: Music in the Private Sphere During the Nine teenth Century (6.) Two key texts concerning this development—and getting listening studies more gen erally on their way—are Gay, Peter. 1995. Introduction to The Bourgeois Experience: Vic toria to Freud. Vol. 4, The Naked Heart, 11–35. New York: Norton; and Johnson, James H. 1995. Listening in Paris: A Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Johnson’s term “absorption” can be understood as the psychological and behavioral cor respondence to what I call “close” or “intense” listening. (7.) This claim is admittedly derived from the music rather than reports on listening, which are hard to find before the eighteenth century; for the latter, see Weber, William. 1997. “Did People Listen in the Eighteenth Century?” Early Music 25 (4): 678–691. (8.) It is the central thesis of Gay (1995) that music was a privileged medium that formed the interiority of bourgeois consciousness. To make his case, Gay argues mostly with doc umentation of public behavior in concerts, while I think that looking at private documents would be a more promising approach. (9.) The most comprehensive account of domestic music making still seems to be Salmen, Walter. 1969. Haus- und Kammermusik: Privates Musizieren im gesellschaftlichen Wandel zwischen 1600 und 1900. Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag für Musik; see also several contribu tions to Fink, Monika, ed. 1991. Musica privata: Die Rolle der Musik im privaten Leben; Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Walter Salmen. Innsbruck: Helbling. A good deal of information has been contributed by researchers focusing on biography and especially gender studies; a recent sample from German musicology is provided by the contribu tions to the panel “FrauenMusikRäume: Orte von Frauen in der urbanen Musikkultur” in the 14th International Congress of the Gesellschaft für Musikforschung. The proceedings have been published as Keym, Stefan, and Katrin Stöck, eds. 2011. Musik in Leipzig, Wien und anderen Städten im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert: Verlage, Konservatorien, Salons, Vere ine, Konzerte. Musik-Stadt 3. Leipzig: Schröder, 369–441. An attempt to address larger is sues, although for an earlier era than the one under consideration here, is Leppert, Richard. 1988. Music and Image: Domesticity, Ideology and Socio-Cultural Formation in Eighteenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (10.) If not indicated otherwise, the following thoughts will be focused exclusively on the time span between roughly 1750 and 1914; this is neither to imply that there was no change in this era nor that the categories developed here could not be applied also the earlier or later epochs. (11.) See Introduction to Fuhrmann (2010). (12.) The literature concerning salons in general is too vast to attempt even a selection here. There has been much work on specific musical salons, but the only attempt at a general synthesis seems still to be Gradenwitz, Peter. 1991. Literatur und Musik in gesel ligem Kreise: Geschmacksbildung, Gesprächsstoff und musikalische Unterhaltung in der bürgerlichen Salongesellschaft. Stuttgart: Steiner.
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The Intimate Art of Listening: Music in the Private Sphere During the Nine teenth Century (13.) See Klein, Hans-Günter. ed. 2006. Die Musikveranstaltungen bei den Mendelssohns —Ein “musikalischer Salon” ? Die Referate des Symposions am 2. September 2006 in Leipzig. Leipzig—Musik und Stadt: Studien und Dokumente 2. Leipzig: MendelssohnHaus. A parallel development can be seen in Britain, where behavior at concerts and sa lons was changing during the second and third quarters of the century to become more quiet and concentrated on the music. See Weliver, Phyllis. 2017. Mary Gladstone and the Victorian Salon: Music, Literature, Liberalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (14.) “Es ließ sich auch ein dummer Hesel einfallen, unsre Morgenconcerte öffentlich zu erwähnen, eine unerhörte indiscretion, da sie durchaus Privatgesellschaft sind.” Lea Mendelssohn to Henriette von Pereira-Arnstein, May 27, 1823. Cited in Bartsch, Cornelia. 2007. Fanny Hensel, geb. Mendelssohn Bartholdy: Musik als Korrespondenz. Kassel: Furore, 114. See also Bartsch’s n. 78 on the same page, concerning Lea Mendelssohn’s general distance from all things public. (15.) “Es ist nach und nach, und natürlich ohne unser Dazuthun, ein wunderliches Mit telding zwischen Privat- und öffentlichem Wesen geworden, so daß bei jedem Concert 150–200 Personen gegenwärtig sind, und daß, wenn es einmal ausfallen muß, ohne, daß ich absagen lasse, Niemand kommt, weil es sich von selbst bekannt macht.” Quoted in Klein, Hans-Günter. “Sonntagsmusiken bei Fanny Hensel.” In Klein (2006): 47–59, here 49. Also quoted in Klein, Hans-Günter. 2003. “Fanny und Wilhelm Hensel und die Maler Elsasser,” Mendelssohn-Studien 13 (2003): 125–167, here 157. (16.) Bödecker, Hans-Erich, and Patrice Veit, eds. 2007. Les Sociétés de musique en Eu rope, 1700–1920: Structures, pratiques musicales, sociabilités. Berlin: Berliner Wis senschafts-Verlag; Heine, Claudia. 2009. “ ‘Aus reiner und wahrer Liebe zur Kunst ohne äußere Mittel’: Bürgerliche Musikvereine in deutschsprachigen Städten des frühen 19. Jahrhunderts.” PhD diss., University of Zurich. Accessed July 19, 2016. http:// opac.nebis.ch/ediss/20090646_002427553.pdf. For court concerts see Thrun, Martin. “Rang und Bedeutung des Hofkapell-Konzerts im 19. Jahrhundert.” In Keym and Stöck (2011): 498–521. (17.) It is shown (or, rather, idealized) this way by the famous drawing “Hausmusik” by Ludwig Richter, which was originally destined for the frontispiece of Riehl’s eponymous song collection (cf. n. 2). There are many reproductions, for instance, in Dahlhaus, Carl. 1980. Die Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts. Neues Handbuch der Musikwissenschaft 6. Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 124; or Salmen (1969): 173. (18.) This approach is inspired, in a loose way, by Bruno Latour’s “sociology of associa tions,” though Latour would include also extra-human acteurs, while I believe that for the purpose of this analysis it will suffice to deal with human acteurs only. See Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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The Intimate Art of Listening: Music in the Private Sphere During the Nine teenth Century (19.) In the following examples, I strongly focus on German musical culture. Germany and Austria were considered the homeland of (serious instrumental) music in the nineteenth century, and the mode of intense listening was often associated with clichés of German national character such as “depth,” “inwardness,” or “interiority.” The question is too broad to be discussed here, but I return to it in my closing remarks. However, concerning the broad outlines of the concepts of intimacy and intense listening, I believe them to be applicable, with the necessary modifications, also to other European countries during the nineteenth century, especially England (as shown by Christina Bashford and Phyllis Weliv er). (20.) Mendelssohn’s derisive description of the musical salon of the Comtesse de Rumford during his Paris visit in 1825 is a highly entertaining summary of everything German mu sicians hated about salon culture, especially in France; see Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy to Lea and Fanny Mendelsohn Bartholdy and Carl Wilhelm Ludwig Heyse, April 6, 1825. In Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Felix. 2008. Sämtliche Briefe. Vol. 1, 1816 bis Juni 1830, edited by Juliette Appold and Regina Back. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 153–155. (21.) “Es zeigt überhaupt eine eminente Meisterschaft in dem Kapitel der Lebensklugheit, jede Sache vielfach zu benützen, und wie könnte man in Abrede stellen, dass in dieser Hinsicht heutzutage die Musik ein in der menschlichen Ökonomie allgemein brauchbares Hausmittelchen ist, das bald den vermissten Hymen bei den Haaren herzuziehen, bald dem nonum in annum bedrückten Supplikanten Amt und Pfründe zu verschaffen weiss! Aus diesen und ähnlichen Gründen und ganz von Rechtswegen [sic] hat sich daher die Musik selbst dem Tone der Welt fügen müssen, und es gibt kein besseres Zeichen, dass man mit dem Zeitgeiste fortgeschritten sey, als Musique à la mode zu schreiben oder zu exequiren.” Sartorius, J. 1825. “Ein unvorgreifliches Bedenken über die itzige musikalis che Kultur à la mode.” Cäcilia 3:281–291, here 284–285. (22.) This occurred, for instance, in the Brahms cycle. See also Bashford, Christina. 2007. The Pursuit of High Culture: John Ella and Chamber Music in Victorian London. Wood bridge: Boydell. (23.) “[J]a wenn nur ein Alt da wäre, hieß es, ich erbot mich zu falsettiren, die Noten wur den geholt; – guter Rothwein dazu; wir setzten uns um den Tisch und sangen alle seine Lieder, die mich auf’s Herzlichste erfreuten. . . . Ich hatte den Morgen Vielerlei vor, blieb aber doch bis halb zwei da und konnte nicht fort.” Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Felix. 1875. Briefe aus den Jahren 1833–1847, edited by Paul and Carl Mendelssohn Bartholdy, 6th ed. Leipzig: Verlag von Hermann Mendelssohn, 2:332–333; cited in Klein, Hans-Günter. 2011. “‘Wir haben viel Musik gemacht’—Hausmusik und privates Musizieren bei Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy.” In Jahrbuch 2010 des Staatlichen Instituts für Musikforschung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, edited by Simone Hohmaier. Berlin: De Gruyter, 9–17, here 15. Many other examples could be provided from the evening parties of Mendelssohn’s youth, not to be confused with the Sonntagsmusiken. See Bartsch (2007): 116–117, 121.
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The Intimate Art of Listening: Music in the Private Sphere During the Nine teenth Century (24.) “[Zuweilen traf ich ihn] unter vier Augen, gewöhnlich aber mit zwei oder drei seiner vertrauten Bekannten vereinigt, auf Sofas oder weichen Sesseln hingestreckt, ließ sich jeder in seiner Weise bei einem Glase Wein ohne allen Zwang an und aus. . . . Wenn uns allen dann so recht das frohe Herz auf der Zunge lag, dann setzte er sich plötzlich an seinen englischen Flügel . . . und nahm uns alle auf seinen Engelsflügen mit in ein an deres himmlisches Reich.” Webern, Emil von. 1912–13. “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy: Aus den Erinnerungen des Generalleutenants Karl Emil von Webern.” Die Musik 12 (4): 67–94, here 68; cited in Klein (2011): 13. (25.) See, e.g., Bartsch (2007): 142–143. (26.) Pierer’s Universal-Lexikon. 1859. Altenburg: Pierer, 8:951. (27.) Brockhaus’ Kleines Konversations-Lexikon. 1911. 5th ed. Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1:867. (28.) Crabb, George. (1816) 1826. English Synonymes Explained in Alphabetical Order: With Copious Illustrations and Examples Drawn from the Best Writers. New York: J. and J. Harper (originally published London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy), 28–29 (all emphasis is Crabb’s). On the history of the term, see most recently Streisand, Marianne. 2001. Intim ität: Begriffsgeschichte und Entdeckung der “Intimität” auf dem Theater um 1900. Mu nich: Fink. (29.) Even today, intimacy may mean deep emotional knowledge of another human being as well as the fulfillment of sexual desire. Patrice Chéreau’s movie Intimacy (2001) aptly catches in its title the ambivalence of the modern use of this word. The basic story line deals with a man and woman meeting regularly to have sex without knowing anything else about each other—thus establishing a kind of purely carnal intimacy. Subsequently, the man tries to find out something about the woman’s life and personality—thus engag ing on the quest for a more personal intimacy. (30.) I am thinking of the quite different but always erotic role of music and music mak ing in (among others) Charles de Bernard’s Gerfaut (1838); see Daub, Adrian. 2014. FourHanded Monsters: Four-Hand Piano Playing and Nineteenth-Century Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 17–18; Eça de Queiroz’s O primo Bazilio (Cousin Bazilio, 1878), Leo Tolstoy’s Die Kreutzer-Sonate (The Kreutzer Sonata, 1890), and Thomas Mann’s novellas Tristan (1903) and Wälsungenblut (The Blood of the Valsungs, 1921). The explo ration of eroticism in music is still a topic not fully explored by musicology. A case in point is Bizet’s Carmen; see McClary, Susan. 1991. “Sexual Politics in Classical Music.” In Femi nine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality, 53–79. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; and McClary, Susan. 1992. Georges Bizet: Carmen. Cambridge Opera Handbooks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; see also Fuhrmann, Wolfgang. 2016. Georges Bizet: Carmen. Opernführer kompakt. Kassel: Bärenreiter. (31.) See the discussion by Streisand, who states that new concepts of intimacy always emerge “im Zusammenhang mit dem Entwurf neuer Gemeinschaftsutopien” (in connec tion with the creation of new utopias of communal life). Streisand (2001): 31. Page 32 of 39
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The Intimate Art of Listening: Music in the Private Sphere During the Nine teenth Century (32.) “Abends Heydemänner, Lewen[hagen], Droysen, Hensel, Märker. . . . Wir spielten die Meeresstille, dann den Sommernachtstraum, bei niedergeschraubten Lampen, was sehr hübsch war, dann noch einmal die Meeresstille, es war mir den Abend ganz besonders wehmüthig, und die Trennung und das Entbehren mir sehr nah vor die Seele gerückt. Heyd[emann] sagte mir gestern, es sey ihm eben so gewesen. Es gelang uns den Abend manches ganz besonders, ich weiß nicht, es war so eigen hübsch. Hensel dichtete ein Bild, wie er sagte, zur Meeresstille, und wir waren alle gestimmt.” Hensel, Fanny. 2002. Tagebücher, edited by Hans-Günter Klein and Rudolf Elvers. Wiesbaden: Breitkopf und Härtel, 2 (see also Klein (2011): 10). The “Heydemänner” were Ludwig Eduard Heyde mann, a jurist, and Albert Gustav Heydemann, a teacher. Lewenhagen may have been the pensioner “W. Lewenhagen” living nearby at Wilhelmstraße 94. Droysen was Johann Gus tav Droysen, the famous historian. Hensel was, of course, Wilhelm Hensel, who would soon become Fanny’s fiancé (they became engaged on January 22). Märker was the philologist Friedrich Adolf Märker. All identifications follow Hensel (2002): 280–281 (com mentary). (33.) Fanny’s closing remark “und wir waren alle gestimmt” does not translate itself easi ly into English. German Stimmung can mean either the “tuning” (of instruments) or a “mood, atmosphere” (of people and events), and though there is no question that Fanny refers to the latter meaning, the special relevance of music for this mood induction points to the origin of both meanings in the ancient concept of “world harmony.” Such ideas of world harmony and the human soul had recently surfaced in early Romanticism, and we may assume that Fanny was aware of this relationship. See Spitzer, Leo. 1944. “Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony: Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word ‘Stimmung’” Traditio 2:409–64; Spitzer, Leo. 1945. “Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony: Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word ‘Stimmung’ (Part II).” Traditio 3:307–364; both were published as a book, in revised form, under the same title in 1963 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.) The importance of “Stimmung” for the Ro mantic concept of music is emphasized in Besseler, Heinrich. 1959. Das musikalische Hören der Neuzeit. Berichte über die Verhandlungen der sächsischen Akademie der Wis senschaften zu Leipzig, Philologisch-historische Klasse 104 (6). Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Reprinted in Besseler, Heinrich. 1978. Aufsätze zur Musikästhetik und Musikgeschichte, edited by Peter Gülke, 104–173. Leipzig: Reclam. (34.) Introduction to Gay (1995). (35.) Fernand Khnopff, En écoutant du Schumann (1883). Brussels: Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique. See Johnson’s chapter (18) in this handbook. (36.) Dejonghe, Gustave. Une mélodie de Schubert (1880). Paris: Collection Violet. Ac cessed July 20, 2016. http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b84266276; see also the repro duction in Salmen (1969): 186. (37.) Balestrieri, Lionello. Beethoven (1900). Trieste: Museo Revoltella.
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The Intimate Art of Listening: Music in the Private Sphere During the Nine teenth Century (38.) All of these pictures are considerably later than the examples from the Mendelssohn family; it seems that intimate listening started considerably earlier than the tradition of depicting it. To investigate the reasons for this would mean to trace the history of por traits of intimacy in painting, and this is clearly beyond the scope of this chapter. (39.) I am indebted to Phyllis Weliver for alerting me to the picture of Sand and Chopin. (40.) At the beginning of 1829 Felix considered a Grand Tour through Italy, though he em barked only in April, and then went to Great Britain. But this was the start of his Wander jahre, as Fanny well knew. (41.) See, inevitably, Dahlhaus, Carl. 1989. The Idea of Absolute Music. Translated by Roger Lustig. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; and as healthy correctives Pederson, Sanna. 2009. “Defining the Term ‘Absolute Music’ Historically.” Music and Letters 90 (2): 240–262; and Bonds, Mark Evan. 2014. Absolute Music: The History of an Idea. New York: Oxford University Press. (42.) Thus, Adorno’s essay “Vierhändig, noch einmal,” though it certainly is pertinent to the whole question of private music making, describes a slightly different phenomenon: experiencing music by making music, however imperfectly. That this sort of experience is closely related to intense listening cannot be denied, but it is mashed with the bodily ex perience of producing the music and does not require the staging of mood described above. See Adorno, Theodor W. 1971. “Vierhändig, noch einmal.” In Musikalische Schriften IV. Gesammelte Schriften 17, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, 303–306. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (43.) Compare this working definition with Christina Bashford’s in her 1999 article “Learning to Listen: Audiences for Chamber Music in Early-Victorian London.” Journal of Victorian Culture 4, (1): 25–51, n. 15, p. 47. Bashford uses “intimacy” in two senses: “(1) to denote the relatively small size and quasidomestic arrangement of the performance spaces under discussion; (2) to connote the group audience feeling that can be engen dered by listening to music under such conditions.” The resemblances of this concept to my own are the more striking because the latter was developed without knowing Bashford’s article. Bashford also describes how a mock-domestic “intimacy” was imitated in London public chamber concert halls during the 1830s and 1840s “through a more ca sual and comfortable salon-like environment, with sofas and chairs arranged informally, and refreshments on hand,” in order to suggest an intense listening behavior. Bashford (2007): 103 (see also 136–137, 223). (44.) “Es war eine Eigentümlichkeit Mendelssohns, seine neuen Kompositionen, wenn er sie in der Intimität zu hören gab, mit einer Zurückhaltung zu spielen, die offenbar in der Intention begründet war, durch den Vortrag nicht zu bestechen und das Werk rein durch seinen Inhalt wirken zu lassen.” Hiller, Ferdinand. 1874. Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy: Briefe und Erinnerungen. Cologne: Du Mont–Schauberg, cited in Gradenwitz (1991): 249. (45.) See n. 34 above. Page 34 of 39
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The Intimate Art of Listening: Music in the Private Sphere During the Nine teenth Century (46.) See the passage quoted in n. 21. (47.) “Jener (der Mann) gehört dem geräuschvollen öffentlichen Leben, dieses (das Weib) dem stillen häuslichen Cirkel.” Conversations-Lexikon, oder Handwörterbuch für die gebildeten Stände. 1815. 3rd ed. Leipzig: n.p., 4:211; cited after Hausen, Karin. 2012. “Die Polarisierung der ‘Geschlechtsscharaktere’: Eine Spiegelung der Dissoziation von Erwerbs- und Familienleben.” In Geschlechtergeschichte als Gesellschaftsgeschichte. Kri tische Studien zur Geschichtswissenschaft 202, 19–49. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 22. Hausen’s classic article was first published in 1976, building upon (and cor recting) the observations by Welter, Barbara. 1966. “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820– 1860.” American Quarterly 18 (1966): 151–174. See also Wolff, Janet. 1988. “The Culture of Separate Spheres: The Role of Culture in Nineteenth-Century Public and Private Life.” In The Culture of Capital: Art, Power, and the Nineteenth-Century Middle Class, edited by Janet Wolff and John Seed, 117–134. New York: St. Martin’s. (48.) See the extensive quotation from Biedermann, Karl. 1856. Frauen-Brevier: Kul turgeschichtliche Vorlesungen. Leipzig: n.p., 9, cited in Hausen (2012): 39, n. 49. (49.) Some feminist theorists have suggested that we should deconstruct or dissolve the public-private distinction (henceforth called the Great Divide) altogether, because it stabi lizes the hierarchical oppositions male-female; others have argued that the Divide hinges on certain power relations, especially political and social ones, and must be critically in vestigated according to specific and concrete situations and events. For a quick overview, see Klaus, Elisabeth, and Ricarda Drüeke. 2010. “Öffentlichkeit und Privatheit: Frauenöf fentlichkeiten und feministische Öffentlichkeiten.” In Handbuch Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung: Theorie, Methoden, Empirie, edited by Ruth Becker and Beate Kortendiek. 3rd rev. ed. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 247. Aida Hurta do has argued that the Great Divide is perceived differently depending on whether a femi nist is white or black: “White feminists’ concerns . . . stem from a political consciousness that seeks to project private sphere issues into the public arena. Feminists of Color focus instead on public issues that cultivate an awareness of the distinction between public pol icy and private choice.” Hurtado, Aida. 1989. “Relating to Privilege: Seduction and Rejec tion in the Subordination of White Women and Women of Color.” Signs 14 (4): 849. Nancy Fraser has suggested investigating the power relations underlying the divide, writing: “Who has the power to decide where to draw the line between public and private? What structures of inequality underlie the hegemonic understandings of these categories as well as the struggles that contest them?” Fraser, Nancy. 1997. Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition. New York: Routledge, 103. Turning to music, there are good arguments to make against identifying the private sphere with women and the public sphere with men. These are summarized in Katharina Hottmann’s contribution to Hottmann and Fuhrmann (2016). For instance, domestic string quartet playing was, as far as I am aware, mostly a male occupation, though some women engaged in it. See the important study by Sumner Lott, Marie. 2015. The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music: Composer, Consumers, Communities. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Sumner Lott, whose book came to my attention when this chapter was already un Page 35 of 39
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The Intimate Art of Listening: Music in the Private Sphere During the Nine teenth Century der review, restricts her discussion to chamber music for strings and therefore to genres cultivated almost exclusively by men; see especially Sumner Lott (2015): 13–18. See also Bashford, Christina. 2010. “Historiography and Invisible Musics: Domestic Chamber Mu sic in Nineteenth-Century Britain.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 63:291– 360. Almost needless to say, public quartet performance from the later eighteenth centu ry onward was exclusively male until Marie Soldat-Roeger founded her first Damenquar tett in 1887 in Berlin. See Borchard, Beatrix. 2011. “Öffentliches Quartettspiel als geschlechtsspezifische “ ‘Raumgestaltung’?” In Keym and Stöck (2011): 385–399. SoldatRoeger was a public figure also as a soloist, being the first woman to perform Brahms’s Violin Concerto op. 77 in 1885 in a concert of the Viennese Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde; see Borchard (2011): 392. An even more notable solo performer was, of course, Clara Wieck-Schumann, a celebrated pianist active in the public concert sphere for most of her life; see Klassen, Janina. 2009. Clara Schumann: Musik und Öffentlichkeit. Köln: Böhlau, and generally on gendered perspectives concerning virtuosity, see Borchard, Beatrix. 2004. “Der Virtuose—Ein ‘weiblicher’ Künstlertypus?” In Musikalische Virtuosität, edited by Heinz von Loesch, Ulrich Mahlert, and Peter Rummenhöller, 63–76. Mainz: Schott. The end of the Great Divide (or, rather, the beginning of its end) came in the 1870s: See Gillett, Paula. 2000. Musical Women in England, 1870–1914: Encroaching on All Man’s Privileges. Basingstoke: Macmillan. All these examples (and many more could be cited) notwithstanding, one should not forget that the distinction between female private and male public music making was a very real one to many (and probably most) nineteenthcentury men and women and that we should be cautious about overemphasizing the ex ceptions to that rule and blinding ourselves to the prevalent social norms of the time, as ideologically biased as they may seem to us today. See the reflections by Grotjahn, Rebec ca. 2002. “Alltag im Innenraum: Die ‘Höhere Tochter’ am Klavier—Innenraum, Außen raum, Geschlechterraum.” In Keym and Stöck (2011): 431–441, esp. 431–434. (50.) Ruhbaum, Antje. 2009. Elisabeth von Herzogenberg. Salon—Mäzenatentum—Musik förderung. Beiträge zur Kultur- und Sozialgeschichte der Musik 7. Kenzingen: Centaurus Verlag, 140. (51.) “Unterkapellmeister, der bald dem Tenor, bald dem Alt einhalf und selbst dem Baß den Kopf zurechtsetzte.” Brahms, Johannes, Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, and Heinrich von Herzogenberg. 1907a. Johannes Brahms im Briefwechsel mit Heinrich und Elisabet [sic] von Herzogenberg. Brahms-Briefwechsel 1, edited by Max Kalbeck. Berlin: Verlag der Deutschen Brahms-Gesellschaft, xv (preface). (52.) Ruhbaum (2009): 185. One might suggest, alternatively, that this was a cunning move by Brahms. To send these love songs right away to Elisabeth would have been too obvious a gesture. (53.) “Mit ihren Liedern feierten wir hier gerührtes Wiedersehen, in Leipzig gewährte mir die Bekanntschaft fast ebensoviel Pein als Freude; denn solch eine schöne Reihe von Liedern da haben und nicht ordentlich intim werden können, sie nicht ordentlich stre icheln können, das ist eine Tantalusqual. Hier hab ich nun einigermaßen nachgeholt und Page 36 of 39
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The Intimate Art of Listening: Music in the Private Sphere During the Nine teenth Century mich mit einigen innig befreundet, so daß sie bereits mit mir spazieren gehen und aller wege in mir erklingen.” Brahms et al. (1907a): 26. (54.) These “Hauptlieblinge” were identified by Elisabeth as “Ätherische ferne Stim men” (= “Lerchengesang,” op. 70, no. 2), “Sommerfäden” (op. 72, no. 2), “das g-mollige 4/4 Takt mit den punktierten Achteln, von Lemcke—wie heißt es nur und dann der her rliche ‘Mädchenfluch’ und! und! ‘die dunklen Schwalben’ (von Henschel)” (the g-mi noresque in 4/4 measure with the dotted eighth notes—oh, what was its title [“Im Garten am Seegestade,” op. 70, no. 1] and then the glorious “Mädchenfluch” [op. 69, no. 9] and! and! “die dunklen Schwalben” (by Henschel) [recte “Es kehrt die dunkle Schwalbe,” op. 72, no. 1]). Brahms et al. (1907a): 26–27. Earlier, Heinrich had named as “unsere aller größten Lieblinge” (our most favorite darlings) “Ei, schmollte mein Vater” (op. 69, no. 4), “Ätherische ferne Stimmen,” “Silbermond” (An den Mond, op. 71, no. 2), “O Früh lingsabenddämmerung” (Geheinnis, op. 71, no. 3), “Es kehrt die dunkle Schwalbe,” and “Sommerfäden.” Brahms et al. (1907a): 22. When performing “O Frühlingsabenddäm merung” the couple would even ignore the prescribed tempo, relishing a much slower one; see Brahms et al. (1907a): 22–23, and Brahms’s response on p. 25. See also Ruh baum (2009): n. 2, p. 239. (55.) “[D]ie öffentliche Musiziererei ist eigentlich eklig, was sind das alles für Leute!” Brahms et al. (1907a): 61. (56.) “Meine Frau zählt nicht, denn das sind quasi Selbstgespräche, so sehr sind wir Ein er das Product des Anderen.” Cited in Ruhbaum (2009): 161. (57.) Ruhbaum (2009): 85. (58.) Ruhbaum (2009): 163. (59.) As a very sketchy definition, the sociocultural semantics of music may be under stood as the way social and cultural experiences (and the historical change in such expe riences) sediment themselves in musical styles, forms, or expressive means. Susan McClary’s attempts to read gender issues into harmonic tonality would be a specific ex ample of sociocultural semantics, though whether these attempts are thoroughly convinc ing is not my issue here. See McClary (1991). (60.) See Daub (2014). (61.) See DeNora, Tia. 2000. Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 38–41; DeNora, Tia. 2003. After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 46–51. (62.) Accessed July 9, 2012. http://chambermusictoday.blogspot.de/2008/05/chamber-mu sic-is-intimate-how.html. In trying to re-access the blog in September 2015 I was notified that this blog was now closed to any other than invited readers—another paradoxical
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The Intimate Art of Listening: Music in the Private Sphere During the Nine teenth Century move in the ambiguous stance of the anonymous blogger toward what one might still call the public sphere of the World Wide Web. (63.) Daverio, John. 1998. “Fin de siècle Chamber Music and the Critique of Modernism.” In Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music. Studies in Musical Genres and Repertories, edit ed by Stephen E. Hefling, 348–382. New York: Schirmer, 350–351; Notley, Margaret. 2007. Lateness and Brahms: Music and Culture in the Twilight of Viennese Liberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 187. See also Bashford (1999) and Bashford (2007). (64.) See Notley (2007), esp. chap. 6 (“Adagios in Brahms’s Late Chamber Music: Genre Aesthetics and Cultural Critique”), 169–203. (65.) See, to quote two more recent examples, Notley, Margaret. 1994. “Brahms’s Cello Sonata in F Major and Its Genesis: A Study in Half-Step Relations.” In Brahms Studies, edited by David Lee Brodbeck, 1:139–160. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press; and Wiesenfeldt, Christiane. 2006. Zwischen Beethoven und Brahms: Die Violoncello-Sonate im 19. Jahrhundert. Kieler Schriften zur Musikwissenschaft 51. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 233– 250. Notley argues that the slow movement may originally have been intended for Brahms’s Cello Sonata no. 1 in E minor op. 38, published twenty years earlier, in 1866. This has fascinating implications for Brahms’s conception of the latter sonata as a whole that cannot even be touched on here. (66.) I have restricted myself to the motivic relationships that are very clearly audible (and visible in the score), and I have shunned any more esoteric approaches. I do so in compliance with Brahms’s own convictions; see the letter to Adolf Schubring in Brahms, Johannes. 1915. Johannes Brahms Briefe an Joseph Viktor Widmann, Ellen und Ferdinand Vetter, Adolf Schubring. Brahms-Briefwechsel 8, edited by Max Kalbeck. Berlin: Verlag der Deutschen Brahms-Gesellschaft, 216. (67.) See the analytical remarks by Wiesenfeldt (2006): 239–241. (68.) “Daß wir in den wohlig warmen Klängen des Adagios schwelgten und beim her rlichen Zurückfinden ins Fis dur, das so wunderbar klingt, so ganz besonders, brauche ich nicht erst zu sagen.” Brahms, Johannes, Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, and Heinrich von Herzogenberg. 1907b. Johannes Brahms im Briefwechsel mit Heinrich und Elisabet [sic] von Herzogenberg. Brahms-Briefwechsel 2, edited by Max Kalbeck. Berlin: Verlag der Deutschen Brahms-Gesellschaft, 131. (69.) At this point the conference audience listened to the first nineteen measures of the Adagio affettuoso on the Decca recording with Janos Starker on the violoncello and Julius Katchen at the piano. (70.) See in general Gramit, David. 2002. Cultivating Music: The Aspirations, Interests, and Limits of German Musical Culture, 1770–1848. Berkeley: University of California Press. See also Applegate, Celia. 1998. “How German Is It? Nationalism and the Idea of Serious Music in the Early Nineteenth Century.” 19th-Century Music 21:274–296; Apple Page 38 of 39
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The Intimate Art of Listening: Music in the Private Sphere During the Nine teenth Century gate, Celia. 2005. Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn’s Revival of the St. Matthew Passion. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. (71.) “Vereinigt ein Salon einen Kreis, in welchem musikalischer Geschmack vorherrscht, und wird in diesem Kreise um der Musik willen musicirt, so ist das immer noch Haus musik, wenn auch nicht mehr im engsten Sinne. Die wahre Salonmusik ist jene, für welche nicht das Auditorium dem Spielenden, sondern der Vortragende den Zuhörern dankbar zu seyn hat.” ([) Riehl, Wilhelm Heinrich?]. 1856. “Die musikalischen Zustände der Gegenwart.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift 1:297–351, here 328. (72.) Geiger, Friedrich. 2003. ‘ “Innigkeit” und “Tiefe” als komplementäre Kriterien der Bewertung von Musik.” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 60:265–278.
Wolfgang Fuhrmann
Wolfgang Fuhrmann, Universität Leipzig
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Symmetries in Spaces, Symmetries in Listening: Musical Theater Buildings in Europe ca. 1900
Symmetries in Spaces, Symmetries in Listening: Musi cal Theater Buildings in Europe ca. 1900 Gesa Zur Nieden The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries Edited by Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer Print Publication Date: Jan 2019 Subject: Music, Musicology and Music History Online Publication Date: Nov 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190466961.013.16
Abstract and Keywords Based on the importance of the concept of symmetry in French sociological aesthetics cir ca 1900, this chapter analyzes the convergence of theaters, musical form, and musical understanding. The analysis focuses on architectural shape, audience response, and the musical repertoire in the new theaters built in Barcelona (1847), Paris (1862), and Rome (1880). While these theaters were fashioned after the baroque form of the “teatro all’italiana” that prevailed in Italy, France, and Spain during the late nineteenth century, they provided huge spaces accommodating a socially mixed audience within an architec turally symmetrical form. Music critics often aligned acoustic sound waves with actual visibility in the auditorium, and semicircular structures in the scenography on stage may have affected the reception of the musical performance. The newly built theaters arrived at a time when the “classical” music scene and a certain canon was developed, opposing the more “intellectual” audiences and repertories of contemporary music. Keywords: aesthetic hierarchies, architecture, audience composition, Gran Teatre del Liceu, opera house, Théâtre du Châtelet, Teatro Costanzi, sociological aesthetics
DURING the second half of the nineteenth century, European musical life was shaped by a marked increase of newly built venues for musical performances. Opera houses and the aters for musical performances in many European metropolises, such as London, Vienna, Paris, and Rome, were constructed in the context of broader processes of urban renova tion.1 The sociological, commercial, and political aspects of those processes are exempli fied by the theaters built during the “Haussmannization” of Paris under Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann.2 In sociological terms, official efforts to improve hygienic conditions and transportation infrastructure in the city center led to the construction of squares and buildings that reflected a social advancement under close political surveillance. Inside the theater buildings, which combined individual boxes with collective seating areas on the model of an amphitheater, these social changes were reflected in an openness to a more socially diverse public. In commercial terms, national governments, municipal councils, and independent impresarios tried to build theaters with large seating capacities that could exploit the new social intermixing and ensure financial profitability without state Page 1 of 23
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Symmetries in Spaces, Symmetries in Listening: Musical Theater Buildings in Europe ca. 1900 subsidies. This aim was achieved in part by the use of large stages to present grandiose spectacles, but more important, by the construction of large auditoriums able to accom modate up to three thousand spectators. In political terms, the Parisian process of urban renovation served as a model for metropolises such as Rome and Barcelona. These cities implemented cultural institutions such as theaters and concert halls with the objective of shaping national representation through art and culture on an international scale.3 The state and municipal governments of Italian and Spanish metropolises turned to the archi tectural innovations in Paris, and its new buildings were seen as models for cultural rep resentation.4 As a result, theater buildings in important European cities, in particular, the “secondary theaters” for large audiences, exhibit similar architectural features. This is in deed the case for the Théâtre du Châtelet (p. 314) in Paris, the Teatro Costanzi in Rome, and the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona—all secondary theaters under the direction of independent impresarios, all with huge stages and auditoriums, and all based on the com bination of boxes and collective seating (see Figures 13.1–13.3).5
Figure 13.1. Pibaraud, Interior of the Théâtre du Châtelet (1862). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, Fonds du Théâtre du Châtelet / ullstein bildRoger-Violett.
This chapter investigates the spatial conditions of these newly built theaters and their im pact on audiences listening to musical performances. How was the act of listening shaped by the increased social diversity in musical auditoriums and the homogenization of con temporary theater architecture as driven by commercial concerns? Based on contempo rary theoretical principles of the relation between musical understanding and architec ture, I explore the spatial layout used during musical performances around 1900, deploy ing the sociology of space to investigate the spatial conditions of musical reception and their functions for the understanding of music. This approach takes into account urban transformations and their social consequences and, taken together with contemporary theoretical reflections, may shed light on the physical and symbolical place of the listener among the factors of musical composition, performance, and the symbolic values of musi cal works. Page 2 of 23
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Symmetries in Spaces, Symmetries in Listening: Musical Theater Buildings in Europe ca. 1900 Because Paris was a central point of reference for both processes of urban renovation and musical productions circa 1900, I begin by describing the theoretical background of the French aesthetics of music, inextricably linked with social concerns and spatial (p. 315) analogies prevalent at the time. I then contrast these theoretical concerns with the archi tectural structures and their reception by the audiences of the Théâtre du Châtelet, the Teatro Costanzi, and the Gran Teatre del Liceu, all of which exhibited the typical urban renewal of the second half of the nineteenth century and took the form of the teatro all’italiana. Finally, I take a closer look at the practices of listening to music and under standing music during performances, focusing on the spatial configuration of all actors within the buildings and on the formal elements of musical compositions.
Figure 13.2. Montanari, Auditorium of the Teatro Costanzi (1880). From Frajese, Vittorio. 1977. Dal Costanzi all’opera: Cronache, recensioni e documenti. Vol. 1. Rome: Edizioni Capitolium, 32–33. Staatsbib liothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz (1 A 832998).
Symmetry as a Concept in French Sociological Aesthetics With the publication of the French translation of Eduard Hanslick’s Vom MusikalischSchönen in 1877, if not before, musical formalism emerged as an important theory in late nineteenth-century France.6 While conservative music critics used this approach to em phasize their rejection of program music, philosophers, music historians, and music (p. 316) theorists considered Hanslick’s formalism from the perspective of its conflict with the emotional perception of music.7 These theoretical works, written by musicologists such as Jules Combarieu and philosophers including Charles Lalo, were embedded in the development of a sociological and sociohistorical contouring of the aesthetics of music that paralleled the contemporaneous establishment of aesthetics as an empirical disci pline.8 In 1908 Lalo introduced his Esquisse d’une esthétique musicale scientifique with the statement: “Basically, perhaps the only thing that formalism has lacked up to now to Page 3 of 23
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Symmetries in Spaces, Symmetries in Listening: Musical Theater Buildings in Europe ca. 1900 explain all facts has been the sociological element.”9 For Lalo, Hanslick’s formalism and his concept of a dynamic perception of formal musical components offered an important basis for studying the variety of expressive aspects of musical works in their historical de velopment, but also in their specific reception by different listeners.10 According to Lalo, this was possible because, in contrast to sentimentalism—which is mainly based (p. 317) on a metaphorical perception of musical forms and modes of composition and which Lalo associated with Romanticism—the formalistic view is a very comprehensive, systematic approach not restricted to the epoch of classicism.11
Figure 13.3. Onofre Alsamora, performance of Bellini’s Norma in the Gran Teatre del Liceu (ca. 1870), hand-colored lithograph. © Onofre Alsamora. MAE. Institut del Teatre.
While Lalo pointed out the interest of Hanslick’s formalism for systematic research con cerning the development of musical expressiveness, other approaches sharpened formal istic aspects even further, with the intent of revealing the overall comprehensibility of ba sic musical forms by the public at large. Only three years later, the Revue Musicale dated September 15, 1911, published an article by the composer and pianist Lucien Chevaillier on symmetry as a basic compositional principle to achieve unity in a musical work and thus attract the listener.12 For Chevaillier, symmetrical forms evolved from nearly every single element of musical composition, for example, from repeated themes or motifs, from rhythms, and from sound vibration.13 The latter form of symmetry is described as “symétrie dans la matière” (symmetry in the material) and emphasizes the naturalness of symmetrical forms in musical composition.14 These forms characterize not only popular musical genres but also art music such as baroque compositions: “Sound is an exact repe tition of equal vibrations in equal beats or times. It is somewhat natural that the plan by which these sounds are arranged is made according to the image of the sound itself. How could one obtain a more homogeneous ensemble if not by making the element and its sys Page 4 of 23
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Symmetries in Spaces, Symmetries in Listening: Musical Theater Buildings in Europe ca. 1900 tem of combination respond to the same principle?”15 On one hand, Chevaillier describes symmetry as a ubiquitous concept of musical composition and perception. Thus, even con temporary works featured symmetrical forms as a basic instrument to achieve unity, as the author demonstrates using the example of Vincent d’Indy; symmetry only has to be defined in smaller dimensions and in more complex ways.16 On the other, Chevaillier uses both physical and metaphorical parallels to strengthen his rather general theory of com positional symmetry. In addition to the link between acoustic vibration and artistic com position, he foregrounds an analogy between music and architecture: “Music is also the art—together with architecture—where exact or pure symmetry takes the biggest place. Architecture is a spatial symmetry: music is a temporal symmetry.”17 In his analysis Chevaillier interprets musical forms such as ABA as a triangle and as a gable or dome ow ing to their usual succession of tonic-dominant-tonic. With these three steps—symmetry of musical forms, symmetry of acoustic vibration, and the analogy of both with architec ture—Chevaillier explains the listener’s understanding of music as a relationship between the work, its “natural” acoustic attributes during a performance, and the geometrical structures of architectural features. These three elements are superposed and bound to gether by geometrical and temporal symmetries.18 Lalo and Chevaillier both stressed that their geometric or metaphorical analogies were not meant to impose social facts on the musical artifact; for them, music remained a sepa rate means of expression. They thus took up a central concern that was also discussed in emotionally based models such as Jules Combarieu’s notion of a nonconceptual, sensa tional musical metaphor.19 Paralleling that concern, Lalo and Chevaillier opted for a pure ly musical expressiveness and comprehension that was defined by its indeterminacy and fluidity. This fluidity seemed, for Lalo and Chevaillier, to (p. 318) arise from the fact that musical compositions are based on generic forms that are open to expressive variety. At the same time, it is obvious that their systematic and socially inclusive concerns accorded with the key developments of French musical life circa 1900. First, Chevaillier picked up on the important public discourse about the musical educa tion of a broad audience fostered by the many symphonic orchestras formed in Paris since the end of the Second Empire with the aim of familiarizing the French public with “ab stract” music far beyond the entertainment of the masses in theaters and opera houses.20 He distinguished educated music listeners from listeners who are only interested in non musical, textual imagery: “Please note that I refrain from talking of everything that could be descriptive, because as soon as a piece has a title, the musical unity becomes less im portant and the image is there to create a non-musical link between possibly heteroge neous parts.”21 Consequently, and in contrast to Combarieu’s more atmospheric ap proach, Chevaillier tried to understand the unity of musical works by employing the con cept of symmetry, which manifests itself in musical aspects alone and has to be associat ed with spatial structures. In this manner, he took part in a tradition that had propagated the principles of formal aesthetics using architectural metaphors since the mid-nine teenth century.22
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Symmetries in Spaces, Symmetries in Listening: Musical Theater Buildings in Europe ca. 1900 Second, Chevaillier’s purely compositional approach reflected the increasing dissolution of the former distinctions between musical genres that was institutionally represented by the two different types of venues, théâtres primaires and théâtres secondaires, until the end of the Second Empire. Chevaillier created a more comprehensive basis for a compre hensive study of “popular” and art music, all bound by different scales of symmetry. In his view, the basic geometric structure of symmetry and its architectural shapes were more important than the social differentiation of musical genres. Third, Lalo’s and Chevaillier’s accentuation of forms as synchronous features with a so cial effect, and not only as a diachronically important tradition of musical composition, seems to have responded to the national concern with fostering the French legacy of clas sicism in an epoch of democratization and modernity. Chevaillier concluded his article by stating that “modern musical works are more difficult to access for the still-classical ears of most listeners. We must accept, however, that this evolution is logical and inevitable, because it parallels the general evolution of science and the human spirit.”23 The reliance on generic geometric and architectural forms (here, the symmetry of the gable and its function of binding together musical composition, performances, and recep tion within a democratized, commercialized French musical life) is less present in a Ro mantic aesthetics of music than in the sociological thinking of the same period. Chevaillier’s concept shows some similarities with Georg Simmel’s reflections on symme try in Soziologische Ästhetik, especially those related to the role of symmetry in creating unity through aesthetic forms, or “architectural dispositions within the social entity.”24 However, Chevaillier did not go quite as far as Simmel, who described symmetrical as pects of social entities and events as ideal forms that corresponded to sensations of use fulness and beauty.25 Different as the approaches of the philosopher Lalo, the musician Chevaillier, and the sociologist Simmel may be in terms of their focus (p. 319) on sensa tions and forms of musical or aesthetic composition, they all appear to connect formal musical or artistic aspects to generic geometrical and metaphorical structures. These for mal elements determine musical composition and also the faculties of the listeners and the collective atmosphere during performances. Why were the French aesthetics of music and musical practitioners so interested in for malism and architectural analogies, in the context of the development of sociological aes thetics with respect to music? In order to understand the intersections between the musi cal work, the composer, and the listener, it is useful to analyze spacing (that is, the spatial distribution of actors and objects) and its synthetic reception during musical perfor mances in the context of their historical and social development. Given that theorists of the sociological aesthetics of music in the period tended to rely on analogies between mu sic and architecture, and that Chevaillier constantly returned to acoustic vibration as a symmetrical principle of music, I now use the sociology of architecture and space to re trace the spatial structures that arose during musical performances in three newly built theaters in the second half of the nineteenth century.
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Symmetries in Spaces, Symmetries in Listening: Musical Theater Buildings in Europe ca. 1900
Sociology of Space and the Italian-Style The ater The sociology of space is particularly well suited to the analysis of spatial structures in musical performances because it describes forms of listening to and understanding mu sic. It investigates situations of social and cultural behavior by analyzing spacing and its reception by various actors.26 According to Chevaillier’s conception of sociological aes thetics, described above, spatial distribution provokes a synthetic perception structured around geometric shapes. Architectural structures are significant for this spacing and for the “activity of synthesizing” in geometric shapes because they can facilitate or impede certain actions of spacing and synthesizing.27 To be sure, in musical performances, archi tectural geometric shapes are not sufficient for an analysis of the spatial conceptions of the event: apart from the acoustics of a musical venue, fictional and symbolic relations between audiences and performers are also important.28 The architectural conception of the Théâtre du Châtelet, the Gran Teatre del Liceu, and the Teatro Costanzi was based on the “Italian” style of theater architecture. This style is characterized by galleries with boxes, which are oriented on a central perspective of the stage, and by a proscenium stage that articulates a separation between the stage and the auditorium. In the view of many nineteenth-century musicians and composers, especially Richard Wagner, this structure prevented most of the listeners from concentrating on the music or the dramatic action because it encouraged luxurious stage designs and an at mosphere of “seeing and being seen” in the auditorium.29 During the second half of the nineteenth century, architects became very aware of the social aspects of architecture and the cultural use of buildings, though (in defiance of Wagner) they continued (p. 320) to rely on the traditional Italian form of theater building. In Paris the architect of the Théâtre du Châtelet, Gabriel Davioud, responded not only to Haussmann’s request for a symmetrical arrangement of urban space but also to the desire to attract a large audi ence.30 This aim could only be achieved with a certain adequacy of the theater’s interior, along with a perfect view onto the stage and good acoustics. In pursuit of these goals, Davioud made several changes throughout the stages of architectural planning. He trans formed the circular horseshoe shape of the auditorium into a U-shape, flattened by an ex posed balcony on the first level in front of five galleries of boxes and amphitheatrical rows.31 The circular form was considered the most suitable structure for good reverbera tion in the auditorium of an opera house.32 Davioud also believed that the proscenium frame was the best instrument to provoke a direct reflection of both the orchestral sound and the spoken word from the stage into the auditorium.33 If Davioud had managed to place the orchestra pit right underneath the proscenium frame in the Théâtre du Châtelet instead of constructing a proscenium there, the orches tra would have constituted the axis of symmetry between the stage and the auditorium, both of which were of the same depth. This proved impossible. Nevertheless, by design ing a symmetrical plan of the whole theater, Davioud aligned himself with early eigh teenth-century treatises on theater architecture such as that of Andrea Pozzo, which ad Page 7 of 23
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Symmetries in Spaces, Symmetries in Listening: Musical Theater Buildings in Europe ca. 1900 vocated a symmetrical layout of stage and auditorium.34 Such spatial symmetry had been applied to entire theater buildings by French architects including Victor Louis and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux during the eighteenth century.35 Certainly, in Davioud’s mind, geo metrical shapes and architectural symmetry were strongly linked to the acoustics of an auditorium. His intention to achieve perfect audibility of the actors and musicians on stage, even in the furthest corners of the auditorium and notably in the cheaper seats, re flected his desire to attract a numerous and socially mixed audience.36 This geometrical conception was picked up on by the music critics who evaluated the new Théâtre du Châtelet after its inauguration in August 1862. They praised the structure of the many proportionally arranged columns framing the boxes on the first, second, and third galleries, which changed into big arcades in front of the areas of collective seating on the fourth and fifth galleries. To the critics, these arcades and columns—with their so cial symbolism expressed in a proportional duplication from the top (the cheaper collec tive seating areas) to the ground (where the columns framed individual boxes)—made it possible for the spectator’s gaze to descend easily toward the stage. They also ensured that the spoken word could travel up to the listeners without obstacles, whether they were seated in the expensive boxes and balcony of the dress circle or in the amphitheatri cal rows with the cheaper seats.37 Reflecting an acoustic concept of a perfect geometric correlation between viewing and listening that ignores sound reflection, this evaluation made the architectural shape of the auditorium the crucial element for good acoustics. The reception of the new Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona illustrates the connection between columns decorating the galleries above and the geometric concept of the audito rium. After the inauguration of the theater in 1847, spectators worried whether the addi tional exposed balcony on the dress circle, which cut short the auditorium in the form of a horseshoe (cf. the first balcony on the Figure 13.3) and was not supported by (p. 321) columns, was stable enough. The theater management responded to these doubts with an experiment: it had heavy stones and bricks placed on the balcony for two weeks to prove its stability.38 This anecdote reflects the importance of walls that are both architecturally and symbolically solid, as perceptible limits of the auditorium and as basic structures for the spatial distribution of the spectators and listeners. The example of the Teatro Costanzi in Rome, on the other hand, may serve to highlight the social connotations of a particular fixed spatial structure in auditoriums, one of which theater-goers of the late nineteenth century would have been very much aware. After the first few years of activity, Domenico Costanzi, the theater’s builder and owner, tried to sell it to the City of Rome, which had failed to construct or renovate a national opera house for the new Italian capital. Although the Teatro Costanzi fulfilled the criterion of a large capacity, the councilors rejected Costanzi’s offer owing to the small number of box es and the insufficient depth of the stage.39 Although this might have been a financial ar gument, since box owners significantly contributed to the funding of a theater, the “see and be seen” aspect of the presence of boxes may well have been the real origin of this rejection. The open collective seating areas, free of the symbolic structure of proportion ally arranged columns or framed boxes, had apparently not yet been accepted as an ap Page 8 of 23
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Symmetries in Spaces, Symmetries in Listening: Musical Theater Buildings in Europe ca. 1900 propriate spatial distribution within an auditorium by the more genteel members of the public.40 Instead, it was associated with the more popular politeama theaters and the cir cus.41 The “politeama” were theatres of a big capacity that were built to attract a socially varied audience since the end of the 19th century in Italy.42 The planning and construction processes of these buildings indicate the great importance of the traditional architectural semicircular form of the teatro all’italiana (U, horseshoe, or bell shape), its geometry forged by closed boxes instead of exposed balconies, and its symmetric relation to the stage. It formed the basis for the spatial distribution of specta tors and actors within the theater building and its synthetic perception by the audience, which in commercially productive theaters was now far more socially diverse. Principally, the symbolic ornamentation of the different seating areas with columns connected the semicircular forms to a hierarchical order of social classes. Since even acoustic percep tion seemed to be closely linked to a visual geometry, the geometrical forms of newly built theaters assumed an important role in the experience of musical performances. In the fol lowing, I ask how the forms of individual and collective seating affected musical reception during musical performances in the three theaters in question and outline a correspon dence with musical forms.
Listening Between Architectural Shapes and Acoustics Given the production and reception of performances of musical genres as varied as féeries, revues, symphonic concerts, and avant-garde music, many types of symmetry (p. 322) between the stage and the auditorium in the Théâtre du Châtelet can be detected. They cover a wide range of geometrical realities and ideal descriptions of relations be tween the audience and the actors. For example, the scenery of the inaugural féerie Rothomago was illustrated with a replica of the view of the Place du Châtelet, its fountain establishing the auditorium as an axis of reflection between urban life and the fiction on stage.43 The ramp formed another axis of symmetry between the mostly semicircular stage sets and choreographies and the flattened, and thus semicircular, U-shape of the auditorium. This pattern made it possible to integrate the audience into the play in the form of various conventionalized practices. The throwing of turkeys into the auditorium, a common act in popular pieces,44 descriptions of the relationships between the characters on stage (uttered by the characters themselves) and the auditorium as a “danse en ronde”45 all demonstrate the significance of round shapes—both geometrically speaking and as abstract symbolic forms—such as the circle between the stage and the auditorium as a basic structure of collective reception where the audience was part of the perfor mance. For popular music theater, one may note the frequent use of musical structures that Chevaillier would have called “the tyranny of ABA,” for example, a very basic and fre quent realization of symmetry.46 In fact, this form, along with a fast tempo and basic keys, was predominant in the musical pieces performed in féeries and revues. When the con ductor Marius Baggers started to compose more complex forms beyond the ABA form Page 9 of 23
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Symmetries in Spaces, Symmetries in Listening: Musical Theater Buildings in Europe ca. 1900 around 1914, music critics complained: “With his arrangements M. Baggers took pains to disturb many popular songs that perhaps would have been more conveniently conserved in their normal state.”47 In response, the producers of popular music theater started to stage closing vaudevilles in which the characters on stage assembled in a semicircle and invited the audience to applaud the lyrics of their songs.48 Similar visual and auditive structural connections between geometrical and symbolic mu sical conceptions can be found in the symphonic concerts that were regularly organized in the Théâtre du Châtelet by the Concerts Colonne. The conception of a semicircular po sitioning of the orchestra on stage was echoed in Berlioz’s Traité de l’instrumentation, in which the composer describes the best disposition of an orchestra as “amphitheatrical,” taking up the term used for the collective seating areas in theaters of his day.49 In La Reli gion de la Musique, Camille Mauclair points out that the junction of the two semicircles connected orchestra and audience in a perfect circle, giving the example of the théâtres du Cirque with their exposed amphitheatrical rows, which provoked collective musical re ception. At the same time, Mauclair stresses that the trapped listeners in the more closed amphitheatrical rows behind the arcades in the Théâtre du Châtelet tended to react no less passionately, but more individually and intellectually to the music: The amphitheater of the Châtelet is not similar at all. No light comes through. . . . In the Cirque d’Été we floated in the bright impressionistic coloring: here every body cancels himself in the black of a lithograph. . . . And very high hangs this cluster of people, enclosed by iron bars which seem to prevent them from falling into the abyss. (p. 323) Out of this anonymous blackness rises sometimes a norther ly wind of discordant cries: but it is no longer the cheerful insolence of the Roman plebeians that manifests itself in this bright light, truly free before the gods of the circus, when the virtuoso appeared from the bottom of the orchestra like a figure head visible from every point of the spacious orb. . . . The compactness of the Châtelet makes it less easy for the masses in the cheaper seats to participate in such a drama: there is a split into two zones, the theater takes place from the bot tom to the top while the musical arena, really suitable for concerts, allows the tempest to blow horizontally over heads rich or poor. Nevertheless, I still often go there because you do not find any bored faces and you can hear intelligent things.50 Numerous incidents show that the practice during concert performances favored the transformation of the potentially passionate listeners in the cheap amphitheater seats in to an “intelligent” audience, mainly by means of the mandate of musical education as pired to by the Concerts Colonne. For example, when the conductor, Édouard Colonne, had to calm down the spectators in the amphitheatrical rows, who were about to disturb the performance by demanding encores, he used the concert-goers seated in the lower part of the auditorium on the exposed balcony as models to demonstrate good concert be havior.51 The listeners in the cheap seats located behind the big arcades were encour aged by the conductor to intensify their comprehension and thereby their knowledge of music.52 The more genteel part of the audience was seated on an open balcony that gave Page 10 of 23
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Symmetries in Spaces, Symmetries in Listening: Musical Theater Buildings in Europe ca. 1900 the auditorium a semicircular shape similar to that of the former circus theaters. Judging by the French formalists’ and Mauclair’s descriptions, this enabled intellectual and pas sionate forms of listening to coexist during the same concerts, possibly among the same listeners. The most often-demanded and -granted encores in symphonic concerts in the Théâtre du Châtelet circa 1900 were La danse des Sylphes and La Marche Hongroise from Berlioz’s Damnation de Faust.53 These two pieces have a circular structure manifesting itself in re peated parts. It seems plausible to argue that for both audience and performers in musi cal productions, it was important to create moments of collective unity by means of musi cally and temporally symmetrical forms. The superposition of naïve and rudimentary sym metrical architectural, scenographic, and musical forms appears to have guaranteed the attractiveness of musical performances for socially diverse audiences in large theaters such as the Théâtre du Châtelet. In order to achieve such superposition, composers, li brettists, stage designers, choreographers, and conductors aimed for geometrical (circu lar) and metaphorical forms (the round dance) to complement one another. As discussed in the case of the Liceu, spectators and listeners seem to have valued the circular archi tectural structures of auditoriums as a constitutive part of geometric forms more general ly. It would be interesting to ask whether, in times of constantly increasing musical educa tion, this repeatedly practiced symmetrical superposition of architectural and musical forms was due to the simultaneously sociological and formalist concerns of musical pro ducers or to the basic geometric structure of Italian theater architecture, if only because of the enormous dimensions of the three commercially (p. 324) oriented theaters I have examined. A brief look at the reception of Italian operas in the three theaters at the be ginning of the twentieth century may yield an elementary answer. The Gran Teatre del Liceu and, especially, the Teatro Costanzi were important theaters for the propagation of Italian verismo operas in Europe. Since these operas attracted large audiences because of to their brevity and the many set changes, large theaters were particularly well suited for their staging. The Costanzi hosted the premiere of Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana in 1890, and veristic operas entered the repertoire of the Gran Teatre del Liceu in the last years of the nineteenth century despite the many negative critiques by Catalan Wagneri ans, who demanded more sincerity in the repertoire.54 According to Hanslick, Mascagni’s works, in particular, perpetuated the regular forms of the Italian opera, in contrast to the more complex structures of the French grand opéra,55 and critics in Rome praised Caval leria Rusticana as a simple and regular classical work enriched with the achievements of modern composition.56 The Roman premieres of such French operas as Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots (1888) and Bizet’s Djamileh (1890) were received more critically. In the words of Vittorio Frajese, summarizing reviews of that time, the size of the Costanzi was partic ularly important: The music [of Djamileh] is all an embroidery out of harmonic, delicate, and charm ing combinations, like a chased work; maybe it is somewhat small or banal, cer tainly such as to require a less vast theater than the Costanzi, but rather an exclu Page 11 of 23
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Symmetries in Spaces, Symmetries in Listening: Musical Theater Buildings in Europe ca. 1900 sive assembly of spectators, all packed closely and not absorbed in the abysses far away from the immense pit with their heads in the clouds of the gallery.57 My analysis of the geometric and ideal forms evoked in the practice and reception of mu sical performances in Italian-style theaters around 1900 suggests that the various people involved tended to amalgamate the distinct entities of musical production and reception— the work, the composer, the performance, and its reception—into symmetrical forms to describe moments or simply the scale of collective reception. According to many critics and theorists of the time, the violation or modification of symmetrical or regular forms de noted a tendency toward intellectualization that went beyond the intellectualization of the broader public via the comprehension of basic circular forms. Since architects, com posers, and music critics often linked the musical forms to geometrical circular shapes, the symmetrical distribution of space in the theaters discussed here probably had a great impact on the use of geometrical shapes in descriptions of collective reception. The large size of the three theaters and the semicircular arrangement of their auditoriums rein forced this kind of reception and may thus be seen as one of the origins of the interest in spatial structures and the analogies between music and architecture in aesthetic and so ciological essays found circa 1900. Conversely, the large scale of the newly built theaters throughout Europe, with their capacity to strengthen semicircular forms of musical pro duction and reception, may have been one of the major reasons for the development of “classical” music scenes, repertoires, and listeners during the twentieth century.
Archives Archives de Paris Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Rome
References Alier, Roger. 1983. La Historia del Gran Teatro del Liceo. Barcelona: La Vanguardia. Alier, Roger. 1986. El Gran Teatro del Liceo. Mexico: Ediciones Daimon. Aubrun, Juliette. 2010. “Le théâtre dans les travaux d’Haussmann: Histoire d’une recon struction d’un dessein culturel.” In Les spectacles sous le Second Empire, edited by JeanClaude Yon, 72–83. Paris: Armand Colin. Bekker, Paul. 1926. Musikgeschichte als Geschichte der musikalischen Formwandlungen. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt. Berlioz, Hector. 1843. Grand Traité d’Instrumentation et d’Orchestration Modernes. Paris: Schonenberger. Berlioz, Hector. ca. 1904. Instrumentationslehre ergänzt und revidiert von Richard Strauss, pt. 2. Leipzig: Peters. Bernard, Élisabeth. 1989. Le chef d’orchestre. Paris: La Découverte. Page 12 of 23
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Symmetries in Spaces, Symmetries in Listening: Musical Theater Buildings in Europe ca. 1900 Chevaillier, Lucien. 1911. “De la symétrie dans l’art musical.” Revue Musicale, September 15:381–388. Clairville, M., Albert Monnier, and Ernest Blum. [1865]. La Lanterne magique: Grande Re vue de l’année en quatre actes et vingt tableaux; Musique de Victor Chéri, Ballets de M. Honoré, Décors de MM. Froment, Pelette, Daran, Poisson, Robecchi et Philatre, Ma chinerie de M. Riotton, Costumes dessinés par M. Grévin. Représentée pour la première fois à Paris, sur (p. 331) le théâtre impérial du Châtelet, le Vendredi 8 décembre 1865. Di rection de M. H. Hostein. Paris: n.p. Combarieu, Jules. 1909. La musique et la magie: Étude sur les origines populaires de l’art musical; Son influence et sa fonction dans les sociétés. Paris: Alphons Picard et fils. Daly, César, and Gabriel Davioud, eds. [1874]. Architecture contemporaine: Les Théâtres de la Place du Châtelet; Théâtre du Châtelet—Théâtre-Lyrique. Construits d’après les dessins et sous la direction de M. Gabriel Davioud, Architecte. Paris: Ducher. Delitz, Heike. 2010. Gebaute Gesellschaft: Architektur als Medium des Sozialen. Frankfurt am Main: Campus. de Nussac, Sylvie. 1995. Le Théâtre du Châtelet. Paris: Assouline. Eckart-Bäcker, Ursula. 1965. Frankreichs Musik zwischen Romantik und Moderne: Die Zeit im Spiegel der Kritik. Regensburg: Bosse. Frajese, Vittorio. 1977. Dal Costanzi all’opera: Cronache, recensioni e documenti I. Rome: Edizioni Capitolium. Francfort, Didier. 2002. “Rome et l’opéra.” In Capitales culturelles, Capitales symbol iques: Paris et les expériences européennes (XVIIIe–XXe siècles), edited by Christophe Charle and Daniel Roche, 381–402. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. Gerhard, Anselm. 2005. “‘A Musical Composition May Be Compared to the Elevation of a Building’: Architekturmetaphern als Triebfedern musikästhetischer Paradigmenwechsel.” In Musik und Raum: Dimensionen im Gespräch, edited by Annette Landau and Claudia Emmenegger, 177–181. Zurich: Chronos. Hafner, Otfried. 1999. “‘Jedermann erwartet sich ein Fest’: Opernhausboom und Grün derzeit.” In Fellner and Helmer: Die Architekten der Illusion; Theaterbau und Bühnenbild in Europa, edited by Gerhard Michael Dienes, 38–41. Graz: Stadtmuseum. Hanslick, Eduard. 1892. “Der Vasall von Szigeth.” In Aus dem Tagebuch eines Musikers (= Die moderne Oper pt. 6: Kritik und Schilderungen), 147–154. Berlin: Allgemeiner Vere in für Deutsche Litteratur. Haß, Ulrike. 2005. Das Drama des Sehens: Auge, Blick und Bühnenform. Munich: Fink.
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Symmetries in Spaces, Symmetries in Listening: Musical Theater Buildings in Europe ca. 1900 Jones, Timothy. 2006. “Nineteenth-Century Orchestral and Chamber Music.” In French Music Since Berlioz, edited by Richard Langham Smith and Caroline Potter, 53–89. Alder shot: Ashgate. Lalo, Charles. 1908. Esquisse d’une esthétique musicale scientifique. Paris: Félix Alcan. Laloy, Louis. 1910. “La Musique: Edouard Colonne.” La Grande Revue (April 25): 838– 839. Lelièvre, Pierre. 1982. “Théâtre et scénographie urbaine en France au XVIIIe siècle.” In Victor Louis et le Théâtre: Scénographie, mise en scène et architecture théâtrale aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles, edited by Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique/Centre Ré gional de Publication de Bordeaux, 98–105. Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Lippmann, Friedrich. 1993. “Hanslick und die italienische Musik.” Analecta Musicologica 28:107–154. Löw, Martina. 2001. Raumsoziologie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. M. P. 1932. “Necrologie.” Revue de Musicologie 13 (42): 126. Martin, Roxane. 2007. La féerie romantique sur les scènes parisiennes (1791–1864). Paris: Champion. Mauclair, Camille. 1928. La Religion de la musique et les héros de l’orchestre. Paris: Li brairie Fischbacher. zur Nieden, Gesa. 2010. Vom Grand Spectacle zur Great Season: Das Pariser Théâtre du Châtelet als Raum musikalischer Produktion und Rezeption (1862–1914). Vienna: Böhlau. zur Nieden, Gesa. 2013a. “The Internationalization of Musical Life at the End of the Nineteenth Century in Modernized Paris and Rome.” Urban History 40 (4): 663–680. (p. 332)
zur Nieden, Gesa. 2013b. “Richard Wagner und das teatro all’italiana: Die ‘praktische’ Relevanz eines historischen Italienbilds.” Musiktheorie 28 (2): 111–125. Opéra Liceu: Una exposició en cinc actes. 1997. Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, De partament de Cultura. Osterhammel, Jürgen. 2009. Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhun derts. Munich: C. H. Beck. Pasler, Jann. 1993. “Concert Programs and Their Narratives as Emblems of Ideology.” In ternational Journal of Musicology 2:249–308. Pasler, Jann. 2002. “Building a Public for Orchestral Music: Les Concerts Colonne.” In Le concert et son public: Mutations de la vie musicale en Europe de 1780 à 1914, edited by
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Symmetries in Spaces, Symmetries in Listening: Musical Theater Buildings in Europe ca. 1900 Hans Erich Bodeker, Patrice Veit, and Michael Werner, 209–239. Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme. Pasler, Jann. 2009. Composing the Citizen : Music as Public Utility in Third Republic France. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rabreau, Daniel. 1982. “Le Grand Théâtre de Victor Louis: Des vérités, des impressions.” In Victor Louis et le Théâtre: Scénographie, mise en scène et architecture théâtrale aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles, edited by Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique/Centre Ré gional de Publication de Bordeaux, 21–41. Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Radigales i Babi, Jaume. 1998. Els Orígens del Gran Teatre del Liceu. Barcelona: Publica tions de l’Abadia de Montserrat. Schäfers, Bernhard. 2003. Architektursoziologie: Grundlagen—Epochen—Themen. Opladen: Leske und Budrich. Simmel, Georg. (1896) 1998. “Architektonische Neigungen im sozialen Wesen.” In Soziol ogische Ästhetik, edited by Klaus Lichtblau, 77–92. Bodenheim: Philo. Sorba, Carlotta. 2008. “Lieux du théâtre et architecture de la société urbaine: éléments sur le cas italien à la fin du XIXe siècle.” In Mélodies urbaines. La musique dans les villes d’Europe (XVIe–XIXe siècles), edited by Laure Gauthier and Melanie Traversier, 241–252. Paris: PUPS. Stoullig, Edmond, and Édouard Noël. 1903. “Théâtre du Châtelet.” Les Annales du Théâtre et de la Musique 29:349–356. Stoullig, Edmond, and Édouard Noël. 1907. “Concerts Colonne: 20 Janvier.” Les Annales du Théâtre et de la Musique 33:511–512. Thaon, Bernard. 1991. “Acoustique au théâtre.” In Les Théâtres de Paris, edited by Geneviève Latour and Florence Claval, 51–54. Paris: Délégation à l’action artistique de la ville de Paris. Toelle, Jutta. 2010. “Der Duft der großen weiten Welt: Ideen zur weltweiten Ausbreitung der italienischen Oper im 19. Jahrhundert.” In Die Oper im Wandel der Gesellschaft: Kul turtransfers und Netzwerke des Musiktheaters in Europe, edited by Sven Oliver Müller, Philipp Ther, Jutta Toelle, and Gesa zur Nieden, 255–256. Vienna: Böhlau. Tribó, Jaume. 1997. “L’activitat artística dels primers cinquanta anys del Liceu.” In Opéra Liceu: Una exposiciò in cinc actes. Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, Departament de Cultura. Viale Ferrero, Mercedes. 1988. “Luogo teatrale e spazio scenico.” In Storia dell’opera ital iana (pt. 2, I sistemi, vol. 5, La spettacolarità), edited by Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli, 1–122. Turin: E.D.T. Page 15 of 23
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Symmetries in Spaces, Symmetries in Listening: Musical Theater Buildings in Europe ca. 1900 Voss, Egon. 1997. “Wagner konzertant, oder Der Walkürenritt im Zirkus als Ret tung vor der Oper.” In Festschrift Walter Wiora zum 90. Geburtstag, edited by ChristophHellmut Mahling, 547–554. Tutzing: Schneider. (p. 333)
Ziemer, Hansjakob. 2013. “Klang der Gesellschaft: Zur Soziologisierung des Klangs im Konzert, 1900–1930.” In Auditive Medienkulturen: Techniken des Hörens und Praktiken der Klanggestaltung, edited by Axel Volmar and Jens Schröter, 145–163. Bielefeld: Tran script. (p. 334)
Notes: (1.) Toelle, Jutta. 2010. “Der Duft der großen weiten Welt: Ideen zur weltweiten Ausbre itung der italienischen Oper im 19. Jahrhundert.” In Die Oper im Wandel der Gesellschaft: Kulturtransfers und Netzwerke des Musiktheaters in Europa, edited by Sven Oliver Müller, Philipp Ther, Jutta Toelle, and Gesa zur Nieden, 251–261. Vienna: Böhlau, 255– 256; Hafner, Otfried. 1999. “‘Jedermann erwartet sich ein Fest’: Opernhausboom und Gründerzeit.” In Fellner and Helmer: Die Architekten der Illusion; Theaterbau und Büh nenbild in Europa, edited by Gerhard Michael Dienes, 38–41. Graz: Stadtmuseum. (2.) Aubrun, Juliette. 2010. “Le théâtre dans les travaux d’Haussmann: Histoire d’une re construction d’un dessein culturel.” In Les spectacles sous le Second Empire, edited by Jean-Claude Yon, 72–83. Paris: Armand Colin, 72–83. (3.) For the importance of opera production and processes of urban renovation as para digms for national superiority on an international European level, see Osterhammel, Jür gen. 2009. Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Munich: C. H. Beck, 28–31. (4.) Alier, Roger. 1983. La Historia del Gran Teatro del Liceo. Barcelona: La Vanguardia, 54; zur Nieden, Gesa. 2013a. “The Internationalization of Musical Life at the End of the Nineteenth Century in Modernized Paris and Rome.” Urban History 40 (4): 663–680. (5.) For the Gran Teatre del Liceu, see Opéra Liceu: Una exposició en cinc actes. 1997. Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, Departament de Cultura, esp. 79–81. See also Radi gales i Babi, Jaume. 1998. Els Orígens del Gran Teatre del Liceu. Barcelona: Publications de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 134–135. For the Théâtre du Châtelet, see de Nussac, Sylvie. 1995. Le Théâtre du Châtelet. Paris: Assouline. For the Teatro Costanzi, see Frajese, Vit torio. 1977. Dal Costanzi all’opera: Cronache, recensioni e documenti I. Rome: Edizioni Capitolium. (6.) For Hanslick’s favorable reception of music by French composers see Pasler, Jann. 2009. Composing the Citizen: Music as Public Utility in Third Republic France. Berkeley: University of California Press, 231–233, 259. (7.) Jones, Timothy. 2006. “Nineteenth-Century Orchestral and Chamber Music.” In French Music Since Berlioz, edited by Richard Langham Smith and Caroline Potter, 53– 89. Aldershot: Ashgate, 77. Page 16 of 23
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Symmetries in Spaces, Symmetries in Listening: Musical Theater Buildings in Europe ca. 1900 (8.) For an overview of publications on the aesthetics of music in France circa 1900, see Eckart-Bäcker, Ursula. 1965. Frankreichs Musik zwischen Romantik und Moderne: Die Zeit im Spiegel der Kritik. Regensburg: Bosse, 291–314. For the many parallels with the German-speaking debate on formalism relating to architecture and the problem of indi vidual versus collective listening, see Ziemer, Hansjakob. 2013. “Klang der Gesellschaft: Zur Soziologisierung des Klangs im Konzert, 1900–1930.” In Auditive Medienkulturen: Techniken des Hörens und Praktiken der Klanggestaltung, edited by Axel Volmar and Jens Schröter, 145–163. Bielefeld: Transcript. (9.) “Et au fond, ce qui a manqué jusqu’ici au formalisme pour qu’il puisse expliquer tous les faits, c’est peut-être uniquement l’élément sociologique.” Lalo, Charles. 1908. Es quisse d’une esthétique musicale scientifique. Paris: Félix Alcan, 18. For Lalo, the “socio logical element” implies the study of the laws of musical production and reception as well as their historical evolution. Unless otherwise specified, all translations were provided by the author. (10.) “Bref l’intérêt proprement musical réside, selon Hanslick, dans deux éléments seuls: la perception de la forme, sorte d’arabesque sonore; c’est le formalisme; et la perception de la dynamique, c’est-à-dire de l’intensité et des mouvements d’états d’âme indéter minés dans leur qualité; c’est le dynamisme. Quant aux sentiments définis, ce troisième facteur n’entre comme élément que dans le mauvais goût de ceux qui ne comprennent réellement pas la musique en elle-même et ne l’entendent pas pour elle-même.” Lalo (1908): 16, 19. (11.) Lalo (1908): 21: “Ainsi, peut-être le dynamisme de Hanslick bien compris est-il la so lution la plus prudente et la plus libérale, parce qu’il permet de faire sa place à toute vari ation historique bien constatée.” (In this way, Hanslick’s concept of a well-understood dy namic is perhaps the most careful and liberal solution, since it makes it possible to locate every known historical variation.) (12.) Chevaillier, Lucien. 1911. “De la symétrie dans l’art musical.” Revue Musicale (September 15): 381–388. Lucien Chevaillier was a pianist and composer educated at the Paris Conservatoire. After eight years of teaching harmony and music history at the Con servatory of Strasbourg, he directed the music school of Belford. Chevaillier published texts on the aesthetics of music in the journal Monde Musical. He also composed some operas. In 1929 he wrote a preface to the French translation of Paul Bekker’s Musikgeschichte als Geschichte der musikalischen Formwandlungen, published as La Musique: Les transformations des formes musicales depuis l’antiquité jusqu’à nos jours. Paris: Payot, 1929. M. P. 1932. “Necrologie.” Revue de Musicologie 13 (42): 126. (13.) As examples of “symmetrical” compositions, Chevailler analyzes Couperin’s gavotte Bourbonnaise, Bach’s fugue in F major (Well-Tempered Clavier, vol. 2, no. 12) and Alle mande (2nd French Suite in C minor), Mozart’s Sonata in C major, Beethoven’s Appas sionata, Chopin’s Sonata in B minor, and Beethoven’s Symphony no. 5 in C minor.
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Symmetries in Spaces, Symmetries in Listening: Musical Theater Buildings in Europe ca. 1900 (14.) Chevaillier (1911): 381. The naturalness of musical forms is also underlined in Paul Bekker’s Musikgeschichte, which applies a Darwinist evolutionary approach described as “Metamorphose” (following Goethe’s description). Bekker, Paul. 1926. Musikgeschichte als Geschichte der musikalischen Formwandlungen. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 8–9. (15.) “Le son est une répétition exacte de vibrations égales dans des temps égaux. Il est assez naturel que le plan selon lequel ces sons sont ordonnés soit fait à l’image du son luimême. Comment obtenir un ensemble plus homogène qu’en faisant obéir au même principe l’élément et son système de combinaison?” Chevaillier (1911): 382. (16.) Chevaillier (1911): 388. (17.) “[L]a musique est aussi l’art—avec l’architecture—où la symétrie exacte ou symétrie pure tient la plus grande place. L’architecture, c’est la symétrie dans l’espace: la musique, la symétrie dans le temps.” Chevaillier (1911): 381. (18.) Chevaillier (1911): 383. (19.) Combarieu, Jules. 1909. La musique et la magie: Étude sur les origines populaires de l’art musical; Son influence et sa fonction dans les sociétés. Paris: Alphons Picard et fils, 358: “Une page de symphonie ou de drame lyrique est une suite d’images—tout comme une page de poésie—mais d’images réalisées avec des sensations, non avec des concepts.” (A symphonic or operatic page is a succession of images—like a page of poetry —but of images realized with sensations and not with concepts.) (20.) Bernard, Élisabeth. 1989. Le chef d’orchestre. Paris: La Découverte, 20–21. (21.) “Notez ici que je m’abstiendrai encore de parler de tout ce qui peut être descriptif: car dés qu’il y a un titre à un morceau, l’unité musicale passe au second plan et l’image est là pour créer entre des parties peut-être hétérogènes un lien qui, lui, n’a plus rien de musical.” Chevaillier (1911): 388. (22.) Gerhard, Anselm. 2005. “‘A musical composition may be compared to the elevation of a building’: Architekturmetaphern als Triebfedern musikästhetischer Paradigmenwech sel.” In Musik und Raum: Dimensionen im Gespräch, edited by Annette Landau and Clau dia Emmenegger, 175–189. Zurich: Chronos, 177–181. (23.) “[L]’œuvre musicale moderne est plus difficilement accessible à l’oreille demeurée encore classique de la plupart des auditeurs. Il faut reconnaître cependant que cette évo lution est logique, inévitable, puisque parallèle à l’évolution générale des sciences et de l’esprit humain.” Chevaillier (1911): 388. (24.) Simmel, Georg. (1896) 1998. “Architektonische Neigungen im sozialen Wesen.” In Soziologische Ästhetik, edited by Klaus Lichtblau, 77–92. Bodenheim: Philo, 82. (25.) Simmel (1998): 87. Page 18 of 23
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Symmetries in Spaces, Symmetries in Listening: Musical Theater Buildings in Europe ca. 1900 (26.) Löw, Martina. 2001. Raumsoziologie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. See also Delitz, Heike. 2010. Gebaute Gesellschaft: Architektur als Medium des Sozialen. Frankfurt am Main: Campus. (27.) Schäfers, Bernhard. 2003. Architektursoziologie: Grundlagen—Epochen—Themen. Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 31–32. (28.) Viale Ferrero, Mercedes. 1988. “Luogo teatrale e spazio scenico.” In Storia dell’opera italiana (pt. 2, I sistemi, vol. 5, La spettacolarità), edited by Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli, 1–122. Turin: E.D.T., 3–4. (29.) zur Nieden, Gesa. 2013b. “Richard Wagner und das teatro all’italiana: Die ‘praktis che’ Relevanz eines historischen Italienbilds.” Musiktheorie 28 (2): 111–125. See also Voss, Egon. 1997. “Wagner konzertant, oder Der Walkürenritt im Zirkus als Rettung vor der Oper.” In Festschrift Walter Wiora zum 90. Geburtstag, edited by Christoph-Hellmut Mahling, 547–554. Tutzing: Schneider. (30.) With the Théâtre du Châtelet and the Théâtre Lyrique on the new Place du Châtelet, Davioud created an extremely symmetrical urban space right at the intersection of the two main axes, Rue de Rivoli and Boulevard de Sébastopol. That symmetry continued in the interior of the Théâtre du Châtelet, where the arcades of the auditorium reflected the arcades in front of the loggia in the theater façade. (31.) zur Nieden, Gesa. 2010. Vom Grand Spectacle zur Great Season: Das Pariser Théâtre du Châtelet als Raum musikalischer Produktion und Rezeption (1862–1914). Vi enna: Böhlau, 49–78. (32.) Daly, César, and Gabriel Davioud, eds. [1874]. Architecture Contemporaine: Les Théâtres de la Place du Châtelet; Théâtre du Châtelet—Théâtre-Lyrique. Construits d’après les dessins et sous la direction de M. Gabriel Davioud, Architecte. Paris: Ducher, 21: “La forme demi-circulaire avec tangentes normales à la scène était plus favorable à la vue que la disposition en fer à cheval avec des côtés rentrant vers l’ouverture de la scène, qui est plus généralement employée pour les théâtres de chant.” (The semicircular form with normal tangents up to the stage was more favorable to a good view than was the horseshoe design with its ends converging at the stage opening, which is generally used in theaters for sung music.) (33.) Daly and Davioud (1874): 20: “L’écho produit sur la paroi ne doit donc profiter qu’aux spectateurs voisins du point où il s’est produit. Il n’y a qu’une seule partie de la salle qui puisse être disposé de façon à renvoyer au loin, sans inconvénient, les sons qu’elle reçoit: celle qui avoisine la scène. C’est qu’en effet les sons réfléchis par elle, étant renvoyés très-près de leur point d’émission, n’ont subi qu’une déviation insignifi ante qui leur permet d’arriver presque en même temps que le son direct et de se confon dre sensiblement avec lui.” (The echo reflected by the wall must only reach the audience members sitting next to the point where is is reflected. There is only one part of the audi torium that can be arranged to reflect direct sounds further without any inconvenience: Page 19 of 23
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Symmetries in Spaces, Symmetries in Listening: Musical Theater Buildings in Europe ca. 1900 the part next to the stage. Indeed, since in this part the sounds are reflected very close to their point of emission, they have undergone only a minor deviation, permitting them to arrive at about the same time as the direct sound and to be considerably mixed with it.) (34.) Haß, Ulrike. 2005. Das Drama des Sehens: Auge, Blick und Bühnenform. Munich: Fink, 366–374. (35.) Rabreau, Daniel. 1982. “Le Grand Théâtre de Victor Louis: Des vérités, des impres sions,” 21–41, here 30–32, and Lelièvre, Pierre. 1982. “Théâtre et scénographie urbaine en France au XVIIIe siècle,” 98–105, here 101. Both in Victor Louis et le Théâtre: Scéno graphie, mise en scène et architecture théâtrale aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles, edited by Cen tre National de la Recherche Scientifique/Centre Régional de Publication de Bordeaux. Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. (36.) It has to be emphasized that the breakthrough of acoustic research concerning ar chitectural buildings took place only at the beginning of the twentieth century, under Wal lace Clement Sabine. (37.) Le Moniteur Universel, August 22, 1862, as cited in Thaon, Bernard. 1991. “Acous tique au théâtre.” In Les Théâtres de Paris, edited by Geneviève Latour and Florence Claval, 51–54. Paris: Délégation à l’action artistique de la ville de Paris, 54: “La voix des acteurs nous a semblé répercutée dans de bonnes conditions d’acoustique. De larges ar cades donnent en effet passage à l’œil descendant du spectateur et à la voix montante de l’acteur.” (The actors’ voices seemed to have resounded under good acoustic conditions. Ample arcades create the effect of a passage downward for the spectator’s eye and up ward for the actor’s voice.) (38.) Alier (1983): 32; see also Alier, Roger. 1986. El Gran Teatro del Liceo. Mexico: Edi ciones Daimon, 20–21. (39.) Opere Governative ed edilizie per Roma (Government buildings for Rome), Minis tero dei Lavori Pubblici, 100° proposta al Consiglio Comunale di Roma nella sessione or dinaria primaverila (100th proposal to the Roman City Council in its ordinary spring ses sion), Seduta del giorno 8° maggio 1885 (Session of May 8, 1885). Fasc. 434, busta 155, ACS. (40.) See Francfort, Didier. 2002. “Rome et l’opéra.” In Capitales culturelles, Capitales symboliques: Paris et les expériences européennes (XVIIIe–XXe siècles), edited by Christophe Charle and Daniel Roche, 381–402, pt. 6. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 383–384. (41.) In fact, in 1887 a councilor complained that the Teatro Costanzi was not fit to be come the Roman “teatro massimo,” since it had been built as a politeama. Opere Governa tive ed edilizie per Roma (Government buildings for Rome), Ministero dei Lavori Pubblici. 48° Proposta al Consiglio Comunale di Roma nella sessione ordinaria primaverile Seduta
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Symmetries in Spaces, Symmetries in Listening: Musical Theater Buildings in Europe ca. 1900 del 4 Marzo 1887 (48th proposal to the Roman City Council in its ordinary spring session of March 4, 1887). ACS. Fasc. 434, busta 155, ACS. (42.) For more information see Sorba, Carlotta. 2008. “Lieux du théâtre et architecture de la société urbaine: éléments sur le cas italien à la fin du XIXe siècle.” In Mélodies ur baines. La musique dans les villes d’Europe (XVIe–XIXe siècles), edited by Laure Gauthier and Melanie Traversier, 241–252. Paris: PUPS, esp. 249–252. (43.) Rothomago: Esquisse de décor pour le tableau 2 du prologue ou pour le tableau 4 de l’acte II; Escaliers monumentaux conduisant à la terrasse d’un palais. 1862. Paris, Biblio thèque de l’Opéra, Opéra Esq. 19 (199). Accessed July 16, 2018. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/ 12148/btv1b7001255v (44.) Tribó, Jaume. 1997. “L’activitat artística dels primers cinquanta anys del Liceu.” In Opéra Liceu (1998): 59; Martin, Roxane. 2007. La féerie romantique sur les scènes parisi ennes (1791–1864), Paris: Champion, 413. (45.) Clairville, M., Albert Monnier, and Ernest Blum. [1865]. La Lanterne magique: Grande Revue de l’année en quatre actes et vingt tableaux; Musique de Victor Chéri, Bal lets de M. Honoré, Décors de MM. Froment, Pelette, Daran, Poisson, Robecchi et Phila tre, Machinerie de M. Riotton, Costumes dessinés par M. Grévin. Représentée pour la première fois à Paris, sur le théâtre impérial du Châtelet, le Vendredi 8 décembre 1865. Direction de M. H. Hostein. Paris: n.p., 22. (46.) “La tyrannie de l’ABA.” Chevaillier (1911): 388. (47.) “M. Baggers s’est donné beaucoup de peine pour déranger en les arrangeant maints airs populaires que peut-être il eût été plus convenable de conserver dans leur état nor mal.” Stoullig, Edmond, and Édouard Noël. 1903. “Théâtre du Châtelet.” Les Annales du théâtre et de la musique 29:356. (48.) As to the Théâtre du Châtelet, the resort to closing vaudevilles had been prefigured by more frequent “mises en abîme” starting in 1909. The closing pieces performed before 1914 did not have texts that directly addressed the audience. See zur Nieden, Gesa (2010): 145–147. (49.) Berlioz, Hector. 1843. Grand Traité d’Instrumentation et d’Orchestration Modernes. Paris: Schonenberger, 284–285. See also Berlioz, Hector. ca. 1904. Instrumentationslehre ergänzt und revidiert von Richard Strauss, pt. 2. Leipzig: Peters, 434ff. (50.) “L’amphithéâtre du Châtelet n’est point semblable. Nulle lumire n’y parvient. . . . Au Cirque d’Eté nous flottions dans le joyeux coloris impressionniste: ici chacun s’annule dans un noir de lithographie. . . . Et très haut cette grappe humaine est suspendue, envi ronnée de barres de fer qui semblent l’empêcher de crouler dans le gouffre. De cette noirceur anonyme s’élève parfois un aquilon de cris discords: mais ce n’est plus cette joyeuse insolence de plèbe romaine se manifestant dans la lumière éclatante, et vraiment libre comme devant les dieux du cirque, lorsque, à l’extrémité de l’orchestre, avançant Page 21 of 23
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Symmetries in Spaces, Symmetries in Listening: Musical Theater Buildings in Europe ca. 1900 comme une proue, le virtuose apparaissait, visible de tous les points de l’orbe vaste. . . . L’entassement du Châtelet rend moins aisée cette participation de la foule des petites places au drame: il y a scission entre deux zones, le théâtre se passe de bas en haut, alors que l’arène musicale, vraiment propre au concert, permet que la tempête souffle horizon talement sur les têtes riches ou pauvres. Cependant je vais là souvent encore, parce qu’on n’y trouve point de visages blasés, et qu’on y entend des choses intelligentes.” Mauclair, Camille. 1928. La Religion de la musique et les héros de l’orchestre. Paris: Li brairie Fischbacher, 277–278. (51.) Laloy, Louis. 1910. “La Musique: Edouard Colonne.” La Grande Revue (April 25): 838–839. This report conforms to the notice of the Secrétaire du Chant on the concert of April 3, 1896: “Vendredi Saint 3 Avril 1896 Suite.” In 22e Année (1895–1896): Comptesrendus des Concerts (Soli et Chœurs): Rapport du Secrétaire du Chant. V3S/17, Archives de l’Association artistique des Concerts Colonne, AdP. Colonne’s authority was preserved in the twentieth century: Stoullig, Edmond, and Édouard Noël. 1907. “Concerts Colonne : 20 Janvier.” Les Annales du Théâtre et de la Musique 33:511–512. (52.) This aim was mainly achieved by introductory lectures on the works to be played and by the programming itself, which often was organized in cycles of works. See Pasler, Jann. 2002. “Building a Public for Orchestral Music: Les Concerts Colonne.” In Le concert et son public: Mutations de la vie musicale en Europe de 1780 à 1914, edited by Hans Erich Bödeker, Patrice Veit, and Michael Werner. Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 214, 216, 228; Pasler, Jann. 1993. “Concert Programs and Their Narratives as Emblems of Ideology.” International Journal of Musicology 2:249–308, here 263. (53.) Comptes-rendus des concerts. V3S/14–V3S/36, Archives de l’Association Artistique des Concerts Colonne, AdP. (54.) Alier (1983): 99. (55.) Hanslick, Eduard. 1892. “Der Vasall von Szigeth.” In Aus dem Tagebuche eines Musikers (= Die moderne Oper 6, Kritik und Schilderungen), 147–154. Berlin: Allgemein er Verein für Deutsche Litteratur, as cited by Lippmann, Friedrich. 1993. “Hanslick und die italienische Musik.” Analecta Musicologica 28:107–154, here 150: “Für mein Teil gestehe ich offen, dass ich die unverfälschten, die italienischen Italiener vorziehe. Wir machen uns keine Illusionen darüber, dass diese in der Musik ausgestorben sind.” (For my part, I freely admit to preferring the genuine, Italian Italians. We are under no illusion that these have died out in music.) (56.) Frajese (1977): 110. (57.) “La musica [of Djamileh] è tutto un ricamo di combinazioni armoniche, delicate e leggiadre, come miracoloso lavoro di cesello fiorentino; forse è un po’ minuta, un po’ tri ta, certamente tale da richiedere un teatro meno ampio del Costanzi, una eletta accolta di spettatori, tutti stretti intorno, e non sprofondati negli abissi lontani della immensa platea, non col capo fra le nuvole del loggione.” Frajese (1977): 114. For more informa Page 22 of 23
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Symmetries in Spaces, Symmetries in Listening: Musical Theater Buildings in Europe ca. 1900 tion about the staging of Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots (1888) at the Costanzi, see Frajese (1977): 101.
Gesa Zur Nieden
Gesa zur Nieden, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
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Music in the Air—Listening in the Streets: Popular Music and Urban Listen ing Habits in Berlin ca. 1900
Music in the Air—Listening in the Streets: Popular Mu sic and Urban Listening Habits in Berlin ca. 1900 Daniel Morat The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries Edited by Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer Print Publication Date: Jan 2019 Subject: Music, Musicology and Music History Online Publication Date: Nov 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190466961.013.15
Abstract and Keywords The history of music listening has focused mainly on art music and the cultivated listen ers of the educated classes. But the nineteenth century saw not only the rise of concert music and its middle- and upper-class audiences, it also witnessed the “popular music revolution” in European and North American cities and metropolises. By drawing on the example of turn-of-the-century Berlin, this chapter explores the place of popular music within modern urban leisure culture. The chapter investigates the different venues and locations in which popular music was performed and consumed (dance halls, café ter races, amusements parks, street corners, and so on). Then it focuses on the ways in which popular music was listened to and appropriated by urbanites and how these urbanlistening habits facilitated the process of mental adaptation to big-city life and the devel opment of a metropolitan mentality. Keywords: aesthetic hierarchies, turn-of-the-century Berlin, ideology of cultivation, popular music, street listening, urbanity
FOR a long time, the history of listening to music has focused mainly on art music and the cultivated listeners of the educated classes.1 This older narrative describes the disciplin ing of the middle-class concert and opera audiences during the late eighteenth and nine teenth centuries: they fell silent and learned to concentrate on the musical performance.2 This development was linked to the growing divide between art music and popular music, or between high culture and popular culture in a broader sense.3 At the same time, it can be understood as a divide between silence and noise: whereas middle-class culture was based on a clear separation of different sounds (music, recitation, conversation, and so on) before a background of silence, popular culture allowed a mixture of sounds (music, laughter, clatter, talking, and so on) that could blur into noise.4 It is therefore no surprise that music that was perceived to occur at the wrong time and in the wrong place played an important role in the complaints about noise that proliferated in middle-class publica tions from the nineteenth century on. These complaints could address both the pianoplaying daughter of the neighbors and popular musicians performing on the streets or in Page 1 of 20
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Music in the Air—Listening in the Streets: Popular Music and Urban Listen ing Habits in Berlin ca. 1900 coffeehouses. In 1908 the German philosopher and anti-noise activist Theodor Lessing railed against the latter, calling it a “music frenzy”: A terrible nuisance afflicts all of Germany: the popular restaurant or coffeehouse concert. If you rely on the benevolence of your fellow men, have musically attuned ears, and are unable to retreat from professional life, you will be almost butchered to death by music, with which everybody is drowning out their pain and sor row. . . . All places of recreation are overfilled with bad music. The latest hit song [Gassenhauer], today the ‘Lied von der Holzauktion,’ tomorrow the maxixe, haunts us into our dreams at night. The popular music frenzy affects the culture of the ear in the same (p. 336) way that the illustrated journal, the comic paper, and the tasteless artistic reproduction affects the culture of the eye.5 Here, a disdain for the alleged bad quality of popular music goes hand in hand with the complaint about its ubiquity. Music that was part of everyday life or accompanied every day activities, and that was not supposed to be listened to carefully, was experienced as noise. Behind this perception and behind the call for the separation of sounds lies another binary opposition: that between concentration and diversion. Whereas art music required concentrated listening, popular music did not only intend to divert the mind from the troubles of everyday life and so could be listened to inattentively, but its unwanted pres ence also made concentration on other things impossible. It is clear that these binary oppositions of art music and popular music, silence and noise, concentration and diversion, and so on are themselves a product of the nineteenth-centu ry middle-class culture and mindset. We must be careful, therefore, not to adopt them in an uncritical manner when dealing with the history of music listening today. Often, though, the “art of listening,” conceptualized as a cultural skill, seems to be modeled on the ideal of the formal concert listener. Yet the consumption of popular music should not be measured by this standard and classified as a diminished form of so-called serious mu sic listening. Instead, it should be understood as a genuine form of musical practice, of “musicking,” that was part of the aestheticization of everyday life brought about by the rise of popular culture since the mid-nineteenth century.6 In what follows I elaborate on this point in two steps, taking fin-de-siècle Berlin as a case study. In the first section I briefly discuss the notion of popular music and give a short overview of the venues and contexts in which it was performed in Berlin at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. In the second section I focus on the ways in which popular music was listened to and appropriated by urbanites and on how these urban listening habits facilitated the process of mental adaptation to big-city life and of developing a met ropolitan mentality.
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Music in the Air—Listening in the Streets: Popular Music and Urban Listen ing Habits in Berlin ca. 1900
Popular Music in Nineteenth- and Early Twenti eth-Century Berlin The nineteenth century experienced what Derek Scott has called the “popular music revo lution.”7 According to Scott and others, the development of musical life in nineteenth-cen tury Europe and North America was characterized by two important features: the afore mentioned divide between art music and popular music and the “incorporation of music into a system of capitalist enterprise.”8 In other words, popular music became part of the growing entertainment industry, which supplied the solvent populace of the big cities in particular with ever-new amusements and leisure opportunities. This commercialization can also be understood as a kind of democratization of music, as Sabine (p. 337) Gies brecht-Schutte has emphasized.9 This did not only mean that larger parts of the populace now gained access to music. It also meant that the societal function of music fundamen tally changed in the transition from an estate-based to a civil society. In the ancien régime, music making and the different musical genres were closely tied to the respective estates in which and for which they were performed. In contrast, the civil society of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought forth the idea of “music for everybody.”10 The ensuing divide between art music and popular music was a reaction to this democratization. The rising middle classes sought a means of social distinction in the arts and created the idea of a highbrow culture that was distinguished by taste, manners, and education from the lowbrow culture of the masses. Within this system, the distinction between art music and popular music was not necessarily dependent on the character of the music itself. An overture by Mozart, Beethoven, or Verdi was a piece of art when it was performed as part of the entire opera in an opera house for a silent and concentrated audience, but it was a piece of popular music when it was performed as part of a potpour ri on a coffeehouse terrace before a chattering crowd. Whereas art music increasingly was superelevated into the sphere of the extraordinary, the example of the coffeehouse terrace shows that popular music was becoming part of everyday life for many city dwellers of the middle and lower classes alike.11 This is espe cially true for the metropolitan cities that spearheaded the popular music revolution of the nineteenth century. In his study devoted to this revolution, Derek Scott examines pop ular music in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna, and for each of these cities he identi fies a representative musical format: for Vienna it was the Viennese waltz, for New York the minstrel show, for London the music hall, and for Paris the cabaret. All of these for mats have gained international significance and have influenced the evolution of popular music in other places, among them Berlin. The international transfer of musical styles and formats was indeed an important component of the popular music revolution of the nineteenth century. Prior to the founding of the German Empire in 1871, however, Berlin did not play an equally important part in this metropolitan concert, and popular music in Berlin remained less influential in the musical development of other metropolises relative to the degree of foreign influence it experienced. But a study of Berlin in the nineteenth century similar to Scott’s for London, New York, Paris, and Vienna would no doubt identi
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Music in the Air—Listening in the Streets: Popular Music and Urban Listen ing Habits in Berlin ca. 1900 fy a similarly typical musical format driving the popular music revolution there: the mili tary concert. Berlin was not only the Prussian royal capital (and capital of the German Empire after 1871) but also a garrison town with a heavy military presence. At the end of the nine teenth century, thirteen infantry regiments, eight cavalry regiments, and five artillery regiments of the Guards Corps had been garrisoned in Berlin, along with the Guards Pio neer Battalion and the Guards Train Battalion, and each of these units had its own music corps.12 At the same time, a large leisure infrastructure of coffeehouses and beer gar dens, recreation parks, and outing destinations developed on the outskirts of Berlin dur ing the nineteenth century. This started with the Tiergarten in the west of the city, where already in the eighteenth century refreshments had been sold in linen tents near the Spree. Since then, this area had been known as In den Zelten, or “in the (p. 338) tents,” and later expanded into a series of garden cafés.13 In 1844 Kroll’s Etablissement, a huge amusements complex with a large beer garden which was turned into an opera house in the 1890s, opened its doors between In den Zelten and the Brandenburg Gate.14 Finally, the Berlin Zoo, also opened in 1844, was developed into a recreation park with restau rants and music pavilions under its third director, Heinrich Bodinus, after 1869.15 In addi tion, more beer gardens and amusement areas were established as the city of Berlin grew in the last third of the nineteenth century: brewery gardens in the northern and eastern working-class districts of Wedding and Friedrichshain, and more to the south, the Tivoli amusement park in Kreuzberg and the huge beer gardens at Tempelhof, Hasenheide, and Treptower Park.16 In all of these leisure establishments music was performed. In fact, music was commonly one of the main attractions and an important means of distinction in the competition be tween the various entertainment offerings. The concert promoters were often the propri etors of the garden cafés and beer gardens, which were in many cases the breweries that served their own beer. The musicians could be small coffeehouse ensembles and civilian bandsmen with a temporary engagement. But more often than not, they were military bands. The military music corps were allowed to accept civilian engagements and domi nated the popular music market, leading to complaints by civilian musicians, who criti cized the unfair competition.17 This could not lessen the dominance of the military bands, though. The programs of their garden concerts did not consist exclusively of military marches but usually also encompassed popular waltzes and occasionally lighter pieces by Mozart, Beethoven, or Carl Maria von Weber.18 However, taken together with the fre quent military parades and exercises on the streets and squares of Berlin, it is fair to say that military music, that is, music played by military bands and with a bias for marches and military rhythms, dominated the music that could be heard in public places in Berlin during the nineteenth century and until World War I. This can be seen from a typical con cert advertiser from 1904 in which military bands dominated the performances in the zoo, in Kroll’s Etablissement, In den Zelten, and in the brewery gardens in the Hasenhei de and in northern and eastern Berlin (see Figure 14.1). An etching of the same period shows the atmosphere of these concert gardens, where music was played by a military Page 4 of 20
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Music in the Air—Listening in the Streets: Popular Music and Urban Listen ing Habits in Berlin ca. 1900 band to a chattering, eating, and drinking crowd (see Figure 14.2). The picture also shows the intermingling of servicemen and civilians in the audience. One of the most important promoters of this merging of military and popular music in nineteenth-century Berlin was Wilhelm Wieprecht. Born in 1802 in Saxony-Anhalt, in 1838 the composer, conductor, and arranger Wieprecht became the director of all the mu sic corps of the Guards Corps in Berlin. From then until his death in 1872, he was the most important conductor and reformer of Prussian military music. On the occasion of Czar Nicholas I’s visit to Berlin on May 8, 1838, he put together a gigantic orchestra of a thousand musicians and two hundred tambours taken from all the Berlin music corps and performed the Great Tattoo for the first time; even now, in its current form, it retains Wieprecht’s innovations. In July 1867 he and his orchestra won the first prize in a military band competition at the World Fair in Paris, and he was celebrated like a (p. 339) (p. 340) war hero in Berlin. There, he not only performed on military occasions but also was en gaged by civilian concert promoters. One of these was the aforementioned director of the Berlin Zoo, Heinrich Bodinus, who signed a contract with Wieprecht for sixteen summer concerts in the zoo in 1870.19
Figure 14.1. Berliner Konzert-Anzeiger (Berlin Con cert Advertiser) (1904), Beiblatt der Allgemeinen Musikalischen Rundschau, May 22–28. From Wolf gang, Jansen, and Ruldolf Lorenzen. 1987. Possen, Piefke und Posaunen: Sommertheater und Gartenkonzerte in Berlin. Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 4. Freie Universität Berlin (88/87/22705[6]).
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Music in the Air—Listening in the Streets: Popular Music and Urban Listen ing Habits in Berlin ca. 1900
Figure 14.2. “Concert Garden at the Turn of the Century.” From Born, Franz. 1966. Berliner Luft: Eine Weltstadt und ihr Komponist Paul Lincke. Berlin: Apollo-Verlag, fig. 6. Freie Universität Berlin (18/72/15560).
Although the popularity of military music persisted until the end of the German Empire, a second major stream of popular music gained importance in the 1880s and 1890s: the op eretta and so-called Schlager music.20 The “große Schlagerzeit” (great period of the Sch lager music) in Berlin around 1900, as Walter Kiaulehn has termed it, was associated with such popular operetta composers as Paul Lincke, Walter Kollo, and Jean Gilbert.21 Berlin then became the center of German operetta and musical comedy, as well as of the music publishing industry.22 This operetta and Schlager music was still closely connected to the military-music complex, with its performance venues as described above. Paul Lincke, for instance, started his career as bandleader in one of the brewery gardens in Friedrichshain, the Schweizer Gärten, and often used marching rhythms when composing his operetta songs.23 The most famous example of this is his marching tune “Berliner Luft,” composed in 1904, which became a kind of unofficial city anthem for Berlin and was often played by military bands and civilian orchestras (p. 341) alike.24 But at the same time, stylistic influences from the Paris of Jacques Offenbach and the Vienna of Franz Lehár and Johann Strauß gained in importance. Moreover, the new operettas and Sch lager tunes were written not for the beer gardens and recreation venues but for elaborate stage shows in newly founded popular theaters such as the Apollo-Theater and the Metropol-Theater or for variety theaters such as the Wintergarten. This led to a shift of the entertainment hot spots from the outing destinations at the outskirts of the city to the popular theaters, vaudeville stages, dance halls, cafés, and restaurants at the city center. Thus, Friedrichstraße became the center of the downtown entertainment district of Berlin during the German Empire.25 This shift towards the city center and the operetta theaters notwithstanding, the Schlager songs and operetta tunes still found their way off the stage and into public space. Tobias Becker, author of a monograph on popular music theater in Berlin and London,26 has re traced the paths of dissemination taken by the Schlager songs: After the melodies for an Page 6 of 20
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Music in the Air—Listening in the Streets: Popular Music and Urban Listen ing Habits in Berlin ca. 1900 operetta or revue show had been performed on stage in popular theaters and music halls, they were sold as sheet music for the use of dance halls and also for private use. The sheet music was also sold on broadsheets and postcards in the street. At the same time, the hit songs were produced as gramophone recordings that were played in private homes, cafés, and pubs.27 In this way, the popular songs found their way from the theater stage into public space, as they were performed in beer gardens and promenade concerts by military bands and coffeehouse orchestras—and, last but not least, by organ grinders, who brought the Schlager songs to the backyards and streets of the working-class dis tricts. Barrel organs, which were invented in the eighteenth century and were popular in mar ketplaces and fairgrounds throughout the nineteenth, became the typical backyard instru ment in Berlin after they began to be manufactured on an industrial scale in the late nine teenth century.28 According to one source, there were as many as three thousand organ grinders in Berlin in 1893.29 Those who did not own an organ themselves could rent one for a fee from the manufacturer or at a bourse, where they also traded the barrels and music rolls. Thus, the popular hit songs were eventually sung and whistled by the work ers, housewives, and street urchins.
Music Appropriation and Urban Listening Habits As we have seen, popular music was widely performed in Berlin circa 1900 and available to almost everybody in a variety of forms. But what did people actually do with this mu sic? How should we conceptualize the consumption and appropriation of popular music in the urban context? If the dissemination of Schlager music was as described above, it ap pears to have been very much a top-down process. This was the recollection of the op eretta composer Oscar Straus when he commented on hit songs: “First, they (p. 342) had to be successful on stage. Then the sheets would be purchased for the piano-playing daughter. Finally, the dance bands would play our hit songs, until our tunes became Gassenhauer and gradually ridden into the ground.”30 Of course, the music industry had a business interest in this top-down dissemination. An advertisement for sheet music from the Otto Wrede publishing house, designed by the famous graphic artist and cartoonist Heinrich Zille, tried to capitalize on the ubiquitous spread of hit songs by stating, “Every body sings the Schlager songs from Wrede” (see Figure 14.3). In the journal of the Ger man anti-noise league, it was even reported that people were hired to whistle the latest hit songs on the street as a marketing tool for the operetta industry.31 Nevertheless, it is important to note that there was also an appropriation from below at play in this process. When people sang the popular songs on the street, they did not al ways sing them the way they were supposed to be sung. In fact, it is constitutive for the so-called Gassenhauer that they circulated in different versions. Lyrics were changed or written completely anew and were adapted to local circumstances.32 One prominent ex ample of this process is the song “Mutter, der Mann mit dem Koks ist da.” The melody of Page 7 of 20
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Music in the Air—Listening in the Streets: Popular Music and Urban Listen ing Habits in Berlin ca. 1900 this popular Gassenhauer was taken from the 1884 operetta Gasparone by Karl Millöcker, but the lyrics were made up by the people who sang the song in the streets and ad dressed the poor living conditions in the Berlin tenement houses (referring to the coal man whom the mother addressed in the song cannot afford to pay). These new lyrics were so popular that they found their way back onto the stage. In April 1886 a new musical burlesque was staged in the Luisenstädtische Theater called “Der Mann mit dem Coaks, oder Das weinende Berlin.”33 This example shows that street music and the new entertainment industry were closely intertwined and that Gassenhauer were not simply products of the popular music industry but were simultaneously a product of the active appropriation and transformation of pop ular music by the people. This is why they gave cultural critics, whether of conservative or leftist leaning, a hard time. Karl Storck, a contemporary music critic, was opposed to the musical “trash” of the Schlager music, but he acknowledged the musical creativity of the Gassenhauer. That is why he categorized it as being somewhere between Volkslied (folk song) and Schundlied (trash song) and strove to refine it in the direction of the folk song.34 More than half a century later, the GDR musicologist Lukas Richter was the first scholar to devote a systematic study to the history of the Berlin Gassenhauer. From his Marxist point of view, he had to be opposed to the cultural industry and its mass produc tion of music as well, but he also tried to save the Gassenhauer from damnation by inter preting it as a kind of people’s music that was, again, to be categorized as standing be tween the Volkslied and the Schlager.35 This juxtaposition of Volkslied and Schlager is itself a product of the nineteenth-century divide between art music and popular music and follows a normative standard for “valu able” music. But if this normative evaluation is discarded, the Gassenhauer can be inter preted in a different way. The German cultural anthropologist Kaspar Maase has argued that the rise of popular mass culture since the mid-nineteenth century led to an aestheti cization of everyday life in the sense that it made aesthetic experience an element of the daily life of the so-called normal people. By providing them with a medium (p. 343) (p. 344) for self-reflection, the popular arts helped people cope with their lives and make sense of them.36 This seems to be especially true for the Gassenhauer and the popular songs and couplets, which thematized the changing living conditions in the big city as well as social and political experiences, mostly in a humorous or satirical way. In this manner, they con tributed to the process of mental adaptation to urban living conditions that Gottfried Ko rff has called “inner urbanization.”37 Hundreds of Gassenhauer dealt with Berlin and its changing living conditions during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.38 Often, these songs were written and sung in the Berlin dialect and thereby contributed to the construction of the so-called Berliner Schnauze, meaning the typical attitude of the Berliner, conveyed in his colloquial language.39 These songs thus served as a medium for the construction of what was perceived to be typical for the city. This was especially im portant for a city with such a high immigration rate as Berlin and, accordingly, with an in creasingly non-native population. By providing an image of the typical Berliner, the Berlin songs helped integrate and assimilate, socially and mentally, the many migrants who came to the city in the nineteenth century, especially after the founding of the Germen Page 8 of 20
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Music in the Air—Listening in the Streets: Popular Music and Urban Listen ing Habits in Berlin ca. 1900 Empire in 1871, causing rapid population growth and thus changing the character of the city.
Figure 14.3. Heinrich Zille, advertisement for sheet music. From Flügge, Gerhard. 1978. 'ne dufte Stadt ist mein Berlin: Von Bums und Bühne, Rummel und Revuen, von Kintopp und Kabarett und anderen Amüsements aus dem “Milljöh” von Heinrich Zille. Berlin: Henschelverlag, 56. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz (1 A 832998).
The Berlin Gassenhauer have been a part of this construction of the urban identity of Berlin since the Biedermeier period, along with the so-called Berliner Lokalpossen, the di alect folk plays that often also featured popular music.40 As Peter Jelavich has shown, the popular music theater and cabaret shows at the turn of the century picked up this tradi tion of the Lokalpossen, at the same time transforming it and modernizing it by adapting their performance styles and by fitting them to the changing living conditions of the me tropolis, thus offering new and more modern images of Berlin.41 One of the cabaret artists who was extremely successful in building a career on depicting and thereby creat ing the stereotypical Berliner was Claire Waldoff. Born in 1884 in Gelsenkirchen as Clara Wortmann, Waldoff came to Berlin in 1906 and started to perform in cabaret shows in 1907, often in cooperation with Walter Kollo, who wrote most of her hit songs.42 Her ca reer peaked during the Weimar Republic, but she became very popular and managed to be perceived as quintessentially Berlinese even before World War I, her Rhenish descent notwithstanding. Part of her self-fashioning as Berliner Original was to accentuate her connection to the lower classes and the ordinary people, often depicted in the drawings of Heinrich Zille.43 In order to do that, she picked up the musical format of the Gassenhauer and integrated it into her cabaret shows, thus creating a kind of feedback loop between stage and street, her hit songs being distributed in the aforementioned way and sung on the streets. Heinrich Zille also participated in this circulation between stage and street by Page 9 of 20
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Music in the Air—Listening in the Streets: Popular Music and Urban Listen ing Habits in Berlin ca. 1900 collaborating on some of these cabaret shows. For a show by James Klein in 1924, Zille not only created the set design but also illustrated the sheet music of the “newest Gassen hauer” from the show (see Figure 14.4). His illustration depicted a street scene in a work ing-class district where a group of children, women, and young boys are listening to a melodeon player singing this new Gassenhauer. Zille and Waldoff can therefore both be taken (p. 345) (p. 346) as prominent examples of the ways in which popular music could play a part in the social and mental processes of creating and fostering an idea of what it meant to be a Berliner.
Figure 14.4. Heinrich Zille, “The newest Gassen hauer” (1924). From Gerhard Flügge. 1978. 'ne dufte Stadt ist mein Berlin: Von Bums und Bühne, Rummel und Revuen, von Kintopp und Kabarett und anderen Amüsements aus dem “Milljöh” von Heinrich Zille. Berlin: Henschelverlag, 77. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz (1 A 832998).
Conclusion Brought forth in this manner, the argument that popular music was a medium and cata lyst for the “inner urbanization” of Berliners in the nineteenth and early twentieth cen turies rests mainly on two points: the fact that popular songs and Gassenhauer often the matized Berlin and its changing living conditions and the fact that they were picked up, adapted, and sung in different versions, that is, they were actively appropriated and re produced by the people. But what about pieces of popular music that carried no direct reference to Berlin and that were not adapted by the audience? Compared to the Gassen hauer and the Berlin songs, they still formed the majority of the music played in the amusement venues described above. But going to these venues and listening to the popu lar music still constituted a distinctly urban practice. In the minds of the contemporaries, Page 10 of 20
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Music in the Air—Listening in the Streets: Popular Music and Urban Listen ing Habits in Berlin ca. 1900 the metropolitan quality of a city could be measured by the diversity and richness of its entertainment offerings. The pervasiveness of popular music was the audible proof of Berlin’s status as a Weltstadt, or cosmopolitan metropolis. At the same time, being able to deal with the changing and intermingling sounds of music played within the urban sound scape was part of what Georg Simmel described as the mental abilities necessary to cope with the sensory onslaught of the big city.44 Even if singing a Gassenhauer and listening to a popular waltz tune in a coffeehouse concert must be described as two different musi cal practices, two different ways of “musicking” in the sense of Christopher Small, they are still linked by their urban context. They are both expressions of the degree to which popular music became part of the everyday life of a modern urbanite at the turn of the twentieth century. In these early days of recorded sound, when most music was still heard in live perfor mances, this “symbiosis of music and everyday life” had not yet reached the level it has today.45 But the beginnings, or rather, the harbingers of what Anahid Kassabian has de scribed as “ubiquitous listening” and of the ways in which mobile music devices are used today to structure our urban experience can be found in the urban habits of listening to popular music in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.46
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Music in the Air—Listening in the Streets: Popular Music and Urban Listen ing Habits in Berlin ca. 1900 Bemmann, Helga. 1994. Claire Waldoff: “Wer schmeißt denn da mit Lehm?” Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein. Bijsterveld, Karin. 2008. Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture, and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Botstein, Leon. 1998. “Toward a History of Listening.” Musical Quarterly 82 (3–4): 427– 431. Buchner, Eberhard. 1905. Variété und Tingeltangel in Berlin. Berlin: Hermann Seemann Nachfolger. Bull, Michael. 2007. Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban Experience. London: Rout ledge. Burke, Peter. 1992. “We, the People: Popular Culture and Popular Identity in Modern Eu rope.” In Modernity and Identity, edited by Scott Lash and Jonathan Friedman, 293–308. Oxford: Blackwell. Czerny, Peter, and Heinz P. Hofmann. 1968. Der Schlager: Ein Panorama der leichten Musik. Berlin: VEB. Eckhardt, Josef. 1978. Zivil- und Militärmusiker im Wilhelminischen Reich. Regensburg: Gustav Bosse Verlag. Flügge, Gerhard. 1978. 'ne dufte Stadt ist mein Berlin: Von Bums und Bühne, Rummel und Revuen, von Kintopp und Kabarett und anderen Amüsements aus dem “Milljöh” von Heinrich Zille. Berlin: Henschel Verlag. Giesbrecht-Schutte, Sabine. 2001. “Zum Stand der Unterhaltungsmusik um 1900.” In Schund und Schönheit: Populäre Kultur um 1900, edited by Kaspar Maase and Wolfgang Kaschuba, 114–160. Vienna: Böhlau. Grosch, Nils. 2011. “Über das Alter der Populären Musik und die Erfindung des ‘ “Volk slieds.’ ” In Musik und Popularität: Aspekte zu einer Kulturgeschichte zwischen 1500 und heute, edited by Sabine Meine and Nina Noeske, 59–76. Münster: Waxmann. Höfele, Bernhard. 2004. Die Deutsche Militärmusik: Ein Beitrag zu ihrer Geschichte. Bonn: Luthe. Hoffmann, Niels Frédéric. 2014. Berliner Liederbuch: Lieder und Geschichten aus 200 Jahren. Berlin: Elsengold Verlag. Hopf, Manuela, Klaus Krug, and Helmut Wiemann, eds. 1991. Der Leierkasten: Ein Wahrzeichen Berlins. Berlin: Verlag Wort- und Bild-Specials. Jansen, Wolfgang, and Rudolf Lorenzen. 1987. Possen, Piefke und Posaunen: Sommerthe ater und Gartenkonzerte in Berlin. Berlin: Edition Hentrich. Page 12 of 20
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Klös, Heinz-Georg. 1994. Die Arche Noah an der Spree: 150 Jahre Zoologischer Garten Berlin; Eine tiergärtnerische Kulturgeschichte von 1844–1994. Berlin: FAB. Klotz, Volker. 2007. Bürgerliches Lachtheater: Komödie, Posse, Schwank, Operette. Hei delberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. Koepp, Johannes, and Wilhelm Cleff, eds. 1959. Lieber Leierkastenmann: Berliner Lieder. Bad Godesberg: Voggenreiter Verlag. Koreen, Maegie. 1997. Immer feste druff: Das freche Leben der Kabarettkönigin Claire Waldoff. Düsseldorf: Droste. Korff, Gottfried. 1985. “Mentalität und Kommunikation in der Großstadt: Berliner Notizen zur ‘inneren’ Urbanisierung.” In Großstadt: Aspekte empirischer Kulturforschung, edited by Hermann Bausinger and Theodor Kohlmann, 343–361. Berlin: Staatliche Museen Preußischer Kulturbesitz. Lentz, Matthias. 1995. “‘Ruhe ist die erste Bürgerpflicht’: Lärm, Großstadt und Ner vosität im Spiegel von Theodor Lessings ‘Antilärmverein.’” Medizin, Gesellschaft und Geschichte 13:81–105. Lessing, Theodor. 1908. Der Lärm: Eine Kampfschrift gegen die Geräusche unseres Lebens. Wiesbaden: Bergmann. Levine, Lawrence W. 1988. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lindenberg, Paul. 1893. “Straßenexistenzen.” In Berliner Pflaster: Illustrierte Schilderun gen aus dem Berliner Leben, edited by M. Reumund and L. Manzel, 97–120. Berlin: Pauli. Page 13 of 20
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Music in the Air—Listening in the Streets: Popular Music and Urban Listen ing Habits in Berlin ca. 1900 Maase, Kaspar. 1997. Grenzenloses Vergnügen: Der Aufstieg der Massenkultur, 1850– 1970. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag. Morat, Daniel. 2017. “Berliner Luft. Zur Karriere einer Stadthymne.” Moderne Stadt geschichte 1:20–33. Morat, Daniel, et al. 2016. Weltstadtvergnügen: Berlin, 1880–1930. Göttingen: Vanden hoeck und Ruprecht. Nathaus, Klaus. 2013 “Popular Music in Germany, 1900–1930: A Case of Americanisa tion? Uncovering a European Trajectory of Music Production into the Twentieth Century.” European Review of History [Revue europe ́enne d’histoire] 20 (5): 755–776. Ostwald, Hans. 1905. Berliner Tanzlokale. Berlin: Hermann Seemann Nachfolger. Pappenheim, Hans E. 1963. “In den Zelten, durch die Zeiten. Kulturgeschichte am Tier gartenrand.” In Jahrbuch für Brandenburgische Landesgeschichte, edited by Gerhard Küchler and Werner Vogel, 111–133. Berlin: Paul Funk. Penkert, Anton. 1911. Das Gassenlied: Eine Kritik. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel. Peregrin. 1910. “Kultur.” Der Antirüpel 2 (3): 15–16. Pfannenstiel, Alexander. 1914. Die Erhaltung der Militärkapellen—Eine Kulturfrage. Berlin: Verlag Arthur Parrhysius. Port le roi, André. 1998. Schlager lügen nicht: Deutscher Schlager und Politik in ihrer Zeit. Essen: Klartext. Richter, Lukas. 2004. Der Berliner Gassenhauer. Darstellung, Dokumente, Sammlung; Mit einem Register neu herausgegeben vom Deutschen Volksliedarchiv. Münster: Waxmann. Satyr. [Richard Dietrich]. 1907. Lebeweltnächte der Friedrichstadt. Berlin: Hermann See mann Nachfolger. Schafer, R. Murray. 1994. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions. Schneidereit, Otto. 1968. Berlin, wie es weint und lacht: Spaziergänge durch Berlins Operettengeschichte. Berlin: VEB. (p. 353)
Schneidereit, Otto. 1981. Paul Lincke und die Entstehung der Berliner Operette. Berlin: Henschel Verlag. Schutte, Sabine. 1987. “Untersuchungen zur Entstehung und Funktion ‘populärer’ Musik formen vom ausgehenden Jahrhundert bis zum Ende der Weimarer Republik.” In Ich will aber gerade vom Leben singen: Über populäre Musik vom ausgehenden 19. Jahrhundert
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Music in the Air—Listening in the Streets: Popular Music and Urban Listen ing Habits in Berlin ca. 1900 bis zum Ende der Weimarer Republik, edited by Sabine Schutte, 10–57. Reinbek bei Ham burg: Rowohlt. Scott, Derek B. 2008. Sounds of the Metropolis: The Nineteenth-Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Simmel, Georg. 1997. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” In Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, edited by David Frisby and Mike Featherstone, 174–185. London: Sage. Small, Christopher. 1998. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Middle town, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Sperr, Monika. 1978. Schlager: Das große Schlager-Buch; Deutscher Schlager, 1800– Heute. Munich: Rogner und Bernhard Verlag. Stahrenberg, Carolin. 2011. “Donnerwetter! Tadellos!! Stadtidentitäten Berlins im Klang von Couplets und Schlagern, 1907/1908.” In Musik in Leipzig, Wien und anderen Städten im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert: Verlage, Konservatorien, Salons, Vereine, Konzerte, edited by Stefan Keym and Katrin Stöck, 335–347. Leipzig: Gudrun Schröder. Storck, Karl. 1911. Musik-Politik: Beiträge zur Reform unseres Musiklebens. Stuttgart: Greiner and Pfeiffer. Uebel, Lothar. 1985. Viel Vergnügen: Die Geschichte der Vergnügungsstätten rund um den Kreuzberg und die Hasenheide. Berlin: D. Nishen. Waldoff, Claire. 1997. Weeste noch . . . ? Erinnerungen und Dokumente. Berlin: Parthas Verlag. Wicke, Peter. 1998. Von Mozart zu Madonna: Eine Kulturgeschichte der Popmusik. Leipzig: Gustav Kiepenheuer. Wieke, Thomas. 1993. Vom Etablissement zur Oper: Die Geschichte der Kroll-Oper. Berlin: Haude und Spener. Zeraschi, Helmut. 1976. Drehorgeln. Leipzig: Koehler und Amelang.
(p. 354)
Notes: (1.) The chapter draws in large part on my chapter on popular music in Morat, Daniel, et al. 2016. Weltstadtvergnügen: Berlin, 1880–1930. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 109–152. (2.) See Botstein, Leon. 1998. “Toward a History of Listening.” Musical Quarterly 82 (3– 4): 427–431; Johnson, James H. 1995. Listening in Paris: A Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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Music in the Air—Listening in the Streets: Popular Music and Urban Listen ing Habits in Berlin ca. 1900 (3.) On the concept of popular culture (from a vast literature), see: Burke, Peter. 1992. “We, the People: Popular Culture and Popular Identity in Modern Europe.” In Modernity and Identity, edited by Scott Lash and Jonathan Friedman, 293–308. Oxford: Blackwell. On the divide between highbrow and lowbrow culture, see Levine, Lawrence W. 1988. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. The concept of popular music is discussed in more detail below. (4.) The middle-class ideal of a clear separation of sounds can still be found in Murray Schafer’s influential distinction of high-fi and low-fi soundscapes in which low-fi sound scapes are characterized by a bad signal-noise ratio; see Schafer, R. Murray. 1994. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions. (5.) “Eine grauenhafte Unsitte grassiert in ganz Deutschland: das allgemeine Restaurantund Kaffeehauskonzert. Wer auf das Wohlwollen seiner Mitmenschen angewiesen ist, musikalische Ohren besitzt und sich nicht ‘aus dem Erwerbsleben zurückziehen’ kann, der wird durch Musik, in der alle Welt ihre Nöte und Sorgen übertäubt, fast zu Tode gemetzgert. Jede Arbeit in Fabrikhöllen und Schwitzschachten wird von rhythmisiertem Lärme begleitet. Aber auch alle Erholungsstätten sind von schlechter Musik überfüllt. Der jeweilige Gassenhauer, heute das ‘Lied von der Holzauktion’, morgen die Matschiche, verfolgt uns bis in die Träume der Nacht. Die allgemeine Musikwut übt auf die Kultur des Ohres die selbe Wirkung, die das illustrierte Journal, das ‘Witzblatt’ und die kitschige Re produktion auf die Kultur des Auges übt.” Lessing, Theodor. 1908. Der Lärm: Eine Kampf schrift gegen die Geräusche unseres Lebens. Wiesbaden: Bergmann, 69. Unless other wise noted, all translations were provided by the author. On the context, see Baron, Lawrence. 1982. “Noise and Degeneration: Theodor Lessing’s Crusade for Quiet.” Journal of Contemporary History 17 (1): 165–178; Lentz, Matthias. 1995. “‘Ruhe ist die erste Bürgerpflicht’: Lärm, Großstadt und Nervosität im Spiegel von Theodor Lessings ‘Antilär mverein.’” Medizin, Gesellschaft und Geschichte 13:81–105. For the broader context of public debates about noise, see Bijsterveld, Karin. 2008. Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture, and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (6.) Small, Christopher. 1998. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Mid dletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. (7.) Scott, Derek B. 2008. Sounds of the Metropolis: The Nineteenth-Century Popular Mu sic Revolution in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (8.) Scott (2008): 4. (9.) See Giesbrecht-Schutte, Sabine. 2001. “Zum Stand der Unterhaltungsmusik um 1900.” In Schund und Schönheit: Populäre Kultur um 1900, edited by Kaspar Maase and Wolfgang Kaschuba, 114–160. Cologne: Böhlau; see also Schutte, Sabine. 1987. “Unter suchungen zur Entstehung und Funktion ‘populärer’ Musikformen vom ausgehenden Jahrhundert bis zum Ende der Weimarer Republik.” In Ich will aber gerade vom Leben Page 16 of 20
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Music in the Air—Listening in the Streets: Popular Music and Urban Listen ing Habits in Berlin ca. 1900 singen: Über populäre Musik vom ausgehenden 19. Jahrhundert bis zum Ende der Weimarer Republik, edited by Sabine Schutte, 10–57. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt. (10.) Wicke, Peter. 1998. Von Mozart zu Madonna: Eine Kulturgeschichte der Popmusik. Leipzig: Gustav Kiepenheuer, 9. (11.) On this “symbiosis of music and everyday life,” see Wicke (1998): 25. (12.) Jansen, Wolfgang, and Rudolf Lorenzen. 1987. Possen, Piefke und Posaunen: Som mertheater und Gartenkonzerte in Berlin. Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 134. (13.) Pappenheim, Hans E. 1963. “In den Zelten, durch die Zeiten: Kulturgeschichte am Tiergartenrand.” In Jahrbuch für Brandenburgische Landesgeschichte, edited by Gerhard Küchler and Werner Vogel, 111–133. Berlin: Paul Funk. (14.) Wieke, Thomas. 1993. Vom Etablissement zur Oper: Die Geschichte der Kroll-Oper. Berlin: Haude und Spener. (15.) Klös, Heinz-Georg. 1994. Die Arche Noah an der Spree: 150 Jahre Zoologischer Garten Berlin; Eine tiergärtnerische Kulturgeschichte von 1844–1994. Berlin: FAB, 395– 403. (16.) See Jansen and Lorenzen (1987): 111; Uebel, Lothar. 1985. Viel Vergnügen: Die Geschichte der Vergnügungsstätten rund um den Kreuzberg und die Hasenheide. Berlin: D. Nishen. (17.) Eckhardt, Josef. 1978. Zivil- und Militärmusiker im Wilhelminischen Reich. Regens burg: Gustav Bosse Verlag; for a contemporary document of this debate, see Pfannenstiel, Alexander. 1914. Die Erhaltung der Militärkapellen—Eine Kulturfrage. Berlin: Verlag Arthur Parrhysius. (18.) Jansen and Lorenzen (1987): 130ff. (19.) See Applegate, Celia. 2017. The Necessity of Music: Variations on a German Theme. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 213–217; for the older literature, see Kalkbrenner, August. 1882. Wilhelm Wieprecht: Director der sämmtlichen Musikchöre des GardeCorps; Sein Leben und Wirken nebst einem Auszug seiner Schriften. Berlin: Prager; on the historical context, see Höfele, Bernhard. 2004. Die Deutsche Militärmusik: Ein Beitrag zu ihrer Geschichte. Bonn: Luthe; Allihn, Ingeborg. 1997. “‘ . . . über meine Klinge mußten alle großen Meister springen . . . ’: Militärmusik und musikalische Volksbildung: Carl Maria von Webers Oberon-Ouvertüre im Arrangement für Militärmusik von Wilhelm Friedrich Wieprecht.” In Festschrift Christoph-Hellmut Mahling zum 65. Geburtstag, edit ed by Axel Beer, Kristina Pfarr, and Wolfgang Ruf, 11–23. Tutzing: Hans Schneider. (20.) The German term Schlager is difficult to translate into English. A single Schlager can be translated as “hit song.” When used as a foreign word in English to describe a mu sical genre, “Schlager music” usually denotes the German popular music of the second half of the twentieth century. But in German, the term had already emerged in the second Page 17 of 20
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Music in the Air—Listening in the Streets: Popular Music and Urban Listen ing Habits in Berlin ca. 1900 half of the nineteenth century and was used, often in a deprecatory sense, to describe the new kind of light, popular music most often associated with the operetta. For the German early history of Schlager music, see Czerny, Peter, and Heinz P. Hofmann. 1968. Der Sch lager: Ein Panorama der leichten Musik. Berlin: VEB Lied der Zeit Musikverlag; Port le roi, André. 1998. Schlager lügen nicht: Deutscher Schlager und Politik in ihrer Zeit. Es sen: Klartext; Sperr, Monika. 1978. Schlager: Das große Schlager-Buch; Deutscher Sch lager, 1800–Heute. Munich: Rogner und Bernhard. On the Berlin operetta, see Schnei dereit, Otto. 1968. Berlin, wie es weint und lacht: Spaziergänge durch Berlins Op erettengeschichte. Berlin: VEB Lied der Zeit; Schneidereit, Otto. 1981. Paul Lincke und die Entstehung der Berliner Operette. Berlin: Henschelverlag. (21.) Kiaulehn, Walther. 1997. Berlin: Schicksal einer Weltstadt. Munich: C. H. Beck, 238. (22.) On the economic context of this music (publishing) business, see Nathaus, Klaus. 2013. “Popular Music in Germany, 1900–1930: A Case of Americanisation? Uncovering a European Trajectory of Music Production into the Twentieth Century.” European Review of History [Revue europe ́enne d’histoire] 20 (5): 755–776. (23.) Schneidereit (1968): 14–44. (24.) See Morat, Daniel. 2017. “Berliner Luft. Zur Karriere einer Stadthymne.” Moderne Stadtgeschichte 1:20–33. (25.) For contemporary descriptions, see Buchner, Eberhard. 1905. Variété und Tingeltan gel in Berlin. Berlin: Hermann Seemann Nachfolger; Ostwald, Hans. 1905. Berliner Tan zlokale. Berlin: Hermann Seemann Nachfolger; Satyr. 1907. Lebeweltnächte der Friedrichstadt. Berlin: Hermann Seemann Nachfolger. On the concept of the entertain ment district, see Becker, Tobias. 2011. “Das Vergnügungsviertel: Heterotopischer Raum in der Metropole.” In Die Stadt der tausend Freuden: Metropolenkultur um 1900, edited by Tobias Becker, Anna Littmann, and Johanna Niedbalsk, 137–167. Bielefeld: Transcript. (26.) Becker, Tobias. 2014. Inszenierte Moderne: Populäres Theater in Berlin und London, 1880–1930. Munich: Oldenbourg. (27.) Becker, Tobias. 2013. “Die Anfänge der Schlagerindustrie: Intermedialität und wirtschaftliche Verflechtung vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg.” In Lied und populäre Kultur [Song and Popular Culture] 58, 11–39. Münster: Waxmann Verlag. (28.) Hopf, Manuela, Klaus Krug, and Helmut Wiemann, eds. 1991. Der Leierkasten: Ein Wahrzeichen Berlins. Berlin: Verl. Wort- und Bild-Specials; Zeraschi, Helmut. 1976. Drehorgeln. Leipzig: Koehler und Amelang. (29.) Lindenberg, Paul. 1893. “Straßenexistenzen.” In Berliner Pflaster: Illustrierte Schilderungen aus dem Berliner Leben, edited by M. Reumund and L. Manzel, 97–120, here 114. Berlin: Pauli.
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Music in the Air—Listening in the Streets: Popular Music and Urban Listen ing Habits in Berlin ca. 1900 (30.) “Zuerst mußten sie auf der Bühne Erfolg haben. Dann kaufte man die Noten für die Klavier spielende Tochter. Schließlich übernahmen die Tanzkapellen die Schlager, bis un sere Melodien zu Gassenhauern und so allmählich zu Tode gehetzt wurden,” as cited in Becker (2013): 12. (31.) Peregrin. 1910. “Kultur.” Der Antirüpel 2 (3): 15–16, here 15. (32.) Gassenhauer is another German term that is difficult to translate. It does not simply mean “popular song,” but also implies that this popular song was picked up by the people and sung in the streets. A hit song, one could say, only became a Gassenhauer when it was reproduced, changed, and adapted by the public. See Richter, Lukas. 2004. Der Berliner Gassenhauer: Darstellung, Dokumente, Sammlung; Mit einem Register neu her ausgegeben vom Deutschen Volksliedarchiv. Münster: Waxmann. (33.) Richter (2004): 389. (34.) Storck, Karl. 1911. Musik-Politik: Beiträge zur Reform unseres Musiklebens. Stuttgart: Greiner und Pfeiffer, 51–63. On the German idea and tradition of the Volkslied, which was a highly normative concept in Romanticism and is not the equivalent of the English folk song, see Grosch, Nils. 2011. “Über das Alter der Populären Musik und die Erfindung des ‘Volkslieds.’” In Musik und Popularität: Aspekte zu einer Kulturgeschichte zwischen 1500 und heute, edited by Sabine Meine and Nina Noeske, 59–76. Münster: Waxmann. On the contemporary critique of the Gassenhauer, see also Penkert, Anton. 1911. Das Gassenlied: Eine Kritik. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel. (35.) Richter (2004): 1–14. (36.) Maase, Kaspar. 1997. Grenzenloses Vergnügen: Der Aufstieg der Massenkultur, 1850–1970. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 16–37. (37.) Korff, Gottfried. 1985. “Mentalität und Kommunikation in der Großstadt: Berliner Notizen zur ‘inneren’ Urbanisierung.” In Großstadt: Aspekte empirischer Kulturforschung, edited by Hermann Bausinger and Theodor Kohlmann, 343–361. Berlin: Staatliche Museen Preußischer Kulturbesitz. (38.) In addition to Richter (2004) see also the collection by Koepp, Johannes, and Wil helm Cleff, eds. 1959. Lieber Leierkastenmann: Berliner Lieder. Bad Godesberg: Voggen reiter Verlag; Hoffmann, Niels Frédéric. 2014. Berliner Liederbuch: Lieder und Geschicht en aus 200 Jahren. Berlin: Elsengold Verlag. (39.) See Baumeister, Martin (2010). “‘Berliner Witz’ oder die Eigenlogik der Großstadt.” Historische Anthropologie 18 (1): 69–87. (40.) See Richter (2004): 26–76; on the Lokalpossen, see Klotz, Volker. 2007. Bürgerliches Lachtheater: Komödie, Posse, Schwank, Operettek. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter.
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Music in the Air—Listening in the Streets: Popular Music and Urban Listen ing Habits in Berlin ca. 1900 (41.) Jelavich, Peter. 1990. “Modernity, Civic Identity, and Metropolitan Entertainment: Vaudeville, Cabaret, and Revue in Berlin, 1900–1933.” In Berlin: Culture and Metropolis, edited by Charles Werner Haxthausen and Heidrun Suhr, 95–110. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; Jelavich, Peter. 1993. Berlin Cabaret. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni versity Press. See also Stahrenberg, Carolin. 2011. “Donnerwetter! Tadellos!! Stadtiden titäten Berlins im Klang von Couplets und Schlagern 1907/1908.” In Musik in Leipzig, Wien und anderen Städten im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert: Verlage, Konservatorien, Salons, Vereine, Konzerte, edited by Stefan Keym and Katrin Stöck, 335–347. Leipzig: Gudrun Schröder. (42.) Bemmann, Helga. 1994. Claire Waldoff: “Wer schmeißt denn da mit Lehm?’ Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein; Koreen, Maegie. 1997. Immer feste druff: Das freche Leben der Kabarettkönigin Claire Waldoff. Düsseldorf: Droste; Waldoff, Claire. 1997. Weeste noch . . . ? Erinnerungen und Dokumente, edited by Volker Kühn. Berlin: Parthas Verlag. (43.) On the connection between Waldoff and Zille, see Flügge, Gerhard. 1978. ‘ne dufte Stadt ist mein Berlin: Von Bums und Bühne, Rummel und Revuen, von Kintopp und Kabarett und anderen Amüsements aus dem “Milljöh” von Heinrich Zille. Berlin: Hen schel Verlag. (44.) Simmel, Georg. 1997. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” In Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, edited by David Frisby and Mike Featherstone, 174–185. London: Sage. (45.) Wicke (1998): 25. (46.) Kassabian, Anahid. 2013. Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity. Berkeley: University of California Press; Bull, Michael. 2007. Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban Experience. London: Routledge.
Daniel Morat
Daniel Morat, Freie Universität Berlin
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The Opera-Telephone in Munich: A Short History
The Opera-Telephone in Munich: A Short History Sonja Neumann The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries Edited by Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer Print Publication Date: Jan 2019 Subject: Music, Musicology and Music History Online Publication Date: Nov 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190466961.013.17
Abstract and Keywords Through a cultural-historical analysis, the chapter portrays the Opera-Telephone in Mu nich as a special means of listening and explores its technical, social, economic, and psy chological aspects. These aspects strongly reflect the reciprocal relation of technical in novation and listening to music, for example, by emphasizing the meaning of live broad casting for listening habits and by highlighting the impact of headphone use on aural per ception. The latter practice enables the transfer of the multidimensional opera event into a pure listening experience as the visual element is eliminated. The Opera-Telephone also serves to illustrate matters of social status in regard to private and public listening. In this way, opera was incorporated into the marketing of modern technical products. Keywords: aurality, listening and technology, listening and visuality, audio technology, audio transmission, Electri cal Exhibition Munich, Opera-Telephone, Oskar von Miller
THE excitement was palpable as numerous members of the press gathered for a presenta tion at the Central Post Office in Munich on the evening of June 17, 1924. An unusual event was about to take place: The Valkyrie by Richard Wagner was to be broadcast live from the Bavarian State Opera—by telephone. The broadcast of the opera was a complete success, and the reaction of the press corps was nothing short of euphoric: “A Sensational Invention,” ran the headline of the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, while the MünchenAugsburger Abendzeitung jubilantly exclaimed: “Wonder of Wonders. . . . Now it will be possible for the music enthusiasts who find it challenging to follow highly convoluted polyphonic paths to precisely follow the music at home, score in hand and telephone headphones on their ears, without being disturbed.”1 About three months later, on October 1, 1924, telephone customers in Munich could sub scribe to the Opera-Telephone (see Figure 15.1). At least one thousand long-distance cus tomers in Munich ordered the opera subscription and listened to the broadcast of Aida at home that day.2 Word of the opera’s telephonic broadcast reached Berlin, where the fa mous satirical magazine Kladderadatsch immediately composed a few capricious lines:
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The Opera-Telephone in Munich: A Short History Telephonic Opera3 A new salvation: all hail the phone! He who remains upset by ringing, yet lives in Munich’s long-distance zone, Can hear by wire operatic singing! Phone rings. Who? That you, Frieda? Hello! Who are you calling for? Is Meier there? This is ‘Aida.’ The orchestra begins to play the score. (p. 358) Soon you hear how winds they blow, And how the flautist warbles bold; And only the sound of coughing is low, From the audience member with a cold. And so you enjoy the hours long, But dread befalls your heart, For suddenly: The Banana Boat Song! Wrong number! Instead of Mozart!4
Figure 15.1. Ludwig Hohlwein, Telephonische Über tragung (Telephonic broadcast) (1920s, poster print ed by H. Sonntag Munich/Bruchsal), lithograph, inv. no. C 4/37. Courtesy of the Münchner Stadtmuseum, Sammlung Graphik, Plakate, Gemälde.
Installation of an Opera-Telephone was simple. After payment of a fee, an additional sock et was installed on the telephone. Between two and eight headphones per phone (p. 359) line could be rented for a monthly subscription charge. The opera was not listened to via the telephone receiver but with headphones. In the event a call came in during the music Page 2 of 17
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The Opera-Telephone in Munich: A Short History broadcast, the listener’s connection to the opera would be automatically interrupted. Thus the opera listener was always on call by telephone. There was a live broadcast from the Munich National Theater nearly every evening. In subsequent years the Munich Opera-Telephone was expanded, and new playhouses such as the Odeon and the Prinzregententheater were connected, offering not only opera but also a few concerts. The opera subscription service was also established beyond Munich, so that by about the end of the 1920s all of Bavaria was well provided with operas from Munich, even the areas west of the Rhein River around Speyer and Ludwigshafen (see Figure 15.2). The number of subscriptions climbed as a result; the year 1927 saw 3,500 subscriptions with 11,200 pairs of headphones throughout Bavaria. In addition, an opera parlor for listening was established across from the Cathedral of Our Lady in Munich in 1924 for opera enthusiasts who lacked telephones.
Figure 15.2. Service map of the broadcast network in Bavaria showing the Leitungsrundspruchnetz in Bayern. Opernübertragung München, Stand 1.4.1928 (Opera transmission in Munich, as of April 1, 1928). From Steidle, Karl. 1928. “Staatsoper und Akademiekonzerte in telephonischer Übertragung.” In 150 Jahre Bayerisches National-Theater, edited by Generaldirektion der Bayerischen Staatstheater, 300–305. Munich: Hirth, 303. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz (4° Yp 1183/40).
This relatively large number of subscribers is quite surprising, considering that only opera was transmitted over the Opera-Telephone at first, with performances often re (p. 360)
peated in the schedule. In addition, there was an ambitious competing medium that took similar advantage of the publicity effect of the opera: radio also had a broadcast of the opera at least once per week in its schedule. Still, the decisive advantage of the OperaTelephone was the high quality of the audio reproduction, which far exceeded that of ra dio.
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The Opera-Telephone in Munich: A Short History The technical effort that went into the service was considerable. Nearly eighty micro phones were installed in the orchestra and forty on the stage. These transferred the mu sic to amplifiers installed within the municipal long-distance telephone offices, which in turn led the sound to their individual telephone booths (see Figure 15.3).5 The complete facility thereby provided a far more differentiated sound spectrum than radio broadcasts could ever offer.6
Historical Context: The Telephone as a Medium of Music The Opera-Telephone, while celebrated as a sensation in the mid-1920s, was also praised as a technical innovation. This latter fact is surprising when one bears in mind that the telephone had been used in Munich for (live) musical broadcasts for more than forty years by then. Actually, the telephone was presented and seen as a musical medium in its developmental period. The first telephone apparatuses were presented during numerous exhibitions of electronic innovation in music transmission. When Philipp Reis first pre sented his “Telephone” in 1863, for example, it experienced huge popularity outside the technical community. The experimental setup was based on the transmission of vocals and bugle sounds, while a violin was used as a resonator.7 Reis was presented as the in ventor of the “music-telegraph” in Gartenlaube (Garden Arbor), one of the illustrated “monthly periodicals for entertainment and advice on home and family.” He had been suc cessful, according to the magazine, in designing an apparatus he named the “telephone,” with which one was able to “accurately reproduce songs of all sorts, particularly melodies sung in the midrange, with great clarity over any distance.”8 Enthusiasm and interest in “music-telegraphs” on the part of the broader public could be explained not only by the fascination that arose from localization of voices and sound but also by the fact that acoustic phenomena were presented as somewhat disembodied by the newly developed audio devices, and the sound seemed to have a magical, supersensory power. However, Reis’s music-telegraph was only one apparatus of many in the enormous field of technical innovation during the 1860s.9 Some insight into the newest developments was provided by Franz Josef Pisko in his 1865 work “Die neueren Apparate der Akustik” (New Acoustic Apparatuses). Pisko specified the readership in the subtitle, which stated explic itly: “For friends of the natural sciences and music.”10 (p. 361) Pisko presented numerous inventions such as phonographs, sound recording devices, acoustic measuring devices, multifrequency sirens, tuning forks, devices for speech, and Reis’s telephone. Moreover, Pisko provided a detailed presentation of Hermann von Helmholtz’s (1821–1894) famous On the Sensation of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music (1863). The re search by Helmholtz became the theoretical foundation for all of the inventions in the area of acoustics. Since his theories were based on musical systems and phenomena, acoustics as a tangible subject was very strongly dominated by the acoustics of music. Notes, tones, harmonics, and chords, as well as musical scales and tonality, were also im portant aspects of “objective” physical sound investigated by Helmholtz.11 In contrast, Page 4 of 17
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The Opera-Telephone in Munich: A Short History speech, which behaved extremely vaguely in an acoustic sense, (p. 362) was neither suited nor practical as material for research in acoustics. Vibrations that are more sine shaped, for example, those from a singing voice or a musical instrument, are usually much more appropriate for acoustical experiments.
Figure 15.3. Großleistungverstärker für die tele phonische Opernübertragung (High-powered amplifi er system used for the Opera-Telephone) (1928), pho tograph. From Steidle, Karl. 1928. “Staatsoper und Akademiekonzerte in telephonischer Übertragung.” In 150 Jahre Bayerisches National-Theater, edited by Generaldirektion der Bayerischen Staatstheater, 300–305. Munich: Hirth, 301. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz (4° Yp 1183/40).
This was a fundamental principle taken into account by two of the most prominent pro tagonists of the telephone: Thomas A. Edison (1847–1931) and Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922).12 As a matter of fact, Edison and Bell were highly interested in Helmholtz’s research on the physiology of the ear. Reciprocally, Helmholtz adapted the newest audio devices, which were essential for the graphic display of sound waves and his investigation of combination tones.13 The telephone developed by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 was presented to the public at the Philadelphia World’s Fair. Fundamentally, it involved an apparatus that could trans form sound waves into electrical waves and vice versa. Bell demonstrated the workings of this device by transmitting the song “Yankee Doodle” from Boston to Philadelphia. Bell’s telephone also met with great interest in Germany. Postmaster General Heinrich von Stephan had the Bell device immediately reconstructed and further developed.14 He then presented the capabilities of the apparatus by transmitting “the singing of songs and
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The Opera-Telephone in Munich: A Short History playing of instruments,” which enabled him to persuade Chancellor Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm of its utility.15 In 1877 Edison invented his phonograph, an apparatus that for the first time could record acoustic events and also reproduce them. His bellowing the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb” into the funnel was the first recording that could be brought again to the ears of his surprised contemporaries.16 Edison no doubt initially planned for his invention to be used primarily in modern offices as a dictation aid, but the phonograph also had tremendous entertainment potential, as proved by the Pacific Phonograph Company. At the Palais Royal Saloon in San Francisco in 1889 this company established a coin-operat ed phonograph through which several people could simultaneously listen to music on “headphones” similar to stethoscopes. It was a successful design that spread quickly throughout the United States. These kinds of musical recordings promoted the popularization and implementation of the telephone. During the last third of the nineteenth century, the large number of different uses for acoustic devices was actively discussed in contemporary technical journals. Tech nical experts frequently associated the use of the telephone not primarily with interper sonal communication but instead with music. An example of this was the treatise by Theodor Schwartze in 1883 titled “Telephon, Mikrophon und Radiophon” (The Telephone, Microphone, and Radiophone). In his paper Schwartze also reflected on the various tech nical designs of what were known as “music telephones,” as the subtitle of the book in deed promised, “with special consideration of their practical implementation.”17 In fact, the music telephone at that time was actually not an inspiration of Schwartze’s but the simple state of things, for there already were well-established and economically feasible designs for music telephones. These included the famous Paris Théâtrophone, which had been presented in Paris at the First International Electrical Exhibition in 1881.18 The Théâtrophone was received with just as much sensation as the presentation of the new in candescent light bulbs by Thomas A. Edison.19 The reason (p. 363) behind the success of the Théâtrophone was primarily the newly designed carbon microphone. About forty of them were installed around the edge of the stage at the Opéra Garnier, and they transmit ted the performance to the Industrial Palace on the Champs-Élysées. Listeners needed to hold two earpieces over their ears to hear the music. Since the earpieces were connected to different microphone areas, even listening in stereo was apparently possible. Oskar von Miller, an engineer in Munich who later founded the Deutsches Museum, visit ed the Paris exhibition in 1881 and was enthusiastic about the Théâtrophone. When he or ganized the large International Electrical Exhibition in Munich at the Glass Palace in 1882, he had a specialized telephone booth installed in all of the exhibition buildings. Vis itors could hear various music broadcasts from the Royal Court and National Theater, the Gärtner Square Theater, and the Kilschen Colosseum on the telephones.20 Besides the “normal” telephone transmission which used what was known as the “listening tele phone” that one had to continuously hold against the ear, there was also a “giant loud speaker telephone” set up for concert transmissions. The actual technical setup of the “giant loudspeaker telephone” can no longer be reconstructed, but it appears obvious Page 6 of 17
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The Opera-Telephone in Munich: A Short History nevertheless that the term “telephone” in this connection was used as a synonym for loudspeaker or public address system.21 Miller described the Opera-Telephone at the Munich Exhibition 1882 in his memoirs: [B]esides the lighting, what caused the most amazement for visitors was the tele phonic transmission from the opera. Today’s generation, accustomed from child hood to the telephone, cannot imagine what an eerie surprise it was to hear the singers and musical instruments as well as the applause of the public on the tele phone.22 For Miller, art and technology were not antithetical at all. He grew up in a very artistic family: his well-known father was the head of the royal Bavarian art foundry, his brother Ferdinand was director of the Munich art academy, and his wife Marie Seitz was a painter who had experimented with photography since the 1880s. Miller’s view stood out from the general notion in those days that art and technology have separate assessments. Es pecially in the course of electrification, the performing arts had discovered new artistic possibilities. Public buildings such as the opera houses and theaters had been furnished with electrical lighting relatively early. Music broadcasts by telephone were just a logical continuation of progressive electrification for Miller. After the short-distance transmission at the Paris Exhibition, Miller set up a long-distance transmission of an opera from Munich. A corresponding wired connection ran to the towns of Pasing and Tutzing as well as to Oberammergau, which lies seventy kilometers south of Munich.23 It was not the distance from the sound source that caused trouble for the audio transmission, however, but rather the different acoustic characteristics of the instruments being played. Whereas solo and polyphonic singing and solo and ensemble instrumental music could be clearly perceived on the telephone, the arrangement of the microphones for the extremely diverse sound spectrum of an (p. 364) orchestra presented great challenges. Therefore the test of the various new types of microphone systems from Berliner, Blake, and Paterson were of great interest during the opera broadcast from Mu nich.24 The Opera-Telephone set up in 1882 by Miller was not meant to remain a one-time event, but the opportunity to make it available to a wider public was limited by the small num ber of telephone connections. A commercial usage similar to the Théâtrophone could not be established in Munich. Miller did later find at least one practical application, however. In 1884 a line was laid for Karl von Perfall, the artistic director of the Court Theater at the time, to his villa in Tutzing so that he could check on the quality of the performances and judge the reaction of the public from his home. Miller relates an anecdote about Per fall showing that the combination of listening to music and communication using media technology could completely overwhelm the faculties of perception. Perfall was listening to a performance of his theatrical company from his home in Tutzing, unaware that Miller was connected to the same line from his office in the Glass Palace. When Miller asked
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The Opera-Telephone in Munich: A Short History Perfall during the performance “whether it is not convenient to be able to monitor the opera from Tutzing,” he received no answer. Nevertheless, Perfall appeared the next morning in Miller’s office furious because Miller had screamed on stage and almost drowned out a singer. As Miller tried again to explain that he had himself been in his office and on no account been on the stage, Perfall rejected this, claiming himself to have heard Miller scream.25 In later years the use of an Opera-Telephone in Munich continued to be available only to a very small and select circle: there were only thirteen subscribers connected in 1915, in cluding Prinz Konrad and Prinz Heinrich of Bavaria. The Opera-Telephone was discontin ued during the course of the World War I.26 Against the background of the developmental history of the Munich Opera-Telephone, then, the version of 1924 was only a repeat performance of a principle that had long ex isted already and was not a new achievement. This is why some basic marketing strate gies were essential to attract new customers.
The Idealized Listener The advertising poster created by the famous Munich graphic artist Ludwig Hohlwein (1874–1949) shows an exemplary Opera-Telephone listener of the modern era: An older gentleman is listening using over-the-ear headphones (see Figure 15.1). A partial profile of the telephone receiver indicates the mode of music transmission. This listener assumes an intensely concentrated pose and wrinkles his forehead deeply. In the background are the outlines of Richard Wagner’s imposing head and (p. 365) Beethoven’s death mask. Both cultural icons were clearly used in order to approve of the Opera-Telephone. The visual features of the poster have to be interpreted in the context of Munich and its self-representation as a cultural center. Wagner is displayed as the unique representative of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork), in which opera is the supreme and most ener getic musical discipline. Wagner’s life and work are closely linked to the cultural identity of Munich. But why did Hohlwein refer to Beethoven, who had no distinct connection to Munich and was not known as an outstanding composer of operas? It is likely that Hohlwein interpreted Beethoven as a towering symbol of Germany as a cultured nation, and in this he joined the chorus of Beethoven admirers in Munich. Hohlwein’s image of Beethoven was modeled on the laurel-crowned Beethoven mask of Franz von Stuck (1863–1928).27 Furthermore, this reference to Beethoven is connected to a specific man nerism of listening. It is not a coincidence that Hohlwein referred also to a painting by the Munich artist Albert Gräfle (1809–1889), who had captured an intimate situation of listening on canvas. Gräfle’s very popular painting Die Intimen bei Beethoven was widely distributed as a print by the famous Munich art publisher Franz Hanfstaengel. It shows Beethoven playing on the piano in a parlor with his friends, who were listening closely and mindfully (see Figure 15.4).
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The Opera-Telephone in Munich: A Short History This correlation between behavioral patterns and listening attitudes could be observed al so on the poster by Ludwig Hohlwein. What is actually not new but typical of the period is the use of headphones, particularly their design as a double headset telephone with both ear cups held on the head using a band. This kind of headphone design creates a listening environment that favors concentrating exclusively on what is heard. Furthermore, the ex clusion of visual input seems to be a prerequisite for being able to adequately perceive the music. Obviously, the Opera-Telephone cultivated a distinct type of listener—or at least it promoted an idealized listener. But this scenario appears questionable, at least in relation to the musical genre of opera but particularly in relation to the operas of Wagner and their image as a Gesamtkunst werk. The privacy of the salon or living room becomes an enclosed space of solitude; the headphones with their connecting cable situate the opera listener in a place external to the social sphere of the opera house. In this way, the specific listening environment en sures that the listener undergoes a corresponding conditioning: for him or her, listening should involve purely art, for he or she is in possession of an independent and exacting in strument of critical judgment. As a result, the serious listener using headphones should be able to understand music in every detail by listening to the music in a proper mode. This ideal is similarly bound up with a specific context and with specific psychological as sumptions: “True” and “genuine” art needs active (“aesthetic”) listening, not merely pas sive (“pathological”) hearing, a point of view which was formulated by Eduard Hanslick in the mid-nineteenth century and which made a lasting contribution to conceptions of lis tening in the musical world far into the twentieth century.28
(p. 366)
Figure 15.4. After a painting by Albert Gräfle (1807– 1889), Die Intimen bei Beethoven. Reproduktion der Druckerei Hanfstaengl nach einem Gemälde von Albert Gräfle (Close Friends of Beethoven. Reproduction of the Printing Office Hanf staengl) (ca. 1892), photogravure. Courtesy of Beethoven-Haus Bonn, B 2318. Page 9 of 17
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The Opera-Telephone in Munich: A Short History
The End of the Opera-Telephone Despite the high sound quality, the Opera-Telephone could only manage until 1930. The numbers of subscribers had fallen by that time already, and the operation was no longer economically viable. It was unceremoniously cancelled. The customers were only in formed that they could now listen to the radio program over the telephone, a method re ferred to as Drahtfunk (wired broadcasting). The end of the Opera-Telephone was not un expected—for various reasons. The technical advantage of the sound quality of the OperaTelephone was lost when the quality of radio transmissions advanced and electrodynamic loudspeakers became available for private households in Germany around (p. 367) 1930. Both factors led to a significantly improved sound. Furthermore, the hearer’s state of mind while listening itself changed. Because the “wireless” listener was not bound to the radio anymore, the opportunity for distraction increased and could lead to background listening. Precisely because the radio programming was dominated by popular music, a less cultivated form of listening attention was seen as unproblematic. Programs were var ied and offered different shows for different family members, so music listening could be integrated into the domestic activities at home. It was not surprising that the number of officially signed-in radios in Germany increased rapidly from 9,895 (April 1, 1924) to more than 3 million (December 1, 1929).29 The situation for the Opera-Telephone listener was completely different. The opera as a most exclusive musical art form and public institution was transferred into the privacy of the living room. Admittedly, listening to music in private homes was not exactly new; the gramophone had been in use for decades for playing short pieces of music (listening to a complete opera was not possible on shellac, which was limited to a three- or four-minute playing period). But listening to an opera for hours at fixed times—that was evidently not a vital need for the broader public. In fact, the Opera-Telephone provided a listening situ ation to which scarcely anybody was able to do justice. The idealized listener was a rare specimen, and the Opera-Telephone therefore only a niche product. The 1924 promotion was ineffectual against the range of different entertainment preferences. Efforts to ex tend the musical program of the Opera-Telephone were limited and not successful. Nevertheless, an overall perspective can be distilled about the relation between technolo gy, listening to music, and culture: the auditory experience being transformed by the technology of new acoustic recording, storage, and transmission media represents a strik ing turning point in the history of listening. This involves not simply changes to the condi tions associated with hearing itself, but also, and especially, the new type of acquisition and processing among those participating in this cultural practice. The Opera-Telephone listener using headphones in the 1920s corresponded completely with the commonly held view of the educated class that technology only acquires its social value in the service of high culture. Also, the efforts to promote high culture among a wider public functioned as an educational objective.
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The Opera-Telephone in Munich: A Short History That high culture could not consist of modern popular music but instead oriented itself to ward the classical, “worthy” musical repertoire assumes a certain underlying cultural and historical context: while the acceptance of technological innovations was still relatively high prior to World War I, the situation proved to be different following the loss of that war. This shift was due to a growing discrepancy between the traditional artistic perfor mances and the new popular mass culture, which fostered further antipathies toward modernity. For the educated class, opera served as the cultural flagship of the musical field to a certain extent. On one hand, opera manifested the sophisticated reception of art (the connoisseur), but on the other hand it also continued to serve as a national art form in the sense of reconfirming cultural identity. Certainly, the phenomenon of the Opera-Telephone shows how “a technical device can be defined as a cultural object” and how “a technical innovation can (p. 368) become a cultur al object through its use in society.”30 Yet it also shows how short-lived such develop ments can be, precisely because they participate in variable processes that in turn do not have to proceed in a linear fashion but instead could appear at various times in different cultural settings. The same applies generally for listener habits and categories that evolve within the interaction of culture and technology but can only claim to be valid within this specific constellation and are not transferrable. This history of a technical device for listening to music and the conceptions that surround it has parallels with the beginning of the twenty-first century. The principle of music transmission by wire is realized by modern glass fiber cables that enable access to highspeed Internet, where streaming media including Web radio are provided. And it is a curi ous fact that the “old” genre of opera is very much present in the new media. Opera hous es all over the world make great efforts to increase people’s interest in so-called serious music. Live streaming via the Internet and live broadcasts projected on giant screens in the most famous squares in cities are just two of the ways to promote opera. This might il lustrate the attempts to promote operatic experiences as multisensory experiences for everyone.
References Besseler, Heinrich. 1975. “Grundfragen des musikalischen Hörens.” In Musikhören, edit ed by Bernhard Dopheide, 48–73. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Bettermann, Silke. 2012. Beethoven im Bild: Die Darstellung des Komponisten in der Bildenden Kunst vom 18. bis zum 21. Jahrhundert. Bonn: Verlag Beethoven-Haus. Buddemeier, Heinz. 1987. Illusion und Manipulation: Die Wirkung von Film und Fernse hen auf Individuum und Gesellschaft. Stuttgart: Urachhaus. Burkart, Günter. 2000. “Das Mobiltelefon und die Veränderung der Kommunika tion im sozialen Raum.” Soziale Welt: Zeitschrift für sozialwissenschaftliche Forschung und Praxis 51 (2): 209–227. (p. 371)
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The Opera-Telephone in Munich: A Short History “Drahtkonzert: Eine aufsehenerregende Erfindung.” 1924. Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung Berlin. June 19. Feudel, Willi. 1976. “Telephonische Opernübertragung aus der Staatsoper in München: Eine besondere bayerische Leistung der zwanziger Jahre.” Archiv für Postgeschichte in Bayern 1976 (1): 1–21. Füßl, Wilhelm. 2005. Oskar von Miller, 1855–1934: Eine Biographie. Munich: C. H. Beck. Haase, Ricarda. 2002. “Gesang gleichsam wie aus Engelssphären: Zur Geschichte der Opernübertragung via Telefon.” Das Archiv: Magazin für Kommunikationsgeschichte 3:82–87. Hanslick, Eduard 1891. The Beautiful in Music: A Contribution to the Revival of Musical Aesthetics. Translated by Gustav Cohen. London: Novello, Ewer. Höflich, Joachim R. 1996. Technisch vermittelte interpersonale Kommunikation: Grundla gen, organisatorische Medienverwendung, Konstitution “elektronischer Gemeinschaften.” Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Hui, Alexandra E. 2011. “Instruments of Music, Instruments of Science: Hermann von Helmholtz’s Musical Practices, His Classicism, and His Beethoven Sonata.” Annals of Science 68 (2): 149–177. Jurinek, Josef M. 1924. “Walküre im Telephon: Das Problem der Musikübertragung durch Fernsprecher.” München-Augsburger Abendzeitung, June 18. Lenoir, Timothy. 1994. “Helmholtz and the Materialities of Communication.” Osiris 9, 2nd ser.: 184–207. Lerg, Winfried B. 1980. Rundfunkpolitik in der Weimarer Republik. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. Miller, Oskar von. 1932. Erinnerungen an die Internationale Elektrizitätsausstellung im Glaspalast zu München im Jahre 1882. Berlin: VDI-Verlag. Offizieller Bericht über die im Königlichen Glaspalaste zu München 1882 unter dem Pro tektorate Sr. Majestät des Königs Ludwig II. von Bayern stattgehabte Internationale Elek tricitäts-Ausstellung verbunden mit elektrotechnischen Versuchen. 1883. Munich: Auto typie-Verlag. Peters, John Durham. 2004. “Helmholtz, Edison, and Sound History.” In Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture, edited by Lauren Rabinovitz and Abraham Geil, 177–198. Durham: Duke University Press. Pisko, Franz Josef. 1865. Die neueren Apparate der Akustik: für Freunde der Naturwis senschaft und Tonkunst. Wien: Gerold.
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The Opera-Telephone in Munich: A Short History Rehding, Alexander. 2003. Hugo Riemann and the Birth of Modern Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reuter, Michael. 1990. Telekommunikation: Aus der Geschichte in die Zukunft. Heidel berg: Decker. Ri-Ri. 1924. “Opern durchs Telephon.” Kladderadatsch 77 (43): 688. Rieger, Matthias. 2006. Helmholtz Musicus: Die Objektivierung der Musik im 19. Jahrhun dert durch Helmholtz’ Lehre von den Tonempfindungen. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Riemann, Hugo. 1874. Über das musikalische Hören. Leipzig: Andrä’s Nachfolger. Schwartze, Theodor. 1883. Telephon, Mikrophon, Radiophon mit besonderer Berücksichtigung auf ihre Anwendung in der Praxis. Wien: Hartleben. (p. 372)
Steidle, Karl. 1928. “Staatsoper und Akademiekonzerte in telephonischer Übertragung.” In 150 Jahre Bayerisches National-Theater, edited by Generaldirektion der Bayerischen Staattheater, 300–305. Munich: Hirth. Sterne, Jonathan. 2003. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke University Press. Van Drie, Melissa. 2014. “Images of the Fin de Siècle Mediatised Listening in Paris: Iconography of the Théâtrophone and Its Articulation Between Cultures of Theatre and Technology.” In Le document iconographique dans son context: Le hors-champ des im ages du spectacle. European Drama and Performance Studies 2 (3): 171–190. Van Drie, Melissa. 2016. “Hearing Through the Theatrophone: Sonically Constructed Spaces and Embodied Listening in Late 19th Century French Theatre.” Functional Sounds, special issue, Sound Effects Journal 5 (1): 73–90. “Was ist besser? Opernübertragung durch Rundfunk oder Telephon?” 1930. Bayerische Radio-Zeitung. No. 7 (35): 8. Wegman, Rob C. 1998. “‘Das musikalische Hören’ in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Perspectives from Pre-War Germany.” Musical Quarterly 82 (3–4): 434–454. Wesp, Rosemarie. 1997. “Die Zunge der Zeit: Stephan und das Telefon.” In Kommunika tion im Kaiserreich: Der Generalpostmeister Heinrich von Stephan, edited by Klaus Beyr er, 244–252. Heidelberg: Edition Braus.
Notes: (1.) “Drahtkonzert: Eine aufsehenerregende Erfindung.” 1924. Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung Berlin. June 19: 1; Jurinek, Josef M. 1924. “Walküre im Telephon: Das Problem
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The Opera-Telephone in Munich: A Short History der Musikübertragung durch Fernsprecher.” München-Augsburger Abendzeitung, June 18, 2. (2.) Steidle, Karl. 1928. “Staatsoper und Akademiekonzerte in telephonischer Übertra gung.” In 150 Jahre Bayerisches National-Theater, edited by Generaldirektion der Bay erischen Staatstheater, 300–305. Munich: Hirth, 300. (3.) Translation by Tim Ryan. (4.) “Ein neues Heil dem Telephone! / Wer ist ob Anrufs noch verstimmt, / Der in der Münchner Fernsprech-Zone, / Ein Opernwerk per Draht vernimmt! // Es klingelt. Wer? Bist Du es, Frieda? / Hallo! Wer ruft mir?—Sie verzeihn: / Ist Meier dort? Hier ist—‘Ai da’. / Und schon setzt das Orchester ein. // Bald hörst du, wie die Bläser pusten / Und lieblich trällert der Flötist. / Und eins entgeht dir nur: das Husten / Des Nachbarn, der erkältet ist. // So erntest du vergnügte Stunden, / Doch Unmut in dein Herze zieht, / Hörst du statt Mozarts—falsch verbunden! / —Urplötzlich—das ‘Bananenlied’.” Ri-Ri. 1924. “Opern durchs Telephon.” Kladderadatsch 77 (43): 688. (5.) Steidle (1928): 301. (6.) Bayerische Radio-Zeitung. 1930. “Was ist besser? Opernübertragung durch Rundfunk oder Telephon?” No. 7 (35): 8. (7.) Reuter, Michael. 1990. Telekommunikation: Aus der Geschichte in die Zukunft. Hei delberg: Decker, 84–87. (8.) Haase, Ricarda. 2002. “Gesang gleichsam wie aus Engelssphären: Zur Geschichte der Opernübertragung via Telefon.” Das Archiv: Magazin für Kommunikationsgeschichte 3:82–87, here 82; the original document (1863) is published in Reuter, Michael. 1990. Telekommunikation: Aus der Geschichte in die Zukunft. Heidelberg: Decker, 6. (9.) Even Elisha Gray (1835–1901) developed in 1874 an “Electric Telegraph for Transmit ting Musical Tones” (patent 166,096; July 27, 1875). Gray discovered that sound could be controlled by a self-vibrating electromagnetic circuit. In fact, he invented a basic singlenote oscillator, demonstrating the principle behind an electronic music synthesizer. (10.) Pisko, Franz Josef. 1865. Die neueren Apparate der Akustik: Für Freunde der Natur wissenschaft und Tonkunst. Wien: Gerold. (11.) Hui, Alexandra E. 2011. “Instruments of Music, Instruments of Science: Hermann von Helmholtz’s Musical Practices, His Classicism, and His Beethoven Sonata.” Annals of Science 68 (2): 149–177. (12.) See, in particular, chaps. 2 and 3 of Sterne, Jonathan. 2003. The Audible Past: Cultur al Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke University Press; Sterne delineates sound-reproduction technologies as a field where modern listening and techniques of au dition were developed. See also Peters, John Durham. 2004. “Helmholtz, Edison, and Page 14 of 17
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The Opera-Telephone in Munich: A Short History Sound History.” In Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture, edited by Lau ren Rabinovitz and Abraham Geil, 177–198. Durham: Duke University Press. (13.) Lenoir, Timothy. 1994. “Helmholtz and the Materialities of Communication.” Osiris 9, 2nd ser.: 184–207. (14.) Wesp, Rosemarie. 1997. “Die Zunge der Zeit: Stephan und das Telefon.” In Kommu nikation im Kaiserreich: Der Generalpostmeister Heinrich von Stephan, edited by Klaus Beyrer, 244–252. Heidelberg: Edition Braus. (15.) Heinrich von Stephan to Reichskanzler Bismarck, November 9, 1877. Cited in Kom munikation im Kaiserreich: Der Generalpostmeister Heinrich von Stephan, edited by Klaus Beyrer. Heidelberg: Edition Braus, 253–254. (16.) Buddemeier, Heinz. 1987. Illusion und Manipulation: Die Wirkung von Film und Fernsehen auf Individuum und Gesellschaft. Stuttgart: Urachhaus, 75–76; Rieger, Matthias. 2006. Helmholtz Musicus: Die Objektivierung der Musik im 19. Jahrhundert durch Helmholtz’ Lehre von den Tonempfindungen. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 149. (17.) Schwartze, Theodor. 1883. Telephon, Mikrophon, Radiophon mit besonderer Berück sichtigung auf ihre Anwendung in der Praxis. Wien: Hartleben. (18.) Van Drie, Melissa. 2016. “Hearing Through the Theatrophone: Sonically Constructed Spaces and Embodied Listening in Late 19th Century French Theatre.” Functional Sounds, special issue, Sound Effects Journal 5 (1): 75. (19.) Füßl, Wilhelm. 2005. Oskar von Miller, 1855–1934: Eine Biographie. Munich: Beck, 41–42. (20.) Offizieller Bericht über die im Königlichen Glaspalaste zu München 1882 unter dem Protektorate Sr. Majestät des Königs Ludwig II. von Bayern stattgehabte Internationale Elektricitäts-Ausstellung verbunden mit elektrotechnischen Versuchen. 1883. Munich: Au totypie-Verlag, 29; see also Füßl (2005): 52. (21.) It is highly probable that Miller built a plain loudspeaker consisting of a large vibrat ing diaphragm as part of a magnetic field combined with a speaker horn. (22.) Miller, Oskar von. 1932. Erinnerungen an die Internationale Elektrizitätsausstellung im Glaspalast zu München im Jahre 1882. Berlin: VDI-Verlag, 154. (23.) Füßl (2005): 58. (24.) Offizieller Bericht (1883): 137. (25.) See also Haase (2002): 85; Miller (1932): 164.
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The Opera-Telephone in Munich: A Short History (26.) Feudel, Willi. 1976. “Telephonische Opernübertragung aus der Staatsoper in München: Eine besondere bayerische Leistung der zwanziger Jahre.” Archiv für Post geschichte in Bayern 1976 (1): 1–21; Höflich, Joachim R. 1996. Technisch vermittelte in terpersonale Kommunikation: Grundlagen, organisatorische Medienverwendung, Konsti tution ‘elektronischer Gemeinschaften.’ Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 205. (27.) Silke Bettermann describes Franz von Stuck and his preoccupation with Beethoven as follows: “Vor dem Hintergrund dieses Interesses an der Musik verwundert es nicht, dass sich Stuck in der Zeit um 1900 auch verschiedentlich mit der Person Ludwig van Beethovens beschäftigte. Wie eine 1899 veröffentlichte Photographie des sogenannten ‘Alten Ateliers’ in seiner Villa belegt, besaß er einen Abguss der Lebendmaske des Kom ponisten, der ihn mehrfach zur Gestaltung eigener Darstellungen Beethovens inspirierte. So entstand etwa 1896 ein vom Verlag Hanfstaengl in München reproduziertes und dadurch einem größeren Publikum bekannt gewordenes Gemälde, in dem der Maler diese Maske, die Beethoven zu seinen Lebzeiten von Franz Klein (1779–1840) abgenommen worden war, umdeutete und zu einer lorbeerbekränzten Totenmaske des Komponisten machte.” (Considering his interest in music, it is not surprising that around 1900 Stuck was preoccupied with biographical details of Ludwig van Beethoven. A photograph of the so-called “Old Atelier” in Stuck’s villa, published in the year 1899, shows that he was in possession of a replica of the composer’s life mask, which inspired him to create different Beethoven images. Around 1896 a reproduction of a painting was printed by Hanfstaengl and therefore known to a wider public. In this painting Stuck reinterpreted the life mask, which was removed by Franz Klein (1779–1840) as a plaster cast from the face of the liv ing Beethoven, as the laurel-crowned death mask of the composer.) Bettermann, Silke. 2012. Beethoven im Bild: Die Darstellung des Komponisten in der bildenden Kunst vom 18. bis zum 21. Jahrhundert. Bonn: Verlag Beethoven-Haus, 298–299. (28.) Hanslick identifies two modes of listening. The active listener hears music to discov er the method of composition, while to the passive listener music is merely sound: Hanslick, Eduard. 1891. The Beautiful in Music: A Contribution to the Revival of Musical Aesthetics. Translated by Gustav Cohen. London: Novello, Ewer, 135–136. Hanslick’s statement should be seen in combination with the two other important concepts of modes of listening by Hugo Riemann and Heinrich Besseler. Riemann, Hugo. 1874. Über das musikalische Hören. Leipzig: Andrä’s Nachfolger. Besseler, Heinrich. 1975. “Grundfragen des musikalischen Hörens.” In Musikhören, edited by Bernhard Dopheide, 48–73. Darm stadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. (29.) Lerg, Winfried B. 1980. Rundfunkpolitik in der Weimarer Republik. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 524–525. (30.) Burkart, Günter. 2000. “Das Mobiltelefon und die Veränderung der Kommunikation im sozialen Raum.” Soziale Welt: Zeitschrift für sozialwissenschaftliche Forschung und Praxis 51 (2): 209–227.
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The Opera-Telephone in Munich: A Short History
Sonja Neumann
Sonja Neumann, Deutsches Museum Munich
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First Re-Creations: Psychology, Phonographs, and New Cultures of Listen ing at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century
First Re-Creations: Psychology, Phonographs, and New Cultures of Listening at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Alexandra Hui The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries Edited by Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer Print Publication Date: Jan 2019 Subject: Music, Musicology and Music History Online Publication Date: Nov 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190466961.013.18
Abstract and Keywords This chapter explores how the goals of cognitive and behavioral psychologists contributed to a new kind of listening at the beginning of the twentieth century. This chapter focuses on two interrelated efforts to cultivate a new type of listening. First, it examines the ef forts by the Edison Company to transform the listener into a consumer. Second, it looks at studies carried out by psychologists to understand the functional effects of music and ap ply their understanding. The Edison-Carnegie Research Program and the subsequent Mood Music marketing campaign show how new sounds and new ideas about listening to them were both actively created. This historical episode provides new insight into the processes by which new listening cultures develop. The understanding of music as func tional—it could cause certain mood and bodily effects—co-developed with an understand ing that listening could and should be altered. Keywords: Edison Company, history of science, ideal listener, listener types, listening and commercialization, lis tening and technology, psychology
THE Re-Creation Recital would begin with a duet, human and machine matching tone for tone. The performer would then pause and let the phonograph perform solo. Sometimes the phonograph would be silent and the recording artist would perform solo. A particular ly popular stunt would include switching off the lights or drawing a curtain so that the au dience couldn’t tell whether a machine or an artist was performing. Audiences were in structed to listen carefully in order to distinguish between the live performer and their recreation (see Figures 16.1 and 16.2 for the oral instruction script and audience form). The demonstrators would follow up with audience members. Suggested copy read as fol lows: Mr. and Mrs. So and So
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First Re-Creations: Psychology, Phonographs, and New Cultures of Listen ing at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century We believe you heard Miss Christine Miller sing in unison with her Diamond Disc records at the Woman’s Club. Everyone says it was impossible to distinguish the original from the reproduction. We should like you to know the Diamond Disc bet ter.1 Because the goal of the Re-Creation Recitals was to showcase the fidelity of the phonograph’s sound, the artists were expected to make their performance match the machine’s. Anna Case described holding back on volume so as to not drown out the in strument as well as altering the quality of her voice so that the audience was unable to distinguish a difference.2 Advertisements additionally exclaimed: The Artist’s Tone is the Edison Tone. There is no such thing as an “Edison Tone.” There is, in the New Edison, a Bonci Tone, a Spalding Tone, a Destinn Tone, and Anna Case Tone—each separate and faithful to the distinctive character of the artist. But the New Edison has no tone of its own. It is merely a perfect vehicle for (p. 374) the reproduction of the artist’s work. There is no foreign sound, there is no “talking machine tone.” Mr. Edison has eliminated all these. The music of the New Edison is nothing but the pure, unaltered, life-like tone of the original artist.3
Figure 16.1. Tone Test oral instructions (ca. 1920). Courtesy of the Carnegie Mellon University Archives, Walter Van Dyke Bingham Collection, Pittsburgh. Folder 0158, reel 16.
The Edison Company’s new promotional campaign was in part predicated on Edison’s in sistence, rooted in anxiety about accusations of charlatanry in his early years, that the public experience his phonograph’s superior sound directly, either in Edison shops or in individuals’ homes.4 The thousands of Tone Tests and Re-Creation Recitals performed (p. 375)
in the first decades of the twentieth century were opportunities for the public to
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First Re-Creations: Psychology, Phonographs, and New Cultures of Listen ing at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century learn how to properly operate the device in order to generate a standardized product and for the Edison Company to train listeners to receive the phonograph’s sound in a very specific way.
Figure 16.2. Tone Test response card (ca. 1920). Courtesy of the Carnegie Mellon University Archives, Walter Van Dyke Bingham Collection, Pittsburgh. Folder 0158, reel 16.
If these documents are read to suggest that listeners truly could not distinguish between a recorded performance and a live one, by setting up a difficult (p. 376) comparison (be cause the recording and live performance were hard to distinguish) the Edison Company was able to highlight the fidelity of its recording. Or, regardless of what listeners could or could not hear, the Edison Company was attempting to train listeners to hear a differ ence, to constantly, vigilantly consider how sure they were whether the singer was live or not. If the phonograph’s superiority over its competitors was its tone quality and fidelity, then the Re-Creation Recitals would instruct consumers in how to hear this difference and find the Edison machine superior. This handbook is a testament to the proliferation of listening practices in the modern era. Much of the scholarship here and elsewhere that examines the intersection of science and music has been devoted to the history of sound sensation, noise abatement, acoustic architecture, and concert-listening culture—the concept of soundscapes, generally speak ing.5 These works focus on the evolving active listening practices of the individual and the public. This distinction is rooted in the belief that listening and hearing were separate phenomena. There are, however, many types of listening that exist between active listen ing and passive hearing, from casual to discursive to suggestive listening. This chapter examines an early twentieth-century attempt to create a new form of listening that was bound up with a new way of thinking about music: it could be functional. Music’s emo Page 3 of 22
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First Re-Creations: Psychology, Phonographs, and New Cultures of Listen ing at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century tional and physiological effects on listeners could be mobilized to make people behave in a certain way. With the development of sound recording and replay technology at the end of the nine teenth century, the listener was liberated from a temporally and geographically bound ex perience of music. Listening practices could change. And could be changed. Several scholars have examined the Edison Tone Tests and Re-Creation Recitals to varying ends— to illustrate the consumerist turn of the modern music industry, the new role of music in the home, and the standardization of tone fidelity.6 Emily Thompson, who has worked the most extensively with these materials, argues that Edison’s Tone Test campaign offered listeners a framework of understanding—a resource—with which to “transform their con ception of what constituted ‘real music’ to include phonographic reproductions.7 I build on Thompson’s work here and show how this resource for achieving fidelity was the first step of many in the formation of a modern music listener and I look at what happened next. Psychologists—with encouragement from the fledgling music industry—became interest ed in cultivating a type of listening specifically oriented toward phonograph music. This chapter explores how their goals contributed to this aim by focusing on two interrelated efforts. First, I examine the campaign by the Edison Company to transform listeners into consumers. Second, I discuss studies undertaken by psychologists to understand the functional effects of music and then, in turn, apply this understanding. These efforts dovetailed in the creation and distribution of Mood Music, an advertising campaign that marketed music in terms of its effects on listeners’ bodies and emotions. The process of first classifying then marketing music in terms of its effects on mood shaped the way the psychologists and the listening public thought about and, ultimately, heard music.
Tone Tests: Making Listeners and Then Making Them into Consumers (p. 377)
At first, Tone Tests were conducted only in Edison shops, but then they spread to church es, schools, YMCAs, and private homes, often at the request of a host. One was held on a Lake Erie ferry.8 Audiences ranged from perhaps a dozen people to several hundred. In a typical Tone Test, the demonstrators would explain to the audience before, during, and af ter the recital what to listen for, always emphasizing the quality of the phonograph’s sound.9 Sometimes a local academic would give a short lecture.10 Intended to approxi mate proper musical concerts, programs of what the phonograph would perform were distributed. Audiences applauded between pieces. No explicit advertising or sales pitches were allowed during Tone Tests, but a week or so after the concert, demonstrators or shop owners would follow up with audience members to secure a sale.11 The demonstra tors were also expected to report back to the Edison Company on the location and size of the event and the pieces performed and write a sentence or two summarizing the audi ence reaction. These reports were initially just handwritten letters, but soon they were standardized in an official form. The volume of documentation of the Edison Tone Tests is Page 4 of 22
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First Re-Creations: Psychology, Phonographs, and New Cultures of Listen ing at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century staggering. Thompson has surmised from her archival work that more than four thousand Tone Tests were performed between 1915 and 1920, attended by as many as two million people.12 Whether residing in a big city or a small farm town, if an individual wanted to participate in a Tone Test, one was surely happening soon nearby. The commercial effectiveness of the Tone Tests appears to have been mixed. Although the goal of the recitals was to demonstrate the sound fidelity of the instrument and not to push the audiences to make purchases, William Maxwell, the head of the Phonograph Di vision at the Edison Company, had anticipated a corresponding increase in sales.13 Dealers reported that they had, for the most part, seen no increase in sales.14 One dealer offered that the Tone Tests were an effective form of publicity, explaining that “a great many people are appealed to strongly by the tone quality of the instrument and they would probably never hear it unless it were presented directly to them in some form as this.”15 The Edison Company’s main competitor, Victor, had no comparable campaign. Vic tor relied predominantly on print advertising and maintained market dominance by recording celebrity performers and promoting its catalog rather than the Victrola’s sound quality. Though Edison would continue to insist that great performers of the time were overhyped and would not record well (he therefore refused to record certain artists), the Edison Company eventually caved in to consumer pressure and began recording well-known per formers.16 In early 1915 the soprano Anna Case, an artist with the new Re-Creation recording series, wandered into an Edison shop to find that it was playing one of her recordings. She decided to sing along, and the comparison version of the Tone Test— sometimes called a Re-Creation Recital, sometimes still just called a Tone (p. 378) Test— was born. Artists were recruited to perform along with their recordings. One can imagine how such promotions might alter expectations, not only of the phonograph’s sound but of the artist’s sound, as well. Indeed, as Thompson argues, Edison’s Re-Creation Recitals marked the beginning of the trend of equating recordings, rather than live performances, with musicians’ sound.17 Again, the demonstrators’ main task was to emphasize the fidelity and clarity of the phonograph’s tone. They noted this before, during, and after the concert in follow-up notes. Certainly they did not discuss any scratching or buzzing sounds, perhaps hoping that if they weren’t mentioned, they couldn’t be heard.18 The demonstrators did not talk about the music itself. There was no discussion of the formal structures of the pieces, their interesting melodic elements or harmonies. The Re-Creation Recitals were not in tended to educate audiences about music. Rather, they had a twofold standardization function: First, by a centralized and systematized demonstration protocol, the sound of the New Edison was made uniform. Second, audiences were trained to be experts at a new kind of listening, one that could separate musical fidelity from noise to the point of tuning out the latter. This accommodative ability to hear the object of one’s attention more distinctly relative to all other sounds was not new. The phenomenon of accommodation in hearing had been an Page 5 of 22
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First Re-Creations: Psychology, Phonographs, and New Cultures of Listen ing at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century object of scientific study in the preceding decades.19 What was innovative in the case of the Tone Test and Re-Creation Recitals was the Edison Company’s effort to create an ac commodative experience. Through public demonstrations, home visits, advertisements, and follow-up notes, the company emphasized again and again that to experience the phonograph’s sound was to experience the artist standing in front of you. And again, the main medium of this message was sound itself, in the form of the carefully worded scripts of the demonstrators. In order to create a consumer base for Edison products, Edison had to first train listeners.
The Edison-Carnegie Music Research Program: Making Motor Effects into Mood Effects If ear training—teaching people to listen for fidelity and ignore machine noise—was the first step toward transforming listeners into consumers, a more systematic study of the effects of this ear training was the next. In the early 1920s the Edison Company estab lished a research program in collaboration with Walter Van Dyke Bingham, then of the Carnegie Institute of Technology, to study the effects of music on mood. The centerpiece of the multi-year study was a massive survey of the public. The results of this work were then compiled and cross-referenced with Edison records, culminating in a tidy little pam phlet distributed at Edison shops, Mood Music: A compilation of 112 Edison (p. 379) ReCreations according to “what they will do for you.”20 The scientific study of the mood ef fects of music was also a marketing strategy. Though perhaps best known for his work developing the first generation of intelligence and personality tests for both American industry and the War Department, Bingham be gan his career as the founder and first director of the Division of Applied Psychology at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. He had trained in the psychology laboratories of both Hugo Münsterberg at Harvard University and James Angell at the University of Chicago. His early research concerned the motor effects of music. His 1910 monograph Studies in Melody was based on research performed in these labs between 1905 and 1908.21 The guiding experimental question was how melody was per ceived and what its motor effects were. Bingham’s work was an extension of the laborato ry-based studies on the psychology of consonance, tone differentiation, and rhythm per formed by Wilhelm Wundt, Carl Stumpf, and others. Bingham was, ultimately, asking an aesthetic question—what was musical melody?—and found an answer through precision measurements of the listener’s body. In his experiments, Bingham played a variety of tonal sequences for the listener, some that were internally coherent (in terms of pitch) and some that were not, some that were short (just two tones) and some that were much longer. Listeners were attached to a de vice that would measure their rate of finger tapping (see Figure 16.3). Listeners were in structed to tap continuously before, during, and after the tonal sequence was (p. 380) played for them. This finger-tapping data (rate change) was combined with introspective Page 6 of 22
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First Re-Creations: Psychology, Phonographs, and New Cultures of Listen ing at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century reports. Subjects were students or instructors in the Harvard psychological laboratory. They varied in their musical abilities.
Figure 16.3. Finger-tapping device (1910). From Bingham, Walter. 1910. Studies in Melody. The Psy chological Review: Monograph Supplements. Vol. 12 (no.3). Baltimore: The Review Pub. Co., 44. Bay erische Staatsbibliothek München (Ph. Sp. 708 qb).
The results of Bingham’s experiments were not conclusive, but they were suggestive. In response to his experimental question, Bingham did find a correlation between rates of tapping for the internal coherence and finality of tone sequences. He would eventually conclude that the sense of melody was “contributed by the act of the listener.”22 When a series of tones was sounded, Bingham explained, a parallel muscular response occurred. The tone series and muscular response would resolve simultaneously. This resolution of the muscular response resulted in the recognition of the tone series as a melody.23 The muscular response was a necessary mediator for the listener to recognize and experience musical melody. The motor effects of music established its existence. That is, music had motor effects, but they were not recognized as such until after the fact. In the fall of 1919 the Edison Phonograph Company reached out to Bingham through its public relations firm, the Federal Advertising Agency. The advertising agent, Henry Eck hardt, explained that the Edison Company would like to definitively determine “the psy chological reactions which definite forms of music produce in the human mind” and, if possible, also, drawing on a much older tradition of bodily cures through music, “work out a definite list of musical compositions which can be used by people in their daily lives to allay fatigue, cure mental depression, quiet fretful children, etc.”24 After he agreed to the project, the Edison Company supplied Bingham with $10,000, two Edison phono graphs, and a complete set (443) of Re-Creation records. The Edison-Carnegie Music Re search Program had two branches: a Music Research Department, headed by Bingham and Max Schoen, and a School Research Department, headed by Esther Gatewood and Paul Farnsworth of Columbia University.25
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First Re-Creations: Psychology, Phonographs, and New Cultures of Listen ing at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Bingham framed the research program around three central questions: 1. The theoretical problems of psychology and corresponding questions related to the affective elements of music. 2. Classification and description of the Edison Re-Creations—Develop the basis of a workable classification and develop a method of making the classification. 3. Experiments on the effects of phonographic music in practical situations, from its recreational function to aid in industrial, creative, and health work.26 In their two years of work, Bingham and his colleagues managed to address most of these questions, at least in a general way. In early 1920 the researchers presented Maxwell with the first of their reports, a study of the Edison dance music selections. The goal had been to determine the qualities of the ideal dance record. The team interviewed “dancing masters of repute” and collected experimental data.27 The procedure consisted of asking experts—“dance masters” and “orchestra leaders”—to rate various dance tunes (waltzes, one-steps, and foxtrots) in terms of rhythm, melody, harmony, and so on.28 Next, they had graduate students dance to the pieces and rate them on the basis of their danceability and musical quality. Across all categories of dance music, respondents (p. 381) indicated that good rhythm, regular accent, simple melody, decided harmony, a “dance figure,” movement, and quality of music were important. Dance was, according to the report, mo tor reaction in its highest form.29 Further, the best dance music gradually and rhythmical ly aroused a feeling of strain and physical excitement, then a feeling of relaxation and physical calm. Music stimulated both psychological and physiological changes in the lis tener. Pursuant to the second research question, Bingham presented Maxwell with a report on the classification of the Edison Re-Creation Discs.30 At the time, the discs were classified by price, availability, type of music, means of production (voice, piano, and so forth), and eminence of the artist. In developing a new classification system, Bingham noted that the problem became quite complex once one considered the different needs of the different departments of the Phonograph Division. He proposed two new classifications systems, the first of which would likely be particularly effective when combined with marketing merchandise. It was a classification according to use, noting the location where phono graphic music was used (homes, recreational halls, churches, restaurants, dance parlors, gymnasiums, classrooms, studios, offices, factories, warehouses, hospitals, and sanitari ums) and for what purpose (pleasure, entertainment, refreshment, to regulate move ments in typewriting or factory operation, to create a mood, for distraction, or to stimu late mental activity). The second classification proposed was according to “the Nature of [the musical selection’s] Effects on the Hearer.”31 We see here the nursery of new forms of listening specifically understood in terms of their emotional and bodily effects. Passive and active experiences of sound were considered together. The distinction was, in a sense, irrelevant because the interest was in the various types of effects. Bingham listed seven: 1. General Effect on Psycho-physical Activities: Music may be stimulating or calming Page 8 of 22
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First Re-Creations: Psychology, Phonographs, and New Cultures of Listen ing at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century 2. Effect on Rate and Clarity of Mental Processes: Music makes hearer more or less alert 3. Effect on Imagination: Music may or may not provoke the listener to picture a scene, imagine a story, think out a design, etc. 4. Effect on Interest and Attention: Music may or may not absorb the listener, may heighten or diminish attention to one’s activities 5. Effect on Feeling, Moods and Emotions: Music may or may not stir simple or com plex emotions or lasting moods 6. Effect on Will and Action: Music may or may not contribute to speed and precision of muscular activity 7. Effect on Social Consciousness: Sense of social solidarity through joint participa tion.32 Notice that in the decade following his initial finger-tapping research on the motor effects of music, Bingham had greatly expanded his understanding of the possible effects of mu sic. According to Bingham, music could affect not only body, mind, and mood but (p. 382) also will to act and sense of community. The exercise of examining the old Edison classifi cation system and developing possible new ones potentially made him think about more diverse but also more specific possible effects of music. In pursuit of the third research question, Gatewood began further investigating the emo tional effects of a large number of musical selections on listeners. The goal was then to classify the Re-Creation records according to these various effects. The 589 Re-Creations, selected from across all price classes, were played in sets of twenty (two songs per disc), pausing in between in order to give judges time to fill out data sheets. There were three judges, two women and one man, of varied levels of musical training, all three expert psy chologists trained in the practice of introspection. They were to indicate on their data sheets whether they felt any of the emotions listed (familiarity, pleasant/unpleasant, inter esting/boring, action, memory, imagination/fancy, logical thought, rest/quiet, sadness, joy, love/tenderness, longing, amusement, dignity/stateliness, patriotism/stirring, reverence/ devotion, disgust, and irritation). The compiled data were then used to sort the record ings into four classes ranging from “having one or more well defined emotional qualities to a marked degree” to “no definitive emotional effect.”33 These were then cross-refer enced with musical qualities such as rhythm and melody, as well as recording quality and longevity. Finally, they were cross-referenced with the respondents’ marks for pleasant ness or unpleasantness. Of the 589 pieces played for the judges, 261 had one or more emotional quality to a marked degree. Another 173 had one or more emotional quality to some degree. Among these 434, there was a strong correlation with a pleasure response. From this, the re searchers concluded that emotional effect played a significant part in the amount of plea sure derived from listening to music. On the basis of reports of scientific study, it ap peared that music indeed affected mood and that pleasure could be predicted and poten
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First Re-Creations: Psychology, Phonographs, and New Cultures of Listen ing at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century tially created. And now the researchers had conveniently classified these emotional ef fects and had even made playlists (of Re-Creation recordings). In order to bring this research in line with the Edison Company’s marketing goals, one Gertrude Brainerd compared the emotional qualities classified by Gatewood’s study to the sales records of 200 Re-Creation discs. Again three judges (it’s unclear whether they were the same three judges used in Gatewood’s work) were asked to indicate their emo tional response to each record. Brainerd cross-referenced these responses with sales data and found several correlations. She concluded that the greater the emotional qualities (both amount and degree) of a recording, the better its sales.34 Edison now had a reason to market the mood effects of music. Recent work in the history of science has examined classificatory thinking as scientific process.35 The activity involved in categorizing, list making, and organizing objects within frameworks (both theoretical and material) has been shown to inform scientific thinking. Something similar was occurring in the Edison-Carnegie Music Research Program. The researchers spent their first year organizing, classifying, re-classifying, and cross-refer encing the Edison Re-Creations. Music, for their work, only needed to be understood in terms of its emotional effects. Information about a selection’s compositional form, per former, and style was unnecessary. The 589 recordings were sorted into (p. 383) a set number of possible emotional responses (this reduction of the spectrum of possible sub jective experiences of the listener into a mere dozen is also interesting). The unclassifi able recordings were eliminated. I argue that these actions of reducing and classifying al tered the way the psychologists understood music and, potentially, altered the way they heard music. Their next task was to train the listener-consumer to do the same.
Functional Music: Making Mood Music Work for You The centerpiece of the Edison-Carnegie Music Research program was the Mood Change Test, a massive study of the public’s listening habits launched in the spring of 1921. Us ing the classifications determined by Gatewood’s study, Maxwell and Bingham developed the Mood Change Chart (see Figure 16.4). The listener was to fill out the first portion of the chart, listen to an Edison recording on the phonograph, and then complete the chart. The finished charts could be turned in to a shop owner or, if the test was performed as part of a Mood Change Party in a private home or club, mailed directly to the Edison Lab oratories. Describing the program to Edison, Maxwell touted the dual benefits of receiving both da ta and advertising value, perhaps giving the company an edge against Victor. The slogan What Music Will Do For You would be a great selling point, he explained, and, further, “in the present state of the public’s mind, it should be rather easy to get the people interest
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First Re-Creations: Psychology, Phonographs, and New Cultures of Listen ing at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century ed in an analysis of their reactions to music, and this may prove one method of increasing our city business.”36 Edison noted in the margin: “This will be good propaganda.”37 Shop owners and Edison dealers were given specific instructions on how to conduct a Mood Change Party. The campaign was pitched to the dealers as “real research work.”38 The disc jobbers, too, were told that the Mood Change Charts were “a forerunner of one of the most interesting experiments ever made in the world of music.”39 They were en couraged to join Professor Bingham and Mr. Edison “IN THIS NOVEL AND EPOCHMAKING EXPERIMENT.”40 The enthusiastic dealers and jobbers became quite creative in their efforts to collect filled-out charts. At least one Edison shop owner instituted the Mood Change Test as part of the application process for positions at the store.41 Others collaborated with local colleges and universities, performing the test on undergraduates.42 Advertisements for the Mood Change Test encouraged readers to be a part of sophisticat ed and groundbreaking science. In an advertisement that ran in Colliers, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Cosmopolitan, celebrity private investigator William Burns, sitting beside an Edison phonograph and an enlarged copy of his filled-out Mood Change Chart, explained: “It registers a decided mood change but it represents the emotional effects of music only on one man. Mr. Edison needs thousands of these charts (p. 384) because his research work must be conducted as the law of averages.”43 To continue to advance his science, the copy suggested, Edison needed everyone to listen carefully to his recordings and take the Mood Change Test. In September of that year, the Edison Company forwarded more than twenty-seven thousand completed Mood Change Charts to Bingham for his analysis.
Figure 16.4. Mood Change Chart (1921). Courtesy of the U.S. Department of the Interior, Na tional Park Service, Thomas Edison National Histori cal Park, West Orange, NJ.
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First Re-Creations: Psychology, Phonographs, and New Cultures of Listen ing at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Let us walk through the chart completion scenario. Participants would begin by indicat ing the date and location of the Mood Change Test. Then, they would note the time and the weather. The next two questions switch to the past tense (“What kind of music did you feel like hearing?” And “What was your mood immediately preceding the test?”), which suggests that participants should pause at this point and listen to (p. 385) some music. The format of the chart, however, encourages participants to charge right through, and I suspect that this is what most of them did (see Figure 16.4). So, in anticipation of listen ing to some music, they would choose among thirteen types (ranging from Tender to Viva cious to Weird). Then they would choose among seven pairings (Serious or Gay, Nervous or Composed, and so on) to indicate their mood immediately preceding the Mood Change Test. So, before hearing any music, participants had already been made aware of their sur roundings, thought about their current mood, and considered what type of music they wanted to hear. Note that the types listed were not musical forms (a symphony, a march, or a lullaby, for example), nor were they styles (ragtime or classical). In order to select the type of music they felt like hearing, the participants had to choose from a list of moods. They began their listening experience having just thought about and noted on the chart both their current mood and their desired mood. Then they would listen to a ReCreation recording. Upon the piece’s completion the listeners would turn to their Mood Change Chart and fill in the blanks to document their change of mood, from X to Y. (The alternative scenario, that the participants paused after Question 3, listened to music, and then carried on, answering Questions 4, 5, and 6, would have similarly underscored the mood-changing effects of music.) If desired, participants could do this exercise two more times, documenting their emotional journey the entire way. Done and pleased with their contribution to science, participants would then either turn in their Mood Change Chart to the Edison Shop owner or send it to the Edison Laboratories for analysis. I argue that the Mood Change Charts created and reinforced a certain type of listening. The charts forced the participants to think about their mood—and not just any mood, but the select few listed—before, during, and after listening to music. This would have had two significant consequences: First, it would have encouraged listeners to think about music in terms of its effects on mood. Second, it would have encouraged listeners to hear music in terms of those effects. The avalanche of responses apparently produced results robust enough that the Edison Company planned a marketing campaign around the mood-changing effects of music (more on this shortly). This suggests that listeners’ perceptual frameworks were indeed being altered by music, or at least that listeners believed that their active selection of mu sic affected their moods. Certainly the Edison Company believed it was happening. In fact, they were banking on it and titled their new marketing scheme based on listeners’ newly formed desire to select music by its emotional effects Mood Music. Mood Music: A compilation of 112 Edison Re-Creations according to “what they will do for you” was promoted as the result of a series of psychological experiments conducted Page 12 of 22
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First Re-Creations: Psychology, Phonographs, and New Cultures of Listen ing at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century under the direction of Dr. W. V. Bingham.44 The pamphlet claimed to be a departure from all earlier music compendiums both in organization and content. “Has it occurred to you that music . . . might be utilized to do you much practical good?” the text asked.45 Edison explained that he sought to “harness this newly released power of music to the service of man” and had called on science to help.46 The pamphlet noted that Bingham and his col leagues had in their studies carefully regulated the conditions under which (p. 386) listen ers were exposed to various Re-Creation recordings and “scientifically recorded all changes to mood and feeling.”47 The data collected from the returned Mood Change Charts, the pamphlet continued, was then analyzed. Some recordings had a wide variety of mood effects. Of the 589 Re-Creations, however, 135 produced marked and consistent effects (this figure was trimmed down from the 261 that Gatewood had determined in her study). “These 135,” the pamphlet continued, “are the music that is most valuable to you, —set apart at last.”48 Mood Music arranged these 135 selections into lists, complete with record number and purchase price. The categories were 1. To Stimulate and Enrich Your Imagination 2. To Bring You Peace of Mind 3. To Make You Joyous 4. Moods of Wistfulness 5. Jolly Moods and Good Fellowship 6. For More Energy! 7. Love—and Its Mood 8. Moods of Dignity and Grandeur 9. The Mood For Tender Memory 10. Devotion Is Also a Mood 11. Stirring 12. For the Children The psychological study of the motor and mood effects of music had been made mar ketable. We can also see Mood Music and the research on which it was based as an effort to create a new kind of listening experience, one in active pursuit of an immediate and in dividual emotional change. Mood Music encouraged people to approach their listening ex perience in terms of a desired mood change. This effort to confirm and subsequently mo bilize the mood-changing effects of music as a motivation to listen was innovative. The pamphlet described the lists as “a musical medicine chest” to ease the selection of appro priate music to summon one’s desired moods.49 For example, for “Moods of Dignity and Grandeur,” the pamphlet warmly explained: Wonderful are those moments when you gaze upon the vast revelations of nature! Standing on a stormy shore, and viewing the tumultuous immensity of the sea; ly ing on your back atop a hill, and regarding the grandeur of the heavens; emerging from a woodland path, to find yourself unexpectedly in the shadow of a towering mountain—you thrill with your expanding self. Such moods of the dignified, the
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First Re-Creations: Psychology, Phonographs, and New Cultures of Listen ing at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century grand, and the awesome are induced by the music on this list. Play them for the elevation of your emotions.50 Readers were then offered ten Re-Creation selections to choose from, including Beethoven’s Menuet in G, Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody, and Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus. Immediate self-improvement was now possible.
(p. 387)
Conclusion
The Edison-Carnegie Music Research Program sought to train listeners to choose (pur chase) and listen to music based on its motor and mood effects. Because listeners were encouraged to make their selections on the first level in terms of desired mood, the selec tions themselves became far less important. They were a secondary choice, and there were no more than twelve selections to choose from. The musical decision was made on the basis of its scientifically supported, hoped-for effects. The music was listened to with this—again—scientifically supported, hoped-for effect in mind. This was new. Certainly the understanding of music in terms of its effects on mood was part of a larger trend, but the systematic scientific study and marketing of music in terms of these effects was inno vative. Because of the work of the Edison-Carnegie Music Research Program, listeners could begin to think of, and hear, music in terms of its effects on their bodies. The episodes discussed in this chapter illuminate the historiographical challenge of deter mining which came first, the new perceptual practice or the science and technology asso ciated with it. Intuitively we might assume that innovations in science and technology made new perceptual practices possible.51 Some scholars, however, have begun to push back against this model. Jonathan Sterne, for example, argues that technology is often the culmination of established practices.52 With regard to the efforts of the Edison Com pany discussed here, the evidence can be read both ways. On one hand, internal company correspondence reveals an active effort to demonstrate and promote the mood effects of music. It had created this new instrument—the phonograph—and needed to create a per ceptual need for it among consumers. On the other, the first decades of the twentieth cen tury were host to a number of innovations related to the mood effects of music. Sheet mu sic for silent films, for example, began to be cataloged according to the scene or mood type.53 Workers were polled about whether music in their factories made them happier or less accident-prone.54 Thus the mood effects of music were under consideration in places where there was no phonograph (though phonographs were sometimes used in both the aters and industrial settings). The consideration of the mood effects of music was a phe nomenon that extended beyond phonograph owners; it was not simply a consequence of the recording technology. Further, despite the extensive efforts of the Edison Company to create mood changes (or at least market them) in their listeners, there is little documen tation that it did so. So as to the question of what came first, the experience of mood mu sic or the sound of it, I have attempted to remain agnostic and highlight cases where the evidence can be read both ways.
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First Re-Creations: Psychology, Phonographs, and New Cultures of Listen ing at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Edison, for his part, became increasingly ambivalent about Bingham’s research program. He noted in response to Maxwell’s concerns that Bingham wasn’t aiming high enough in his work, that he would “end up throwing all these things in the waste basket after infi nite trouble and irritation.”55 Edison appeared to appreciate the mood music research from a marketing angle (recall that he said it would be good propaganda) but had (p. 388) serious doubts that Bingham could produce a science-based classification of musical ef fects on the emotions.56 Funding for the program ended after 1921. The short life of the Edison-Carnegie Music Research Program and the eventual demise of the Edison Phonograph Company itself in 1929 belie the lasting effects of Bingham’s research. First, the program, one of the earliest collaborations between psychologists and a corporation’s marketing arm, established a practice that continues to this day in acade mia and in the marketing world. Market research had come into being only decade earli er. The subsequent interest in the application of social science techniques as well as psy chological concepts (especially after the transition to behaviorism in the United States) dominated marketing through the 1930s, which is to say that the program was one of the earliest examples of applied psychology in marketing. But what makes this episode interesting and of central importance to better understand ing how new forms of listening come into being is that the Edison-Carnegie Music Re search Program was not simply developing a product. Bingham and his colleagues were creating a new, functionalized way of listening. Prior to the phonograph’s entering the home, listeners’ musical experiences were limited to live performances. They could, of course, make music themselves, as in the case of salon music. But concerts and religious services had predetermined programs. The only choice listeners had over their musical experience was whether to attend them (though they did, if they were in an urban set ting, have more professional performance options). The phonograph opened up the possi bility of seemingly infinite choice that for the first time was independent of the need to at tend a concert or make music on one’s own. And it was a choice not only of the musical selection itself but the time and place in which to listen to it, perhaps in response to an immediate need for, say, a change of mood. Bingham’s work gave listeners the tools for negotiating this infinitude. Rather than selecting their favorite song or favorite per former, listeners could choose their music based on a hoped-for emotional response. Want more energy? Choose from the nine selections listed below! It doesn’t matter which! The individual piece of music was secondary. Mood Music empowered listeners to mobilize the scientifically proven mood effects of music: “See what music can be made to do for you. Begin to utilize its power.”57
Archives Walter Van Dyke Bingham Collection, Carnegie Mellon University Archives, Pittsburgh William Maxwell Files, Thomas Edison National Historical Park Archives, West Orange, NJ
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First Re-Creations: Psychology, Phonographs, and New Cultures of Listen ing at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century
References Bijsterveld, Karin. 2008. Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture, and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bingham, Walter. 1910. Studies in Melody. Psychological Review: Monograph Supple ments 12 (no. 3). Baltimore: The Review. Bingham, Walter. 1921. Mood Music. Orange, NJ: Thomas A. Edison, Inc. Brainerd, Gertrude. n.d. “An Analysis of Certain Factors determining the Sale of Re-Cre ations of the Thom. A. Edison Company.” William Maxwell Files, Thomas Edison National Historic Park, West Orange, NJ. Brainerd, Gertrude. n.d. “A Comparison of the Characteristics of one hundred Re-Cre ations having an Excellent Sales Record with one hundred Re-Creations having a very Poor Sales Record.” William Maxwell Files, Thomas Edison National Historic Park, West Orange, NJ. Clark, Kenneth. 1929. Music in Industry: A Presentation of Facts Brought Forth by a Sur vey, Made by the National Bureau for the Advancement of Music, on Musical Activities Among Industrial and Commercial Workers. New York: National Bureau for the Advance ment of Music. Gatewood, Esther. n.d. “A Classification of 589 Re-Creations according to their effects up on the hearer.” William Maxwell Files, Thomas Edison National Historic Park, West Or ange, NJ. Gouk, Penelope, and Helen Hills. 2005. Representing Emotions: New Connections in the History of Art, Music, and Medicine. Aldershot: Ashgate. Grajeda, Tony. 2013. “Early Mood Music: Edison’s Phonography, American Modernity and the Instrumentalization of Listening.” In Ubiquitous Musics: The Everyday Sounds That We Don’t Always Notice, edited by Elena Boschi, Anahid Kassabian, and Marta Garcia Quiñones, 30–47. New York: Routledge. Harvirth, John, and Susan Harvirth, eds. 1987. Edison, Musicians, and the Phonograph: A Century in Retrospect. Westport, CT: Praeger. Hui, Alexandra. 2012a. The Psychophysical Ear. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hui, Alexandra. 2012b. “Sound Objects and Sound Products: Creating a New Culture of Listening in the First Half of the Twentieth Century.” Culture Unbound 4:599–616. Hui, Alexandra. 2013. “Changeable Ears: Ernst Mach’s and Max Planck’s Studies of Ac commodation in Hearing.” In Music, Sound and the Laboratory in the Nineteenth and
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First Re-Creations: Psychology, Phonographs, and New Cultures of Listen ing at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Twentieth Centuries. Osiris 28, edited by Alexandra Hui, Julia Kursell, and Myles Jackson, 119–145. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hui, Alexandra, Julia Kursell, and Myles Jackson, eds. 2013. Music, Sound and the Labo ratory in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Osiris 28. Chicago: University of Chica go Press. Hui, Alexandra. 2017. “Walter Bingham und die Universalisierung des individuellen Hör ers.” In Wissensgeschichte des Hörens in der Moderne, edited by the Netzwerk Hör-Wis sen im Wandel (coordinated by Daniel Morat). Berlin: De Gruyter. Jackson, Myles. 2006. Harmonious Triads: Physicists, Musicians, and Instrument Makers in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Johnson, James. 1995. Listening in Paris: A Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press. (p. 393)
Kennaway, James, ed. 2014. Music and the Nerves, 1700–1900. London: Macmillan. Millard, Andre. 2003. America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound. 2nd ed. Cam bridge: Cambridge University Press. Milner, Greg. 2010. Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music. Lon don: Faber and Faber. Pinch, Trevor, and Karin Bijsterveld, eds. 2011. The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pinch, Trevor, and Frank Trocco. 2004. Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rapee, Erno. 1924. Motion Picture Moods for Pianists and Organists. New York: G. Schirmer. Rapee, Erno. 1925. Encyclopedia of Music for Pictures. New York: Belwin. Sterne, Jonathan. 2003. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Suisman, David. 2009. Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thompson, Emily. 1995. “Machines, Music, and the Quest for Fidelity: Marketing the Edi son Phonograph in America, 1877–1925.” Musical Quarterly 79 (1): 131–171. Thompson, Emily. 2002. Soundscapes of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Cul ture of Listening in America, 1900–1933. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (p. 394)
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First Re-Creations: Psychology, Phonographs, and New Cultures of Listen ing at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century
Notes: (1.) Carbon copy sample letter circulated to demonstrators. William Maxwell, June 24, 1925. William Maxwell Files, Thomas Edison National Historic Park (hereafter Maxwell Files). (2.) Interview with Anna Case, John Harvith, and Susan Harvith in Harvirth, John, and Su san Harvirth, eds. 1987. Edison, Musicians, and the Phonograph: A Century in Retrospect. Westport, CT: Praeger, 44. (3.) Advertising copy distributed among dealers. Maxwell Files. (4.) A sense of the scale of the phonograph and record industry at this time comes from Andre Millard, who claims that record players of some form (phonographs, Victrolas, and so on) were in millions of American homes by the end of World War I. In 1914 the Edison Company’s phonograph and record sales brought in $4 million. At the end of 1920, sales were at $20 million. This, however, was the high point for the Edison Company as compe tition from Columbia and Victor as well as the proliferation of smaller record companies fueled Edison’s decline. Millard, Andre. 2003. America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 65–73. (5.) Hui, Alexandra, Julia Kursell, and Myles Jackson, eds. 2013. Music, Sound and the Laboratory in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Osiris 28. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jackson, Myles. 2006. Harmonious Triads: Physicists, Musicians, and In strument Makers in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Bijster veld, Karin. 2008. Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture, and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Johnson, James. 1995. Listening in Paris: A Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press; Pinch, Trevor, and Karin Bijsterveld, eds. 2011. The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies. Oxford: Oxford Uni versity Press; Pinch, Trevor, and Frank Trocco. 2004. Analog Days: The Invention and Im pact of the Moog Synthesizer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; Sterne, Jonathan. 2003. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press; Thompson, Emily. 2002. Soundscapes of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (6.) See Milner, Greg. 2010. Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Mu sic. London: Faber and Faber; Thompson, Emily. 1995. “Machines, Music, and the Quest for Fidelity: Marketing the Edison Phonograph in America, 1877–1925.” Musical Quarter ly 79 (1): 131–171; Suisman, David. 2009. Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (7.) Thompson (1995): 160. (8.) Demonstrator to Maxwell, July 30, 1915. Maxwell Files.
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First Re-Creations: Psychology, Phonographs, and New Cultures of Listen ing at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century (9.) The demonstrators sometimes pushed this to the point of pedantry, irritating the audi ence members. See letter to Maxwell, June 21, 1915. Maxwell Files. (10.) Frank Hildebrand, for example, gave a series of Lecture-Recitals with such titles as “The Growth of Music,” “Music and Life,” and “The Opera” in 1915. Programs are held in the Maxwell Files. (11.) Memorandum, April 1, 1914, and recital reports submitted to Maxwell between April and July 1915. Maxwell Files. (12.) Thompson (1995). (13.) Maxwell to American Piano Company, April 30, 1915. Maxwell Files. (14.) They did, however, take the request for feedback as an opportunity to complain about the demonstrators. The main critique was that the demonstrators would sweep into town and, unaware of local mores, plan recitals in the wrong part of town or among the wrong kind of people and in the process alienate actual prospective buyers. Correspon dence, April 20–30, 1915. Maxwell Files. (15.) Geo. Lincoln Parker Pianos to Maxwell, May 4, 1915. Maxwell Files. (16.) “[O]nly Grand Opera singers with good voices can be used, and I have nearly all of them. I am not going to queer the Diamond Disc by a poor singer, no matter what their reputation in Opera might be. Let me say that Scotti has lost his voice almost entirely, but because he is one of the best actors on the Operatic Stage and a great favorite, am I to have him sing on the phonograph merely on account of his great reputation? I prefer that the Victor should do this.” Letter to Maxwell, February 8, 1915. Maxwell Files. In a reply to a customer’s inquiry the following year, Edison explained: “There are some artists who have great reputations but they have very inferior voices, although good actresses and of pleasing personality—These I do not consider should be put on a phonograph even for ad vertising purposes.” Drafted reply (unclear if it was typed and sent) by Edison to Lowell Frost (original letter from Frost to the Edison Company dated September 2, 1916), September 2, 1916. Maxwell Files. (17.) Thompson notes that by 1922 most of the public heard new music on recordings first (rather than “live” performances). See Thompson (1995): 159. (18.) There were complaints to both Thomas Edison and William Maxwell about instru ment noise and scratchy-sounding recordings from 1915 through the end of the war (war shortages had required a change in the chemical process used to make the discs). These complaints, it should be noted, were that the sound quality had worsened. Noise had not been independently noticed. Maxwell Files and Thomas Edison Files, Thomas Edison Na tional Historic Park. (19.) Ernst Mach and Max Planck both studied (slightly different understandings of) ac commodation in hearing. I discuss their work in Hui, Alexandra. 2012a. The Psychophysi Page 19 of 22
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First Re-Creations: Psychology, Phonographs, and New Cultures of Listen ing at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century cal Ear. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Hui, Alexandra. 2013. “Changeable Ears: Ernst Mach’s and Max Planck’s Studies of Accommodation in Hearing.” In Music, Sound and the Laboratory in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Osiris 28, edited by Alexandra Hui, Julia Kursell, and Myles Jackson, 119–145. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (20.) Bingham, Walter. 1921. Mood Music. Orange, NJ: Thomas A. Edison, Inc. (21.) Bingham, Walter. 1910. Studies in Melody. Psychological Review: Monograph Sup plements 12 (no. 3). Baltimore: The Review. I have previously discussed some of this ma terial in Hui, Alexandra. 2012b. “Sound Objects and Sound Products: Creating a New Cul ture of Listening in the First Half of the Twentieth Century.” Special issue, Culture Un bound 4:599–616; Hui, Alexandra. 2017. “Walter Bingham und die Universalisierung des individuellen Hörers.” In Wissensgeschichte des Hörens in der Moderne, edited by the Netzwerk Hör-Wissen im Wandel (coordinated by Daniel Morat). Berlin: De Gruyter. (22.) Bingham (1910): 87–88. (23.) Bingham (1910): 87–88. (24.) Eckhardt to Bingham, November 3, 1919. Walter Van Dyke Bingham Collection, Carnegie Mellon University Archives. For more on the history of therapeutic applications of music, see Gouk, Penelope, and Helen Hills. 2005. Representing Emotions: New Con nections in the History of Art, Music, and Medicine. Aldershot: Ashgate; and Kennaway, James, ed. 2014. Music and the Nerves, 1700–1900. London: Palgrave Macmillan. (25.) The School Research Department was charged with helping area schoolteachers in corporate Edison phonographs and records into their music pedagogy. Gatewood appears to have compiled and written up the reports for both departments. (26.) Bingham to Gatewood, January 26, 1920. Walter Van Dyke Bingham Collection, Carnegie Mellon University Archives. (27.) Gatewood, Esther. 1920. “Study of Dance Music.” Box 15, Folder “May 1–15, 1920.” Maxwell Files. (28.) Gatewood (1920). (29.) Gatewood (1920). (30.) October 1920 Report. Maxwell Files. (31.) October 1920 Report. Maxwell Files. (32.) October 1920 Report. Maxwell Files. (33.) Gatewood, Esther. n.d. “A Classification of 589 Re-Creations according to their ef fects upon the hearer.” Box 26, Folder “Re-Creation Classifications,” Maxwell Files.
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First Re-Creations: Psychology, Phonographs, and New Cultures of Listen ing at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century (34.) Brainerd, Gertrude. n.d. “A Comparison of the Characteristics of one hundred ReCreations having an Excellent Sales Record with one hundred Re-Creations having a very Poor Sales Record.” Maxwell Files (35.) I am thinking in particular of the work of Anke te Heesen, Robert Kohler, and Staffan Müller-Wille. (36.) Maxwell to Edison, November 20, 1920. Maxwell Files. (37.) Maxwell to Edison, November 20, 1920. Maxwell Files. (38.) Maxwell to dealers, February 22, 1921. Maxwell Files. (39.) Maxwell to dealers, February 22, 1921. Maxwell Files. (40.) Maxwell to Disc Jobbers, January 12, 1921. Maxwell Files. (41.) Maxwell to Bingham, April 9, 1921. Maxwell Files. (42.) These tests were mostly conducted in the tri-state area, including universities such as Harvard and Yale. Correspondence, March through May 1921. Maxwell Files. (43.) Advertisement. 1921. Ladies’ Home Journal (February), 141. (44.) Tony Grajeda and I have apparently been circling each other in the archives. Graje da argues that the Edison-Carnegie Research Program can be understood as the begin ning of a larger arc towards an instrumentalized listening (so, scientific and rationalized) over the course of the twentieth century. Although I don’t disagree, I am focusing on the processes by which both the researchers and participants, listeners, or consumers came to understand music as functional—and act on this understanding. Grajeda, Tony. 2013. “Early Mood Music: Edison’s Phonography, American Modernity and the Instrumentaliza tion of Listening.” In Ubiquitous Musics: The Everyday Sounds That We Don’t Always No tice, edited by Elena Boschi, Anahid Kassabian, and Marta Garcia Quiñones, 30–47. New York: Routledge. (45.) Bingham (1921): 5. (46.) Bingham (1921): 8. (47.) Bingham (1921): 9. (48.) Bingham (1921): 9. (49.) Bingham (1921): 10. (50.) Bingham (1921): 21. (51.) Suisman (2009), for example, argues that the dramatic shifts in modern American music culture were actively propelled by the new music industry. Page 21 of 22
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First Re-Creations: Psychology, Phonographs, and New Cultures of Listen ing at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century (52.) Sterne (2003). (53.) Rapee, Erno. 1924. Motion Picture Moods for Pianists and Organists. New York: G. Schirmer; Rapee, Erno. 1925. Encyclopedia of Music for Pictures. New York: Belwin. (54.) Clark, Kenneth. 1929. Music in Industry: A Presentation of Facts Brought Forth by a Survey, Made by the National Bureau for the Advancement of Music, on Musical Activities Among Industrial and Commercial Workers. New York: National Bureau for the Advance ment of Music. (55.) Edison’s reply in the margin to Maxwell’s note to Edison, October 30, 1920. Maxwell Files. (56.) Eckhardt to Bingham, carbon copies to Maxwell and Edison, dated October 30, 1920. Maxwell Files. (57.) Bingham (1921): 10.
Alexandra Hui
Alexandra Hui, Mississippi State University
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Experiencing High Fidelity: Sound Reproduction and the Politics of Music Listening in the Twentieth Century
Experiencing High Fidelity: Sound Reproduction and the Politics of Music Listening in the Twentieth Centu ry Axel Volmar The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries Edited by Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer Print Publication Date: Jan 2019 Subject: Music, Musicology and Music History Online Publication Date: Nov 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190466961.013.19
Abstract and Keywords This chapter focuses on the shifting conceptions of how to listen to music in the age of sound recording. I start with reviewing Adorno’s concerns regarding a regression of lis tening and contrast these with new listening practices in the first half of the twentieth century. I show, then, how hi-fi enthusiasts in the Cold War era linked ideals of sophisti cated music listening to recorded music and technical expertise. While the self-image of the cultivated yet technologically aware domestic listener greatly revalued the experi ence of skillful music listening, I show how societal change rendered normative ideals of listening increasingly unattractive late in the century. Relying on recent sound studies re search and various historical sources, I offer a critical discussion of conceptions of skillful music listening and put this debate in the context of shifting self-conceptions among the middle classes as well as the power struggles this section of society faced. Keywords: bourgeois identity, crisis of listening, hi-fi listening, listening and technology, recorded music, skillful listening, sound studies, Theodor W. Adorno
IN his 1938 article “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” Theodor W. Adorno famously lamented a decline of skilled music listening—a practice he later termed “structural listening”—among contemporary concert-hall audiences.1 Rather than encountering works of Western art music with informed, critical appreciation to grasp their structural unity, contemporary listeners, according to Adorno, would reject even the mere possibility of such perception. They fluctuate between comprehensive forgetting and sudden dives into recognition. They listen atomistically and dissociate what they hear, but precisely in this dissociation they develop certain capacities which accord less with the concepts of traditional aesthetics than with those of football and motoring.2
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Experiencing High Fidelity: Sound Reproduction and the Politics of Music Listening in the Twentieth Century For Adorno, the study of music and participation in the public concert life formed not only an academic but a political practice, a way of analyzing the current state of society and of articulating social critique through the lens of music as both an autonomous art and a public culture. To this end, the ideal listening practice demanded a self-conscious, pur poseful engagement with the text of musical works beyond personal pleasure. Adorno felt that concert-goers, influenced by the growing mass culture, had lost both the skill and the will to practice structural listening to such a degree that music listening had in fact “re gressed, arrested at the infantile stage,” (p. 396) which made “the perception of a whole”—and hence the conditions for critique—impossible.3 In the 1920s and 1930s, Adorno repeatedly blamed the technological mediation of music for the loss of interest in sophisticated modes of music listening. Owing to their inferior sound quality, he argued, the phonograph and the radio would render structural listening simply impossible and re sult instead in forms of distracted listening. In this chapter I take Adorno’s essays on reproduced music as a starting point to revisit the entwined histories of sound reproduction and music listening. Adorno read the shifts in audience behavior in the 1920s and 1930s as signs of social change, and his moralizing analysis of the regression of listening in the concert hall articulates fears about the wan ing cultural authority of bourgeois discourse producers linked to “traditional aesthetics.” Yet with regard to technologically mediated forms of listening, Adorno curiously makes the reverse, and one might say technologically deterministic, argument that the observed change in audience behavior results not from shifts in the social and discursive domain but from specific conditions or affordances of sound reproduction. In a way, Adorno’s im pression is exemplary of a very common perception regarding the impact of technological innovation on cultural practice. For instance, in his book Capturing Sound: How Technolo gy Has Changed Music, Mark Katz correlates musical changes since the invention of sound recording technologies with a number of “phonograph effects,” or historical con stellations in which new ways of recording and manipulating sound led to shifts in musi cal practice. From numerous examples, he distills seven features characteristic of sound reproduction—tangibility, portability, (in)visibility, repeatability, temporality, receptivity, and manipulability—that can be linked to transformations in the production of music.4 Drawing on Katz’s technological perspective and on ecological psychology, Eric F. Clarke argues, further, that the specific “affordances” of playback devices led to changing listen ing practices because they caused alterations in the “ecology of listening,” that is, the sites, situations, and practices of reception.5 Like Katz, Clarke concludes that “it is recording that changed music so profoundly in the twentieth century, rather than the changes in ‘musical language.’ ”6 These observations by Katz and Clarke certainly bear truth: After the increased dissemi nation of technologies of sound reproduction and the rapid growth of the music industry in the first half of the twentieth century, the circumstances, practices, and conventions of music listening in the Western world underwent radical transformations. Focusing on technological innovation alone, however, may obscure the fact that cultural techniques, such as trained forms of music listening, result to a considerable extent from discursive interventions (Adorno himself is but one of many examples of this). In following the dis Page 2 of 25
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Experiencing High Fidelity: Sound Reproduction and the Politics of Music Listening in the Twentieth Century cursive construction of technologically mediated forms of listening throughout the twenti eth century, I show that the affordances of sound reproduction technologies indeed con tributed to new modes of music listening but that, at the same time, new ideals of listen ing emerged that shaped the ways listeners engaged with reproduced music. By examining the changing relation between private listening practices and new public discourses on “proper” forms of music consumption, I argue that sound media were not the cause for a decline in skilled music listening but instead the major site for reconceptualizing listening practices and shifts in aesthetic values in the twentieth centu ry. On one hand, the new listening ideals, which emerged alongside the dissemination of gramophones in a growing discourse on reproduced music, were modeled after the nor mative listening ideals of bourgeois music culture. On the other, the ability to acutely dis criminate and assess audible intricacies and subtleties resulting from the technological process of recording, reproduction, and transmission became a socially valued listening skill. Over the course of the century, sound media and the associated practices of listen ing to reproduced music therefore contributed more to stabilizing than to obliterating so phisticated practices of music listening. (p. 397)
Taking Adorno’s writings on the phonograph and radio as examples, I show, in the first section, how members of the bourgeois music culture in the first half of the twentieth century reiterated claims of cultural authority by condemning sound reproduction as a threat to the proper appreciation of music. Confronting the assumption that audio tech nologies would cause only distracted modes of reception, I then recount how bourgeois listeners after 1900 appropriated the gramophone in the domestic environment and culti vated individualized and personal listening practices. I further contextualize the familiar ization of listeners with recordings by outlining how new actors, especially the emerging phonograph companies and their marketing divisions, began to promote alternative modes of skilled music listening linked to technological mediation in order to market gramophones to bourgeois customers. Turning to the emerging discourse of high fidelity in the 1950s, I show how the introduction of stereophonic recording and hi-fi equipment once again gave rise to novel listening experiences and new discourses on proper music listening. This time, the greatly improved sound quality and recording length of the LP proved to appeal even to the advocates of “traditional” listening ideals. However, a closer look into the discourse about high fidelity reveals that the proposed listening ideals should not be mistaken as neutral guidelines to an optimal reception of musical record ings but, rather, need to be understood as discursive means that helped middle-class men articulate claims of social and cultural superiority. In the last section, I therefore offer a critical discussion of the politics of skilled listening in hi-fi culture and point to growing objections to normative modes of listening in the second half of the century. In tracing this history, I show how discourses that promoted normative ideals of music lis tening can be read as indicators of power struggles connected to shifting self-conceptions and epistemic values within the educated middle classes. Male listeners in particular, whether consciously or subconsciously, used carefully trained listening skills and their crystallizations in normative listening ideals not only to experience music in ways they Page 3 of 25
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Experiencing High Fidelity: Sound Reproduction and the Politics of Music Listening in the Twentieth Century considered truthful and profound but also to communicate a common identity, articulate social hierarchies, and stake claims to societal power. In order to uncover the fundamen tal politics of listening with regard to reproduced music, I discuss some of the hidden bi ases incorporated in the conceptions of idealized forms of listening to (p. 398) reproduced music, the social exclusions of which eventually contributed much more to a decline in skilled listening than had Adorno’s fear of technological reproduction.
Sound Reproduction and the “Regression” of Listening For most of his life, Theodor W. Adorno, an avid concert-goer and music critic, expressed strong reservations toward reproduced music. In his 1927 essay “The Curves of the Nee dle,” he states plainly: “The relevance of the talking machine is debatable.”7 Despite the improved recording and playback process made possible by electrification in 1925, Adorno deemed sound recordings to be mere “herbaria” of the world of music. As he fur ther elaborated in his text “The Form of the Phonograph Record” (1934), phonographic recordings represented “nothing more than . . . acoustic photographs” that, similar to the black-and-white photographs of the time, turned real-world events into a “two-dimension al model of a reality that can be multiplied without limit, displaced both spatially and tem porally, and traded on the open market. This, at the price of sacrificing its third dimen sion: its height and its abyss.”8 Conceived as a critical answer to Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” Adorno’s text expressed far less optimism about technological reproduction. Whereas Benjamin contrasted the creation of traditional artworks such as paintings with the potential of new collective work practices, as for instance in cinema, Adorno considered musical recordings simply as incapable of delivering acoustic stimuli suitable for sophisticated aesthetic experi ences. Adorno held the growing consumption of music through radio, even more than musical recordings, responsible for the decline in critical music listening. In his 1941 study “The Radio Symphony,” for instance, he reaffirms his fear that “serious music as communicat ed over the ether may indeed offer optimum conditions for retrogressive tendencies in lis tening, for the avalanche of fetishism which is overtaking music and burying it under the moraine of entertainment.”9 In analyzing the effects of radio on the aesthetic experience of listening to Beethoven’s Symphony no. 9, Adorno found the loss of dynamic range caused by AM radio transmission to substantially impede the appreciation of the overall structure of the work: Only if the motif can develop from the restrained pianissimo to the striking yet af firming fortissimo, is it actually revealed as the “cell” which represents the whole even when exposed as a mere monad. Only within the tension of such a gradation does its repetition become more than repetition. The more the gradation is com pressed—which is necessarily the case in radio—the less this tension is felt. [By
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Experiencing High Fidelity: Sound Reproduction and the Politics of Music Listening in the Twentieth Century the same token,] radio’s neutralization of sound colors practically blots out pre cisely those minute differences upon which the classical orchestra is built.10 For Adorno, the loss of dynamic differentiation and spectral quality eventually re sulted in a general inability to grasp the symphony’s structural unity: “For it is in Beethoven that the idea of articulate unity constitutes the essence of the symphonic scheme. That unity is achieved by a severe economy of means forbidding their reduction, which is inevitable by radio.”11 Owing to the deficiencies of sound reproduction, Adorno concluded, radiophonic mediation would render music listening a form of mere entertain ment, citing such contemporary cultural phenomena as the dancing crowds of “jitter bugs” and the amateur “radio hams.”12 (p. 399)
Regardless of whether we agree with these observations, Adorno’s views on music listen ing reveal two important points: First, his emphatic discrimination between proper and reprehensible listening modes underlines the strong significance of normative concep tions of music listening within bourgeois music culture. As James Johnson has argued, public demonstrations of attentive and appreciative forms of music listening, both in con cert halls and in domestic environments, had represented a crucial expression of the com mon identity and moral integrity of the growing bourgeoisie in the long nineteenth centu ry.13 As part of such bourgeois claims to power, music listening was considered not a mere diversion but a purposeful, social, and inherently public activity, the right applica tion of which was to exhibit moral integrity and which therefore had to be monitored and secured by representatives of the public sphere of music. Second, Adorno’s laments fur ther reveal that in the first half of the twentieth century, the guiding figures of public mu sic life perceived their influence on concert audiences as increasingly waning. In this re spect, it is rather telling that for someone as deeply immersed in the musical culture and concert life of the time as Adorno was, music reproduction did not seem to offer benefits but appeared instead to be threatening. What intrinsically bothered Adorno about repro duced music, and what had been discursively crystallized in the presumably negative ef fects of technical deficiencies on aesthetic practice, seems to be the fact that technologi cal reproduction, alongside new practices of listening to music in the confined space of their homes, enabled audiences to elude the guiding influence and surveillance of the standard-bearers of public music culture. Apart from that, the emergence of domestic forms of music listening also raised method ological problems for sociological studies of musical life, because inquiries into aesthetic practices were simply difficult to carry out outside the public sphere. It is interesting that Adorno’s essays, apart from occasional remarks on cultural phenomena such as dancing jitterbugs and tinkering radio hams, bear little reference to in actu listening practices that emerged alongside musical reproduction. Contrary to Adorno’s belief, listeners did not necessarily approach phonographic music recordings with a lower level of attentive ness. Had he asked people about how they engaged in listening to reproduced music, Adorno might have found the values of bourgeois music culture to be more prevalent than
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Experiencing High Fidelity: Sound Reproduction and the Politics of Music Listening in the Twentieth Century he expected. Owing to the novel possibility of consuming music alone, listeners simply de veloped more individualistic and personal relations to music.
(p. 400)
Listening in Solitude
With the growing dissemination of reproduced music in the early twentieth century, lis tening in solitude became a popular mode of music consumption. In his acclaimed novel The Magic Mountain, set in an upper-class sanatorium in the years preceding World War I, Thomas Mann meticulously adumbrated the characteristics of solitary listening. The work convincingly lays out his protagonist Hans Castorp’s initiation into the joys of repro duced music. When the sanatorium’s management introduces a luxurious gramophone to its well-heeled guests, the “musical apparatus” captures Castorp’s immediate attention.14 The first demonstration, organized in the form of a public gramophone concert, features Offenbach, Mozart’s Figaro, and an aria from La Traviata. Although the mechanical repro duction, as the considerate narrator is quick to remark, “was scarcely like a real orches tra playing in the room” but rather “as though one were to look at a painting through the wrong end of an opera-glass, seeing it remote and diminutive,” the young engineer Cas torp nevertheless develops a deep fascination with the “light-hearted invention.”15 Castorp is particularly drawn to the vast selection of recordings, seemingly “a world full of beautiful possibilities” waiting to be explored.16 Subsequent to the demonstration, Cas torp returns to examine the catalog and passionately engages in extensive daily listening sessions—preferably alone and during the quiet nightly hours, in which he ventures into the phonographic archive, “bustling and solitary.”17 Rather than being a social, public ac tivity, listening to recordings develops into an intimate, almost spiritual private ritual: Hans Castorp was alone among four walls with his wonder-box; with the florid performance of this truncated little coffin of violin-wood, this small dull-black tem ple, before the open double doors of which he sat with his hands folded in his lap, his head on one side, his mouth open, and let the harmonies flow over him.18 Contrary to Adorno’s apprehension, the gramophonic presentation did not necessarily re sult in less attentive and contemplative modes of music listening. As becomes apparent in Castorp’s engagement with Carmen, the possibility of repeated consumption in fact pro vides for an even deeper knowledge and appreciation of the music: “Hans Castorp played this single record over and over, and listened with the deepest participation.”19 An off spring of the German Bildungsbürgertum (educated bourgeoisie), Castorp is portrayed as being accustomed to grappling with the meaning of an artwork rather than to regarding music as mere entertainment. Despite this musical education, however, he shows little in terest in the musical structure of the compositions. Rather, he immerses himself in a state of affective and hermeneutic listening to savor the sentiments of the works and to ponder the evolution of their narrative—especially in the case of vocal works (arias and Lieder are among his favorites).20 Castorp gives himself over, in particular, to the “consoling power” and “soothing effect” of certain works.21 Thanks to the (p. 401) vast selection of Page 6 of 25
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Experiencing High Fidelity: Sound Reproduction and the Politics of Music Listening in the Twentieth Century available recordings, reproduced music proved to be especially well suited to forms of musical mood management.22 Moreover, the combined possibility of selection and repetition enables Castorp to use recorded music as a medium for biographical recollection and commemoration: Valentine, the character from Charles Gounod’s Faust, for instance, strongly reminds him of his late cousin Joachim, while “The Linden Tree” from Schubert’s Winter Journey so intensely re verberates with his own personal fascination with death that on each rendition “the lis tener felt his heart gripped in undreamed-of fashion.”23 The self-conception of being the master of ceremonies of his own private concerts gives Castorp a novel feeling of control over musical content, while his gratitude for the moments of media-induced nostalgia re sults in a devout adoration of the “small dull-black temple” of music. In order to express his appreciation, he not only engages profoundly with the available catalog of records but equally makes himself acquainted with the proper maintenance of the apparatus, the pur poses of the various types of needles, and the effects of different settings on the quality of the produced sound. With his preference for listening in solitude, his intimate and personal engagement with music, and his awe at the refinements of the playback apparatus, Hans Castorp is arche typical of the—usually male—listener of technologically mediated music in the twentieth century. As his example shows, the dissemination of sound recording indeed shaped indi vidual practices of music listening. A seemingly discrete and versatile musical servant, the gramophone allowed for personal and individualized experiences of music in solitude. Rather than being a mere “phonograph effect,” however, the turn to domestic solitary lis tening can also be taken as a sign of the desire of contemporary listeners to elude the normative ideals and social protocols associated with bourgeois concert life in order to make more private and affective listening experiences. We can even read it as a precur sor to twentieth-century individualism, condensed in the promise of freedom of expres sion and a seemingly unlimited control over the process of music consumption. Yet de spite Adorno’s concerns, listening to the gramophone did not necessarily lead to a dis tracted and unfocused reception of musical works. Solitary listeners were far from being entirely detached from the outside world, for gramophone users approached reproduced music still as more or less musically educated individuals. Moreover, over the course of the twentieth century, domestic music listeners became a target group for diverse actors such as marketing departments of gramophone manufacturers and, later, high-fidelity ex perts, who aimed to influence the attitudes, habits, and behavior of the listeners by creat ing new discourses about the practices of listening to musical recordings.
Educating Gramophone Listeners As it turns out, Adorno’s aversion to reproduced music proved to be quite representative of the initial reactions among the educated classes toward the introduction of (p. 402) do mestic gramophones. In the early 1900s, music was conceived as something either to be enjoyed by attending public concerts or to be practiced with family and friends at home. Page 7 of 25
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Experiencing High Fidelity: Sound Reproduction and the Politics of Music Listening in the Twentieth Century Listening to recordings, by contrast, was considered more an entertainment for the lower classes, who would listen to so-called nickel-in-the-slot machines in public spaces such as phonograph parlors and hotel lobbies.24 Because music was considered a social activity, solitary listening did not come about naturally. To persuade higher-class customers of the benefits of musical recordings and to get them to accept the gramophone as a “wonderbox,” the phonograph industry had to create a convincing rhetoric for the bourgeoisie that the technology would indeed suit their musical tastes, habits, and attitudes. For instance, advertisers began to market gramophones as a substitute for nineteenthcentury Hausmusik (music-making in the home) in the effort to symbolically enrich tech nologies of sound reproduction with inherent values from bourgeois music culture. The Victor Talking Machine Company and Columbia Records offered recordings by acclaimed performers and conductors and praised the possibility of bringing celebrities from the music world into one’s own home. Advertisements presented phonographic recordings as faithful reproductions of original performances, while obscuring the shortcomings of the recording process.25 Phonograph companies also created high-end products tailored to the appeal of bourgeois taste in furniture: the “Victrola” gramophones, introduced by Vic tor in 1906, for example, were elegant wooden cabinets in the size of small chests of drawers devised to visually conceal both the mechanism and the horn.26 Other manufac turers were quick to adopt the design strategy. By taking the piano as a reference point, the intention was to establish gramophones as a bourgeois “musical instrument.”27 Adorno was well aware of this strategy, stating in “The Curves of the Needle” that the “transformation of the piano from a musical instrument into a piece of bourgeois furni ture—which Max Weber accurately perceived—is recurring in the case of the gramo phone but in an extraordinarily more rapid fashion.”28 The marketing of cabinet gramo phones not only suggested that phonographs were musical but also contributed to estab lishing sophisticated technology as an inherent bourgeois value. In a similar fashion, manufacturers aimed to appeal to the bourgeois habit of articulating social distinction via the exposition of refined taste by advertising the “fidelity” of music recordings and gramophones as a crucial criterion for the reception of reproduced music. By referring to existing practices of skilled music listening, manufacturers encouraged listeners to develop critical judgment in evaluating the acoustic quality of the various phonograph models and to express preferences for the supposedly distinct tones of differ ent devices. To this end, customers were taught early on to carefully register minute son ic differences between the different makes of recording media and gramophones. As Emi ly Thompson notes, “Music lovers critically compared not only old and new phonographs but also the various competing models of the day.”29 Such comparative listening modes, however, were based less on musical knowledge than on a somewhat artisanal listening expertise or, to come back to Adorno, on “certain capacities which accord less with the concepts of traditional aesthetics than with those of football and motoring.” Listeners, writes Jonathan Sterne, (p. 403)
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Experiencing High Fidelity: Sound Reproduction and the Politics of Music Listening in the Twentieth Century were to hone their audile technique, to become connoisseurs of the various shades of perfection in tone, thereby learning to distinguish between truth and falsity, or at least to be able to construct their own auditory realities. . . . Thus grew a whole set of techniques for discerning the various qualities of sound alongside the dis course of fidelity.30 The strategies devised to educate consumers to listen to recorded music become particu larly apparent in the so-called Tone Tests, or Re-Creation Recitals, initiated by the Edison Company alongside the introduction of their new Diamond Disc system in 1912.31 The Tone Tests were joint performances of artists playing or singing alongside their own phonographic recordings. Held in thousands of auditoriums throughout the United States between 1915 and 1925, the tests constituted a massive marketing program designed to educate listeners in how to “properly” listen to phonographic reproductions of musical performances. Particularly fitted to appeal to higher-income audiences, the company ad vertised the Tone Tests as “high-class musical entertainments” and promised listeners that owning a Diamond Disc system, or “New Edison,” would speak “eloquently and con vincingly of [their] musical culture and discriminating taste.”32 According to Thompson, the tests were conceived to convince audiences that the Diamond Discs, which were re ferred to as Re-Creations, conveyed, in fact, “real music” that could be considered to be artistically on a par with and in fact indistinguishable from original performances.33 In or der to achieve this impression, audiences were educated to focus on the acoustic resem blance of the recording to the original source of sound rather than on the differences re sulting from the recording process.34 At the same time, however, listeners were also en couraged to note and appreciate the superior sound quality of the New Edison compared to previous models and devices from competitors. Thereby, as Thompson points out, the Tone Tests “additionally provided an opportunity for audiences to engage in the critical listening that many had already undertaken in their homes or in phonograph shops.”35 Thus with the dissemination of the gramophone, a new discourse on sophisticated listen ing evolved that was exclusively linked to technologies of sound reproduction. Advertise ments and manuals asked gramophone customers to acknowledge the sonic realism of the recordings and to ignore the sonic traces of the reproduction process. The practice of critical listening, however, which was tailored to suit the typically male habits of talking shop and displaying technical expertise, rendered the ability to formulate well-grounded judgments concerning the sound quality of particular recording media and playback de vices both a topic of conversation and a new way of articulating social distinction. More over, the new art of listening to acoustic instead of musical features bears similarities to other skilled listening practices associated, for instance, with specialized professions or groups such as musicians, doctors, soldiers, and motorists.36 Therefore, I argue that the grounding of critical listening and “sound fidelity” in bourgeois aesthetic merit high lights, above all, the growing social value of technical expertise in the first half of the twentieth century.
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Experiencing High Fidelity: Sound Reproduction and the Politics of Music Listening in the Twentieth Century (p. 404)
The Hi-Fi Experience
With respect to music listening in the home, the introduction of the long-playing record (LP) and of high-fidelity equipment in the late 1940s and early 1950s marked a major caesura. Just as the gramophone, which, in spite of its shortcomings, allowed Castorp to develop a more personal relation with music, high-fidelity technology offered new ways of experiencing music by capturing listeners’ attention to details of the sonic reproduction. Dating back to World War II, the LP featured both greatly enhanced sound quality and an extended playing time, making classical music a notable beneficiary of the technology. In 1940 the RAF Coastal Command had asked Decca Records to develop a recording process with an improved dynamic range and frequency response suitable for creating high-defin ition recordings of German and British submarine noises for the purpose of training sonar operators. Four years later, Decca started to release FFRR, or “full frequency range re sponse,” musical recordings on 78-rpm shellac discs that covered almost the complete hu man range of audibility and were hence praised for their sonic “naturalness.”37 In order to meet its British competitors, Columbia Records launched the long-playing record in 1948. Polyvinyl chloride, or short vinyl, the rigid and highly unbreakable material used to manufacture the discs, allowed for smaller grooves (termed “micro grooves”) and hence an increased playing time while featuring an even higher signal quality and considerably less surface noise. The enhanced bandwidth and dynamic range subsequently enabled lis teners to discern even subtler sonic differences in musical recordings and to henceforth explore recorded sonic worlds, as Friedrich Kittler suggests, like carefully trained sonar operators.38 In 1949 Capitol Records first began to label its new LP records as “high fidelity.” Throughout the 1950s, however, the term became more broadly associated with stereo phonic recordings and improved sound reproduction technologies.39 The hi-fi boom, which initially started as a do-it-yourself hobby in the late 1940s, developed into a niche culture with specialized magazines, shops, and trade shows in the 1950s before ultimate ly turning into a mass market in the 1960s.40 Hi-fi equipment and recordings had consid erable effects on the culture of music and listening practices. Although Jonathan Sterne has argued that the notion of “sound fidelity” had always been bound to social practices of sound reproduction and the faith people were willing to invest in a certain technology,41 the enthusiastic response to the LP points to the fact that the recording medium’s ability to cover the entire spectrum of human hearing nevertheless made a con siderable difference for the perception of music. With the enhanced dynamic and spectral resolution of hi-fi recordings, “acoustic photographs,” to stay within Adorno’s imagery, had suddenly become large-scale color images, and with stereophonic reproduction they had literally gained in depth and dimensionality. The fascination with high fidelity, as Keir Keightley has argued, “was predominantly tied to musical recordings, whose value was also judged based on an aesthetic of audio real ism, sonic immersion and mental transportation. The listening experience was to be (p. 405) enhanced by the approximation of aural ‘reality,’ an illusion of presence ideally in distinguishable from the ‘live’ real thing.”42 For hi-fi aficionados, “aural reality” entailed Page 10 of 25
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Experiencing High Fidelity: Sound Reproduction and the Politics of Music Listening in the Twentieth Century not only a “natural” reproduction of the music but also the perceivable sonic characteris tics of the environment or recording space. Many recordings in the 1950s were made with only a single omnidirectional microphone placed at a certain distance in order to create an authentic acoustic perspective. High-quality recordings were thought to deliver a sonic point of view, or “point of audition,” and a faithful “documentation” of original performances. At the same time, as Eric Barry has shown in his study of the recording practices of the “exotica” pioneer Emory Cook and Mercury’s classical division, listeners were captivated by the hyperrealism of stereophonic recordings and became increasingly fascinated by immersive “acoustic spectacles” that brought “sublime listening experi ences” to the Cold War-era living room.43 In contrast to radios and television sets, high-fidelity audio equipment was almost exclu sively advertised to male consumers. According to Keightley, the unprecedented detail of spectral resolution (or “sound color”) and ambient sound stimulated a desire to be “trans ported (mentally) ‘elsewhere.’ ”44 As a result, he argues, home audio was perceived not only as a means to engage with music but also as one that provided “a virtual escape from domestic space.”45 Enhanced by louder playback volumes, the hi-fi experience of fered a soothing private space of retreat for suburban middle-class subjects who per ceived themselves to be living in a fragile and increasingly menacing world during the high tide of the Cold War. High fidelity spurred curiosity about new sounds, encouraging sonic exploration, and hence emphasized the “sensual experience of sound” rather than the intellectual comprehension and appreciation of a work’s inner structure.46 In this way, hi-fi recordings further nurtured the evolution of affective, subjective listening practices.
The High-Fidelity Discourse and the Going Technical of Skilled Music Listening As the above-mentioned examples indicate, the affordances of high-fidelity sound repro duction had a considerable impact on how listeners experienced and engaged with repro duced music. Yet domestic listening practices once again became the target of normative conceptions of music listening. Special interest journals such as High Fidelity (founded in 1951), which had quickly grown into the marketing arm of the consumer electronics in dustry during the 1950s, marked a specific place where different discourses on music lis tening intersected with each other. As Alf Björnberg has shown in a study of early hi-fi culture in Sweden, the discourse of high fidelity actually emerged from the conjunction of three different discourses on mediated listening: the “engineer” discourse (p. 406) of the technologically interested hobbyist, the “classical connoisseur” discourse of the art-music listener, and the “fan” discourse of the jazz and popular-music listener.47 Hi-fi writers used expert language drawn mainly from the first two of these discourses to present themselves as authorities on mediated listening, especially by advocating normative modes of listening.
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Experiencing High Fidelity: Sound Reproduction and the Politics of Music Listening in the Twentieth Century Hi-fi columnists adopted the discourse of engineers to encourage music lovers to familiar ize themselves with the technological aspects of high-fidelity equipment and record pro duction. For instance, they urged listeners to train their ears to evaluate the effects that the different modules of their stereo systems had on the aesthetic result of the reproduc tion, a skill that was supposed to help customers make informed purchasing decisions. Authors also borrowed from technological acoustics and asked listeners to develop pref erences for different recording settings and mixing concepts. The West German hi-fi ex pert Heinz Joseph Nisius, for instance, avidly initiated newcomers into the divergent aes thetic paradigms of reproducing music and how they relate to technological features and listening habits: Many [listeners] consider hi-fi stereo to be the transmission of the concert hall in to the living room; supporters of this view favor speakers that render a spacious, far-sounding reproduction that does not necessarily need to be very brilliant but capable of conveying the offset in depth. To meet this requirement, they are, at times, willing to accept discolorations. For others, hi-fi stereophony is supposed to help render the score transparent. They prefer a sound with presence, two-dimen sional if necessary but free of discoloration. The velvety, juicy, and voluminous sound favored by the “documentarists” is less attractive for them than the sort of “indiscretion” that enables an exact sonic definition of instruments.48 Like the gramophone marketers of half a century earlier, hi-fi columnists appropriated traditional ideals of art-music listening as well. Björnberg, for instance, cites a writer of a Swedish hi-fi journal who, in 1959, promoted domestic listening that followed the eti quette of public concerts: Then you should relax, sit still and comfortably and listen relaxedly like at an ordi nary concert. Concentration should be directed towards hearing stereo music as an artistic experience rather than exploring acoustic or technical details. . . . Stereo should be enjoyed in small doses and may give its owner good opportuni ties for putting together programmes for home concerts.49 The prescriptive language and admonishing directions paired with the somewhat pharma cological rhetoric prevalent in the quotation exemplify the way self-proclaimed hi-fi ex perts borrowed from the art-music discourse. Taking normative conceptions of skilled mu sical listening as role models, they often portrayed listening as an art with clear rules that had to be learned and practiced. To this end, introductory texts perpetually demanded that listeners “train the ear correctly from the start” and obtain a “proper listening atti tude.”50 By constantly reiterating and anchoring normative imperatives in (p. 407) the dis course of high fidelity, the writers characterized music listening as not simply an effort less practice but a skill that had to be successively cultivated and hence called for the guidance of esteemed experts who had, supposedly, already mastered the art. Authors en gaged in the hi-fi discourse thus combined technical and musical expertise to establish themselves as official authorities on proper forms of listening to reproduced music.
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Experiencing High Fidelity: Sound Reproduction and the Politics of Music Listening in the Twentieth Century Throughout the following decades, the new listening ideals were diffused into the public discourse, as seen in the regular hi-fi columns in newspapers and magazines such as Bill board. For the first time, however, musical reproduction also attracted the interest of tra ditional musical experts. When exigent music connoisseurs became aware of the potential of stereo recordings and FM radio, many engaged in the vogue of high fidelity. As one of the effects of these developments, the 1950s and 1960s saw growing ties between musi cologists and hi-fi culture. The Austrian musicologist Kurt Blaukopf, one of the leading figures of twentieth-century German sociology of music, for instance, started issuing the journal Phono as early as 1954 in Austria and later became the editor of the renowned German hi-fi magazine HiFi-Stereophonie in 1965. In the late 1960s, even Adorno revealed himself to be a fan of the stereo LP. In his short text “Opera and the Long-Playing Record” (1968), written in the year before his death, he sang the highest praises of the medium: In any case, the term “revolution” is hardly an exaggeration with regard to the long-playing record. The entire musical literature could now become available in quite-authentic form to listeners desirous of auditioning and studying such works at a time convenient to them. . . . The ability to repeat long-playing records, as well as parts of them, fosters a familiarity which is hardly afforded by the ritual of performance.51 On the basis of the LP’s sophisticated sound quality and transparency, the avowed enemy of sound reproduction finally came to experience and appreciate the benefits of its affor dances. Furthermore, Adorno regarded the LP to be a “deus ex machina” capable of pre venting the danger of anachronism, which, according to Adorno, resulted from the con temporary staging of traditional operas. Reminiscent of radio as described in Rudolph Arnheim’s famous text “In Praise of Blindness,” the LP removed the visual aspects of the opera entirely and hence enabled structural musical listening without distractions.52 For Adorno, then, the stereo LP allowed for “the optimal presentation of music, enabling it to recapture some of the force and intensity that had been worn threadbare in the opera houses. Objectification, that is, a concentration on music as the true object of opera, may be linked to a perception that is comparable to reading, to the immersion in a text.”53 In other words, the LP was welcomed as a new medium for musicologists and historians of music because it enabled what Thomas Levin terms a “close reading” of works in ways al most impossible to achieve during live performances.54 Adorno even changed his mind about deeming radio a dubious conveyor of art music. In the 1960s he actually became a rather engaged disc jockey with, as Levin points out, a (p. 408) distinct “preference for gramophonic citation”: while hosting a series of radio shows for the North German Radio (NDR), he presented and commented on his favorite passages in the manner of the fictional Hans Castorp, albeit with theoretically deeper analyses.55 Three decades after expressing his outrage at the technological reproduction of music, Adorno considered acoustic mediation to be not only equal but superior to con cert performances. By means of radio, he admitted, “the technologically mediated [sound] Page 13 of 25
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Experiencing High Fidelity: Sound Reproduction and the Politics of Music Listening in the Twentieth Century gains a corporeal proximity which the immediacy of the live performance often denies to those whose goal is a concentrated reception.”56 Thanks to the long-playing record and the hi-fi stereo system, structural musical listening literally found a second home in the domestic environment.
Expertise and Exclusion: Ideological Biases in Normative Ideals of Music Listening The reconciliation of canonized modes of art-music listening with technological mediation contributed to a further ennoblement of high-end audio technology. Although domestic music listening flourished under the technological regime of high fidelity, there was also a rather troubling, uneasy side to the discursive construction of listening ideals because the exclusivity that expert listeners claimed for themselves was built on not only exceptional knowledge and experience but also a number of questionable ideological biases and mechanisms of discursive exclusion. One common expression of this discursive politics is the fact that members of the hi-fi cul ture exhibited rather strong tendencies toward misogyny—to the degree, one might safe ly say, that the very conceptions of normative listening attitudes in hi-fi culture were deeply grounded in the gendering of audio technology and sensory perception. In his de tailed analysis of the early public discourse of high-fidelity audio, Keightley demonstrates how discursive tropes were frequently used to gender and naturalize taste preferences and underscores that it was widely acceptable to consider women to be generally unwill ing, if not mentally incapable, of truly appreciating music. For instance, pondering fe males’ complaints about high playback volumes, an author of the Saturday Review of Lit erature suggested that most women like to play records . . . at sub-normal volume because they can thus continue their chatter over the music, or above it, or—let us be frank—in spite of it. . . . Do women really listen to music . . . ? Is music a part of their experience be cause it is thought-provoking and soul-satisfying, or merely because it comes out of a “blond” cabinet . . . ?57 In hi-fi culture, Keightley concludes, the discourse on proper musical listening be came a site for domestic power struggles and spousal conflict—a “weapon in the battle of the sexes.”58 Moreover, the belief that women would not be amenable or receptive to sub lime listening experiences but, rather, would worry about the appearance of cabinets re mained so common among hi-fi enthusiasts that it gave birth to a grotesque pseudo-tech nical parameter: the so-called wife acceptance factor (later also called “wife approval fac tor” or “wife appeal factor”). The “WAF,” first used in 1983 by Larry Greenhill in the September issue of the high-end audio magazine Stereophile, shows the continuing pres ence of deep-rooted gender stereotypes in hi-fi culture.59 A discourse that represented high-end audio so clearly as a male hobby most certainly discouraged women from partic (p. 409)
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Experiencing High Fidelity: Sound Reproduction and the Politics of Music Listening in the Twentieth Century ipating in it. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that in surveys conducted in 1988 and 1991 by Stereophile, 99 percent of the respondents were male.60 Another bias concerns an implicit but specific conception of class affiliation: although high-fidelity culture clearly appropriated the habitus of bourgeois music culture, average hi-fi listeners belonged to the aspiring but not necessarily wealthy middle classes. The majority were well-educated professionals, often in technical fields, whose disposable in comes were considerable but nonetheless fixed.61 The readers of hi-fi magazines were in structed to formulate rational and well-articulated judgments that spoke to their refined taste and expertise, not only to demonstrate technical expertise but also as a tactic to jus tify expenditures on pricey equipment. Joseph O’Connell suggested that for this reason, high-end audio journals are more than just guides to technical equipment; they also are guides to an “attitude that might be called ‘educated consumption.’ ”62 Technology re views resemble restaurant reviews or wine tastings so that the (male) “reader receives the message that he is justified in consuming the expensive goods to which others do not have access, provided only that he is discriminating enough to appreciate their quality.”63 Such compromises that ask a fortiori for well-articulated justifications are, however, irrel evant for both indifferent lowbrow consumers who need to stay with what they can afford and well-heeled customers who can buy expensive gear without having to worry about the cost. In the German handbook Hifi Hören (Listening to Hi-Fi), for example, the hi-fi expert Nisius is, although in a polemic way, quite clearly prejudiced against more affluent hi-fi customers: Such hi-fi aspirants need not search for long. They may purchase “unheard” the most expensive, largest, most eccentric, most complex, kinkiest, loudest, most col orful or cheapest, depending on taste and demand. Only the “normally welloff” . . . music lover needs to exert himself to spot devices within the financial means and spatial circumstances that suffice his ambitions.64 We may read this excerpt as a sort of guilty hedonism on the part of middle-class “music lovers” who are in need of good reasons to give themselves to consumerism. The ex pressed belief that hi-fi components must not be suggestive of extravagance, however, seems to speak as much of the musical ambitions of the listener as of his social identity. In other words, in hi-fi culture, musical and technical expertise served as a vehicle not on ly for appreciating music but also for articulating the social status and (p. 410) aspirations of a new tech-savvy male elite that formed throughout World War II and especially during the space age. More generally speaking, we can regard the listening ideals circulated in the hi-fi discourse as expressions of the rise of the educated middle class, whose mem bers understood themselves to be responsible for the economic and scientific progress and prosperity of postwar Western society. In hi-fi culture, normative ideals of music listening served as means to claim cultural and moral authority; for this reason, the discursive practices of normalizing certain listening modes while denouncing others were not only exclusive but excluding. My intent is not to make judgments about audiophiles, however. Rather, I aim to allude to the fact that simi Page 15 of 25
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Experiencing High Fidelity: Sound Reproduction and the Politics of Music Listening in the Twentieth Century lar biases were present and ultimately became apparent in the older conceptions of skilled music listening as well. From the 1960s on, interventions by musicologists like Charles Rosen, Joseph Kerman, and others urged that studies of musical works should be interpretive and based more on subjective experience than on “positivist” technical analy sis. Toward the end of the century, critical musicologists, often termed “new musicolo gists” by their critics, incorporated new research methods and unlocked formerly es chewed fields of study such as popular music.65 Some of these musicologists, such as Gary Tomlinson, Susan McClary, and Rose Subotnik, also turned their criticism toward the foundational concepts, theories, and methods of musicology itself and, in particular, lashed out against the lack of social and cultural context that had dominated the disci pline. As musicologists began to doubt the universality of musical meaning supposed by traditional musicology, they also challenged well-established ideals of listening. To these writers, the belief in structural unity, as propagated by Adorno, for example, had lost much of its former potential as a critical aesthetic practice. Instead, they came to regard it as an excluding and elitist normalization of musical experience.66 In a time of increased social change, in which scholars began to politicize musicological inquiry by questioning the canonical knowledge, the traditional authorities, and the implicit presuppositions of the field, structural listening was thus no longer considered part of the solution to the ap propriate reception of music but, rather, conceived as a part of a bigger problem, namely, the cultural hegemony sustained by predominantly “white male” musicologists. Interestingly, the growing critique of structural listening coincided, if only roughly, with a divestment of the electronics industry from promoting skilled music listening. After com pact-disc burners and file sharing allowed listeners to obtain perfect copies of musical recordings in the 1990s, the electronics industry started to promote conveniences such as storage capacity, accessibility, and portability rather than sound quality. Although, of course, there are still many with sophisticated listening skills today, normative listening ideals based on musical and technical expertise have almost entirely disappeared from the public discourse on music listening.
Conclusion This chapter has traced the history of skillful listening to recorded music in the twentieth century with attention to shifts in listening practices and the discourses (p. 411) surround ing them. Contrary to the lament of an intellectual and music critic such as Theodor Adorno, who felt that the inferior sound quality of the gramophone and radio had caused structural listening to decline, this history shows that the appropriation of sound repro duction technologies equally gave rise to various new forms of attentive music listening. Domestic listening enabled the emergence of solitary listening subjects such as Thomas Mann’s Hans Castorp, who enjoyed engaging with music outside the strictures of the pub lic concert. The introduction of the long-playing record and high-fidelity equipment after World War II further nurtured private musical experiences in the home. As evidenced by examples from across the century, sound recording indeed contributed to the formation of new practices of music listening. Yet mediated listening practices were influenced not Page 16 of 25
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Experiencing High Fidelity: Sound Reproduction and the Politics of Music Listening in the Twentieth Century simply by the characteristics of the technology but also by the many people involved in promoting and using them, ranging from phonograph companies and advertisers to hi-fi experts and audiophiles. To foster the acceptance of musical reproduction among gramo phone customers, these actors incentivized forms of expert listening by promoting new normative discourses about “appropriate” ways of listening modeled after the so-called traditional aesthetics of bourgeois music culture. Seeking to appeal to the bourgeois predilection for refined judgments of taste, gramophone manufacturers even propagated a new discourse of skilled listening based on the nuanced discrimination of the sounds of the reproduction medium. The history of hi-fi culture further reveals that normative ideals of music listening did not remain restricted to the concert hall but slowly expanded to the reception of reproduced music in the home. In the public discourse on high-fidelity audio equipment, as fostered mainly by writers of special-interest magazines, the virtues of attentive and trained modes of critical listening to the electroacoustic quality of playback devices as well as to recordings gained traction. Moreover, the extended playback time and greatly enhanced signal quality of the stereo LP made reproduced music a suitable medium for musicologi cal study, allowing for a mode of “objectifying” musical listening that enabled “concen trated reception” (Adorno) of musical texts in recorded form. Although intellectuals such as Adorno initially perceived technical means of sound reproduction as a threat to tradi tional practices of structural listening, the hi-fi discourse in the second half of the twenti eth century actually proved to be the site where ideals of attentive and trained listening were most appreciated, especially during a time when Western music culture was becom ing more diverse and classical music was losing its cultural supremacy to popular music. Thus the discourse fostered by the phonograph companies and, later, the hi-fi experts should be seen as having exerted more of a stabilizing than a deteriorating force on nor mative conceptions of listening. These discourses also highlight problems with normative conceptions of skillful listening. The emerging discourse of hi-fi culture revealed that ap propriations of bourgeois ideals of music listening came with considerable ideological bi ases, as the idea of the expert listener was used to express and reaffirm the identity and moral authority of the educated and aspiring middle-class male at the expense of others. Therefore, technologically mediated listening should not be read as a decline of bour geois ideals of music listening but rather as an index of broader value shifts within the hegemonic discourse of the educated middle classes. Listening to music in recorded form did not merely represent a turn away from humanist ideals of high culture but instead points to a growing cultural investment by the middle classes in the authority of science and technology, tied closely to the promise of “modernity” and economic prosperity through technological progress.67 That phonograph manufacturers succeeded in selling sound fidelity as a commodity to their customers may therefore be regarded as a general symptom of a wider acceptance of technology as a fundamental value—after all, high-end gramophones spoke as much of the advancements of technology as automobiles and other industrially manufactured commodities. In The Magic Mountain the sanatorium’s director, the Hofrat Behrens, praises the newly ac quired gramophone as “the truly musical, in modern, mechanical form, the German soul (p. 412)
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Experiencing High Fidelity: Sound Reproduction and the Politics of Music Listening in the Twentieth Century up to date.”68 Moreover, the value and discursive construction of sound fidelity can be read as expressions of the fact that in the twentieth century, the discourse of the natural and engineering sciences slowly but steadily began to challenge the epistemologies of the traditional humanist disciplines. It therefore seems to be no accident that Mann actually portrayed Hans Castorp as a university-trained engineer. The rise of technical expertise as a value for the educated middle classes becomes even more apparent in the mass cul ture that emerged after World War II. Owing to their achievements during the war and the space age, scientists and engineers became new role models that challenged the fig ure of the public intellectual. In the postwar culture of high fidelity, such expertise be came not only a virtue in itself but a prerequisite for providing the appropriate conditions for the reception of music. By the end of the twentieth century, it had become clear that, despite a continuing and vi brant global concert life and persistent album sales, Western art music had lost much of the cultural significance it enjoyed at the beginning of the century. Moreover, as musicol ogists increasingly questioned the supposed objectivity and ethical value of disciplined structural listening starting in the late 1970s, other forms of music listening and alterna tive conceptions of structural unity came to be viewed as legitimate ways of engaging with music. The decline in structural listening, though clear, was the result not merely of sound reproduction technologies, as Adorno had charged, but of conscious interventions made by critical musicologists, composers, advertisers, and the wider public.
References Adorno, Theodor W. (1927/1965) 2002a. “The Curves of the Needle.” In Essays on Music: Theodor W. Adorno, edited by Richard Leppert, 271–276. Berkeley: University of Califor nia Press. Adorno, Theodor W. (1934) 2002b. “The Form of the Phonograph Record.” In Essays on Music: Theodor W. Adorno, edited by Richard Leppert, 277–282 Berkeley: University of California Press. Adorno, Theodor W. (1938) 2001. “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Re gression of Listening.” In The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, edited by J. M. Bernstein, 29–60. London: Routledge. (p. 416)
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Experiencing High Fidelity: Sound Reproduction and the Politics of Music Listening in the Twentieth Century Adorno, Theodor W. (1963) 1976. “Über die musikalische Verwendung des Radios.” In Der getreue Korrepetitor: Lehrschriften zur musikalischen Praxis. Gesammelte Schriften 15, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, 369–401. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Adorno, Theodor W. (1969) 2002d. “Opera and the Long-Playing Record.” In Essays on Music: Theodor W. Adorno, edited by Richard Leppert, 283–287. Berkeley: University of California Press. Adorno, Theodor W. 1976. Introduction to a Sociology of Music. New York: Seabury. Arnheim, Rudolf. 1936. “In Praise of Blindness: Emancipation from the Body.” In Radio, edited by Rudolf Arnheim. Translated by Margaret Ludwig and Herbert Read, 133–203. London: Faber and Faber. Atkinson, John. 1988. “Stereophile and You?” Stereophile 11 (10): 69–77. Atkinson, John. 1992. “Who Are You?” Stereophile 15 (6): 7–10. Barry, Eric D. 2010. “High-Fidelity Sound as Spectacle and Sublime, 1950–1961.” In Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, edited by David Suisman and Susan Strasser, 115–140. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Björnberg, Alf. 2009. “Learning to Listen to Perfect Sound: Hi-fi Culture and Changes in Modes of Listening, 1950–80.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicolo gy, edited by Derek B. Scott, 105–130. Farnham: Ashgate. Buxbaum, Edwin C. 1949. “On Playing Music Loud.” Saturday Review of Literature 25:51. Clarke, Eric F. 2007. “The Impact of Recording on Listening.” Twentieth-Century Music 4 (1): 47–70. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1478572207000527. Dell’Antonio, Andrew. 2004. Introduction to Beyond Structural Listening? Postmodern Modes of Hearing, edited by Andrew Dell’Antonio, 1–12. Berkeley: University of Califor nia Press. Gelatt, Roland. 1977. The Fabulous Phonograph, 1877–1977. 2nd ed. London: Cassell. Greenhill, Larry. 1983. “Quad ESL-63 Loudspeaker, Part 3.” Stereophile 6 (4). Accessed May 15, 2018. https://www.stereophile.com/content/quad-esl-63-loudspeaker-larrygreenhill-part-3. Johnson, James H. 1995. Listening in Paris: A Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Katz, Mark. 2004. Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music. Berkeley: Uni versity of California Press. Keightley, Keir. 1996. “‘Turn it down!’ She Shrieked: Gender, Domestic Space, and High Fidelity, 1948–59.” Popular Music 15 (2): 149–177. Page 19 of 25
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Experiencing High Fidelity: Sound Reproduction and the Politics of Music Listening in the Twentieth Century Kittler, Friedrich A. 1999. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univer sity Press. Krebs, Stefan. 2012. “‘Sobbing, Whining, Rumbling’: Listening to Automobiles as Social Practice.” In The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, edited by Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, 249–270. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levin, Thomas Y. 1990. “For the Record: Adorno on Music in the Age of Its Tech nological Reproducibility.” October 55:23–43. (p. 417)
Mann, Thomas. 1953. The Magic Mountain. Translated by Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter. New York: Knopf. Maus, Fred Everett 2011. “What Was Critical Musicology?” Radical Musicology 5. Ac cessed October 24, 2014. http://www.radical-musicology.org.uk. McClary, Susan. 1991. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mundy, Rachel. 2014. “Evolutionary Categories and Musical Style from Adler to Ameri ca.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 67 (3): 735–768. https://doi.org/ 10.1525/jams.2014.67.3.735. Nisius, Heinz Josef. 1979. HiFi hören: HiFi-Qualität? Sie hören es! HiFi-Praxis für kritis che Käufer und Fachhändler. Würzburg: Vogel. Nye, David E. 1996. American Technological Sublime. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. O’Connell, Joseph. 1992. “The Fine-Tuning of a Golden Ear: High-End Audio and the Evo lutionary Model of Technology.” Technology and Culture 33 (1): 7–9, https://doi.org/ 10.2307/3105807. Perlman, Marc. 2004. “Golden Ears and Meter Readers: The Contest for Epistemic Au thority in Audiophilia.” Social Studies of Science 34 (5): 783–807, https://doi.org/ 10.2307/4144361. Sterne, Jonathan. 2003. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke University Press. Subotnik, Rose R. 1996. “Toward a Deconstruction of Structural Listening: A Critique of Schoenberg, Adorno, and Stravinsky.” In Deconstructive Variations: Music and Reason in Western Society, edited by Rose R. Subotnik, 148–176. Minneapolis: University of Min nesota Press. Thompson, Emily. 1995. “Machines, Music, and the Quest for Fidelity: Marketing the Edi son Phonograph in America, 1877–1925.” Musical Quarterly 79 (1): 131–171.
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Experiencing High Fidelity: Sound Reproduction and the Politics of Music Listening in the Twentieth Century Volmar, Axel. 2014. “In Storms of Steel: The Soundscape of World War I and Its Impact on Auditory Media Culture During the Weimar Period.” In Sounds of Modern History: Audito ry Cultures in 19th- and 20th-Century Europe, edited by Daniel Morat, 227–255. New York: Berghahn. (p. 418)
Notes: (1.) Adorno coins the term in Adorno, Theodor W. 1962. Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie: 12 theoretische Vorlesungen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp (I here refer to the English version: Adorno, Theodor W. 1976. Introduction to a Sociology of Music. New York: Se abury, 5, 130). He further elaborates on the concept in Adorno, Theodor W. 1963. Der ge treue Korrepetitor: Lehrschriften zur musikalischen Praxis. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fisch er, 39. (2.) Theodor W. Adorno. (1938) 2001. “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regres sion of Listening.” In The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, edited by J. M. Bernstein. London: Routledge, 46. (3.) Adorno ( [1938] 2001): 46, 49. (4.) For instance, Katz describes the historical circumstances in which the phonograph contributed to a significant increase in the use of vibrato in the early twentieth century. See Katz, Mark. 2004. Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music. Berkeley: University of California Press. (5.) Clarke, Eric F. 2007. “The Impact of Recording on Listening.” Twentieth-Century Mu sic 4 (1): 48. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1478572207000527. (6.) Clarke (2007): 48. (7.) Adorno, Theodor W. (1927/1965) 2002a. “The Curves of the Needle.” In Essays on Mu sic: Theodor W. Adorno, edited by Richard Leppert. Berkeley: University of California Press, 272. (8.) Adorno, Theodor W. (1934) 2002b. “The Form of the Phonograph Record.” In Essays on Music: Theodor W. Adorno, edited by Richard Leppert. Berkeley: University of Califor nia Press, 278. (9.) Adorno, Theodor W. (1941) 2002c. “The Radio Symphony: An Experiment in Theory.” In Essays on Music, edited by Richard Leppert. Berkeley: University of California Press, 252. (10.) Adorno ([1941] 2002c): 259–260. (11.) Adorno ([1941] 2002c): 261. (12.) Adorno ([1938] 2001): 53–54.
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Experiencing High Fidelity: Sound Reproduction and the Politics of Music Listening in the Twentieth Century (13.) See Johnson, James H. 1995. Listening in Paris: A Cultural History. Berkeley: Univer sity of California Press. (14.) Mann, Thomas. 1953. The Magic Mountain. Translated by Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter. New York: Knopf, 978. (15.) Mann (1953): 980–981. (16.) Mann (1953): 983. (17.) Mann (1953): 985. (18.) Mann (1953): 987. (19.) Mann (1953): 996. (20.) Mann (1953): 1004. (21.) Mann (1953): 992. (22.) See also Alexandra Hui (Chapter 16) in this handbook. (23.) Mann (1953): 1000. (24.) Thompson, Emily. 1995. “Machines, Music, and the Quest for Fidelity: Marketing the Edison Phonograph in America, 1877–1925.” Musical Quarterly 79:138. doi: 10.2307/742520. (25.) See Sterne, Jonathan. 2003. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduc tion. Durham: Duke University Press, 215–218. (26.) See Thompson (1995): 144–145. (27.) Thompson (1995): 142. (28.) Adorno ([1927/1965] 2002a): 273. (29.) Thompson (1995): 142. (30.) Sterne (2003): 267. (31.) See Thompson (1995); see also Alexandra Hui in this handbook. (32.) Thompson (1995): 154. (33.) Thompson (1995): 159. (34.) For a history of sound fidelity see chapter 5 in Sterne (2003): 215–286. (35.) Thompson (1995): 156.
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Experiencing High Fidelity: Sound Reproduction and the Politics of Music Listening in the Twentieth Century (36.) For the history of medical listening, see Sterne (2003): chap. 2, 87–136. See also Vol mar, Axel. 2014. “In Storms of Steel: The Soundscape of World War I and Its Impact on Auditory Media Culture During the Weimar Period.” In Sounds of Modern History: Audito ry Cultures in 19th- and 20th-Century Europe, edited by Daniel Morat. New York: Berghahn, 227–255; Krebs, Stefan. 2012. “‘Sobbing, Whining, Rumbling’: Listening to Au tomobiles as Social Practice.” In The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, edited by Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 249–270. (37.) Gelatt, Roland. 1977. The Fabulous Phonograph, 1877–1977. 2nd ed. London: Cas sell, 282; Kittler, Friedrich A. 1999. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 99. (38.) Gelatt (1977): 105; Kittler (1999): 99. (39.) Keightley, Keir. 1996. “‘Turn it down!’ She Shrieked: Gender, Domestic Space, and High Fidelity, 1948–59.” Popular Music 15 (2): 151. doi:10.2307/931216. (40.) Barry, Eric D. 2010. “High-Fidelity Sound as Spectacle and Sublime, 1950–1961.” In Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, edited by David Suisman and Susan Strasser, 115–138. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 115; Keightley (1996): 150–152. (41.) Sterne (2003): 219. (42.) Keightley (1996): 152. (43.) Barry (2010). (44.) Keightley (1996): 169. (45.) Keightley (1996): 150. (46.) See Björnberg, Alf. 2009. “Learning to Listen to Perfect Sound: Hi-fi Culture and Changes in Modes of Listening, 1950–80.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Popu lar Musicology, edited by Derek B. Scott. Farnham: Ashgate, 120. (47.) Björnberg (2009): 110. (48.) “Vielen bedeutet HiFi-Stereophonie die Übertragung des Konzertsaals in den Wohn raum; Anhänger dieser Auffassung bevorzugen Boxen, die ein weiträumiges, entfernt klingendes, nicht unbedingt sehr brillantes, aber Tiefenstaffelung abbildendes Klangbild erzeugen. Sie sind manchmal bereit, für die Erfüllung dieser Forderung Verfärbungen in Kauf zu nehmen. Anderen soll HiFi-Stereophonie die Partitur transparent werden lassen. Sie bevorzugen ein präsentes, ggf. flächiges, aber ‘verfärbungsfreies’ Klangbild. Der samtig-saftige und voluminöse Klang, den ‘Dokumentaristen’ bevorzugen, schlägt sie weniger in Bann als vielmehr jene ‘Indiskretion’, die eine exakte Klangdefinition der In strumente zuläßt.” Nisius, Heinz Josef. 1979. HiFi hören: HiFi-Qualität? Sie hören es! Hi
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Experiencing High Fidelity: Sound Reproduction and the Politics of Music Listening in the Twentieth Century Fi-Praxis für kritische Käufer und Fachhändler. Würzburg: Vogel, 100. Translation provid ed by the author. (49.) Björnberg (2009): 114–115; citing Musikrevy 7 (1959). (50.) Björnberg (2009): 113. (51.) Theodor W. Adorno. (1969) 2002d. “Opera and the Long-Playing Record.” In Essays on Music: Theodor W. Adorno, edited by Richard Leppert. Berkeley: University of Califor nia Press, 283, 285. (52.) Arnheim, Rudolf. 1936. “In Praise of Blindness: Emancipation from the Body.” In Ra dio, translated by Margaret Ludwig and Herbert Read, 133–203. London: Faber and Faber. (53.) Adorno ([1969] 2002d): 284–285. (54.) Levin, Thomas Y. 1990. “For the Record: Adorno on Music in the Age of Its Techno logical Reproducibility.” October 55:42–43. (55.) Levin (1990): 44. (56.) Levin (1990): 44–45, quoting from Adorno, Theodor W. (1963) 1976. “Über die musikalische Verwendung des Radios.” In Der getreue Korrepetitor: Lehrschriften zur musikalischen Praxis. Gesammelte Schriften 15, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, 369–401. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. (57.) Keightley (1996): 167, citing from Buxbaum, Edwin C. 1949. “On Playing Music Loud.” Saturday Review of Literature, June 25: 51. (58.) Keightley (1996): 158. (59.) Greenhill, Larry. 1983. “Quad ESL-63 Loudspeaker, Part 3.” Stereophile 6 (4). Ac cessed May 15, 2018. https://www.stereophile.com/content/quad-esl-63-loudspeaker-larrygreenhill-part-3. Greenhill credited fellow reviewer and musicologist Lewis Lipnick with the coining of the term. Lipnick himself suspected the term to have emerged already in the 1950s. (60.) Atkinson, John. 1988. “Stereophile and You.” Stereophile 11 (10): 69–77; Atkinson, John. 1992. “Who Are You?” Stereophile 15 (6): 7–10. See also O’Connell, Joseph. 1992. “The Fine-Tuning of a Golden Ear: High-End Audio and the Evolutionary Model of Tech nology.” Technology and Culture 33 (1): 7–9, https://doi.org/10.2307/3105807; Perlman, Marc. 2004. “Golden Ears and Meter Readers: The Contest for Epistemic Authority in Au diophilia.” Social Studies of Science 34 (5): 786, 789, https://doi.org/10.2307/4144361. (61.) See Atkinson (1988); Atkinson (1992); O’Connell (1992): 9; Perlman (2004): 789. (62.) O’Connell (1992): 8. Page 24 of 25
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Experiencing High Fidelity: Sound Reproduction and the Politics of Music Listening in the Twentieth Century (63.) O’Connell (1992): 8. (64.) “Solche HiFi-Anwärter brauchen nicht lange zu suchen. Sie können ‘ungehört’ das Teuerste, Größte, Ausgefallenste, Aufwendigste, Spleenigste, Lauteste, Bunteste oder Bil ligste kaufen, je nach Geschmack und Anspruch. Nur der ‘Normalbegüterte’ und Musik freund muß sich bemühen, innerhalb seiner finanziellen Möglichkeiten und räumlichen Gegebenheiten Geräte zu finden, die seinem ästhetischen Anspruch genügen.” Nisius (1979): 19. Translation provided by the author. (65.) See Maus, Fred Everett 2011. “What Was Critical Musicology?” Radical Musicology 5: 20 pars. Accessed October 24, 2014. http://www.radical-musicology.org.uk; Mundy, Rachel. 2014. “Evolutionary Categories and Musical Style from Adler to America.” Jour nal of the American Musicological Society 67 (3): 735–768, https://doi.org/10.1525/jams. 2014.67.3.735. (66.) McClary, Susan. 1991. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; Subotnik, Rose R. 1996. “Toward a Decon struction of Structural Listening: A Critique of Schoenberg, Adorno, and Stravinsky.” In Deconstructive Variations: Music and Reason in Western Society. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 148–176. See also Maus (2011); Dell’Antonio, Andrew. 2004. Intro duction to Beyond Structural Listening? Postmodern Modes of Hearing, edited by Andrew Dell’Antonio, 1–12. Berkeley: University of California Press. (67.) See Nye, David E. 1996. American Technological Sublime. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (68.) Mann (1953): 979.
Axel Volmar
Axel Volmar, Universität Siegen
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Capturing the Landscape Within: On Writing the History of Experience
Capturing the Landscape Within: On Writing the Histo ry of Experience James Johnson The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries Edited by Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer Print Publication Date: Jan 2019 Subject: Music, Musicology and Music History Online Publication Date: Nov 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190466961.013.20
Abstract and Keywords This chapter situates the history of listening in the context of recent work in the histories of reading, seeing, and feeling. Using William Reddy’s The Navigation of Feeling (2001), it considers changes in practices—from the absence of silent reading in antiquity and the early Middle Ages, to public reading in the early modern period, to modern silent reading —and, using depictions of museum-goers, sketches a history of experience in the visual arts. By widening the field from listening, this chapter aims both to fill out and to inte grate the modern history of experience. It also suggests ways of understanding how transformations in perception by one of our human senses affects those in another and why historic modes of perception and description will not likely return. Keywords: Charles Baudelaire, John Cage, historicity of listening, history of emotions, listening and reading, lis tening and seeing, William Reddy
Baudelaire’s Wagner AN essay by Charles Baudelaire on the music of Richard Wagner sketches out the struc ture of what one might call the art of listening. The subject was an 1860 concert in Paris featuring excerpts from Wagner. At the time, Baudelaire was among a relative handful of French Wagnerians. The disastrous Paris performances of Tannhäuser had just ended with the critic Paul Scudo laughing outside the Opéra like a madman. Never had so many people damned so much music, Baudelaire wrote, on such scant knowledge. He went on to describe his own intoxication with Wagner. His essay is a self-conscious mapping of the inner landscape of listening. It is also a fair summary of how Baudelaire’s contemporaries heard music, their distaste for Wagner notwithstanding. Although few concert-goers would have come to their experience by reading Baudelaire, grasping the assumptions behind his views is useful in seeing the logic and structure of how they, too, listened. It will also help to frame cultural shifts over later decades, when this kind of listening grew increasingly rare.
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Capturing the Landscape Within: On Writing the History of Experience Baudelaire gives three different accounts of the Prelude to Lohengrin, which was on the program in 1860: one from Wagner, another from Franz Liszt, and the third from his own experience. They move from narrative to a series of impressions to personal musings. Wagner’s description, drawn from the composer’s program notes, ties the Prelude’s open ing notes to the waking dreams of a pious hermit. He sees apparitions: a body, faces, and now a host of angels. The Holy Grail materializes before him, and in adoration he falls to his knees.1 In Liszt’s account, images also appear, but they are neither sequential nor nar rative, and they bear no obvious connection with the opera’s action. The description comes from his “Richard Wagner et ‘Tannhäuser’ à Paris” (1861). (p. 422) Wagner shows us a sanctuary, Liszt writes, as if reflected in “some azure wave” or in an “iridescent cloud.” It is the dwelling of a God who avenges the oppressed and asks only for love. It is built of incorruptible wood and has doors of gold, fragrant walls, and opal columns, and it is open only to those with pure hands and prayerful hearts.2 Baudelaire makes two observations about the accounts of Wagner and Liszt. First, verita ble music—real music, we might say—evokes kindred ideas in different listeners. Second, sounds suggest colors, just as colors create melodies. “Since the day when God created the world as a complex and indivisible totality,” Baudelaire writes, “all things express themselves by reciprocal analogy.”3 Wagner’s and Liszt’s accounts of the Prelude are compatible if we understand their content as broadly metaphoric. Next comes Baudelaire’s own account, which describes a dream state that the Prelude in duced. “I fully grasped the idea of a soul moving in a luminous setting, of ecstasy consist ing of voluptuousness and awareness, and of soaring above and very far from the natural world.”4 Baudelaire felt freed from the force of gravity, pleasantly aware of his solitude, and filled with sensations of whiteness, brightness, and passion. The writing is at once ab stract and intimate. His eyes were closed, and he felt himself lifted from the earth. He saw light and colors but proposed no images. Baudelaire’s experience was physical and transcendent, both solitary and tied to a higher reality. An observer watching this ecstatic listener would see intense attentiveness, profound absorption, and an immediate, unin hibited response. His essay on Lohengrin is the only piece of musical criticism Baudelaire published. By his own description, he was not particularly musical. He more typically used the visual arts to probe affinities among sights, sounds, tastes, textures, and fragrances. A review of the 1846 Salon, for instance, discusses colors in terms of harmony, melody, and counterpoint. In it Baudelaire quotes Johann Kreisler’s commingling of odors, images, and sounds from E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Kreisleriana: It is not only while dreaming or in the light delirium preceding sleep, but also in waking states while listening to music, that I find analogies and intimate connec tions among colors, sounds, and perfumes. . . . The odor of red-and-brown marigolds above all produces a magical effect upon my person. It causes me to fall into a deep reverie, and I hear as if from a distance the somber and serious tones of the oboe.5 Page 2 of 20
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Capturing the Landscape Within: On Writing the History of Experience This is the context for the many references in Baudelaire’s essay on Wager to translation, an idea that recurs like a leitmotif. “[Wagner] possesses the art of translating, by subtle gradations, all that is excessive, immense, and ambitious in man spiritually and natural ly,” he writes.6 The essay can be read as a sustained meditation on Johann Kreisler’s com mingling of the senses. It includes a portion of the sonnet “Correspondences” from Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal, a lush musical poem in which Nature is a temple with living colonnades that pilgrims approach through a forest of symbols. Here “all scents and sounds and colors meet as one. / Perfumes . . . are as sweet as the oboe’s sound, / Green as the prairies, [and] fresh as a child’s caress.”7
(p. 423)
Correspondences
In Listening in Paris (1995), I described the aesthetic and social dynamic that produced this sort of experience. By studying concert and operatic programs in an era before recordings, I could know, by and large, what listeners heard and when they heard it. Reading their musical descriptions in the context of this knowledge allowed me to isolate which compositional elements they found musically meaningful and which they found dif ficult or obscure. In order to explain change in the experience of listeners over time, I iso lated composers whose techniques were familiar enough to be accessible while foreign enough to push listeners to widen their range of acceptable musical meaning. In a general sense, the three responses in Baudelaire’s essay on Wagner recapitulate the slow evolution in musical expectations among Paris audiences from the mid-eighteenth century to Romanticism, from images to emotions to concepts best captured by analogy. Together with the spread of middle-class manners, which urged propriety and considera tion, such musical views predisposed listeners to grow silent and turn inward in the dark ened and increasingly calm halls. They were at once attentive, engaged, and responsive. Many came to consider music as transcendent and spiritually elevating. Yet Baudelaire’s essay points to aspects of listening that I did not fully consider. This shift in listening practices occurred in the context of other broad changes in inner experience. French con cert-goers were also readers and museum-goers. It is likely that their inner experiences were broadly consistent and reinforced one another. There are signs of this in Baudelaire’s essay and in reports of his contemporaries, particularly in regard to the visu al arts. Could one write a history of listening that incorporates the acts of reading and looking? This is a sketch of how it might proceed, offered in the spirit of Baudelaire’s “Correspondences.” Unlike Wassily Kandinsky and Alexander Scriabin, Baudelaire did not claim to see colors when he heard music. The synaesthesia he evokes is more a disposition than an effect. It is an effort to fathom a fundamental unity beyond the forest of symbols. His and other late-Romantic attempts to span genres were a revelation to writers, painters, and musi cians in the decades on either side of 1900.
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Capturing the Landscape Within: On Writing the History of Experience Among those who took up Baudelaire’s vision was the American painter James McNeill Whistler. His canvas The White Girl appeared in the 1863 Salon des Refusés, having been rejected earlier by London’s Royal Academy and the Paris Salon (see Figure 18.1). Critics and the general public mocked the painting for its obscurity—why has the girl let fall her flowers?—and its unsettling incongruities: a skewed perspective plunges the carpet downward; the bearskin has a menacing and lifelike face; the girl’s vacant stare conveys innocence and victimhood. Those in Baudelaire’s circle recognized Whistler’s intention to break with the Realist school and explore the pure sensation of color and form. The im pulse resembled Flaubert’s wish, expressed in a letter to Louise Colet, to write a book “about nothing, . . . held together by the internal strength of its style.”8 Paul Mantz, the editor of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, (p. 424) called Whistler’s painting a symphony in white. Whistler embraced the phrase as its title and set out to paint other works with mu sical allusions. These included two more Symphonies in White (no. 2 and no. 3); Noc turnes (Blue and Green, Blue and Gold, and Blue and Silver), and paintings he called Har monies: Harmony in Grey and Green and Harmony in Grey and Gold.9 Whistler, who spent time with Baudelaire in Paris, defended his titles in aestheticist terms: Why should not I call my works “symphonies,” “arrangements,” “harmonies,” and “nocturnes”? . . . All I know is that my combination of grey and gold is the basis of the picture. . . . As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight, and the subject-matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or of colour.10 (p. 425)
Figure 18.1. James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Sym phony in White, no. 1: The White Girl (1861–1862), oil on canvas. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, USA/Bridgeman Images.
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Capturing the Landscape Within: On Writing the History of Experience Such influences also ran in the opposite direction. Debussy was probably thinking more of Whistler than of Frédéric Chopin or John Field when he composed his three Nocturnes for orchestra. He described the works to Eugène Ysaÿe as “an experiment . . . in finding the different combinations possible inside a single color, as a painter might make a study in grey, for example.”11 In 1924 George Gershwin auditioned a new work he called American Rhapsody for his brother. Ira, who had just seen Whistler’s Nocturnes and Harmonies at the Metropolitan Museum, asked: “Why not call it Rhapsody in Blue?”12 Judging by contemporary accounts and the evidence of comportment, many spectators in the second half of the nineteenth century regarded musical meaning as interior, deeply felt, and abstract. In Listening to Schumann, a painting by the Belgian artist Fernand Khnopff, only the title and a piano at the left keep us from assuming that some catastro phe has just struck: a woman dressed in black bows her head and covers her face (see Figure 18.2). Given the content, Khnopff’s title seems not merely explanatory but didac tic, as if to underscore a particular kind of listening. The critic Emile Verhaeren, Khnopff’s contemporary, offered a similarly instructional commentary on (p. 426) the can vas: “It has only been a few years that music is listened to in this way—not with pleasure: with meditation. The effect of art, of our art, is an influence of vague attraction toward a sad and solemn idea.”13
Figure 18.2. Fernand Khnopff, Listening to Schu mann (1883), oil on canvas. © Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels/ J. Geleyns.
“An influence of vague attraction toward a sad and solemn idea”: listeners were begin ning to find that putting music into words was necessarily an approximation.14 The French writer Camille Mauclair, in a 1909 book called Religion and Music, described the Franck Violin Sonata as “suggesting nothing material, as possessing nothing picturesque or descriptive, and as calling forth no image: it is a hyper-physical radiation, the very point of contact between the infinite and the lost and liberated soul.”15 In The Birth of Page 5 of 20
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Capturing the Landscape Within: On Writing the History of Experience Tragedy Nietzsche came to a similar conclusion about the distortions done to music when put into words. Working from Schopenhauer’s view that music was a copy of the will it self, he asserted that tone-painting was the enemy of true music and that any narrative or description was an impediment to the imagination.16 This was the logic that took Baude laire “far from the natural world” as he listened.17
The Turn Inward One of the most difficult problems I faced in writing Listening in Paris was how to explain collective change in musical expectations across generations. For instance, French listen ers between 1810 and 1820 first described listening for programmatic effects in the mu sic of Joseph Haydn—the Creation’s evocative depictions of cattle, swift horses, and the like—but over time came to describe the more abstract language of tones. How was this shift passed to successive generations, who roundly condemned listening for program matic depictions as naïve?18 What is the medium of preserving such changes in experi ence? Scholarly work in the history of emotions addresses these questions in ways relevant to listening. William Reddy’s The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (2001) offers a sophisticated model for understanding the inner lives of histori cal groups. Reddy’s project was to write a history of the French through their shared emotions. In his account, the period from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century falls into four broad moments: the suppressed suffering that resulted from Louis XIV’s codes of etiquette, which ordered the aristocracy through “cascades of disdain”; the emo tional refuge of marriage, with romantic love its defining feature, as a response to such humiliations; the rise in friendship as an additional reaction, which fueled an appetite for lodges, reading societies, and salons and later fed the Revolution’s fierce loyalties; and the uncertainty, self-doubt, and shame aroused by Napoleon’s new aristocracy of merit, which rewarded ambition, self-seeking, and material success.19 Reddy opens his book with methodological chapters that bring together scholarship on the emotions from psychologists, ethnographers, and anthropologists. This research points to wide cultural and historical differences in the expression of emotion while sug gesting that human nature—and, in particular, our immediate response to given (p. 427) stimuli—is not wholly variable. This balance is important for Reddy, who observes that we should be just as troubled by assertions of universal human nature (which often turn out to be ethnocentrism universalized) as by claims that humans have no innate nature. “If human experience (including emotions) is perfectly malleable,” he writes, if what we feel is purely a product of our cultural context, then why concern our selves with the suffering of others or the liberty and dignity of the individual? Suf fering, in distant times and places, becomes just another byproduct of a cultural context. Liberty becomes a purely modern Western preoccupation, of local signifi cance only.20 Page 6 of 20
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Capturing the Landscape Within: On Writing the History of Experience For Reddy, our capacity for particular responses—reactions to which we give such names as anger, grief, joy, and shame—is a universal feature of our humanity, but how and on what occasions we exhibit and express them are strongly shaped by culture. Drawing from psychological studies, Reddy asserts that putting a name to a feeling necessarily changes it, simplifying, clarifying, and often intensifying its experience. He quotes from William Wordsworth’s introduction to “The Thorn.” Words are not only symbols of the passions, Wordsworth writes, but “things, active and efficient, which are of themselves part of the passion.”21 A poetic innovation or the use of unaccustomed terms to describe feeling or perception, in other words, may frame experience so that it seems to be at once entirely new and to belong wholly to oneself. This helps to explain the contagion of emotions in particular pe riods without labeling those who reported feeling them as impostors or naïvely sug gestible. The startling mix of freshness and familiarity gives such moments their excep tional power. We might think, for instance, of the mania that led scores of young men to don yellow waistcoats and shoot themselves after reading Werther or of audiences who cried as if on cue during the operas of Gluck. Carl Dahlhaus made a similar point when he wrote of “literary models that guided a new musical consciousness to its formulation,” and Leon Botstein has more recently written about the mutual influences of experiencing and writing about music.22 Reddy’s model is especially relevant as we look to other histories of shared experience for insight into shifts in listening practice. Here, too, changes in collective practice affected inward responses. After centuries of reading aloud, a dramatic transformation of the in ner world came with the appearance of silent reading in the Middle Ages. In his pathbreaking book Space Between Words, Paul Saenger isolates orthography as essential to this change. In ancient Greece and Rome, words were written in unbroken lines without spaces, a practice considered to have been a faithful rendering of speech. Reading such uninterrupted lines is cognitively easier if voiced, syllable by syllable, than if scanned silently for word-units. Elites in antiquity saw neither the means nor the need to make documents available to populations with limited literacy, so many of the advantages we associate with silent reading were irrelevant. With notable exceptions such as Augustine’s teacher Ambrose, few deviated from the common practice. Saenger dates the first appearance of word separation to monastic communities of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. He describes fundamental psychological and intel lectual changes among the monks who first began reading silently. Interpretive con straints imposed by the group disappeared, individual readers gained a degree of autono my in their own spiritual development, and an experience of inwardness spread, as did heterodox interpretations. Aware of a new private space, authors introduced irony, politi cal and theological doubt, and, for the first time since antiquity, pornography.23 (p. 428)
The relevance of such shifts is not only medieval. The historian Roger Chartier has de scribed widespread alarm about silent novel-reading in sixteenth-century Spain, where authorities worried that the practice would blur the boundary between thought and the Page 7 of 20
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Capturing the Landscape Within: On Writing the History of Experience printed word, entrancing readers and making them vulnerable to fantasies and fictions.24 Cervantes’s Don Quixote is a vivid expression of these fears. Similar concerns recurred throughout Europe over the course of the next two centuries as literacy spread and the traditional practice of reading before groups in the town square, workshop, or tavern gave way to silent and solitary practices. Johann Georg Heinzmann’s Appel an meine Na tion, über die Pest der deutschen Literatur (1795) listed the dangers of too much silent reading, which included “susceptibility to colds, headaches, weakening of the eyes, heat rashes, gout, arthritis, hemorrhoids, asthma, apoplexy, pulmonary disease, indigestion, blocking of the bowels, nervous disorder, migraines, epilepsy, hypochondria, and melan choly.” Johann Adam Bergk defended the practice. Silent reading is not unhealthy, he ar gued, as long as you don’t do it standing up or immediately after eating.25 Internalizing an outer voice enlarged the imagination and bestowed features of individu ality that, if unaware of this history, we might assume to have been always present. Images of readers from the late nineteenth century by Henri Fantin-Latour (for example, Portrait of Victoria Dubourge [1873] and The Artist’s Sisters [1877]) capture an intensely active inner life that bears similarities with Fernand Khnopff’s Listening to Schumann. Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s Interrupted Reading (1870) is among the most evocative im ages of a reader lost in thought (see Figure 18.3). Images of museum-goers correspond roughly with this shift from group to individual reading and match changes in musical audiences from a common and sometimes rowdy experience to silent, increasingly personal encounters. Pietro Martini’s Salon of 1785 shows viewers eager to share their responses, talking in clusters and milling about in pairs or small groups. Louis Boilly’s Viewing David’s Coronation (1808) also shows view ers engaged in conversations about the painting. Museum-goers depicted in a work from 1847, The Salon at 4:00 p.m. by François Auguste Biard, are not significantly different in their group experience, but the painting conveys just how loud the din of conversation could be (see Figure 18.4). Officials in red coats announce with a full-throated shout that the museum is about to close. These images show that the mid-century experience of art, at least in public, was not the meditative act to which we are accustomed. Images from forty years later, by contrast, depict museum-goers who inhabit the same private universe as musical audiences and the readers of Fantin-Latour and Corot. In a painting of Mary Cassatt and her sister Lydia at the Louvre, Edgar Degas shows an (p. 429) engaged and solitary viewer. Mary is in the world but not entirely of it. The art historian Anne Leonard, who has written about Degas’s and other artists’ attempts to capture attentiveness in the late nineteenth century, draws a distinction between the in wardness of such depictions and the reigning academic style. Leonard observes that in Jean Ernest Aubert’s Reverie, in which a robed, unshod woman sits pensively on a rock beside the sea, the dreaminess is static, rigid, and more allegorical than animated with life.26 Michael Fried, the art historian and critic, describes the distance between such academic styles and late-century artists like Degas in striking terms. Modernist artists, he observes, rejected the theatricality of earlier generations. By this he means the staged look often seen in Grueze and David that conveys the sense that subjects are aware of an Page 8 of 20
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Capturing the Landscape Within: On Writing the History of Experience audience and posing. The seeming obliviousness of late-century subjects to viewers, Fried argues, is a defining feature of modernist artists, who replaced historical or domestic sto ry-telling with presentness and resisted the posed for an illusion of chance.27 Scenes from daily life appear as if captured arbitrarily: faceless pedestrians seen from a terrace above, an absinthe-drinker hollow-eyed in the morning light, a pair of weary ironers. We see this obliviousness in Degas’s Cassatt, and her absorption inspires ours.
Figure 18.3. Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Interrupt ed Reading (1870), oil on canvas. Courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago, IL, USA Pot ter Palmer Collection/Bridgeman Images.
These examples suggest that the inner experience of groups over time is variable, dis cernible, and describable. They also suggest that writing the history of listening through the sociability of audiences and the music they heard gives only a partial view of the constellation of relevant influences. Depictions of silent readers and absorbed viewers likely played a role in shaping musical experience in the second half of the nine (p. 430)
teenth century. They chronicled, modeled, and possibly intensified the inner experiences of an overlapping cohort of readers, viewers, and listeners. To continue in terms roughly consistent with William Reddy’s framework, their inward turn—listening, as Verhaeren had announced, with meditation rather than pleasure—was both fresh and familiar. Yet it would be wrong to say that the attentiveness of musical audiences—or readers, or view ers—was in any large way the effect of such images. Rather, these listeners, readers, and museum-goers knew the experience from having lived it themselves, owing in large part to changes in social practice and the continued evolution of literary, artistic, and musical styles. Seeing such engagement depicted or reading about it in essays or reviews helped turn unarticulated feeling into conscious awareness.
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Capturing the Landscape Within: On Writing the History of Experience
Figure 18.4. François Auguste Biard, The Salon at 4:00 p.m. (Closing of the Annual Salon of Painting) (1847), oil on canvas. Courtesy of bpk | RMN—Grand Palais | Daniel Ar naudet.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, these new ways of listening exercised a pro found influence over artistic depictions. Wassily Kandinsky sought to capture the experi ence of sound by depicting his own inner landscape. Days after hearing a performance consisting solely of the music of Arnold Schönberg Kandinsky painted Impression (p. 431) III: Concert (1911). On the program were Schönberg’s songs, his First and Second String Quartets, and the op. 11 piano pieces.28 Here we see a pianist, the black lid of a grand pi ano, audience members, and a great wall of yellow sound (see Figure 18.5). Whereas Baudelaire had written about and Whistler had sought to convey music’s affinities with colors, Kandinsky’s synaesthesia led him to claim that the sound really was yellow and that he was uniquely equipped to perceive what others could not.
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Capturing the Landscape Within: On Writing the History of Experience
Figure 18.5. Wassily Kandinsky, Impression III. Con cert (1911), oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, Germany, Peter Willi/Bridgeman Images.
This encompassing experience of music was decisive in Kandinsky’s pioneering experi ments with abstraction. His Improvisations and Compositions, titles also borrowed from musical terms, incorporate a minimum of recognizable shapes so that viewers initially drawn by the objects would come to see them as unnecessary to the paintings’ spiritual content. Kandinsky distinguished between the “external effect” of the traces of people, houses, hills, and horses in his works and the more important “internal effect” of the shapes and colors. This internal effect, he wrote, is “produced by the inner sound, which is one of the most powerful and profound means of expression in every composition.”29 The moment replays in the visual arts what listeners had begun to describe one hundred years earlier as they shunned programmatic effects for the abstract language of tones. Richard Leppert’s prudent observations about what painting can and cannot do with regard to music may well still apply. “[V]isual representations,” he writes in The (p. 432)
Sight of Sound, “except perhaps those that include decipherable musical inscriptions, tell us nothing specific about particular pieces of music.”30 Yet it is also true that we see in Kandinsky an effort to show sound. Perhaps we must suspend our disbelief to hear it. What is clear is that the difficulty of these images—their hermetic and, for some, in scrutable nature—expresses aesthetic experience in a radically individual vocabulary.
Doubts and Distractions Even as modernist and late-century artists worked to capture interior states, cultural and intellectual influences were beginning to alter listening in fundamental ways. By way of conclusion, I want to sketch three reasons to account for this and ask where this leaves listeners today.
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Capturing the Landscape Within: On Writing the History of Experience The first change in listening came in response to the ways industrialization transformed European and American soundscapes. Noise, though not new, grew to unprecedented lev els in intensity and variety. In retrospect, the sources of what an 1896 study called a “plague” of city noise seem harmless: horse-drawn vehicles, peddlers’ cries, street musi cians, animals, and bells. A 1925 Saturday Review article conjures another world alto gether: The air belongs to the steady burr of the motor, to the regular clank clank of the elevated, and to the chitter of the steel drill. Underneath is the rhythmic roll over clattering ties of the subway; above, the drone of the airplane. The recurrent ex plosions of the internal combustion engine, and the rhythmic jar of bodies in rapid motion determine the tempo of the sound world in which we have to live.31 Avant-garde composers and innovators in the infant genre of jazz embraced the new sounds to pry audiences away from accustomed ways of listening. On the eve of World War I the Italian futurist Luigi Russolo proclaimed a coming reign of cacophony and called musical dissonance a mere prelude to “MUSICAL NOISE.”32 George Antheil’s Bal let Méchanique is a well-known instance, scored for player piano with amplifier, two pi anos, three xylophones, electric bells, small wood propeller, large wood propeller, metal propeller, tam-tam, four bass drums, and siren. After its 1927 New York premiere, a com panion told William Carlos Williams that the subway sounded sweet by comparison. “Good,” he responded, and later elaborated: I felt that the noise, the unrelated noise of life such as this in the subway, had not been battened out as would have been the case with Beethoven still warm in the mind but it had actually been mastered, subjugated. . . . By hearing Antheil’s mu sic, seemingly so much noise, I found that I had gone up over it.33 (p. 433)
There were plenty who deplored the effects of this new soundscape on human ex
perience. At mid-century, Aldous Huxley wrote that manufactured distractions were now as pernicious as audible interference. Thanks to the “miraculous technology” of radio, Huxley wrote, a new din now penetrates deeper than the eardrums, filling the mind with shallow sentiment, drama without catharsis, and above all advertising: “[T]he noise is car ried from the ears, through the realms of phantasy, knowledge, and feeling, to the ego’s central core of wish and desire.”34 We know the story since Huxley’s time. The interior si lence that permitted earlier listeners to hear music with such attentiveness is under a siege as never before by the corporate organization of the psyche, abetted by technolo gies many times more intrusive than the radio. The second large change affecting listening in our time, also an effect of technology, is music’s sheer ubiquity. We hear it in restaurants, cafes, airports, hospitals, and funeral parlors. When an operator puts us on hold, we’re suddenly plunged into a Vivaldi concer to or a Beethoven quartet, only to be jerked back out just as abruptly. New homes have sound systems linked to cable providers that funnel endless streams of serenades and overtures into every room at any hour. Chain stores and specialty boutiques hire consul tants to discern which styles will best flatter the self-image of their shoppers. United Air Page 12 of 20
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Capturing the Landscape Within: On Writing the History of Experience lines has taken the next step in colonizing our musical experience. In 1987 it purchased the rights to Rhapsody in Blue from the Gershwin estate for use in commercials, in-flight safety videos, and, in a never-ending loop, Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. “Some travelers may not notice the song, so deeply ingrained is it as part of the United experi ence,” a reporter for the Chicago Tribune wrote recently. “But if it were gone, things would feel a tad off.”35 Is this a sign of things to come? A consequence of music’s ubiquity is that we stop listening. In 1960 Edgar Wind gave a series of lectures later published as Art and Anarchy in which he discussed the broad pub lic dissemination of works of culture. Acknowledging the pedagogical impulse behind such popularization—the notion, as we sometimes hear it put, that “a great nation de serves great art”—Wind nevertheless worried about its effects. “It is not the number of persons who look at art that is alarming, it is the number of works of art they look at, and the reduction of art to a passing show,” he wrote.36 The risk is that we grow indifferent to the exceptional. The third change is the systematic rejection of nineteenth-century attitudes by perform ers, composers, and intellectuals. Glenn Gould foresaw and welcomed the kinds of tech nological manipulations that today lie within the reach of ordinary listeners. The erosion of concert-going in favor of recorded music is of course nothing new, and engineers have long altered recordings to produce results that are often unattainable in performance. Gould, who famously detested the “shallow, externalized, public manifestations” of live concerts, followed the logic of such thinking to call for “the total elimination of audience response.” With the aid of electronic media, he announced, listeners will become partici pants in music- making by altering recordings to suit their taste. Gould called this aes thetic narcissism in the best sense: “[We] are awakening to the challenge that each man [will] contemplatively create his own divinity.” Digital audio workstations now permit users to mix and master “ideal” recordings in the ways (p. 434) Gould recommended, com bining, say, Bruno Walter’s exposition and recapitulation of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony with Otto Klemperer’s development.37 Whether this is experienced as a deepened state of “wonder and ecstasy,” as Gould imagined, or whether it has instead elevated the techno logical process to an end in itself, the listener is no longer the passive subject Baudelaire describes, ready and eager to be filled with intoxicants. John Cage redefined the concert experience in different ways. By widening the definition of music to include everything heard or imagined, Cage reduced the status and authority of any particular composition. He denied most of the components that lay behind nine teenth-century listeners’ quasi-religious and intensely personal experiences. He rejected ideals of musical transcendence, described the artist’s stance as disinterested rather than self-revealing, and renounced all notions of genius or posterity. No sound was of higher value than any other. He said, “[A] cough or a baby crying will not ruin a good piece of modern music.”38 Yet while Cage did all he could to eliminate musical hierarchies, it would be wrong to say that he wished for inattentiveness among listeners. On the contrary, he wanted at once to Page 13 of 20
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Capturing the Landscape Within: On Writing the History of Experience heighten attention and to expand the compass of sounds to which we attend. Contrary to some descriptions, 4′33″ was not meant as a prank but as a silencing of the ostensible per former to create a space for other sounds. In redefining the relation between musical pro duction and listening, Cage made existence itself into an aesthetic encounter. The next step is to listen conceptually to unsounded music. What follows is the word score of TAPE PIECE III/Snow Piece, composed by Yoko Ono in 1963: Take a tape of the sound of the snow falling. This should be done in the evening. Do not listen to the tape. Cut it and use it as strings to tie gifts with. Make a gift wrapper, if you wish, using the same process with a phonosheet.39
Although there may well be a difference between perpetual attentiveness and inattentive ness to any particular work, the thrust of this perspective erodes (some would say for good reason) the musical encounter prized by many nineteenth-century audiences. Dismantling musical hierarchies is today an academic stance with which we are all famil iar. The impulses are varied and differ in many ways from the intent of Cage and his fol lowers, but certain resemblances stand out. Scholars are now fluent in detailing the cul tural construction of genius, the hegemony of greatness, the exclusivity of the canon, and the political dangers of an aesthetic that places listeners in a state of numb submission. This awareness has shaped the attitudes of a generation, altering the position of Western music in college curricula and affecting programming in the concert hall. Where do these changes leave audiences of the early twenty-first century? Listeners are distracted and their convictions questioned as never before. Our nerves are on edge from the constant danger of a cell phone ringing, say, in the last moments of Mahler’s Ninth, and we have grown accustomed to the glow of a neighbor checking messages. We are in timidated by an etiquette that destroys most natural responses. Do not applaud (p. 435) between movements! Do not rattle your programs, or cough at the wrong time, or unwrap a candy to prevent it! Do not laugh, sigh, or sway! Whether we want to or not, we com pare what we hear in the concert hall with the impossible perfection of recordings. Sated by such faultlessness, we grow deaf to what makes it special. But then, there may be rea sons for us to feel wary and on guard about calling it special at all. The technological changes that have taken place since Baudelaire first heard Wagner are a defining difference separating his age from our own. Their terms shape how we hear music, much in the way the rhetoric of Romantic universalism and the language of revolu tion influenced the musical experience of audiences before Baudelaire.40 Yet in seeking to understand how contexts and ideas shape experience, we should not forget the aesthetic elements that Baudelaire believed were irreducible: the glades, as he wrote, where all scents and sounds and colors meet as one. The inner landscape of listeners may well be describable, but it can never be rendered in full.
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References Baudelaire, Charles. (1861) 1976. “Richard Wagner et ‘Tannhäuser’ à Paris.” In Oeuvres complètes. 2 vols., 2:779–815. Paris: Gallimard. Botstein, Leon. 1992. “Listening Through Reading: Musical Literacy and the Concert Au dience.” 19th-Century Music 16 (2): 129–145. Botstein, Leon. 2011. “Beyond the Illusions of Realism: Painting and Debussy’s Break with Tradition.” In Debussy and His World, edited by Jane Fulcher, 141–179. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chartier, Roger. 1999. “Reading Matter and ‘Popular’ Reading: From the Renaissance to the Seventeenth Century.” In A History of Reading in the West, edited by Guglielmo Cav allo and Roger Chartier. Translated by Lydia Cochrane, 277–278. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Clark, Carol E., and Robert Sykes, eds. 1977. Baudelaire in English. London: Penguin. Cocking, J. M. 1982. Proust: Collected Essays on the Writer and His Art. Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press. Dahlhaus, Carl. 1989. The Idea of Absolute Music. Translated by Roger Lustig. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Darnton, Robert. 1989. “Toward a History of Reading.” Wilson Quarterly 13 (4): 86–102. (p. 438)
Fried, Michael. 1998. Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Frisch, Walter. 2005. German Modernism: Music and the Arts. Berkeley: University of Cal ifornia Press. Gould, Glenn. 1984. The Glenn Gould Reader. New York: Knopf. Johnson, James H. 1995. Listening in Paris: A Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Joseph, Branden W. 2011. “The Tower and the Line: Toward a Genealogy of Minimalism.” In Sound: Documents of Contemporary Art, edited by Caleb Kelly, 43–53. London: Whitechapel Gallery; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kahn, Douglas. 1999. Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kelly, Caleb, ed. 2011. Sound: Documents of Contemporary Art. London: Whitechapel Gallery; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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Capturing the Landscape Within: On Writing the History of Experience Leonard, Anne. 2007a. “Picturing Listening in the Late Nineteenth Century.” Art Bulletin 89 (2): 266–286. Leonard, Anne. 2007b. “Varieties of Attention: A (Mostly) Nineteenth-Century View.” In Looking and Listening in Nineteenth-Century France, edited by Martha Ward and Anne Leonard, 12–13. Chicago: Smart Museum of Art. Leppert, Richard. 1992. The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lyons, Martyn. 1999. “New Readers in the Nineteenth Century: Women, Children, Work ers.” In A History of Reading in the West, edited by Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Charti er. Translated by Lydia Cochrane, 313–344. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Miner, Margaret. 1995. Resonant Gaps: Between Baudelaire and Wagner. Athens: Univer sity of Georgia Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1967. The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner. Translated and with a commentary by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House. Pennell, Elizabeth Robins, and Joseph Pennell. 1911. The Life of James McNeill Whistler. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott. Reddy, William M. 2001. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emo tions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rosenfeld, Sophia. 2009. “Thinking About Feeling, 1789–1799.” French Historical Studies 32 (4): 697–706. Rosenthal, Phil. 2012. “‘Rhapsody’ remains familiar refrain at United: Merger is no rea son for airline to change its tune.” Chicago Tribune, January 8. Accessed October 21, 2013. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-01-08/business/ct-biz-0108phil--20120108_1_gershwin-music-rhapsody-ira-gershwin. Saenger, Paul. 1997. Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading Stanford: Stan ford University Press. Steegmuller, Francis, ed. 1979. The Letters of Gustave Flaubert. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thompson, Emily. 2002. The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Whistler, James McNeill. 1890. “The Red Rag.” In The Gentle Art of Making Ene mies. New York: John W. Lovell, 126–127. (p. 439)
Wind, Edgar. 1985. Art and Anarchy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Wood, Ean. 1996. George Gershwin: His Life and Music. London: Sanctuary. Page 16 of 20
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Capturing the Landscape Within: On Writing the History of Experience Wordsworth, William. 1895. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. London: Henry Frowde. Zweite, Armin. 1989. The Blue Rider in the Lenbachhaus, Munich. Munich: Prestel.
(p. 440)
Notes: (1.) Baudelaire, Charles. (1861) 1976. “Richard Wagner et ‘Tannhäuser’ à Paris.” In Oeu vres complètes, 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 2:782; See also Miner, Margaret. 1995. Resonant Gaps: Between Baudelaire and Wagner. Athens: University of Georgia Press. (2.) Quoted in Baudelaire ([1861] 1976): 2:783. (3.) Baudelaire ([1861] 1976): 2:784. (4.) Baudelaire ([1861] 1976): 2:785. (5.) Quoted in Baudelaire ([1861] 1976): 2:425–426. (6.) Baudelaire ([1861] 1976): 2:785. (7.) This is Richard Wilbur’s 1955 translation of Baudelaire’s “Correspondances: Nature is a temple whose living colonnades Breathe forth a mystic speech in fitful sighs; Man wanders among symbols in those glades Where all things watch him with familiar eyes. Like dwindling echoes gathered far away Into a deep and thronging unison Huge as the night or as the light of day, All scents and sounds and colors meet as one. Perfumes there are as sweet as the oboe’s sound, Green as the prairies, fresh as a child’s caress, —And there are others, rich, corrupt, profound And of an infinite pervasiveness, Like myrrh, or musk, or amber, that excite The ecstasies of sense, the soul’s delight.
Baudelaire, Charles. 1977. “Correspondences.” In Baudelaire in English, edited by Carol E. Clark and Robert Sykes. London: Penguin, 19. (8.) Flaubert to Louise Colet, January 16, 1852. In Steegmuller, Francis, ed. 1979. The Letters of Gustave Flaubert. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1:154. (9.) See Pennell, Elizabeth Robins, and Joseph Pennell. 1911. The Life of James McNeill Whistler. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 155–156.
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Capturing the Landscape Within: On Writing the History of Experience (10.) Whistler, James McNeill. 1890. “The Red Rag.” In The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. New York: John W. Lovell, 126–127. Originally published in The World, May 27, 1878. (11.) Quoted in Botstein, Leon. 2011. “Beyond the Illusions of Realism: Painting and Debussy’s Break with Tradition.” In Debussy and His World, edited by Jane Fulcher. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 156. (12.) Wood, Ean. 1996. George Gershwin: His Life and Music. London: Sanctuary, 84. (13.) Quoted in Leonard, Anne. 2007a. “Picturing Listening in the Late Nineteenth Centu ry.” Art Bulletin 89 (2): 275. I have learned much from this article; its ideas underlie much of what I write here about the late-century kinship between painting and music. (14.) Quoted in Leonard (2007): 275. (15.) Quoted in Cocking, J. M. 1982. Proust: Collected Essays on the Writer and His Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 120. (16.) See Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1967. The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, 107. (17.) Baudelaire ([1861] 1976): 2:785. (18.) See Johnson, James H. 1995. Listening in Paris: A Cultural History. Berkeley: Univer sity of California Press, 206–227. (19.) Reddy, William M. 2001. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (20.) Reddy (2001): xi. For a perceptive treatment of how collective emotions might be in cluded in works of history, see Rosenfeld, Sophia. 2009. “Thinking About Feeling, 1789– 1799.” French Historical Studies 32 (4): 697–706. (21.) Wordsworth, William. 1895. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. London: Henry Frowde, 900. (22.) Dahlhaus, Carl. 1989. The Idea of Absolute Music, translated by Roger Lustig. Chica go: University of Chicago Press, 146; Botstein, Leon. 1992. “Listening Through Reading: Musical Literacy and the Concert Audience.” Nineteenth-Century Music 16 (2): 129–145. (23.) Saenger, Paul. 1997. Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading. Stanford: Stanford University Press. (24.) Chartier, Roger. 1999. “Reading Matter and ‘Popular’ Reading: From the Renais sance to the Seventeenth Century.” In A History of Reading in the West, edited by Gugliel mo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, translated by Lydia Cochrane, 277–278. Amherst: Univer sity of Massachusetts Press. Page 18 of 20
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Capturing the Landscape Within: On Writing the History of Experience (25.) Heinzmann and Bergk quoted in Darnton, Robert. 1989. “Toward a History of Read ing.” Wilson Quarterly 13 (4): 95. For literacy figures across Europe, see Lyons, Martyn. 1999. “New Readers in the Nineteenth Century: Women, Children, Workers.” In A History of Reading in the West, edited by Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, translated by Ly dia Cochrane. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 313–344. (26.) Leonard, Anne. 2007b. “Varieties of Attention: A (Mostly) Nineteenth-Century View.” In Looking and Listening in Nineteenth-Century France, edited by Martha Ward and Anne Leonard, 12–13. Chicago: Smart Museum of Art. (27.) Fried, Michael. 1998. Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 151–168. (28.) See Frisch, Walter. 2005. German Modernism: Music and the Arts. Berkeley: Univer sity of California Press, 128–137. (29.) Quoted in Zweite, Armin. 1989. The Blue Rider in the Lenbachhaus, Munich. Mu nich: Prestel, 39. (30.) Leppert, Richard. 1992. The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press, xxi. (31.) Quoted in Thompson, Emily. 2002. The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933. Cambridge: MIT Press, 117. (32.) Russolo, Luigi. from L’Arte dei rumori (1913), quoted in Kelly, Caleb. ed. 2011. Sound: Documents of Contemporary Art. London: Whitechapel Gallery; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 22. (33.) Quoted in Thompson (2002): 143. (34.) Huxley, Aldous. 1945. The Perennial Philosophy, quoted in Kahn, Douglas. 1999. Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 183. (35.) Rosenthal, Phil. 2012. “‘Rhapsody’ remains familiar refrain at United: Merger is no reason for airline to change its tune.” Chicago Tribune, January 8. Accessed October 21, 2013. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-01-08/business/ct-biz-0108phil--20120108_1_gershwin-music-rhapsody-ira-gershwin. (36.) Wind, Edgar. 1985. Art and Anarchy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 88. (37.) Gould, Glenn. 1984. The Glenn Gould Reader. New York: Knopf, 246, 347. (38.) Quoted in Joseph, Brandon W. 2011. “The Tower and the Line: Toward a Genealogy of Minimalism.” In Kelly (2011): 44. See also Kahn (1999): 161–191. (39.) Quoted in Kahn (1999): 238. Page 19 of 20
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Capturing the Landscape Within: On Writing the History of Experience (40.) See Johnson (1995): 270–280, 116–136.
James Johnson
James H. Johnson, Boston University
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Listening and Possessing
Listening and Possessing Fred Everett Maus The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries Edited by Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer Print Publication Date: Jan 2019 Subject: Music, Musicology and Music History Online Publication Date: Nov 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190466961.013.21
Abstract and Keywords How do people relate to the music they value? Listening is a central relation, but there are many others. As Charles Keil observed, people may find music, be invaded by music, use music, participate in music, and so on. This chapter explores a relation that may be called possessing music or owning music. Theodor W. Adorno and Simon Frith both em phasized such relations in the context of their very different accounts of mass-media mu sic. A psychoanalytic approach, drawing on the ideas of Melanie Klein and D. W. Winni cott, clarifies the nature of these relations. A close reading of ethnographic interviews from the collection My Music shows some of the specific forms that such relations can take, which are different for every individual. Keywords: Charles Keil, Simon Frith, Theodor W. Adorno, Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott, possessing music, popu lar music, introjection of music, internal object, transitional object
Listening, Recognizing, Owning LISTENING is central to most relationships with music. In some accounts, listening to music seems to constitute and nearly exhaust the relationship—especially if Western clas sical music is the primary or exclusive example. Thus, Joseph Kerman gave the name Lis ten to his college-level introduction to classical music.1 The title, an imperative, tells read ers to do something. Apparently, if you learn to do correctly what the title says, you are far along on the path to understanding classical music. But people have many other relations to music. For one thing, deaf people may relate to music mostly through bodily sensations.2 And many fascinating relations extend beyond basic sensory access and attention. The ethnomusicologist Charles Keil, in his introduc tion to the collection My Music, directs our attention to common verbs as a way of explor ing the variety of relationships to music. This is a useful reminder that attention to lan guage can be, in general, a fine gateway to insights about experience. Keil suggests that one may ask about various individuals:
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Listening and Possessing Is this person finding music to explore and express an identity or being invaded by musics to the point of identity diffusion, using music to solve personal problems, consuming music to fill a void and relieve alienation and boredom, participating in musical mysteries to feel fully human, addicted to music and evading reality, ori enting via music to reality?3 These verbs and the phrases that contain them are wonderfully suggestive, and Keil’s open-ended list encourages us to keep looking for more relations. At the same time, Keil’s phrases are brief, and each one invites further reflection and expansion. Keil intends his questions to apply to many different genres or styles—popular music, definitely, but also jazz, gospel, classical, and more. Ways of relating to music can cut across genre bound aries. One way to follow up on Keil’s list of verbs is to select a particular relation to mu sic (along with its verbs) and give it sustained attention. This chapter explores the notion of owning or possessing music.4 In identifying this topic, I do not have in mind literal own ership of objects that preserve music—scores, records, compact disks, sound files— though such devices bear on my topic in interesting ways. (p. 442)
Someone may feel not only that they like to listen to a certain recorded song or play a certain piano piece but, further, that it belongs to them, perhaps owned as some kind of nonmaterial object, perhaps becoming part of themselves somehow, perhaps existing within themselves, not just externally. Such thoughts are fantasy, that is, acts of imagina tion, contrary to fact. If we ask in what circumstances music literally belongs to someone (again, setting aside ownership of devices that store music), we might identify the owner with reference to the origin of the music, attributing ownership to a composer or songwriter, an improviser, or, for widely shared vernacular music, a culture of origin. From another point of view, we have legal procedures (for better or worse) for determining ownership of music as intel lectual property. But someone who feels, in the sense I intend, that they somehow own “Moon River” or the “Moonlight” Sonata is neither the creator of the music nor the hold er of its legal rights. They own or possess the music in some other way—as I suggest, through fantasy. In order to illustrate such feelings of possession I turn to accounts by two theorists of popular music. A fantasy of music ownership is important in Theodor Adorno’s wellknown analysis of popular music.5 To paraphrase his ideas, I start with his discussion of recognition. Emphasizing a contrast between the consumption of popular music and the comprehension of classical music, Adorno identifies recognition as central for popular music. Recognition also plays a limited role in relation to classical music, or what Adorno calls “good serious music”: Some features of a classical composition—tonality, chords, structural patterns—are familiar to appropriately skilled listeners, and recognized as such. But in order to understand serious music, one must hear what is unique in a compo sition, moving beyond recognition of component elements to a new experience. By con Page 2 of 22
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Listening and Possessing trast, for popular music, recognition does not provide the basis for synthesis of new quali ties. Adorno finds that the distinctive qualities of an individual popular song do not make musi cal sense. They provide nothing to understand; it would be impossible to listen for a unique meaning, which does not exist. Instead, the distinctive qualities of a song “pseudoindividualize” it, making it just different enough that a listener can identify it as one song rather than another. Meanwhile, the structure of the song is standardized, basically the same from one song to the next. Hearing the endlessly repeated standard form, the consumer relaxes into the familiarity that requires no fresh thought. Meanwhile, the unintegrated pseudo-individualizing fea tures allow consumers to distinguish one song from another, in order to have the pleasure of recognizing something that seems special. But recognition of a song does not require that consumers put the separate details together into a new meaning: “Recognition be comes an end instead of a means.”6 According to Adorno, recognition leads to further relations. The song, initially an aspect of experience, becomes an object, and consumers seemingly possess it, imagining that it is their own. Adorno astutely identifies two factors in the feeling of possessing a musical object. When someone remembers a song and can call it to mind, then it can be imagined as something owned, something that cannot be taken away. And listeners who remember a song have certain kinds of control over it: They are able “to evoke it presum ably at will at any given moment, to cut it short, and to treat it whimsically.”7 They can even abuse it, for instance by whistling it in a distorted way. (p. 443)
Finally, as Adorno describes it, the consumer projects the pleasure of ownership onto the object itself as a seemingly objective quality, moving from “I recognize this song” to “I possess this song” to the idea that “This song is good.”8 Thus, Adorno depicts apparent enjoyment of popular music as a product of fantasy. In reality, as Adorno observes, con sumers do not own songs. In reality, an illusion of ownership is not the same as an accu rate judgment of musical value. Adorno describes these fantasies to explain why people believe that they evaluate and enjoy popular songs when, objectively, there is nothing in them to like or admire. I admire many of Adorno’s insights about popular music though not his sweeping nega tive assessment. In particular, I agree that popular music—in the Tin-Pan Alley and jazz traditions Adorno encountered and in later traditions from rock ‘n’ roll on—does not usu ally invite or reward the specific type of listening that Adorno associates with “serious music.” And I find that, contrary to Adorno’s intentions, his ideas about recognizing and possessing pop songs point toward an important and potentially positive relation to mu sic, an alternative to the classical-music listening that Adorno describes. Simon Frith, in an excellent positive account of the aesthetics of popular music, also dis cusses the fantasy of ownership as a common and important relation to popular music.9 In general, Frith’s arguments can be read in dialogue with Adorno’s positions, though his Page 3 of 22
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Listening and Possessing essay does not mention Adorno. Explaining functions of popular music that contribute to its value, Frith counters Adorno’s idea that popular music has no use-value; writing about “possession” of popular music, he puts one of Adorno’s ideas in a more positive light. As Frith puts it, “popular music is something possessed . . . it is not just the record that people think they own: we feel that we also possess the song itself, the particular perfor mance, and its performer.”10 Through feelings of ownership, people bring music close to their own identity; musical ownership blurs the distinction between an object possessed and a part of the self: “In ‘possessing’ music, we make it part of our own identity and build it into our sense of ourselves.”11 As a consequence, disagreements about musical value can feel like personal affronts rather than tolerable variation of opinion. Frith notes that he learned of such strong feelings of ownership when he worked as a rock critic. “To write pop criticism is . . . to attract hate mail. . . . Criticize a star and the fans respond as if you have criticized them.”12 This shows the close relation between fans and their music and also the idea that, in criticizing a star, the critic has done something out of line, intervening inappropriately in the relationship between listener and music. Possession is one of four social functions of music identified in Frith’s essay. Along with feelings of possession, music can give a sense of identity; music mediates between (p. 444)
intimate and public discourse about emotions, offering models for erotic and romantic feelings; and music gives a way of experiencing time, as when a song associates with a particular time in someone’s life. These functions show how people value popular music in relation to “how well (or badly), for specific listeners, songs and performances fulfill the suggested functions.”13 Among the four functions, possession is special. Frith writes that it is “more abstract” than the others, “but a consequence of all of them.”14 He also states that the three other functions “depend . . . on our experience of music as some thing which can be possessed.”15 Possession underlies, and is required for, the other func tions. Thus, both Adorno and Frith place feelings of possessing music at the center of relation ships with popular music. Such fantasies bring popular music close to listeners’ selves and play a crucial role in the value—real value, on Frith’s account, illusory on Adorno’s— that people attribute to it.
Listening to the Same Music I agree with Adorno’s and Frith’s claims that fantasies of owning or possessing music are important relations to it. In this section I extend their accounts, in part through phenome nology (in the non-technical sense of reflection on experience), in part by drawing on psy choanalytic theory. Both Adorno and Frith connect possession with mechanical reproduction of sound. This is clear in Frith’s essay: “[O]bviously,” he writes, “it is the commodity form of music that makes this sense of musical possession possible.”16 (My own account, below, highlights Page 4 of 22
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Listening and Possessing the mechanical storage and reproduction of music but not specifically its commodity as pect.) Adorno writes of listeners noticing and coming to recognize a song that has turned up in their environment, a description implying radio as the medium. In the following comments, I focus on a particular situation within the range of interactions with mediated music. The personal habit of listening to one recorded song, album, or other instance of music again and again, a common use of recordings, may be taken as a behavioral mark of fantasies of ownership. When personal acquisition of recorded musical sound is possible, individuals can easily play one recording repeatedly, in their leisure time, in a domestic space or other space of their choosing, such as a car or any place where they wish to carry a portable device. This way of relating to recorded music is familiar for popular music and for many other kinds. No doubt, different things can happen when a person plays the same recorded mu sic repeatedly, depending on the person, the music, and other contingencies. The follow ing phenomenological description extracts a relatively fixed, though general, model from the range of experiential possibilities. Typically, the person playing the recording will come to know the music well enough to anticipate much of what happens in the succession of sounds. Thus, after a (p. 445)
while the goal of the experience is not to find out what happens in the music, as it might have been on early hearings. One might still seek out new, previously unnoticed details or nuances, but for the type of experience I have in mind, the center of the experience is elsewhere, precisely in the repetition of known material. Such a listener wants to return to the sameness or constancy of the music. After repeated hearings, one may be able to imagine the music in detail, conjuring it up from within oneself. This can happen while listening to the recording. It may also happen, with varying specificity of details, without the recording, when one can call up the music in imagination without audible support, but that is not necessary for the experiences I am describing. When one knows the music well, playing the recording becomes an occasion for imagining the music at the same time one is hearing it. Such an experience, I suggest, no longer feels like “taking in” the music from outside oneself but more like inwardly per forming along with the recorded sound. The inner music arises from two sources: it is stimulated by the music presently perceived and also by the activated memory of that mu sic from previous hearing. Calling up the music from within oneself will usually involve sonic imagery but need not be confined to sonic imagery. Typically it involves much more than that, feelings beyond sound such as emotional and kinesthetic images. I think we can call all these types of im agery “musical images.” One could describe such experience as a kind of duet between the inner musical images and the audible sound in the room. In a way, that is correct. There really are two different things happening in coordination: on one hand, the agitation of air and consequent audi tory-psychological processing, and on the other, the welling up from memory of mental images. But the idea of a duet does not capture the characteristic subjective experience, Page 5 of 22
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Listening and Possessing which is more like a fusion of imagined and heard music into one object. Subjectively, this is, I suggest, a vivid experience of a single musical phenomenon that is neither inside nor outside the individual. Or one could say that it is both inside and outside, but as one thing, not in the manner of a duet. In moving toward such an experience, one begins by listening to an unfamiliar recording. In such cases, one listens not just to learn something objective about external sounds, but in order to take the music into oneself, drawing it into one’s inner world. What is the mu sic, once the listener knows it well, once it is inside? One might reply, most literally, that it is an acquired skill (to imagine sound, to imagine that particular music); or a recurring psychological event; or a complex feeling; or, more imaginatively, turning toward fantasy, a place to which one can return; or something akin to a physical object or even a person, held inside oneself. I find all these descriptions attractive, and the slippery ontology of this internal music is characteristic of its complexity. British object relations psychoanalysis can provide a general theoretical context for these phenomena. Melanie Klein, the central figure in this tradition, developed a rich account of the inner world that each person creates, in fantasy, by introjecting objects and quali ties from the external world.17 An infant, drinking from the mother’s breast, (p. 446) imag ines that they have taken the nourishing breast into herself, and this internalized breast remains within the self, a source of comfort.18 The bad, frustrating breast may also be felt as an inner object. According to Klein, early emotional life involves orientations toward objects that are experienced through the continuous interaction between introjection and projection. Later, when an infant begins to experience the existence of separate people, they can also be brought into the inner world. These are early experiences, but in Klein ian theory “positions” discovered early in life remain, throughout life, as possible orienta tions, and actions such as introjection and projection continue throughout one’s life, shaping experience in powerful ways. Whether an introjected object is felt primarily as something within an inner world or as a part of the self may be uncertain and fluctuating. When one imagines holding the music one knows inside oneself as a complex quality or object, this is another instance of Kleinian introjection.19 Building on Klein’s ideas, D. W. Winnicott emphasized the existence of an area of experi ence between the shared external world and the inner world elaborated by Klein.20 Winnicott suggested that a small child, during the process of becoming fully aware of the external world of objects, independent of the child’s control, lingers for a time with para doxical objects that are neither internal nor external. As is well known, Winnicott took an interest in children’s early possessions such as a blanket or a teddy bear, an object that the infant keeps with them and finds reassuring. Such objects are real but are also in fused with qualities projected by the child. As Winnicott noted, we allow the infant to maintain such possessions in a state suspended between fantasy and external reality. The question whether the infant created the object or discovered it does not come up, from the child’s point of view; the importance of the object lies precisely in its indeterminate status, melding fantasy and reality.
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Listening and Possessing As a child comes to accept the existence of external objects, the child can also retain the capacity to relate to transitional objects. Eventually, a blanket or stuffed animal may be abandoned, but Winnicott argued that the relation to transitional phenomena remains in adult life, forming the basis of cultural life, especially in art and religion. Like Klein, Win nicott believed that some kinds of early experience persist as important experiential pos sibilities in later life. I suggest that the kind of listening I described, when introjected music fuses with heard music to feel like a single object, neither internal nor external, is an experience of a tran sitional phenomenon. As such, it can be comforting, not only because the musical sound is familiar but because of its location in the paradoxical space between inside and outside, a part of the world that is also, somehow, not separate from oneself. It can be comforting, as well, because of its continuity with early experiences of the same paradoxical space. Returning to a familiar recording, one also returns to a familiar, comforting experience of transitional phenomena whose history extends beyond the reach of conscious memory. On this account, the fantasy of possessing music is a continuation from the experience of what Winnicott called “the first ‘not-me’ possession.”21 According to Winnicott, the infant’s relation to transitional phenomena begins as a re sponse to separation and loss. Initially, the mother meets the infant’s desires so consis tently that she gives her infant “the illusion that her breast is part of the infant. It is, as it were, under the baby’s magical control.”22 But the reality that the mother’s breast, and more generally the caretaking adult, are not always available requires that (p. 447)
the infant work toward acceptance of the external world. “The intermediate area . . . is the area that is allowed to the infant between primary creativity and objective perception based on reality-testing.”23 Thus, “the transitional object stands for the breast, or the ob ject of the first relationship.”24 This raises a question: if recorded music, heard repeated ly, can be a transitional object, is it also a symbol of something that has been lost? It con tinues a lifelong mingling of fantasy and reality that arose from the inconstant relation to the maternal breast. But in particular cases, other specific losses or absences may also be relevant; we will see examples in the interview material discussed below. As mentioned, an adult who has a strong sense of the independent reality of the external world can still welcome the freedom and intimacy of transitional phenomena, which in fuse aspects of the external world with fantasy. According to Winnicott, [i]t is assumed here that the task of reality-acceptance is never completed, that no human being is free from the strain of relating inner and outer reality, and that re lief from this strain is provided by an intermediate area of experience . . . which is not challenged (arts, religion, etc.).25 Along these lines, if readers were offended when Frith criticized their favorite musicians, perhaps they understood something about musical ownership as a private, protected fan tasy relationship. When Frith criticizes Phil Collins, a fan might respond, using the same evaluative discourse, that Collins is objectively excellent and Frith is wrong. But the fan could say, instead, that their relationship with Collins is a personal fantasy and that a Page 7 of 22
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Listening and Possessing critic’s judgmental discourse is not relevant. Similarly, a listener who experiences a feel ing of ownership and, with it, a conviction that “this is a good song” need not be under stood as making a specious value judgment, as Adorno claims. The listener may be ex pressing the suitability of the song to their own experiences. Winnicott describes transitional phenomena as “illusion, that which is allowed to the in fant, and which in adult life is inherent in all art and religion, and yet becomes the hall mark of madness when an adult puts too strong a claim on the credulity of others, forcing them to acknowledge a sharing of illusion that is not their own.”26 Winnicott suggests that adult culture holds a place for the enjoyment of illusion in transitional phenomena and that we have an understanding about boundaries: One person’s fantasies should not be mandatory for someone else. But he also suggests that shared fantasy can be the basis of communities: “We can share a respect for illusory experience, and if we wish we may collect together and form a group on the basis of the similarity of our illusory experi ences.”27 Transitional phenomena may be shared, and affinities in fantasy may lead to community, but an attempt to force one’s fantasies on others may be seen as “madness” and rejected.28 Thus, listeners might seek others with similar sensibilities, with the goal of sharing experiences of transitional phenomena, and one would expect such community formation to proceed very differently from assertions of authority or logical arguments. (p. 448)
One aspect of the relation to the transitional object, according to Winnicott, is
that the object “must never change, unless changed by the infant.”29 Of course, recorded music satisfies this requirement of stability with peculiar aptness! Thus, sound recording, a relatively new arrival in the history of music, simplifies certain aspects of musical expe rience and theoretical reflection about music. The account of musical introjection and transitional phenomena that I have offered would require various revisions and complica tions to extend to live performance, concert settings, the relationship to music when one performs it oneself, composition, improvisation, and so on. It would be fascinating to ex plore such extensions in future research.30
Interviews In order to continue the exploration of phenomena related to listening and owning, I turn now to information about several individual listeners. My goal is to attend to the particu lars of each listener’s experiences. My information comes from interviews collected in Buffalo, New York, in the 1980s and published in the collection My Music. I have already quoted from this book; Keil’s suggestion about verbs and relationships comes from his in troduction to the collection. Through open-ended conversations with a variety of people, many of them not musicians, about the role of music in their lives, the interviews in My Music show the diversity and individuality of relationships that people form with music. The title of the book participates in the discourse of ownership or possession that I am ex ploring.31
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Listening and Possessing My Music consists almost entirely of transcribed interviews; the book holds back from of fering generalizations or interpretations. The existence of the collection, however, invites reflections like the ones I offer. I have selected three interviews relevant to the topic of this chapter, all with women who developed intense, elaborate relations to specific music, maintained through repeated listening to recordings. My Music identifies each interview subject by a fictitious first name, and I use the same pseudonyms.
My Neil Diamond In her interview, “Betty” talks mostly about the use she makes of records. Betty briefly describes a series of earlier stages in her relationship with music. As a child, she attend ed classical concerts and studied clarinet performance; her involvement with classical music faded in her late teens. As a young adult, she began to take an interest in what she calls “soft rock,” but her husband preferred classical music. The result of their disparate tastes was that “there wasn’t a whole lot of music played in the house at that time.”32 After separating from her husband, Betty developed an intense attachment to the songs (p. 449) of Neil Diamond and, to a lesser extent, other musicians she considered similar. This attachment still dominates her musical life at the time of the interview, nine years later. Betty regards the songs she likes, by Diamond and others, as “poetry set to music.”33 She admires the talent of musicians who create poetic songs and finds that poetic and musical achievement come together in the music she likes.34 Since she regards the songs as poet ry, she does not play the recordings unless she can listen to the words.35 She dislikes country music because it is “too direct,” preferring songs that have “a lot of interpretive quality”—an ambiguous phrase, perhaps meaning both that a song results from the songwriter’s or performer’s acts of interpretation, and that it invites interpretation from Betty as she listens.36 Betty chooses music in relation to her moods, using it “as a com panion, as a stimulant” to alter or intensify her moods.37 It is interesting that, after per sonifying music by calling it a “companion,” Betty shifts, describing it also as a “stimu lant,” something that affects her in a more mechanical way. Asked why she collects certain kinds of music, Betty says: “Because I can relate to it. Be cause it relates to me.” There is pleasant reciprocity in this wording, suggesting that Bet ty finds music for herself, and the music also finds her. Betty indicates how music stimu lates her: “The poetry is relevant to me and my life . . . it can make me feel things, and it can make me think things.”38 Although the first-person emphasis shows that Betty under stands this relation to music as individual and personal, Betty also likes to share music se lectively: “I love sharing it with my children too. . . . I also like to share [songs] with some body, if I can find somebody.”39 Sharing connotes ownership and voluntary relinquishing of sole possession or control, as though Betty feels that Diamond’s music, like her physi cal record collection, belongs to her and is hers to share if she wishes: “There’s nothing like having a song that really, really means something to you, and sharing it with another person.”40
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Listening and Possessing Apparently the people with whom Betty shares Diamond are female, though Betty herself does not state this generalization. After stating that she shares with her children, Betty backtracks: “My son does not particularly care about it, but my daughter has a lot of the same tastes that I do.”41 Betty also describes sharing music with her sister and with a fe male friend.42 And her listening seems specifically to exclude men: She notes her son’s lack of interest, and, as mentioned, she felt unable to explore her tastes fully until sepa rated from her husband. Again, remembering experiences with her sister, she recounts that “John would be out for the evening, the kids would be in bed, and the two of us could sit there and we could practically cry over songs together and share things with songs to gether.”43 Judging from the interview, Betty’s musical life consists primarily of listening to records in her own home. She mentions no live performances after the classical concerts she heard as a child. She draws attention to the physical presence of her records, emphasiz ing that she takes good care of them and noting that, as she speaks with the interviewer, her whole large collection is within six feet of her. Betty says that when she is away from her home, what she misses most is listening to Dia mond. “When we go away a week every summer, by the end of the week I can’t wait to get home to my Neil Diamond.”44 Betty does not seem to consider listening to “my Neil (p. 450) Diamond” while on vacation; perhaps what she misses is not just Diamond’s music but the act of listening to Diamond in her home. Part of the meaning of “home,” then, would be “the place where I listen to Neil Diamond.” Betty’s records and musical experi ences play a large role in her “sensuous production of place,” to borrow Sara Cohen’s lovely phrase.45 If listening partly constitutes place, Betty’s sense of home, it also con tributes to the sensuous production of time, the feel of Betty’s life after the end of her marriage. Her listening, apparently incompatible with the physical presence of men, has meaning as a mark of their absence. Nonetheless, at the center of Betty’s musical world is the imagery conjured by the earnest songwriting and passionate, husky voice of Neil Diamond. Now, instead of the presence of her husband, Betty has the transitional-object presence of the singer. Betty’s interview says nothing about the masculinity of the figure who is at the center of her mu sical world. Perhaps, for her, that is something to be experienced, rather than described, or something to share with the women who listen to music with Betty, rather than the in terviewer and the readers of My Music.
It Fills Up Every Muscle and Vein Betty is unusual in her near-exclusive devotion to one singer-songwriter. But there is nothing extreme about her manner of expression: she describes her musical life clearly and directly, with pleasant humor. Another interview subject, “Rhonda,” is also devoted to a central musical figure, Roger Waters, in his solo work and with the band Pink Floyd. Un like Betty, she expresses herself in defiantly extreme language, to the extent that her in terviewer seems reluctant to accept her statements. The interviewer asks whether Rhon Page 10 of 22
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Listening and Possessing da has considered the effect of music on daily life. She replies: “It’s simple. Without mu sic, I would die. I would not exist.” Trying to understand, or trying to be helpful, the inter viewer offers a paraphrase: “You wouldn’t exist . . . meaning you wouldn’t be happy in your existence?” Rhonda does not want this kind of conceptual assistance, and responds: “I just wouldn’t be. I wouldn’t have a personality.” The interviewer makes one more at tempt to express Rhonda’s ideas more sensibly: “You think it would take away from your personality?” Rhonda perseveres. “It would take away from my own existence. I don’t think I could live.”46 It is fascinating, if uncomfortable, to witness the interviewer’s efforts to move the conversation toward familiar discourse and Rhonda’s resistance. She is right to resist: everything Rhonda says reflects her own strongly integrated style of language and experience, which the interviewer intrusively attempts to modify. Rhonda’s language reveals her idealized fantasy of a music that is omnipotent in its ability to create and sustain her life. She does not say that her life would be somewhat less without music; she would die, would not exist. When the interviewer asks if Rhonda’s music reflects dif ferent degrees of relaxation, she responds firmly: “No. All my music is passionate and in tense.”47 To explain her bodily feelings while listening to Waters, (p. 451) Rhonda says, “It actually hurts me to listen to his music. It just fills up every muscle and vein in my body.”48 Rhonda does not say that she might enjoy meeting Roger Waters, but rather: “My goal in life is to meet Roger Waters, my life ambition. . . . I would kill to see him again. I am ad dicted to Roger’s solo albums.”49 The reference to killing evokes the violent reversal of music’s creative aspect; music can give both life and death. Rhonda’s musical world has a rich private existence for her and also has intimate inter personal dimensions. Rhonda learned about Roger Waters from her father and now shares her experiences with her brother in particular. Rhonda speaks memorably about the relationship with the brother: “George and I share the gifts of instantaneous commu nication and overemotion. We are able to feel, lock into each other’s minds, and fuse to gether to produce energy on a level so high, it cannot be touched. When Pink Floyd’s per fection gets involved with the scene, a triangular bond of such cogent power shoots through us that if we aimed it at something, it would probably explode.”50 Again, music connects with destruction. Rhonda’s description, its images akin to fantasy fiction, com municates her sense of oneness with her brother and the further intensification caused by Waters’s music. The experience of three-way fusion becomes an experience of power, gen erating something like a ray-gun beam that could potentially demolish objects outside it self, a form of omnipotent power over the external world. Rhonda specifies Waters’s reciprocal role in the relationship: “I honestly feel that if George and I could contact Roger, and have seven minutes of his attention, he would take care of us forever. As far as I can tell, the need is mutual.”51 The fantasy of mutual need brings Waters, in reality a remote celebrity who has created and sold some recordings, in to interpersonal relation with Rhonda and George. No such notion of interpersonal, twoway relationship appears in Betty’s interview (though a related idea appears, more gen Page 11 of 22
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Listening and Possessing tly, in her fleeting reference to music as a companion). It is telling that Rhonda refers to Waters by his first name, “Roger”; Betty consistently refers to “Neil Diamond.” The idea that Waters would “take care of” Rhonda and George “forever” evokes a limitless parental or divine love. In a different pattern, Rhonda sometimes turns to images of nature. Two of Waters’s al bums are “so passionate and full of music, they make the earth feel healthy.”52 Some al bums are “perfect for those days when the sky is full of clouds in motion and gusts of wind push you along the walkways”; another “makes the snow sing. . . . The snow floats with the sound, and I don’t feel as cold as I would otherwise.”53 In these descriptions, mu sic seems to be a gentle healing force, enhancing the natural world and its continuity with humanity. Though much of Rhonda’s interview emphasizes the centrality of Roger Waters for her, there are other aspects of her musical life that barely come up. Near the end of the inter view Rhonda reveals her preference for live concerts, especially by the Grateful Dead, over recordings: “Concerts are the only way for me to get the full satisfaction from mu sic. . . . Going to a Grateful Dead show is the best thing you can do.”54 These emphatic as sertions show that one would need more access to Rhonda, beyond the (p. 452) short pub lished interview, to understand how the parts of her musical world relate to each other. Nonetheless, a pattern is clear. In the absence of their father, to whom the music is linked, Rhonda and sometimes her brother listen to the music of Roger Waters, who, like a perfect parent, would take care of them forever. The music sustains the lives of Rhonda and her brother. It sometimes gives rise to feelings of omnipotent destructive power, sometimes to feelings of enriching and healing the natural world. Rhonda’s intense poetic language reflects her closeness to the world of infantile fantasy, as elaborated by Klein— specifically, to the fluctuation between a position dominated by fantasies of omnipotence and destruction and a position devoted to love and reparation.55
The Family Scene Through Music Another listener, “Gail,” ponders her experiences of classical music, especially Bach can tatas, which have become the music she listens to most often. Her interviewer’s lack of empathy creates tension in the conversation. Though the interviewer’s tone is overly per sistent, sometimes almost bullying, the debate that develops is revealing. Gail begins by recalling the importance of classical music and oboe performance as she was growing up and mentions that her father always listened to classical music. Right away, Gail herself asks why classical music remains so important for her—though, as the interview continues, the interviewer’s persistent “why” questions, asking Gail to explain her responses, will come to annoy her. Repeatedly, Gail says Bach’s cantatas “overwhelm” her; they are “incredible.”56 They can make her very happy sometimes, but the same mu sic can make her sad, even tearful.
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Listening and Possessing The interviewer asks how the same music could lead to opposite emotional responses. Gail states that her listening is always “a dramatic and traumatic experience,” and per haps the different responses come more from her than the music.57 She continues think ing about it, though, and observes that some music would evoke only a specific range of emotions, while Bach’s music, for her, is emotionally flexible. Her description shows a clear awareness that, in the manner of a transitional phenomenon, her experiences result from the interaction between the music as external object of attention and the psychic content that she brings to it.58 Gail also recalls that she wept while listening to Bach when she first left home for col lege, and she speculates that she remembered her father listening to Bach: “It’s so weird that I’m so attached to that . . . to the family scene through music.”59 She notes that she was very close to her parents. So far, Gail and the interviewer have collaborated in seeking explanations for her prefer ences. Gail says that she has been influenced by her past, like everyone, but adds, “I don’t feel as if I’ve been forced, or told to like a certain thing.”60 Then Gail puts on a record of Bach’s Magnificat to listen to with her interviewer. Perhaps Gail communicates, thereby, that she has brought one segment of the interview to an end, the part where she attempts a causal explanation of her musical tastes, and now she moves to a distinct segment where she and the interviewer will share a musical experience. (p. 453)
But the interviewer continues to ask for explanations, insisting that Gail must explain why she reacts to the music in certain ways. His persistence becomes rude, as Gail maintains that she does not know such explanations and does not want them. More poignantly, the interviewer’s relentless tack is a sad refusal or incapacity to share the nonverbal experi ence that Gail offers him. She has already stated that the music, for her, recalls the expe rience of sharing musical enjoyment with her father, and she seems to be offering the in terviewer a re-creation of such sharing. Further, the interviewer promptly creates a dou ble bind, demanding that Gail tell him “what [it is] about the music” that causes her re sponses, while immediately rejecting one of her descriptions, saying, “I don’t understand those musical terms.”61 The two reach an impasse, energetically maintained for more than a page of the printed interview. In her long final statement, passionate and lucid, Gail lists several possible ap proaches to explanation and concludes: “Maybe it’s partially all of them. Or maybe it’s ab solutely none of them. I don’t know and I never will know.” Questions of causal explana tion fail to recognize Gail’s present musical experience, as the interviewer apparently fails to understand Gail’s invitation to listen with her. “It’s not a scientific experiment. And I’m glad, because I don’t want to know.”62
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Listening and Possessing
Summary of Approaches By way of conclusion, I identify several contributions that this chapter makes to reflecting on listening. I believe that each of these topics deserves further reflection. My argument in this chapter brings them together, but each could be developed on its own. First, I have noted the wide variety of relationships to music and Charles Keil’s identifica tion of common verbs as a starting point for reflection on them. From a range of possibili ties, of which Keil lists only a few, I have focused on only one, owning or possessing, al ready much too large a topic for one essay. Keil’s attention to verbs could lead to many more inquiries.63 Second, I have drawn attention to notions of owning or possessing music. Adorno and Frith emphasize these ideas in relation to popular music, but there is no reason to restrict them to that field, as Gail’s interview, oriented to classical music, demonstrates. Although I have treated the two concepts as equivalent, they can be distinguished from each other, and each one also has different meanings. Other terms and concepts could be added to the discussion, for instance, the rich concept of “belonging”—as when music belongs to someone, or belongs with someone, or the person belongs to the identity or group evoked by the music, and so on. Something as apparently simple as the phrase “my music” would reward extended study. Also, whereas this chapter abstracts from the reality of music as a commodity, further work could address the relations between the commodity form and the psychological issues I have raised. (p. 454)
Third, I have identified a specific practice, repeated listening to a single record
ing. This is a very common part of musical life from the twentieth century to the present; it deserves further exploration. Fourth, I have offered a description of repeated listening in concepts drawn from British object relations psychoanalysis. As my arguments show, I find this tradition of psycho analysis valuable for understanding musical experience. Like any form of psychoanalysis (or psychology or any other interdisciplinary resource), object relations psychoanalysis is a specific discourse with adherents, detractors, and a variety of distinct traditions. Thus, I acknowledge that readers may be willing or unwilling to accept my proposals, for reasons of intellectual commitment that fall outside musicology. I believe, however, that the intu itive appeal of these ideas in relation to music offers support for their value. If a reader is drawn to my account of musical introjection or music as a transitional object, this speaks for the value of introjection and transitional phenomena as psychological concepts in gen eral. Music therapists have often drawn on Winnicott’s ideas, musicologists much less often; other figures in the object relations tradition, even someone so significant as Melanie Klein, rarely appear in musicological research. Sustained attention to these thinkers could contribute valuably to the study of music.64
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Listening and Possessing And fifth, I have recalled the innovative book My Music, which pioneered a remarkable method of gathering material about relationships with music: relatively unstructured ethnographic interviews about the nature and value of music for interview subjects. That project points in two directions for further work. The published interviews constitute a collection of individual experience-oriented self-portraits from a specific time and place, a valuable historical document of late twentieth-century musicality in the United States. At the same time, the book illustrates a general method that can be followed in other set tings; we can, if we wish, collect more such interviews in the present time and thereby perpetuate the project’s generous, nonjudgmental curiosity about the diversity of musical experience.65
References Adorno, Theodor W., with the assistance of George Simpson. 2002. “On Popular Music.” In Essays on Music, edited by Richard Leppert and Susan Gillespie, 437–469. Berkeley: University of California Press. Burkholder, J. Peter. 1983. “Museum Pieces: The Historicist Mainstream in Music of the Last Hundred Years.” Journal of Musicology 4 (1): 115–134. Burrows, David. 1987. “Instrumentalities.” Journal of Musicology 5 (1): 117–125. Chester, Andrew. 1970. “Second Thoughts on a Rock Aesthetic: The Band.” New Left Re view 62:75–82. Cohen, Sara. 1991. Rock Culture in Liverpool: Popular Music in the Making. Oxford: Ox ford University Press. Cohen, Sara. 1998. “Sounding Out the City: Music and the Sensuous Production of Place.” In The Place of Music, edited by Andrew Leyshon, David Matless, and George Re vill, 269–290. New York: Guilford. Crafts, Susan D., Daniel Cavicchi, and Charles Keil, eds. 1993. My Music. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Cusick, Suzanne. 2008. “Musicology, Torture, Repair.” Radical Musicology 3. Accessed August 31, 2015. http://www.radical-musicology.org.uk/2008/Cusick.html. De Backer, Jos. 1993. “Containment in Music Therapy.” In Music Therapy in Health and Education, edited by Margaret Heal and Tony Wigram, 32–39. London: Jessica Kingsley. DeNora, Tia. 2000. Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Finnegan, Ruth. 1989. The Hidden Musicians: Music-Making in an English Town. Cam bridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Listening and Possessing Frith, Simon. 1987. “Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music.” In Music and Soci ety: The Politics of Composition, Performance, and Reception, edited by Richard Leppert and Susan McClary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (p. 459)
Glennie, Evelyn. 2015. “Hearing Essay.” Evelyn Glennie Website, Essays. Accessed August 31, 2015. https://www.evelyn.co.uk/hearing-essay/. Grier, Francis. 2015. “La Traviata and Oedipus.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 96:389–410. Guck, Marion. 1994. “Analytical Fictions.” Music Theory Spectrum 16 (2): 217–230. Hinschelwood, R. D. 1991. A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought. 2nd ed. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Isaacs, Susan. 1970. “The Nature and Function of Phantasy.” In Developments in Psycho analysis, edited by Melanie Klein, Paula Heimann, Susan Isaacs, and Joan Riviere, 67– 121. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis. Keil, Charles. 1987. “Participatory Discrepancies and the Power of Music.” Cultural An thropology 2 (3): 275–283. Kerman, Joseph, and Vivan Kerman. 1972. Listen. New York: Worth. Kingsbury, Henry. 1988. Music, Talent, and Performance: A Conservatory Cultural System. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Klein, Melanie. 1975. “Our Adult World and Its Roots in Infancy.” In Envy and Gratitude and Other Works, 1946–1963, edited by Melanie Klein, 247–263. New York: Delacorte. Koskoff, Ellen. 1982. “The Music-Network: A Model for the Organization of Music Con cepts.” Ethnomusicology 26 (3): 353–370. Levinge, Alison. 2015. The Music of Being: Music Therapy, Winnicott and the School of Object Relations. London: Jessica Kingsley. Losseff, Nicky. 2011. “Projective Identification, Musical Interpretation, and the Self.” Mu sic Performance Research 4:49–59. Mailman, Joshua Banks. 2012. “Seven Metaphors for (Music) Listening: DRAMaTIC.” Journal of Sonic Studies 2 (1). Accessed August 31, 2015. http:// journal.sonicstudies.org/vol02/nr01/a03 Malbon, Ben. 1999. Clubbing: Dancing, Ecstasy, and Vitality. London: Routledge. Milner, Marion. 1950. On Not Being Able to Paint. London: Heinemann. Nettl, Bruno. 1995. Heartland Excursions: Ethnomusicological Reflections on Schools of Music. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Page 16 of 22
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Listening and Possessing Pini, Maria. Club Cultures and Female Subjectivity: The Move from House to Home. New York: Palgrave. Sandvoss, Cornell. 2005. “Fandom as Extension of Self: Self-Reflection and Narcissism.” In Fans: The Mirror of Consumption, edited by Cornell Sandvoss, 95–122. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You.” In Touching Feeling: Affect, Peda gogy, Performativity, edited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, 123–151. Durham: Duke University Press. Segal, Hanna. 1979. Klein. Glasgow: Fontana. Segal, Hanna. 1981. “A Psychoanalytic Approach to Aesthetics.” In The Work of Hanna Se gal: A Kleinian Approach to Clinical Practice, edited by Hanna Segal, 185–206. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Spitz, Ellen Handler. 1985. “Psychoanalysis and Aesthetic Experience.” In Art and Psyche: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Aesthetics, edited by Ellen Handler Spitz, 136– (p. 460)
165. New Haven: Yale University Press. Stokes, Adrian. 1978. The Critical Writings of Adrian Stokes. 3 vols. London: Thames and Hudson. Tagg, Philip. 2001. Fernando the Flute: Analysis of Musical Meaning in an Abba Mega-hit. New York: Mass Media Music Scholars Press. Winnicott, D. W. 2005. “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena.” In Playing and Reality, edited by D. W. Winnicott, 1–34. London: Routledge.
Notes: (1.) Kerman, Joseph, and Vivan Kerman. 1972. Listen. New York: Worth. “Western classi cal music” is music, in European-derived traditions, in a canon formed during the nine teenth century, under the broader concept of art, including music from a past extending to the Renaissance and before, and forward to the present and future. Much of the histo ry of classical music antedates the concept itself, which thus represents a retrospective classification. See Burkholder, J. Peter. 1983. “Museum Pieces: The Historicist Main stream in Music of the Last Hundred Years.” Journal of Musicology 4 (1): 115–134. (2.) There is a large literature on deaf musicians and music lovers. For a good introduc tion see Glennie, Evelyn. 2015. “Hearing Essay.” Accessed August 15, 2015. https:// www.evelyn.co.uk/hearing-essay. (3.) Crafts, Susan D., Daniel Cavicchi, and Charles Keil, eds. 1993. My Music. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 3. Page 17 of 22
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Listening and Possessing (4.) One could find interesting distinctions between the concepts of “owning” and “pos sessing”; in this chapter, provisionally, I treat them as equivalent. See point 2 in the final section of this chapter. (5.) Adorno wrote about this topic several times; I draw on the essay “On Popular Music”: Adorno, Theodor W., with the assistance of George Simpson. 2002. “On Popular Music.” In Essays on Music, edited by Richard Leppert and Susan Gillespie, 437–469. Berkeley: University of California Press. (6.) Adorno (2002): 453. There are many ways to argue against this notoriously extreme position. This chapter’s account of possession addresses one aspect of Adorno’s account. Chester (1970) and Keil (1987) show ways to reverse the hierarchy of large-scale form and detail. Tagg’s semiotic studies (for instance, Fernando the Flute) show how details of popular music may be meaningful in ways unrelated to the unifying synthesis of details that concerns Adorno. Chester, Andrew. 1970. “Second Thoughts on a Rock Aesthetic: The Band.” New Left Review 62:75–82; Keil, Charles. 1987. “Participatory Discrepancies and the Power of Music.” Cultural Anthropology 2 (3): 275–283; Tagg, Philip. 2001. Fernando the Flute: Analysis of Musical Meaning in an Abba Mega-hit. New York: Mass Media Mu sic Scholars Press. (7.) Adorno (2002): 456. (8.) Adorno (2002): 453–457. (9.) Frith, Simon. 1987. “Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music.” In Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance, and Reception, edited by Richard Leppert and Susan McClary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (10.) Frith (1987): 143. (11.) Frith (1987): 143. (12.) Frith (1987): 143. (13.) Frith (1987): 144. (14.) Frith (1987): 143. (15.) Frith (1987): 144. (16.) Frith (1987): 143. (17.) Melanie Klein’s extensive writings reflect the gradual development of her ideas through her lifetime. A good starting point is her essay “Our Adult World and Its Roots in Infancy,” published in: Klein, Melanie, ed. 1975. Envy and Gratitude and Other Works, 1946–1963. New York: Delacorte. Hanna Segal (1979) is an excellent overview. Hinschel wood (1991) is a fine resource. Segal, Hanna. 1979. Klein. Fontana. Glasgow: Fontana;
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Listening and Possessing Hinschelwood, R. D. 1991. A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought. 2nd ed. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. (18.) The idea that psychoanalysts can access the fantasies of pre-verbal infants is star tling. For excellent discussion of this, see Isaacs, Susan. 1970. “The Nature and Function of Phantasy.” In Developments in Psychoanalysis, edited by Melanie Klein, Paula Heimann, Susan Isaacs, and Joan Riviere, 67–121. London: Hogarth Press and the Insti tute of Psychoanalysis. Note that psychoanalytic writers sometimes use the spelling “phantasy” to distinguish the psychoanalytic concept from everyday uses of the word “fantasy.” I have not followed this usage. Writing in the early to mid-twentieth century, Klein and Winnicott assumed that a child’s early care is handled by a mother. Other care taking arrangements are possible, of course, and increasingly common, but I have not tried to recast the theory that I paraphrase in updated form. (19.) In an extended discussion, the account would become more complex. The object that is introjected may owe many of its qualities to properties that have been projected by the subject. Also, it would be valuable to consider different relations to an internal object: In trojection may involve fantasies of power over an object, but an internal object may be maintained with a sense of separateness, for instance with respect, love, or awe. (20.) Winnicott, D. W. 2005. “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena.” In Play ing and Reality, 1–34. London: Routledge. (21.) Winnicott (2005): 2. (22.) Winnicott (2005): 15. (23.) Winnicott (2005): 15. (24.) Winnicott (2005): 12. (25.) Winnicott (2005): 18. (26.) Winnicott (2005): 4. (27.) Winnicott (2005): 4. (28.) As we know, attempts to enforce artistic and religious views are not rare; Winnicott’s account is sweetly optimistic about our sense of boundaries. (29.) Winnicott (2005): 7. (30.) See n. 64 for relevant resources. (31.) A number of excellent projects from the 1980s onward explored musical activities in Western “non-exotic” settings through ethnography or sociology. Distinguished examples include Kingsbury, Henry. 1988. Music, Talent, and Performance: A Conservatory Cultural System. Philadelphia: Temple University Press; Finnegan, Ruth. 1989. The Hidden Musi cians: Music-Making in an English Town. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Cohen, Page 19 of 22
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Listening and Possessing Sara. 1991. Rock Culture in Liverpool: Popular Music in the Making. Oxford: Oxford Uni versity Press; Nettl, Bruno. 1995. Heartland Excursions: Ethnomusicological Reflections on Schools of Music. Urbana: University of Illinois Press;Malbon, Ben. 1999. Clubbing: Dancing, Ecstasy, and Vitality. London: Routledge; DeNora, Tia. 2000. Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Pini, Maria. 2001. Club Cultures and Fe male Subjectivity: The Move from House to Home. New York: Palgrave. My Music is dis tinguished by its openness to any type of music; its inclusion of whatever roles come up, such as listener, composer, and performer; and its willingness to leave material in the speaker’s own voice with no imposition of analysis or theory. Keil’s My Music project was inspired in part by Koskoff, Ellen. 1982. “The Music-Network: A Model for the Organiza tion of Music Concepts.” Ethnomusicology 26 (3): 353–370. (32.) Crafts, Cavicchi, and Keil (1993): 119. (33.) Crafts, Cavicchi, and Keil (1993): 118. (34.) Crafts, Cavicchi, and Keil (1993): 120. (35.) Crafts, Cavicchi, and Keil (1993): 121. (36.) Crafts, Cavicchi, and Keil (1993): 121. (37.) Crafts, Cavicchi, and Keil (1993): 118, 122. (38.) Crafts, Cavicchi, and Keil (1993): 120. (39.) Crafts, Cavicchi, and Keil (1993): 118, 121. (40.) Crafts, Cavicchi, and Keil (1993): 122. (41.) Crafts, Cavicchi, and Keil (1993): 118. (42.) Crafts, Cavicchi, and Keil (1993): 121–122. (43.) Crafts, Cavicchi, and Keil (1993): 121. (44.) Crafts, Cavicchi, and Keil (1993): 123. (45.) Cohen, Sara. 1998. “Sounding Out the City: Music and the Sensuous Production of Place.” In The Place of Music, edited by Andrew Leyshon, David Matless, and George Re vill, 269–290. New York: Guilford. (46.) Crafts, Cavicchi, and Keil (1993): 90. (47.) Crafts, Cavicchi, and Keil (1993): 90–91. (48.) Crafts, Cavicchi, and Keil (1993): 91. (49.) Crafts, Cavicchi, and Keil (1993): 91.
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Listening and Possessing (50.) Crafts, Cavicchi, and Keil (1993): 92. (51.) Crafts, Cavicchi, and Keil (1993): 92. (52.) Crafts, Cavicchi, and Keil (1993): 91. (53.) Crafts, Cavicchi, and Keil (1993): 91. (54.) Crafts, Cavicchi, and Keil (1993): 92. (55.) Urgent concerns with limitless parental care, omnipotence, and the threat of annihi lation characterize the paranoid/schizoid position in Kleinian theory; the sense of music as healing or restoring the world moves toward the depressive position, though Rhonda’s thought tends much more toward omnipotence. For a clear introductory account see Se gal (1979). (56.) Crafts, Cavicchi, and Keil (1993): 94. (57.) Crafts, Cavicchi, and Keil (1993): 95. (58.) Crafts, Cavicchi, and Keil (1993): 95. (59.) Crafts, Cavicchi, and Keil (1993): 95–96. (60.) Crafts, Cavicchi, and Keil (1993): 96. (61.) Crafts, Cavicchi, and Keil (1993): 97, 96. (62.) Crafts, Cavicchi, and Keil (1993): 98. (63.) In relation to musical analysis, Marion Guck has drawn attention to the role of verbs in animating musical sound and the theorist or analyst’s problematic tendency to prefer nouns. It is a different point from Keil’s, but a nice counterpart. See Guck, Marion. 1994. “Analytical Fictions.” Music Theory Spectrum 16 (2): 217–230. Joshua Banks Mailman of fers a range of images to illustrate the diversity of listening in Mailman, Joshua Banks. 2012. “Seven Metaphors for (Music) Listening: DRAMaTIC.” Journal of Sonic Studies 2 (1). Accessed August 31, 2015. http://journal.sonicstudies.org/vol02/nr01/a03. (64.) Thinkers in Klein’s tradition have often turned to issues of art and aesthetics. See, e.g., Segal, Hanna. 1981. “A Psychoanalytic Approach to Aesthetics.” In The Work of Han na Segal: A Kleinian Approach to Clinical Practice, 185–206. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson; Milner, Marion. 1950. On Not Being Able to Paint. London: Heinemann. The art criticism of Adrian Stokes, himself analyzed by Klein, is a splendid, unique achievement in this area; see Stokes, Adrian. 1978. The Critical Writings of Adrian Stokes. 3 vols. Lon don: Thames and Hudson. An influential essay by Eve Kosofky Sedgwick adapts Kleinian concepts; see Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You.” In Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, 123–151. Durham: Duke University Press. Suzanne Cu sick draws on Sedgwick’s treatment in Cusick, Suzanne. 2008. “Musicology, Torture, Re Page 21 of 22
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Listening and Possessing pair.” Radical Musicology 3. Accessed August 31, 2015. http://www.radicalmusicology.org.uk/2008/Cusick.htm. Winnicott’s ideas have occasionally been developed in aesthetics, for instance, in Spitz, Ellen Handler. 1985. “Psychoanalysis and Aesthetic Experience.” In Art and Psyche: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Aesthetics, 136–165. New Haven: Yale University Press. Music therapists have frequently drawn on Winnicott and sometimes on other figures in object relations psychoanalysis; see, e.g., Levinge, Alison. 2015. The Music of Being: Music Therapy, Winnicott and the School of Object Relations. London: Jessica Kingsley; De Backer, Jos. 1993. “Containment in Music Therapy.” In Mu sic Therapy in Health and Education, edited by Margaret Heal and Tony Wigram, 32–39. London: Jessica Kingsley. Beyond music therapy, studies of music and object relations are rare; they have taken a range of approaches, at various levels of accomplishment. See ex amples by Burrows (1987), Grier (2015), Losseff (2011), and Sandvoss (2005) (on popular culture, including music) in the reference list.. Burrows, David. 1987. “Instrumentalities.” Journal of Musicology 5 (1): 117–125; Grier, Francis. 2015. “La Traviata and Oedipus.” In ternational Journal of Psychoanalysis 96:389–410; Losseff, Nicky. 2011. “Projective Identi fication, Musical Interpretation, and the Self.” Music Performance Research 4:49–59; Sandvoss, Cornell. 2005. “Fandom as Extension of Self: Self-Reflection and Narcissism.” In Fans: The Mirror of Consumption, 95–122. Cambridge, UK: Polity. (65.) I presented part of this chapter at the 2014 annual meeting of the American Musico logical Society, in a special session on psychoanalysis organized by Seth Brodsky. I am grateful to Seth for creating the session and to Seth, David Levin (who served as session respondent), and many others for comments on that occasion. The Handbook editors pro vided excellent guidance throughout my work on this chapter. The psychoanalyst Eduardo Garcia Silva shared excellent insights into Rhonda’s interview. The psychoanalyst Pamela Sorensen, my mentor in Kleinian theory, read a draft of the paper and shared valuable re sponses, as did music scholars Michael Beckerman, William Cheng, Lisa Colton, Robert Fink, Rebecca Geoffroy-Schwinden, Richard Hermann, Kendra Leonard, Joshua Mailman, Andra McCartney, Bruce Quaglia, and Carol Vernallis.
Fred Everett Maus
Music, University of Virginia
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Is Listening to Music an Art in Itself—or Not?
Is Listening to Music an Art in Itself—or Not? Wolfgang Gratzer The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries Edited by Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer Print Publication Date: Jan 2019 Subject: Music, Musicology and Music History Online Publication Date: Nov 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190466961.013.22
Abstract and Keywords This chapter discusses features of the extensively used attribution “art of listening” in contexts of therapy, partially New Age–like capacity building, sociology, and music. The second section comments on the relationship between music listening and music appreci ation. The key assumption discussed is that understanding (described as a process of re lating oneself to something or somebody) unfolds as activities that can be increased re spectively between four poles: creating meaning, making music, generating emotion, and deepening reflection. Finally, the chapter returns to the question: Is listening to music an art—or not? Agreeing with Adam Heinrich Müller’s assumption that “the art of listening” stands for creating meaning autonomously, this question is answered in the affirmative. Keywords: Adam Müller, art of listening, music appreciation, sociology, understanding of music
To Otto Neumaier THIS chapter focuses on the expanding use of the explicit term “art of listening” in vari ous contexts; the clarification of this history offers a new way to conceptualize how audi ences process musical listening into musical understanding and to suggest how both mu sic listening as well as music understanding might be actively developed. The first section discusses selected uses of the phrases “art of listening” or “art of listening to music.” The second section turns to deal with the connection between listening to music and under standing music, and finally returns to the question: Is the act of listening to music an art in itself—or not?
Functions of Ascriptions It is not possible in this space to list every publication whose title includes the phrase “[the] art of listening” through the twenty-first century. The earliest text to mention a variation is Adam Heinrich Müller’s Von der Kunst des Hörens (On the Art of Listening) of 1812. It seems quite likely that Müller’s choice of title was inspired by Jean Paul’s 1804 novel Flegeljahre, in which, in chapter 44, Vult is suspected of having an unkünstlerische Page 1 of 19
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Is Listening to Music an Art in Itself—or Not? Hörkunst (Unartistic Art of Listening). Müller presented his theories as a series of lec tures in Vienna that from the perspective at the beginning of the twenty-first century read like sermons against grave public negligence toward methods of verbal communication. These lectures were published in Leipzig in 1816 as Zwölf Reden über die Beredsamkeit und deren Verfall in Deutschland (Twelve Lectures on Eloquence and Its Degeneration in Germany) and reissued several times after 1920.1 Müller held the mass distribution of printed books (p. 462) responsible for nothing less than ruining speech and argued that mass distribution promoted passive, uncritical consumption instead of encouraging indi vidual perceptiveness. Müller suggested that listeners instead should engage in an active, enthusiastic exchange of thinking and responding: “These two arts are interdependent; no one can be a greater speaker than he is a listener.”2 Here Müller suggested that on one hand, a proper listener ought to actively seek to understand the other person’s per spective; on the other, he or she must also develop the ability to shape and articulate an opinion. A Polish saying conveys the same: “Out of a good listener, a good story-teller is made.”3 Müller went on to clarify that “good listening” could be learned by drawing a parallel with the way one experiences music: The art of listening consists therefore in the free mastery which one attains over this faculty, in the ability to listen attuned to one another and yet simultaneously to listen to oneself; in other words, like all arts, but the musical in particular, it consists of the ability to sense chords, harmonies, which is not inborn in everyone, nor is it already trained by the reality that the ear remains open and allows any thing to happen to it.4 Here Müller adopted the position that the “emotionless” audiences of his day could re train themselves by exposing themselves to an abundance of high-quality music, a posi tion which, as we shall see, would be reiterated in the twentieth century. In his writing Müller grew increasingly defensive of his stance that the art of listening has been lost—at least in part—and must be founded anew. What is there that isn’t called art? Two hundred years after Müller, Andreas Ammer, a journalist and radio producer, emphasized in his 1997 conference talk “Hören—eine ver nachlässigte Kunst?” (Listening—a neglected art?): “Listening, first of all, isn’t an art at all. Seeing isn’t an art; the pictures are.”5 Objections such as Ammer’s are fairly rare al though there remain few areas of life today that have been spared similar turns of speech. Below are selected examples of this trend from the twentieth century: Erich Fromm titled his much-discussed thesis on the demise of interpersonal relationships in modern times, which was reissued dozens of times, The Art of Loving (Die Kunst des Liebens, 1956). In 1984 the German-language first edition of Vladimir Nabokov’s Die Kun st des Lesens: Meisterwerke russischer Literatur was published, which in the original English version was titled simply Lectures on Russian Literature (1981). More recently, the controversial military historian Martin van Creveld published The Art of War: War and Military Thought (2000). Bård Breien titled his multiple award–winning debut film Kun sten å tenke negativt (The Art of Negative Thinking, 2006). In 2008 the Warsaw company CI Games introduced the point-and-click adventure game onto the market called The Art Page 2 of 19
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Is Listening to Music an Art in Itself—or Not? of Murdering. The Art of Falling was used as the title of a play by Christoph Nußbaumed er that received its premiere in Cologne in 2010 (printed version 2013). In 2010, Georg Haindl published the anthology Die Kunst zu wohnen (The Art of Living), which was sold as a catalogue at various exhibitions of a similar name. Such a plethora of examples is un surprising, and their predecessors can be found even in ancient times. (p. 463) For exam ple, Aristotle spoke of the “Art of Riding,” the “Art of Housekeeping,” and the “Art of Heal ing” in the first book of his Nicomachean Ethics.6 Martin van Creveld did not coin “The Art of War,” either; it can be found ca. 500 BC in Sun Tzu’s important treatise Regarding the Art of War and also around 1520 in Niccolò Machiavelli’s Dell’Arte della Guerra.7 The reasons for this are that techne, the ancient Greek precursor to the Latin ars, was uti lized by many ancient authors as the antonym to nature (ancient Greek, physis), which mankind was meant to imitate. Besides art forms, in particular the visual and performing arts, techne referred to every kind of craftsmanship as well as every type of expertise. In either case, according to the terminological understanding of that time, “doing” (ancient Greek, poesis) becomes visible where it leads to a crafted result (ancient Greek, ergon). Only in the late eighteenth century did—for example—Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason detach “art” as a term for a distinct activity from the triad of techne, poesis, and ergon.8 Kant provided a special status to “art” by suggesting that it uniquely has such attributes as “originality” and evidence of “genius.” The saying that was passed down by Tacitus, “Exercitatio artem parat” (art results from practice), was then modified in the late eigh teenth century by authors such as Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling to “Übung macht [endlich] den Meister” (practice makes perfect.)9 And yet it is still common today to at tach to especially well-honed capabilities apart from literature, painting, music, and so on the attribution of art and thus, categorically, to linguistically elevate any such unusual acts.10 Today one often finds mention of the exact phrase “[the] art of listening.” I suggest that we can utilize Wittgenstein’s conception of the “language game” in order to categorize the various contexts in which we find this phrase into four contextual fields. The first context distinguishes itself by the author’s grounding a work in a professional background of developing therapeutic procedures. The title of Erich Fromm’s anthology The Art of Listening, published posthumously and first edited by Rainer Funk in 1994 within the framework of the Fromm Complete Anthology, corresponds to the same title of one of Fromm’s last writings. This text, amounting to barely two pages of text in the print edition of 1980, described concentrated listening as an essential characteristic of empa thetic conversational conduct, and thus marks conscientious listening as a fundamental prerequisite for effective psychoanalysis.11 In 1995, a year after the publishing of Fromm’s anthology, another volume based on psychoanalytical training followed by the family therapist Michael P. Nichols titled The Lost Art of Listening; Nichols extended Fromm’s focus on listening from the perspective of a psychoanalytic practice to suggest that it forms a central aspect of all interpersonal negotiation.12 He further described em pathetic reactions, in which evaluations of what is heard are omitted if possible, as the motor of the speaker’s better understanding of himself, writing: “such non-directive reac Page 3 of 19
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Is Listening to Music an Art in Itself—or Not? tions encourage the speaker to look more deeply at his experience.”13 In doing so, Nichols brought the idea of “active listening” into the sphere of client-centered psy chotherapeutic praxis, and it is within his framework that authors such as Carl R. Rodgers in his Client-Centered Therapy developed “active listening” into a multi-stage be havioral (p. 464) concept.14 A similar approach wielded a strong influence on popular sci entific terminology starting as early as 1970 through the unrelated vectors of Thomas Gordon and other popular writers in books such as his Parent Effectiveness Training, which propagated many of the same conceptions of active listening. At the same time, the avoidance of the phrase “art of listening” in these works suggests that these writers did not want to jeopardize their claims that active listening could be easily acquired by acci dentally implying that it constituted any sort of difficult techne.15 The second context encompasses self-help initiatives that purport to utilize more or less concrete, practical suggestions in order to facilitate a lifestyle wherein listening is consid ered almost as if it were a salvational activity for humankind. These include Kay Lindahl’s Listening Center in California;16 moreover, Lindahl founded the more explicitly ecumeni cal Alliance for Spiritual Community. In both cases, workshops and counsel are offered with the goal of promoting an attitude defined by interreligious respect. The maxim “Learning to listen—really listen—requires a sacred practice” functions throughout her writings, such as her 2002 publication The Sacred Art of Listening: Forty Reflections for Cultivating a Spiritual Practice, as a slogan. It was prominently displayed on the back of the jacket on the English-language version of Lindahl’s book.17 She attributed this recom mendation to her friend the composer, accordionist, and philosopher Pauline Oliveros. This is hardly a surprise, since Oliveros herself founded an institution called the Deep Lis tening Institute, which rewards those who optimize their listening abilities with a “Deep Listening Certificate.” Each one of the forty aphorisms in Lindahl’s Sacred Art was illus trated with the image of a mandala, including No. 9, “Listening for Connection.” The New Age character of Lindahl’s rhetoric is easily identified by her selections, as well as her stereotypical generalizations about scenarios of affliction and salvation, detached from any sense of scale.18 Her foremost refrain was that listening is the “key to peace in the world.”19 Lindahl later adapted the same concept for young people with the eye-catching title How Does God Listen?20 Lindahl shares her ambitions with other members of the International Listening Associa tion, founded in 1979 and continuously active since then..21 Part of their missionary activ ity includes the publication of the periodical International Journal of Listening. This orga nization also holds itself responsible for the incorporation of new members into a “Listen ing Hall of Fame,” first established in 1980. Coach Linda Eve Diamon’s newsletters for the online forum, Listeners Unite, beginning in 2006, have been proclaiming a salvation of the soul in a fashion similar to Lindahl’s.22 A 2007 article by Diamon bears the perti nent title: “Rule #1: Stop Talking!” In both forums listening appeared to be celebrated as the prerequisite for peaceful coexistence between differing points of view. One can only speculate about the extent to which these sorts of universalist guidebooks titled The Art of Listening actually enlighten their readerships. It remains, however, that the amount of Page 4 of 19
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Is Listening to Music an Art in Itself—or Not? similar publications tends to surge in parallel with times of religious conflict and follow ing acts of terror.23 The third context shapes its discourse around the “art of listening” as a way for improv ing the self-conceptions of the sciences. Much as those writings in the second context, au thors often refer to major contemporary conflicts, but here the art of listening (p. 465) functions as a metaphor for activities that involve self-awareness yet are wholly separate from therapeutic goal-setting. Authors invoke listening in these works to address what is forgotten, repressed, or overlooked by the broader public. The British sociologist Les Back views this tendency as a prime location for revising the field of sociology. On the first page of his 2007 book The Art of Listening, Back reminisced about the events of September 11, 2001, in New York.24 In the book’s preface Back argued for his concept of “sociology as a listener’s art.” He suggested that the central task of sociology is to pro vide “serious attention” to underrepresented societal processes; he therefore treats seri ous attention as synonymous with the emancipation of careful listening from guided or herded listening.25 He concluded with an ambitious thesis: “We live in dark times but so ciology—as a listening art—can provide resources to help us live through them while pointing to the possibility of a different kind of future.”26 Back’s rhetoric explicitly for warded the thesis that a sociology that practices artful listening has the potential to con tribute toward a more peaceful future. In the field of philosophy, Holger Schmid categorized mentions of the “art of listening” in a wholly different way. The subtitle of his 1999 monograph The Art of Listening: Loca tions and Limits of Philosophical Language Experience traced back to, among others, Manfred Riedel’s Hören auf die Sprache (Listening to Speech) (1990) and its discussion of acroamatic traditions, or the oral acquisition of knowledge.27 In chapter 15 of Schmid’s volume, “On the Borders Between Music and Philosophy,” Schmid appeared little con cerned with any particular modalities of listening as experienced in reality. Instead, Sch mid drew on a philosophical tradition that concerns itself much more with the ontological concept of the musical work; the author referred to both Heidegger and Adorno and em phasized the “structure of the moment [Augenblicksgestalt] in the work of art” (chapter 16). Within this tradition, how one might identify the art of listening (or even an art of hearing) remains an open question, or rather, one unworthy of inquiry. The fourth context includes texts that center around the topic of music in its own right. Jean Ferris’s book Music: The Art of Listening (1995) is a music appreciation textbook in the Anglo-American tradition that follows in both design and content from Jeanne Shapiro Bamberger and Howard Brofsky’s earlier volume, The Art of Listening: Developing Musi cal Perception (1988).28 Rudolf Arnheim and Helga de la Motte spoke of an “art of hear ing” in their studies of radio-specific forms of communication and art (without discussing aspects of reception).29 Unlike them, Ferris expanded the traditional concept of introduc tory music theory. He completed each chapter with a rubric for “critical thinking.” With the clear objective of bringing together the book’s introductory knowledge and the reader’s personal experiences and expectations, these rubrics pose questions to the read er such as: “How do you define music?” and “Can you cite reasons for your Page 5 of 19
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Is Listening to Music an Art in Itself—or Not? preferences?”30 The questions aim at reflective application and link the book’s concepts about listening with numerous listening examples that can be accessed via an online Learning Center. Andrew Ford reported on similar ambitions for the students to become more musically active in Writing Good Sense About Music: The Art of Listening (2007), where he described an Australian project involving writing (p. 466) about music, including exercises in differentiation.31 In her book Die Kunst des Hörens (The Art of Listening), Karin Korthase provided a portrait of the QuerKlang, an education project for experimen tal music provided for children and young adults based in Berlin.32 Other initiatives have set out to open traditional forms of ear training and appreciation to a broader idea of lis tener competencies. The registered association Zuhören, for example, which considers it self a forum for this objective, has been built on an initiative co-developed by radio broad casting companies alongside the interdisciplinary series Edition Zuhören, which includes the nine volumes produced to date.33 Finally, I draw attention to two unusual texts that can be thought of in the widest sense as crossing over from the third and fourth contexts: two music-philosophical treatises, one by Charles T. Smith, the other by Konrad Paul Liessmann. These texts differ fundamental ly with regard to the “art of listening” as a stimulating theory of music. Smith’s 1947 volume, Music and Reason: The Art of Listening, Appreciating and Composing reveals Smith’s English-Catholic background on every page. The “ear of faith” is dutifully intro duced before the “physical ear.”34 This 158-page confessional text ends with the aphoris tic and in many ways vague equivalent: “Religion is indeed, like music, an art.”35 In con trast, Liessmann’s 2003 essay Die Kunst des Hörens: Über den Umgang mit Musik (The Art of Listening: On the Handling of Music) pushed back against such religious-philosoph ical premises. Liessmann dealt pointedly with “listening for the sake of listening” and po sitions the “art of listening” at the point where “no other option is provided than to react to what one hears with the sensation of hearing.”36 Liessmann’s conception deserves fur ther consideration, not least because it recalled the unpublished habilitation thesis of Günther Anders (pseudonym Günter Stern), in which, already in 1926, Anders discussed “actively listening to music” in conjunction with actual situations of musical listening.37 Anders introduced this distinction without conceptualizing typologies of listeners as Georg Josef Vogler had earlier (1778), and as did Theodor W. Adorno, writing only shortly after Anders. It is curious that both Vogler and Adorno avoided mentioning any “art of lis tening [to music]” themselves, although typologizing “masters” (Vogler) and “experts” (Adorno) would readily suggest exactly that.38 Anders thought about “appropriate listening to music” at a time when several authors were writing for the first time about an art of listening. The motivations behind these texts included, on the hand, writers’ experiences with radio, still an unfamiliar medium at the time, and on the other, contemporary problems in the reception of new music. Friedrich Bischoff, artistic director at the Schlesische Funkstunde radio station between 1929 and 1933, raised questions about the nature of radio while conjuring a vision of the radio as a place of encounter that demanded an “art to listening.”39 Not long after Bischoff wrote in 1929, unmistakable admonishments of a similar kind appeared in Leslie Reez’s article “Von der Kunst des Hörens” (From the Art of Listening) in a regional Ger Page 6 of 19
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Is Listening to Music an Art in Itself—or Not? man newspaper. Reez was irritated that “not a few among us” only listened to radio in the background and criticized “the increase in noise [pollution] and the diluting of apprecia tive attention”; it was necessary “to train us to become artists of listening.”40 Reez was in no way the only figure concerned about the demise of cultural (p. 467) aptitude. His pes simism was shared by other authors of his generation, including Erwin Ackerknecht and Hans Lutz, who presented arguments in defense of an art of listening that, they believed, was under threat.41 In a way, this generalized apprehension about the ruination of culture —and, as a rule, it is always presented as a generalization—persists even today. Liess mann (2003) is not alone in decrying our need for the art of listening, an art that remains threatened by the “noise of this world.”42 To sum up this overview of four language-games involving the phrase “[the] art of listen ing”: every author—with the exception of Fromm—broaches what he or she sees as soci etal deficits in need of remedy. The uses of the art of listening as a remedy, often praised as a life preserver for society at large, is legitimized by gloomy generalizations. Mean while, the rhetoric used is more or less missionary, depending on the author’s ideological perspective.
The Art of Understanding Music By way of adapting the ancient saying Exercitatio artem parat with a judicious question mark, we might pose the following question: What kind of practical exercises can help make listening into an art, or an artful activity? I would like to add a more fundamental question: What part can listening to music play in the understanding of music? It is useful to consider understanding as a process. In order to describe the different modes of comprehension in this process, we can imagine a space with a minimum of four poles, each defining a different interpretive relation between the listener and a being, object, or action. The very etymology of “[the] art of music” identi fies a historical need to define these relations more clearly. Understanding, in such a model, can therefore be seen as a series of actions with various options for continuation. My thesis is that as more activities take place at and between these four poles, one can develop more understanding, with each pole functioning as a cardinal point on a model for envisioning an art of listening. (First pole) Creating Meaning. Our experiences inform us that the decision to acknowl edge the nature of an action or the result of an action as characteristically musical hap pens quickly, whether consciously or unconsciously; we are quick to arrive at the assump tion that something is or is not music. The act of labeling these experiences largely takes place unnoticed, usually drawing comments only in the case of contested experiences. It is also at this first pole, creating meaning, where an initial decision is made between hearing and listening. Hearing (German hören; French entendre) is predominantly under stood as a casual acoustical perception; however, listening (German zuhören; French écouter) suggests a focused perception, involving noticeable attentiveness. Page 7 of 19
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Is Listening to Music an Art in Itself—or Not? The pole of meaning is also related by their capacities for association; these extend be yond the generation of meanings from the identification of something as a musical object or a narrative. Owing to our constant chaining of neural activity across our mental (p. 468) maps, acoustic events are repeatedly linked with other conceptual matter. Thus, we can hardly count the number of names, points of information, value judgments, and so forth that we link together with sounds, so that we can perceive those sounds as musical forms. At the same time, such linkages are able to influence our hearing, or listening, in turn. In particular, these linkages can alter our patterns for prioritizing where we direct our concentration.43 it is possible that listening to a well-known piece may initially inspire only slight interest. In that case, one can presume that the listener’s attention span would increase if he or she encountered the irritation of some unfamiliar voicing or intonation, and from those moments on he or she might take special interest in particular aspects of what was heard. From this case one can intuitively distinguish between (a) associations that the listener grades to be obligatory to any listener’s interpretation and therefore not up for discussion, and (b) associations that the listener considers to be of variable value and thus open to discursive modeling. In my own experience, many everyday points of controversy about music arise when one listener assesses that one or another aspect of an aural interpretation is obligatory while a second listener judges the same interpretive aspect as optional. These disagreements are not only about associative judgments, however strongly held, but also about questions of what precisely each listener heard or, in some cases, did not hear, as well as about what is considered real or fictional in the end. (Second pole) Making Music. Engaging in music making, or if possible, playing together with others—even at a rudimentary level—offers the opportunity to cultivate a sort of comprehensive ear training. Such training comes from active involvement in confronting formal musical questions. This training means more than just recognizing mere nuances, for example, modified dynamics or rhythmic accents; it also means exploring the compari son between different situations of hearing and listening. Here the radius of “musical practices” is involuntarily traversed, and thus one discovers through experimentation which decisions are obligatory or optional. (Third pole) Generating Emotions. This is where, among other things, the moods and feel ings emerge that help determine the degree to which one wants to continue listening. The nuanced increments of such emotions span the wide spectrum from cautious inquisitive ness to euphoric responses. If, while listening to music, a listener’s emotions become fixed in a negative part of this spectrum, then further engagement will be unlikely, whether that would have been primarily listening or primarily commenting. This explains how, while listening to a piece of music, one may find it interesting, while one may experi ence such boredom that his or her mind floats off to some place far away from the listen ing space, or engaging in interpretation of the piece. The latter case only confirms the in sight contained in the pithy saying: “Not everyone with ears, hears.”
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Is Listening to Music an Art in Itself—or Not? (Fourth pole) Deepening Reflection. When interpretations conflict with one another, there is a good chance that some difference between them can be perceived as a historic differ entiation.44 Identifying such a differentiation indicates that the listener is examining some acute, historically informed interpretive labels, and in so doing, investigating others’ as sociations with said labels, as well as his or her own associations. For any given pole, one can reflect on the noted conditions for the operational steps, (p. 469) and if necessary, even the conditions for initiating this reflection can be investigated.45 Gregory Bateson, a member of the Palo Alto Group alongside Heinz von Förster and Paul Watzlawick, spoke of this in a talk about his theory of learning, specifically “learning of a higher order.”46 By “higher order” Bateson means the gradual expansion of self-awareness about the condi tions prompting one’s actions and, eventually, coming to reflect on the arrangement of multiple prerequisites for reflection. Applying these possibilities of a higher order when listening to music opens up the possibility of an increasingly self-aware contextualization of listening and thereby allows new options for continuing the cycle of actions between the polarities of listening. As soon as it is clear which discursive interests are stimulated by the choice of a music example or how it is judged, one can then attempt to further one’s experience of the music, or to understand it differently, by applying new conditions based on what was experienced along the way. It needs three more comments about musical understanding as a potentially multipolar process of placing oneself in relation to something else. 1. The above list of four polarities is neither intended to imply any relationship of pri orities between the polarities nor to suggest that they constitute a linear sequence of actions. Experience suggests that multiple reciprocal movements and even leaps be tween the poles are probable under particular circumstances, as when difficulties in applying a label for interpretation (creating meaning) provoke an aversion (generat ing emotions) that did not previously exist. Likewise, the irritating feeling that a piece of music fails to impress on the listener a status of “good” music (both generat ing emotions and creating meaning) does not necessarily lead directly to terminating one’s involvement, but may instead provoke a conscious awareness of the trained prerequisites of one’s own action (deepening reflection) and so may, as a conse quence, result in a budding desire to hear it again (generating emotions). 2. This model does not seek to provide any objective delimitating criterion between understanding and misunderstanding of music or between artful and artless listening to music. When interacting with music, it is unhelpful to retain unequal labels which suggest that certain interpretations either “always” constitute understanding or do not do so “at all.” Rather, what is important in this system is tracing the efforts to as sess with increasing differentiation, a process including how sounds can be heard and correctly understood as music. 3. This model does not set out to find any “truth,” in the sense of one and only one way of listening to music. To do so would only allow for the accusation that others “falsely” listen to music.47 My intention is to provide a way to recognize routine ac tions—habits that have since developed into conventions or even rituals—in order to reflect on them and to arrive at a decision among other potential actions. This musi Page 9 of 19
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Is Listening to Music an Art in Itself—or Not? cal ethos could be called a “decision in favor of creativity,” as Karl-Heinz Brodbeck would put it.48 In Latin, creare originally mean to sire, work (out) or, in some cases, create—all of them actions that possess the same core attributes of artistic activity in the sense of Aristotelian techne. It is unfortunate that self-help (p. 470) authors coopt ed the term “creative listening”49—and that they also propagandize “the art of cre ative listening”—for without this baggage, “creative listening” would make sense in musical contexts, without engineering standardized norms for the experience of art. It now falls to each individual to recognize which specific polarities of listening to music might benefit from new initiatives. The following tribute from Hans Zender’s 2009 obituary for the musicologist Heinz-Klaus Metzger may prove motivating: “He was an in genious listener, and laboring along with the piece, so to speak, he developed the act of listening into a creative art, and yet stayed attuned to the work and its place in history.”50 On the basis of his profound respect for Metzger, Zender, furthermore, expressed how im pressed he was with Metzger’s “basic attitude of inquisitive listening.”51 In a similar vein, consider two examples of how such a creative art of listening can be further developed: Simon Obert’s 2012 anthology Wechselnde Erscheinung: Sechs Perspektiven auf Anton Weberns sechste Bagatelle (Changing Appearance: Six Perspectives on Anton von Webern’s Sixth Bagatelle) successfully proposes ways in which creative listening can be promoted from the standpoint of musicology. Obert directly invites listening for cogency of multiple performances of a work in order to study one’s own listening practices when, for example, participating in rehearsals or crafting music-analytical interpretations. This impetus can be understood as an experimental form of combined reading-listeningarrangement which allows for experiences that may be understood as products of consid ering multiple perspectives of one’s own. Such a process has since been described by María do Mar Castro Varela, who argued for a “detailed explication of differing interpre tations of the social text.”52 Contrary to the project of Wechselnde Erscheinung, creative music listening is promoted by R. Murray Schafer: in his artistic projects, Schafer, as a re searcher of sound, invites audiences to combine listening and soundmaking in a variety of unique ways. Schafer’s proposals have since been taken up and developed in numerous projects.53
Conclusions The phrase “[the] art of listening” has been applied, emphasized, and developed by au thors of various professional backgrounds as part of their therapeutic and, at times, ex plicitly missionary efforts to draw attention to social problems that are described as threatening. Instead, I suggest a model for developing musical listening according to which music is constructed between four polarities. This model corresponds to the ap proximately two-hundred-year-old assumption of Adam Müller that the art of listening is to become free in the creation of meaning. If Müller was right, then it is possible to con sider the “basic attitude of the inquisitive listener” that Zender affirmed on the basis of Metzger’s having developed the “act of listening into a creative art.” By assuming this
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Is Listening to Music an Art in Itself—or Not? stance, we can develop the notion of how listening to music might become more artful, without necessarily knowing where artful listening to music begins or ends.
References Ackerknecht, Erwin, et al. 1928. Die Kunst des Lesens. Heidelberg: Wunderhorn. Ackermann, Max. 2003. Die Kultur des Hörens: Wahrnehmung und Fiktion; Texte vom Be ginn des 20. Jahrhunderts. Hassfurt: Falkenberg. Adorno, Thodor W. 1968. Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie: Zwölf Vorlesungen [1939– 1962]. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt. Ammer, Andreas. 1997. “Gespräch mit Andreas Ammer.” In Hören—eine vernachlässigte Kunst? edited by Karl-Heinz Blomann and Frank Sielecki, 179–190. Hofheim am Taunus: Wolke. Aristoteles. 2003. Nikomachische Ethik. Edited by Franz Dirlmeier. Stuttgart: Reclam. Arnheim, Rudolf. 1979. Rundfunk als Hörkunst. Munich: Hanser. Back, Les. 2007. The Art of Listening. Oxford: Beck. Bamberger, Jeanne Shapiro, and Howard Brofsky, eds. 1988. The Art of Listening: Devel oping Musical Perception. New York: Harper & Row. Bateson, Gregory. (1964) 1981. “Die logischen Kategorien von Lernen und Kommunika tion.” In Ökologie des Geistes: Anthropologische, psychologische, biologische und episte mologische Perspektiven, edited by Gregory Bateson, 362–399. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Bernius, Volker, and Margarete Imhof, eds. 2010. Zuhörenkompetenzen in Unterricht und Schule: Beiträge aus Wissenschaft und Praxis. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Bischoff, Friedrich. 1929. “Auf dem Weg zur Hörkunst.” Schlesischer Kulturkalender 1930 (Breslau): 24. Brodbeck, Karl-Heinz. 2010. Entscheidung zur Kreativität. 4th ed. Darmstadt: Wis senschaftliche Buchgemeinschaft. de la Motte, Helga. 1992. “Kunst des Hörens.” In Zum Sehen geboren: Gedenkschrift für Helmuth Hopf. Musik, Kunst und Konsum 3, edited by Walter Reckziegel, Günther Rötter, and Brunhilde Sonntag, 153–161. Münster: LIT. do Mar Castro Varela, María. 2015. “Koloniale Wissensproduktionen: Edward Saids ‘inter pretative Wachsamkeit’ als Ausgangspunkt einer kritischen Migrationsforschung.” In Sch lüsselwerke der Migrationsforschung: Pionierstudien und Referenztheorien, edited by Ju lia Reuter and Paul Mecheril, 307–321. Wiesbaden: Springer.
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Is Listening to Music an Art in Itself—or Not? Duden: Das Bedeutungswörterbuch (Duden 10). 2002. 3rd ed. Mannheim: Dudenverlag. (p. 475)
Ferris, Jean. 1995. Music: The Art of Listening. Madison: Brown & Benchmark.
Ford, Andrew. 2007. “Writing Good Sense About Music: The Art of Listening.” In Growing up Making Music: Youth Orchestras from Australia and the World, edited by M. Kartomi, K. Dreyfus, and D. Pear, 167–173. Melbourne: Lyrebird. Förster, Heinz von, and Bernhard Börksen. 2001. Wahrheit ist die Erfindung eines Lügn ers: Gespräche für Skeptiker. Heidelberg: Carl Auer. Fromm, Erich. 1994. “Psychoanalytic ‘Technique’ or the Art of Listening.” In The Art of Listening, edited by Rainer Funk, 192–193. New York: Continuum. Gordon, Thomas. 1975. P.E.T. Parent Effectiveness Training: The Tested New Way to Raise Responsible Children. New York: Plume. Gratzer, Wolfgang. 2007a. “Bildverstehen—Musikverstehen.” In Gerhard Rühm und die Kunst der Gegenwart, edited by Joachim Brügge, Wolfgang Gratzer, and Otto Neumaier, 82–98. Saarbrücken: Pfau. Gratzer, Wolfgang. 2007b. “Musikalische Interpretation als kreative Handlung: Über Gre gorian und anderes.” In Identität und Kreativität: Beiträge aus Musikwissenschaft und Musikpädagogik, edited by Gabriele Hofmann, 27–35. Augsburg: Wißner. Gratzer, Wolfgang. 2013a. “Kompositorisches Verstehen: Zender hört Schumann hört Beethoven.” In Hans Zender. Musik-Konzepte Sonderband, edited by Ulrich Tadday, 94– 107. Munich: Text und Kritik. Gratzer, Wolfgang. 2013b. “‘Wie es gemeint ist’: Helmut Lachenmanns Beiträge zum Ver ständnis seiner Musik.” In Helmut Lachenmann: Musik mit Bildern? edited by Matteo Nanni and Matthias Schmidt, 97–116. Munich: Fink. Gratzer, Wolfgang. 2017. “Was ist, wem nützt und wie entsteht eine Geschichte des Musikhörens.” In Geschichte und Gegenwart des musikalischen Hörens: Diskurse— Geschichte(n)— Poetiken. klang-reden, Schriften zur Musikalischen Rezeptions- und In terpretationsgeschichte 17, edited by Klaus Aringer, Karl Franz Praßl, Peter Revers, and Christian Utz, 43–58. Freiburg: Rombach. Gratzer, Wolfgang. 2018. “Wer weiß? Musikhören, Wissen und die Annahme auditiver Wissenskulturen.” In Auditive Wissenskulturen. Das Wissen klanglicher Praxis edited by Bernd Brabec de Mori and Martin Winter, 115–133. Wiesbaden: Springer. Gruhn, Wilhelm. 2005. Der Musikverstand: Neurobiologische Grundlagen des musikalis chen Denkens, Hörens und Lernens. 2nd ed. Hildesheim: Olms. Heelas, Paul, et al. 1996. The New Age Movement: The Celebration of the Self and the Sacralization of Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Page 12 of 19
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Is Listening to Music an Art in Itself—or Not? Jung-Stilling, Johann Heinrich. 1997. Heinrich Stillings Jugend, Jünglingjahre, Wander schaft und häusliches Leben. Stuttgart: Reclam. Kant, Immanuel. [ca. 1790]. Critic of Pure Reason, esp. § 45–47. Korthase, Karolin. 2009. “Die Kunst des Hörens: Musikvermittlung wird inzwischen auch auf Festivals groß geschrieben.” Das Orchester 7–8:24–26. Krishnamurti, Jiddu. 2007. The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti, 1933–1934. Vol. 1, Art of Listening. Delhi: Motital Banarsidass. Liessmann, Konrad Paul. 2003. “Die Kunst des Hörens: Über den Umgang mit Musik.” Österreichische Musikzeitschrift 3–4:6–12. Lindahl, Kay. 2002. The Sacred Art of Listening: Forty Reflections for Cultivating a Spiri tual Practice. Woodstock, VT: SkyLight Paths. Lindahl, Kay. 2003. Mit dem Herzen hören: Von der Kunst des richtigen Zuhörens. Berlin: Lüchow. Lindahl, Kay, and Cynthia Maloney, eds. 2005. How Does God Listen? Woodstock, VT: SkyLight Paths. (p. 476)
Lutz, Hans. 1940. Die Kunst des Lesens. Bern: Paul Haupt. Machiavelli, Niccolò. 2009. Dell’Arte della Guerra. Bologna: Zanichelli. Meyer, Paul J. 2012. “The Art of Creative Listening.” Article Dashboard. Accessed June 20, 2016. http://www.articledashboard.com/Article/The-Art-of-Creative-Listening-AreYou-Tuned-In-Or-Tuned-Out/467990. Müller, Adam Heinrich. 1816. Zwölf Reden über die Beredsamkeit und deren Verfall in Deutschland. Leipzig: Georg Joachim Göschen. Reissued in 1920 by Drei Masken-Verlag (Munich) and in 1967 by Insel (Frankfurt am Main). Nichols, Michael P. 1995. The Lost Art of Listening. New York: Guilford. Nichols, Michael P. 2000. Die wiederentdeckte Kunst des Zuhörens. Translated by Nils Thomas Linquist. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Obert, Simon, ed. 2012. Wechselnde Erscheinung: Sechs Perspektiven auf Anton Weberns sechste Bagatelle. Vienna: Lafite. Reez, Leslie. 1931. “Von der Kunst des Hörens.” Mecklenburgsche Monatshefte 7:29–30. Riedel, Manfred. 1990. Hören auf die Sprache: Die akroamatische Dimension der Hermeneutik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Rodgers, Carl R. 1951. Client-Centered Therapy: Its Current Practice, Implications and Theory. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Page 13 of 19
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Is Listening to Music an Art in Itself—or Not? Schafer, R. Murray. 1972. Schule des Hörens. Vienna: Universal Edition. Schafer, R. Murray. 1984. A Sound Education: 100 Lessons in Listening and Sound-Mak ing. Bancroft, ON: Self-published. Schafer, R. Murray. 1986. The Thinking Ear: Complete Writings on Music Education. Toronto: Arcana Editions. Schmid, Holger. 1999. Die Kunst des Hörens: Orte und Grenzen philosophischer Spracherfahrung (Collegium Hermeneuticum). Cologne: Böhlau. Smith, Charles T. 1947. Music and Reason: The Art of Listening, Appreciating and Com posing. London: Watts. Stern, Günter. 1926/27. “Zur Phänomenologie des Zuhörens.” Zeitschrift für Musikwis senschaft 9:610–619. Sun Tsu. 2010. The Art of War: The Ancient Classic, edited by Tom Butler-Bowdon. New York: John Wiley. Tacitus, Publius Cornelius. 1971. Germania, edited by Manfred Fuhrmann. Stuttgart: Reclam. Vogler, Georg Joseph. 1778. “Thätige Geschmaks-Bildung für den Beurtheiler der Ton stücken.” In Betrachtungen der Mannheimer Tonschule 1, 271–306. Speyer: Bossler. Wander, Karl Friedrich Wilhelm, ed. 1880. Deutsches Sprichwörter-Lexikon. Leipzig: Brockhaus. Werner, Hans U. 2006. Soundscape: Landschaften und Methoden des Hörens. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Zender, Hans. 2009. “Hören als Fragen: Zum Tode auf Heinz-Klaus Metzger.” Musiktexte 123:49.
Notes: (1.) Müller, Adam Heinrich. 1816. Zwölf Reden über die Beredsamkeit und deren Verfall in Deutschland. Leipzig: Georg Joachim Göschen; reissued in 1920 by Drei Masken-Verlag (Munich) and in 1967 by Insel (Frankfurt am Main). (2.) Müller (1816): 51. (3.) The saying can be found in the entry for “Zuhörer” in Wander, Karl Friedrich Wilhelm, ed. 1880. Deutsches Sprichwörter-Lexikon. Leipzig: Brockhaus, 5:627. (4.) “Die Kunst zu hören besteht also in der freien Herrschaft, die man über diesen Sinn erhält, in der Fähigkeit im Sinn des andern zu hören, und doch zugleich sich selbst zu hören; kurz sie besteht wie alle Kunst, wie insbesondere die musikalische, in der Page 14 of 19
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Is Listening to Music an Art in Itself—or Not? Fähigkeit Akkorde, Harmonien zu empfinden, die nicht jedem angeboren ist, oder nicht etwa deshalb schon geübt ist, weil das Ohr offen steht, und mit sich geschehen lässt.” Müller (1816): 68. Unless otherwise specified, all translations were provided by the au thor. (5.) Ammer, Andreas. 1997. “Gespräch mit Andreas Ammer.” In Hören—eine vernachläs sigte Kunst? edited by Karl-Heinz Blomann and Frank Sielecki, 179–190. Hofheim am Taunus: Wolke, 179. (6.) Aristoteles. 2003. Nikomachische Ethik, edited by Franz Dirlmeier. Stuttgart: Reclam, bk. 1. (7.) Sun Tsu. 2010. The Art of War: The Ancient Classic, edited by Tom Butler-Bowdon. New York: John Wiley; Machiavelli, Niccolò. 2009. Dell’Arte della Guerra. Bologna: Zanichelli. (8.) Kant, Immanuel. [ca. 1790]. Critic of Pure Reason, esp. §45–47. (9.) Tacitus, Publius Cornelius. 1971. Germania, edited by Manfred Fuhrmann. Stuttgart: Reclam, §24; Jung-Stilling, Johann Heinrich. 1997. Heinrich Stillings Jugend, Jüngling jahre, Wanderschaft und häusliches Leben. Edition with bibliographical supplement. Stuttgart: Reclam, chap. 2. (10.) See the entry for “Kunst” / “Kunst-” in Duden: Das Bedeutungswörterbuch (Duden 10). 2002. 3rd ed. Mannheim: Dudenverlag: 563. (11.) Fromm, Erich. (1980) 1994. “Psychoanalytic ‘Technique’ or, the Art of Listening.” In The Art of Listening, edited by Rainer Funk. New York: Continuum, 192–193. (12.) Nichols, Michael P. 1995. The Lost Art of Listening. New York: Guilford. For the Ger man translation see Nichols, Michael P. 2000. Die wiederentdeckte Kunst des Zuhörens, translated by Nils Thomas Linquist. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. (13.) Nichols (1995): 94. (14.) See Rodgers, Carl R. 1951. Client-Centered Therapy: Its Current Practice, Implica tions and Theory. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. (15.) Gordon, Thomas. 1975. P.E.T. Parent Effectiveness Training: The Tested New Way to Raise Responsible Children. New York: Plume. (16.) See also the Website for Kay Lindahl’s Listening Center: www.sacredlistening.com. (17.) Lindahl, Kay. 2002. The Sacred Art of Listening: Forty Reflections for Cultivating a Spiritual Practice. Woodstock, VT: SkyLight Paths; in German, Lindahl, Kay. 2003. Mit dem Herzen hören: Von der Kunst des richtigen Zuhörens. Berlin: Lüchow; with a later version published in 2007 by Knaur (Munich).
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Is Listening to Music an Art in Itself—or Not? (18.) See Heelas, Paul, et al. 1996. The New Age Movement: The Celebration of the Self and the Sacralization of Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell. (19.) Lindahl (2002): 3. (20.) Lindahl, Kay, and Cynthia Maloney, eds. 2005. How Does God Listen? Woodstock, VT: SkyLight Paths. (21.) See also the Website for the International Listening Association: www.listen.org. (22.) See also the Website for the Listeners Unit: http://listenersunite.com. (23.) See Krishnamurti, Jiddu. 2007. The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti, 1933–1934. Vol. 1, Art of Listening. Delhi: Motital Banarsidass. Krishnamurti, the “World Teacher” as he is known in Theosophical circles, elects to utilize similar formulations of “listening,” al though in his long talks he was generally unwilling to respond to questions from the audi ence; see Krishnamurti (2007): 12. (24.) Back, Les. 2007. The Art of Listening. Oxford: Beck, 1. (25.) Back, Les (2007): 1. (26.) Back, Les (2007): 167. (27.) Schmid, Holger. 1999. Die Kunst des Hörens: Orte und Grenzen philosophischer Spracherfahrung (Collegium Hermeneuticum). Cologne: Böhlau; Riedel, Manfred. 1990. Hören auf die Sprache: Die akroamatische Dimension der Hermeneutik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, see esp. chap. 15, “Zu den Grenzen zwischen Musik und Philosophie.” (28.) Ferris, Jean. 1995. Music: The Art of Listening. Madison: Brown & Benchmark. See Bamberger, Jeanne Shapiro, and Howard Brofsky, eds. 1988. The Art of Listening: Devel oping Musical Perception. New York: Harper & Row, xiii. (29.) Arnheim, Rudolf. 1979. Rundfunk als Hörkunst. Munich: Hanser. The first English edition of this manuscript-form anthology was titled Radio (London: Faber and Faber, 1936). See de la Motte, Helga. 1992. “Kunst des Hörens.” In Zum sehen geboren: Gedenkschrift für Helmuth Hopf. Musik, Kunst und Konsum 3, edited by Walter Reckziegel, Günther Rötter, and Brunhilde Sonntag, 153–161. Münster: LIT. (30.) Ferris (1995): 9, 295. (31.) Ford, Andrew. 2007. “Writing Good Sense About Music: The Art of Listening.” In Growing up Making Music: Youth Orchestras from Australia and the World, edited by M. Kartomi, K. Dreyfus, and D. Pear, 167–173. Australasian Music Research 9. Melbourne: Lyrebird. (32.) Korthase, Karolin. 2009. “Die Kunst des Hörens: Musikvermittlung wird inzwischen auch auf Festivals groß geschrieben.” Das Orchester 7–8:24–26. Page 16 of 19
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Is Listening to Music an Art in Itself—or Not? (33.) See Bernius, Volker, and Margarete Imhof, eds. 2010. Zuhörenkompetenzen in Un terricht und Schule: Beiträge aus Wissenschaft und Praxis. Edition Zuhören 8. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. (34.) Smith, Charles T. 1947. Music and Reason: The Art of Listening, Appreciating and Composing, chap. 2: 2, 3. (35.) Smith (1947): 152. (36.) Liessmann, Konrad Paul. 2003. “Die Kunst des Hörens: Über den Umgang mit Musik.” Österreichische Musikzeitschrift 3–4: 6–12, here 6–7. (37.) An essay titled “Zur Phänomenologie des Zuhörens” published in 1926–27 by Gün ther Stern (his name at the time) provides insights into his considerations: Stern, Günter. 1926/27. “Zur Phänomenologie des Zuhörens.” Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 9:610– 619. (38.) Vogler, Georg Joseph. 1778. “Thätige Geschmaks=Bildung für den Beurtheiler der Tonstücken.” Betrachtungen der Mannheimer Tonschule 1:271–306; Adorno, Theodor W. 1968. Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie: Zwölf Vorlesungen (1939–1962). Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1–20. (39.) Bischoff, Friedrich. 1929. “Auf dem Weg zur Hörkunst.” Schlesischer Kulturkalender 1930 (Breslau): 24. (40.) Reez, Leslie. 1931. “Von der Kunst des Hörens.” Mecklenburgsche Monatshefte 7:29–30. (41.) See Ackerknecht, Erwin, et al. 1928. Die Kunst des Lesens. Heidelberg: Wunderhorn; Lutz, Hans. 1940. Die Kunst des Lesens. Bern: Paul Haupt. Lutz argues ac cording to the ideology of the time when he states that “the white race owes its suprema cy on the planet for the most part to the discovery of the printing press” (Lutz [1940]: 3). See also Ackermann, Max. 2003. Die Kultur des Hörens: Wahrnehmung und Fiktion; Texte vom Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts. Hassfurt: Falkenberg. (42.) Liessmann (2003): 12. (43.) See Gruhn, Wilhelm. 2005. Der Musikverstand: Neurobiologische Grundlagen des musikalischen Denkens, Hörens und Lernens. 2nd ed. Olms Forum 2. Hildesheim: Olms, 33–104. (44.) Gratzer, Wolfgang. 2007a. “Bildverstehen—Musikverstehen.” In Gerhard Rühm und die Kunst der Gegenwart, edited by Joachim Brügge, Wolfgang Gratzer, and Otto Neu maier, 82–98. Saarbrücken: Pfau. (45.) See Gratzer, Wolfgang. 2018. “Wer weiß? Musikhören, Wissen und die Annahme au ditiver Wissenskulturen.” In Auditive Wissenskulturen. Das Wissen klanglicher Praxis, edited by Brabec de Mori, Bernd, and Martin Winter, 115–133. Wiesbaden: Springer. Page 17 of 19
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Is Listening to Music an Art in Itself—or Not? (46.) See Bateson, Gregory. (1964) 1981. “Die logischen Kategorien von Lernen und Kom munikation.” In Ökologie des Geistes: Anthropologische, psychologische, biologische und epistemologische Perspektiven, edited by Gregory Bateson, 362–399. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (47.) With respect to interpretive interactions with music, I broadly agree with the posi tion forwarded by Heinz von Förster: “The one who claims to speak the truth makes a liar, directly or indirectly, out of the others.” See Förster, Heinz von, and Bernhard Börksen. 2001. Wahrheit ist die Erfindung eines Lügners: Gespräche für Skeptiker. Heidelberg: Carl Auer, 29. (48.) Brodbeck, Karl-Heinz. (1955) 2010. Entscheidung zur Kreativität. 4th ed. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgemeinschaft, esp. 18–47. See as well Gratzer, Wolfgang. 2007b. “Musikalische Interpretation als kreative Handlung: Über Gregorian und anderes.” In Identität und Kreativität: Beiträge aus Musikwissenschaft und Musikpädagogik, edited by Gabriele Hofmann, 27–35. Forum Musikpädagogik 80. Augsburg: Wißner. (49.) See Meyer, Paul J. 2012. “The Art of Creative Listening.” Article Dashboard. Accessed June 20, 2016. http://www.articledashboard.com/Article/The-Art-of-Creative-Lis tening-Are-You-Tuned-In-Or-Tuned-Out/467990. (50.) Zender, Hans. 2009. “Hören als Fragen: Zum Tode auf Heinz-Klaus Metzger.” Musik texte 123:49. (51.) Zender (2009). See Gratzer, Wolfgang. 2013a. “Kompositorisches Verstehen: Zender hört Schumann hört Beethoven.” In Hans Zender. Musik-Konzepte Sonderband, edited by Ulrich Tadday, 94–107. Munich: Text und Kritik. (52.) See do Mar Castro Varela, María. 2015. Koloniale Wissensproduktionen: Edward Saids “interpretative Wachsamkeit” als Ausgangspunkt einer kritischen Migrations forschung. In Schlüsselwerke der Migrationsforschung: Pionierstudien und Referenztheo rien, edited by Julia Reuter and Paul Mecheril, 307–321. Wiesbaden: Springer, 313: Obert, Simon, ed. 2012. Wechselnde Erscheinung: Sechs Perspektiven auf Anton Weberns sech ste Bagatelle. Vienna: Lafite. (53.) See Schafer, R. Murray. 1972. Schule des Hörens. Vienna: Universal Edition; Schafer, R. Murray. 1984. A Sound Education: 100 Lessons in Listening and Sound-Making. Ban croft, Ontario: Self-pub.; Schafer, R. Murray. 1986. The Thinking Ear: Complete Writings on Music Education. Toronto: Arcana Editions. Hans U. Werner offers a good overview in Werner, Hans U. 2006. Soundscape: Landschaften und Methoden des Hörens. Edition Zuhören 5. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Contemporary examples include the fol lowing: The project HörPlan-Berlin (2010–2012) opens up the possibility of accessing ur ban areas as aesthetically relevant sound spaces. Similar to the projects by the Viennese artist group gecko-art that started in 1993, an invitation is extended to actively co-design the living environment as a “listening space.” The project Ohrenstrand: Berlins Netzwerk für neugieriges Hören, sponsored by various Berlin institutions, created and designed—at Page 18 of 19
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Is Listening to Music an Art in Itself—or Not? least until 2011—new types of listening situations (www.ohrenstrand.net). Comparable to the Austrian initiative KlangNetze (1993–), a cooperative of diverse institutions estab lished QuerKlang, encouraging young people to be creative as composers in different for mats and providing them with support to do so (http://www.querklang.eu).
Wolfgang Gratzer
Wolfgang Gratzer, Universität Mozarteum Salzburg
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“Everybody in the Concert Hall should be Devoted Entirely to the Music”: On the Actuality of Not Listening to Music in Symphonic Concerts
“Everybody in the Concert Hall should be Devoted En tirely to the Music”: On the Actuality of Not Listening to Music in Symphonic Concerts Christiane Tewinkel The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries Edited by Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer Print Publication Date: Jan 2019 Subject: Music, Musicology and Music History Online Publication Date: Nov 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190466961.013.7
Abstract and Keywords This chapter discusses the extent to which representations of “improper” listening are found in popular and academic literature of German and U.S. origin, for the process of re ception is highly susceptible to error and interference. Indeed, despite near-ideal condi tions, concert-goers are as prone to molding their experience according to subjective predilections as any other type of listener. They may not even be listening at all, despite being physically present and dependent on the musical performance. This mode of behav ior as a fact of (concert) life is sometimes mentioned in recent popular books on music but seldom appears in older books; nor has it been part of musicological accounts of sym phonic concerts, although scholars such as James H. Johnson (1995) and Peter Gay (1995) speak extensively about disruptions in historical performances. The chapter considers changes in the assessment of such listening in recent years and contemplates causes for these shifts. Keywords: attentive listening, error in performance, guide books, historicity of listening, inattentive listening, mu sic appreciation, listener types
ONE of the most frequently paid compliments to a symphonic concert is the comment that you could have heard a pin drop.1 The silence necessary to let the dropping of a pin be heard, however, may not always count as evidence of positive attention paid toward the musical work, its performers, or its composers in the way that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart referred to when he wrote about a performance of his Magic Flute in October 1791: “[W]hat I am most delighted about is the applause of silence!”2 Indeed, today’s concertgoers are expected to stay silent throughout the entire musical performance,3 which can result in there being many more modes of silence than the very one that is the symptom of a strong “focus on the perception of single objects.”4 In compliance with the implicit rules of modern concert life, concert-goers may be silent even when they are not listening at all. While giving the outward impression of being attentive, they alone can tell whether
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“Everybody in the Concert Hall should be Devoted Entirely to the Music”: On the Actuality of Not Listening to Music in Symphonic Concerts they really pay attention, even more so since an audience is constituted, first of all, by just “those present for a performance at the same time, in the same place.”5 Consequently, beyond the manifold listening modes that we cannot possibly subject to scrupulous examination—James H. Johnson has pointed out that “it’s not always possible to tell true belief from mere fascination with the sacraments”6—there are listening modes that we may not even identify as listening modes any more because concert-goers can be absent-minded to such a degree that they will be unable to appreciate a positively charged silence, let alone hear the dropping of a pin. In this chapter I discuss the interferences in the audience that occur besides the well-known outward disruptions that have been made almost extinct in concert life, not only by open announcements but also by means of “informelle Kontrolle” (informal con trol).7 I do, therefore, not deal with concert-goers chatting, eating, or walking around but have a look at the rather unobtrusive yet common phenomenon of individual inattentive ness, investigating the reasons for such inattentiveness and its consequences for the con ceptualization of the musical work and the formation of the audience. Because normative concepts play an important role in this context, in the second part of this chapter I deal with the question of whether and how this phenomenon is addressed in scholarly and popular literature. Finally, I turn to the figure of the overtly attentive listener, to shed light on the issue from an alternative point of view. (p. 478)
Attention, the Musical Work According to Lydia Goehr, the “work-concept” came into existence in about 1800, and it was surrounded by “dependent ideals of compliant performance, accurate notation, and silent reception.”8 If we expand on this line of thought and assume that today’s perfor mances of musical works still imply the selfsame continuum of concepts, then we must come to the conclusion that silent and attentive listeners are helping the musical work come into existence while silent but inattentive listeners are infringing on the integrity of the musical work. We may even contend that a musical work, most probably, will never be presented as a unified whole since listeners of all sorts may go through episodes of inat tentiveness at different points in time. Naturally, such contentions are difficult to sustain. They point at the question of what makes a concert a successful event in the first place and whether the aesthetics of the musical work match the pragmatics of its actual performance. How relevant is listeners’ attention when it comes to assessing a musical evening? To begin with, where do the diffi culties that performers may face on stage fit into the conceptual continuum that Goehr addresses? After all, a concert may be considered a success even if the performance has in extreme ways distracted listeners from the “accurate notation” of the score. A case in point is the concert with young or very old performers or with technically unskilled musi cians. At such times listeners’ attention may be directed in unforeseeable ways, remind
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“Everybody in the Concert Hall should be Devoted Entirely to the Music”: On the Actuality of Not Listening to Music in Symphonic Concerts ing us of the variety of social aspects coming into play during a musical performance and of the complexity of events taking place in a concert hall. Some of these aspects point at intrinsic motivations for attending a concert that do not circle around aesthetic considerations in the first place, as concert-goers may have come to see their unskilled friends on stage, as they may want to cherish the pleasure of a fes tive and well-lit evening amid the impositions of daily life, as attendees give in to con straints that come with political responsibility, or as others merely wish to escort some body who wanted to attend the concert in the first place. With regard to such cases (p. 479) a concert evening may turn out to be a blissful event even if the standard aesthet ic requirement of listening attentively may not be accomplished. All the while, and even more so if we assume that professional musicians are at work, aesthetic considerations remain viable. A case in point is the listener who has come for the above-mentioned reasons and is deeply moved by specific pieces on the program. In deed, the work-concept as discussed by Goehr has proved to be surprisingly important for modern concert life. Strong evidence for this is given by the fact that attentive listeners are expected to make a distinctive contribution to the performance, hence the frequently expressed demand that concert-goers be prepared for listening, in particular, that they are musically literate and that they sing or play an instrument. In this line of thought, inattentive listening is put down to a lack of musical training, whereas attentive listening is equated with thorough training. At a minimum, an aspect of bartering remains in that the attentiveness of an audience, or at least a positive stance, is considered an asset for the musical performance. This holds true for musicians as well as composers, not to speak of listeners who feel challenged by seemingly less attentive concert-goers. In this perspective, clarinetist Sabine Meyer’s be lief that “as an artist you need people to be attentive, willing to give as well”9 in part adopts Arnold Schönberg’s remark that “to receive an artistic impression, one’s own imagination has to be creatively involved. . . . Only the warmth that is radiated by oneself makes an artwork, and finally, almost every artistic expression is created by the imagina tion of the listeners.”10 And while contemporaries like Paul Hindemith attempted to diver sify the audience, going to great lengths to reach out to potential listeners, the Viennese Verein für Musikalische Privataufführungen took the opposite direction, seeking to shape an exclusive audience and banning certain modes of behavior in the concert to ward off distraction. The Verein did not tolerate applause or other signs of gratitude, and “vorschnelles Urteilen” (rash judgment) was tagged an unwelcome reaction.11 It will come as no surprise that the idea of the Verein itself must be regarded in close relation to the “cultivation of structural listening intended to secure the adequate perception of the musical work,”12 according to Ivan Vojtech. The focus on the musical work and its compli ant reception appears to have been a sign not only of the specific status composers around Schönberg assigned to individual compositions but also of the historical trajectory in which they placed themselves.
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“Everybody in the Concert Hall should be Devoted Entirely to the Music”: On the Actuality of Not Listening to Music in Symphonic Concerts A closer look at today’s concert scene reveals that most of the concepts and beliefs ad dressed so far have survived. For instance, the interior design of newly built concert halls as well as the “social imperative[s]”13 to secure optimized reception of the musical perfor mance still aim at heightening attentiveness. If attention is not an option, silence will serve as its substitute; modern concert organizers let their audience know that their mo bile phones need to be switched off, and they ask listeners to use a handkerchief when coughing. Such directives may be understood to be faint traces of the fact that contempo rary listeners are still facing the same challenges as their historical peers. Indeed, at tempts at educating the audience to sit in silence and listen attentively are probably as old as concert life itself. It took a long time to create the infrastructure necessary to im plement the musical work-concept in the concert; countless documents testify to how (p. 480) difficult it has been to suppress the desire for individual activity, to abstain from eating, moving, and conversing, or, in more recent times, from immediately documenting and trading the music performed. In addition, a broad spectrum of alternative concert formats has been preserved or recently been revitalized, with some of these formats de cidedly catering to possibly inattentive listeners. Modern concert organizers have come to realize that a less restrictive environment or a productive return to the historical roots of the concert can have its merits: Food may be offered before, during, or after the per formance, or concert-goers may be invited to promenade or to converse during the event. Some formats also allow for active participation in the music performed. When it comes to the standardized symphonic concert and to instructing potentially new listeners, however, the tight conceptual continuum discussed by Lydia Goehr is still prevalent. Most authors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have reproduced it in their narratives as they agree on the existence of an ideal listener, implying that if all out ward disturbances are eradicated and adequate training has been completed there will be no more disturbances from within. In this vein, failure to listen attentively, that is, ade quately with regard to the work-concept, results in exclusion from the aesthetic communi ty and in damaging the concert event, as it were, despite the obvious fact that attending a concert may satisfy a whole array of needs, not least social ones. Pausing for a moment, we may concede that some of these social needs, again, play into the question of attentiveness because social roles can be negotiated by discussing related matters. Listeners may ally to praise (or complain about) a performance drawing (or not drawing) their attention. Also, while knowing intimately about a musical work and appre ciating its congenial performance can add to the social status of listeners, the reverse is true as well: concert-goers may be reluctant to admit having been inattentive, for fear of compromising the social distinction granted by listening to music in the supposedly right way. Others, again, opt for speaking out their inattentiveness in an almost Goffmanian sense, to set themselves off and revolt against the clear assignment of roles in a tradition al concert setting. Another complication comes into view: Even if listeners are meeting with optimized con ditions in the concert hall, even if they are caring intensely and incessantly for what is be ing performed, their single prominent object of attention need not necessarily be the Page 4 of 25
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“Everybody in the Concert Hall should be Devoted Entirely to the Music”: On the Actuality of Not Listening to Music in Symphonic Concerts compositional structure of the musical work. In this respect, the question of inattentive ness seems to be closely intertwined with the actuality of listening modes believed to be nonstandard ones. One reason for resorting to such “other” listening modes is that it can be too great an effort to perceive an overall form as such. Jerrold Levinson has contended that listeners prefer focusing on musical moments and their development to listening for long hierarchical structures that needs a lot of power from the memory.14 Quite similarly, Helga de la Motte-Haber and Günther Rötter have pointed out that very often, “[l]istening for musical form does not stand at the core of attention, but rather, other musical processes.”15 Some of these processes involve or overlap with the use of music as a de vice for mood management. A case in point is what we may label, for want of a better term, daydreaming triggered by specific pieces. Accordingly, Günter Kleinert and Thomas H. Stoffer have suggested that it is not the “logical structure of the musical (p. 481) work” but the relation of this work to the individual listener that stands at the core of the recep tion of music.16 Other processes that listeners may focus on concern aspects of performa tivity. Indeed, one of the most important objects of attention rivaling the understanding of the formal layout of a composition is a musician’s technical skill and proficiency in ren dering the dramatic shape of a piece. Performances at musical competitions and at non public conservatory concerts provide excellent examples of this.17 In these settings, lis teners’ attention can have an enormous impact on the performers, hence Rainer Dollase’s assessment that the “bigger and more knowledgeable the audience seems to be, the greater the stress for the performers.”18 Performers have their share in the situation, too, because they are able to literally draw attention and manipulate their audiences. Naturally, any single one of these processes is subject to failure and disruption. Musi cians, while performing, can skillfully ruin compositions, and even the most proficient lis tener will fade out from listening to daydreaming from time to time or experience mo ments not pertaining to the musical performance at all, thereby transforming their pres ence at the concert to a mere physical attendance. Given the complexity of the situation and the omnipresence of disruption in the process of listening, it makes sense to go back to the core question of inattentiveness and start with the observation that authors of both scholarly and popular or instructive books usually avoid addressing matters of inatten tiveness at all.
Who’s Afraid of Addressing Inattentiveness? The fact that there are many modes of listening and paying attention in a concert poses a threat to the notion that the structure of the musical work as accurately notated in the score should mark the center of attention, and that only the listener’s full focus during a musical performance will bring it into existence. The reticence of older scholarly writings toward supposedly nonstandard listening modes or toward inattentive listening appears to be aimed at maintaining this specific status quo, although some authors have sporadi cally addressed the phenomenon. For instance, Carl Dahlhaus, in a general critique of critical comments on the principle of autonomy, once conceded that “aesthetic contempla tion . . . is rarely unspoilt,”19 and Hanns-Werner Heister explicitly commented on what he Page 5 of 25
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“Everybody in the Concert Hall should be Devoted Entirely to the Music”: On the Actuality of Not Listening to Music in Symphonic Concerts called “partial reception,” at the foundation of which he identified a strong aesthetic mo tivation: Revolting against the monotony imposed by lengthy passages . . . [listeners] may shorten them by “adaptation,” and by way of “fragmenting” the musical work into “listening for themes,” watching out for favourite moments et cetera, they yield to their pragmatic and “culinary” inclinations even if these may contradict the ide al. . . . It depends on the listeners’ and the listener’s effort to synthesize whether a musical work is fully realized.20 Remarks such as these testify to the assumption that the compositional layout of a musical work must mark the center of attention, rather than the predilections of individ ual listeners, the performance skills of musicians, or the social implications of an evening out in the concert hall. Inattentiveness in this context emerges as a byproduct of listening not worthy of comment. We need to contemplate this assumption with respect to the “Beethoven paradigm” (Lydia Goehr),21 which means, in this case, relating it not only to the history of the work-concept but also to the scope of historical musicology itself. (p. 482)
Younger musicologists will probably evaluate the case differently, as will music psycholo gists. Another dividing line, one would think, exists between scholarly and popular texts on music in that the latter are destined for lay listeners who have most probably experi enced inattentiveness or even cluelessness during a concert. Yet there is no such line, as a closer look at a corpus of about twenty introductory books about music published since 1945 in Western Germany has shown,22 some of them translations of U.S. works.23 Popular authors of the past seven decades have been astonishingly unanimous in their presentation of an ideal setup of listening skills. They have avoided addressing inatten tiveness more openly or more extensively than their scholarly colleagues. Several reasons seem to account for this. First, writers may have been trained as histori cal musicologists who, despite knowing about the broad panorama of possible listening skills with adjacent scopes, maintain a deep interest in the core concept of the musical work. Further evidence for this is provided by projects like the 1970s intra-academic de bate in Western Germany about the applicability of musicological research. Second, we need to point to the didactics of instructive writing. In the same way authors of cook books may leave out the information that the Sunday roast will burn if you use too much heat for too long a time, authors of books may want to avoid mentioning that despite per fect training or education the process of listening is subject to failure and inconsistencies. Apart from these reasons there are still others that may explain why introductory books on music implicitly provide a complement to the narrative Goehr has dealt with, a narra tive that testifies to an unbroken ideological trajectory, with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart commenting on listeners “worthy of being called listeners”24 and conductor Marek Janowski allegedly remarking in the 1980s that “in front of an audience of 2000 we are playing for about 15 listeners.”25 Such disparaging statements are constituent parts of a strong conceptual history, but acknowledging this must not prevent us from asking how and why the reluctance or the inability to fully engage in the listening experience has of Page 6 of 25
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“Everybody in the Concert Hall should be Devoted Entirely to the Music”: On the Actuality of Not Listening to Music in Symphonic Concerts ten been played down so heavily. We may resort to some of the explanations mentioned above, for example, to a lack of appreciation of technical skills and brilliance. Quite un derstandably, performers will object to such ignorance. But, third, political factors have played a part, as well. For the moment, we may think back to the famously top-down list of listeners that Theodor W. Adorno introduced in 1962 in his article about “Typen musikalischen Verhaltens” (types of musical behavior).26 Despite being a draft only (an “Entwurf,” in Adorno’s own words), this text proved to be and probably (p. 483) still is ex tremely influential, as Daniel Fuhrimann has pointed out. Fuhrimann reminds us that this text mirrors the “analytical and rational Zeitgeist of early post-war avant-garde.”27 Indeed, in reconstructing the greater political horizon of listening modes in the twentieth century, we come to comprehend why the mere condition of “faulty” listening would, in specific contexts, be deemed to be highly problematic while “correct” listening could as sume an almost redemptive function. It is important to note that Adorno did not invent the hierarchization of listening modes, although he may have forged a specific way of thinking about them. Similar catalogs may be found earlier in the history of the Western classical concert, but they must be contex tualized quite differently. After Friedrich Rochlitz had published articles on types of listeners and concert-goers starting in 1799,28 the Leipzig and Berlin periodical Illustrirte Zeitung, in 1874,29 presented its readers with an illustration and accompanying commentary on types of con cert-goers (see Figure 21.1 and the Appendix). According to this commentary, those “without piety” rank low because they could have stayed home: It is just “fashion” that “summons them to the temple of art where they occasionally run people over or other wise disturb their enjoyment of art.”30 Above them ranks the group of those who merely wish to “see and be seen,” a “profoundly harmless group. They don’t do harm to art, nei ther by enthusiasm nor by critique; they simply benefit it with the entrance fee.”31 Then there are the “connoisseurs and critics” with their “higher demands.”32 They probably correspond to the very type that Adorno classified decades later as the “expert listener”: “the fully conscious listener who tends to not miss out on anything and who simultaneous ly gives himself account of what he has heard, in every moment.”33 At the top of this nine teenth-century illustration are the “disciples of art and enthusiasts” who delve into music: “they drink its tones, they nurse and purge themselves in its harmonic or disharmonious floods and die away in blissfulness and delight. Music exerts its full power upon them.”34 Phrases such as these open the door to a realm beyond qualifying and ranking different listening modes. While pointing our attention to the fact that listening to music must al ways be discussed with regard to the history of emotions, such works present us with a panorama of modes of reception that modern writers rarely choose to open up. Obviously, as Daniel Fuhrimann has stressed, satirical texts such as the Concerttypen article adopt early Romantic aesthetic thought.35 Writers working circa 1800 had displayed an even stronger interest in the listening experience, which could involve digressing as well, a fa mous example being Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder’s 1792 letter to Ludwig Tieck, his coauthor for Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders. In this letter Wack Page 7 of 25
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“Everybody in the Concert Hall should be Devoted Entirely to the Music”: On the Actuality of Not Listening to Music in Symphonic Concerts enroder described the “true” character of the joy of music as being one of both under standing and devotion. This kind of joy, he wrote, lay “in the most attentive contemplation of tones and their progression; in total devotion of the soul to this onward stream of emo tions; in the distance and isolation of any disturbing thought and of strange sensual im pressions.”36 Yet Wackenroder also remarked that this kind of listening brought with it “a certain exhaustion that one cannot bear for a long time,” pointing out that concerts or opera performances usually strained the (p. 484) (p. 485) listeners’ attention.37 He went on to comment extensively on another kind of listening, one that involved his “thoughts and phantastic visions” being “kidnapped on the waves of music,” with “new general ideas wrenching themselves free from the emotions the composition incites.”38
Figure 21.1. Illustration for a text on types of con cert-goers (1874). From the Illustrirte Zeitung, no. 1614, June 6: 436. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München (2 Per. 26-62, S. 436, urn:nbn:de:bvb:12bsb11176129-1).
If we assume that modes of listening like the ones described here never vanished in real life, why did some of them disappear from introductory books on music? Apart from the reasons already addressed there seems to be a fourth factor at work that dwells within the realm of writing on music itself. Such writing changed in response to the developing genre of program notes and introductory books in the later decades of the nineteenth century, with authors tending to comment on the structure of the musical work and on aesthetic or compositional aspects rather than on questions of responsiveness and sus ceptibility. Later writers narrowed the scope further, concentrating on specific listening skills and defining structural listening against apparently less valuable modes of listen ing. This remains true for German and American authors throughout the late twentieth century, a situation due not only to the above-mentioned mechanics of popularizing schol arship (which would involve staying true to its tenets), the didactics of how-to teaching, Page 8 of 25
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“Everybody in the Concert Hall should be Devoted Entirely to the Music”: On the Actuality of Not Listening to Music in Symphonic Concerts or the history of the program note but also to the social and political implications of the concept of the musical work. In order to fully understand this, we must come back to politics, specifically, to the musi cological landscape of the mid-twentieth century, as German emigrants to the United States contributed to the formation of the American musicological landscape, and the core repertoire of Western classical music remained European. What is more, instructive writing about music in the German-speaking realm was influenced by the process of de nazification. Because teaching, playing, and composing music had been subject to Nation al Socialist ideology, efforts to reeducate the Germans in terms of music did not only evolve around prominent institutions like the Darmstadt summer school but also extend ed to books about music.39 Modes of listening like the ones prioritized by Adorno played an important role in this context. Early postwar introductory books by German-speaking authors, as well as many books by later authors, elaborated on the idea that the musical work needed attention and that listeners’ attention made the musical work come true. Readers were now presented with approaches free of socially or politically suggestive un dertones. Indeed, authors remained in agreement about this for many years despite dif ferences in larger ideological frameworks or personal predilections.40 Reinhold Brinkmann put their political considerations in a nutshell when, looking back on his own dissertation, he remarked in 2000 that the key to approaching musical works in the post war years was “an intensive musical analysis, with a strong focus on compositional de tail,” to avoid the previous blending of hermeneutical processes with ideological under pinnings.41 It is not surprising that popular authors soon took up this approach. For example, in his 1956 Wege zur Musik: Eine Einführung für den Musikfreund (Paths to Music: An Intro duction for the Music Lover), the German author Kurt Knopf, in stating that listeners should “learn about the whole of the musical work itself . . . so they can benefit (p. 486) ef fectively from listening to musical works in the concert hall,”42 presented himself as be ing in a similar vein to German author Fritz Stege although the latter had openly adopted tenets of National Socialist ideology during the Third Reich. In his 1962 Musik hören, ver stehen, erleben. Eine Einführung (Listening, Understanding, Experiencing Music: An In troduction) Stege contended that “understanding a musical work of art needs the music lover’s active co-operation,” and he quoted the composer Hans Pfitzner: “It is an art to be an audience.”43 Well into the late 1990s, popular authors fostered the tight interplay between the musical work and the attentive listener, holding back from saying that even such professional lis teners as agents, musicians, critics, composers, and musicologists may experience dis traction while listening to music or that they may not be attentive at all. An impressive ex ample is Stefan Schaub’s 1988 book Ewig fernes Paradies: Eine Einführung in klassische Musik (Eternally Remote Paradise: An Introduction into Classical Music). Schaub repeat edly mentioned the training necessary to acquire listening skills, emphasizing the special
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“Everybody in the Concert Hall should be Devoted Entirely to the Music”: On the Actuality of Not Listening to Music in Symphonic Concerts meaning of “listening” and eventually equating conscious listening with actively engaging in music. There is immense potential for social distinction in his assertion that those who have sudden insights because they recognize this [the second] theme [in their favorite symphony] know they belong to the circle of “connoisseurs and aficionados.” . . . And this is quite something if you had believed, previously, to be long to the group of those who “merely listen.”44 Quite similarly, American author Michael Walsh, whose book Who’s Afraid of Classical Music? (New York, 1989) appeared in German translation in 1997, wrote about listening as an active rather than a passive process. He mentioned the common belief that “Classi cal aficionados” have “some mysterious God-given talent” and suggested that they “must have the aural keys in their possession that permit them to unlock the baffling structure of a sonata allegro and feast on the emotional content that lies within.”45 Also, David Pogue and Scott Speck, authors of the 1997 Classical Music for Dummies, which ap peared in 1998 in German as Klassik für Dummies, emphasized that what stands at the center of a concert is listening and comprehending musical masterworks.46 Although these American authors were giving preference to listening for the composition al layout of a piece and thereby for structural listening, they heralded a new epoch in writing for lay readers as they shifted the emphasis toward more descriptive accounts. Sometimes they included autobiographical references or accounts of mishaps and errors during concerts that openly drew on the option of inattentiveness: “What if you get bored? What if you’ve finished reading the program notes and you’re down to the ads? What if you fall asleep? This is what terrifies you.”47 Later authors introduced fictional figures such as the notorious taxi driver to comment on alternatives to the ostensibly reg ular concert-going experience, as violinist Daniel Hope did in his book Wann darf ich klatschen? (When Can I Applaud?), published in 2009.48 True, changes like these need to be reassessed with regard to the emergence of the genre of self-help literature and its preference for personalized approaches. But they (p. 487) may also be understood as a symptom of a general change in the reception of the concert event and in the conceptualization of listening as such. Starting in about 2000, authors have tended to open up a broader spectrum of concert going or listening modes, casting light on different facets of the concert experience. For example, Pogue and Speck discussed differences between attending several concert evenings with identical pro grams on three consecutive days. Daniel Hope wrote about his experiences as a violinist. While still addressing “Kompositionen und ihre Architektur” (compositions and their ar chitectural design),49 he included aspects of musical performance, addressing the ques tion of attentiveness from the point of view of the performer. Only if musicians feel, Hope wrote in an echo of Sabine Meyer’s remark, “that their playing reaches the listeners, that the music fascinates the audience and unfolds its effects on them, we may call the enter prise of a concert a success.”50
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“Everybody in the Concert Hall should be Devoted Entirely to the Music”: On the Actuality of Not Listening to Music in Symphonic Concerts Similarly, authors Annette Kreutziger-Herr and Winfried Bönig, in their 2009 introduction Klassische Musik: Die 101 wichtigsten Fragen (Classical Music: The 101 Most Important Questions), presented traditional knowledge regarding what to care for in a concert yet opened up to alternative approaches. Addressing the question of listening, these authors grouped several modes hierarchically, according to different levels of musical training: On a rather low level, listeners may focus on the “sounding exterior of a musical piece.” A step above that is attention to the “outer structure,” which can demand more of “listeners who want to understand.” And “even more complicated” is “getting hold of the structure, for instance, listening for the melodic lines or motivic ramifications. Those who then want to understand artistic harmonic progressions need a perfectly trained relative or even ab solute pitch.” In doing this, Kreutziger-Herr and Bönig drew on a rather traditional rank ing of listening modes, but they concluded that “it means a lot of unnecessary stress for lay hearers interested in music to be capable of all or as many as possible of these levels.”51 Looking back on these more recent publications, we can identify several factors that ac count for the shift in emphasis. On one hand, matters of performance have become fash ionable in recent years, not only in musicological research but also in the realm of the concert itself, with an increased number of lecture-concerts, possibly in reaction to the decline in musical literacy and performance skills as well as in response to the virtualiza tion of daily life. On the other hand, composers have displayed a strong interest in perfor mance and in the byproducts of the sound-making process, Helmut Lachenmann being a major protagonist. Finally, matters of audience development come into play because there seems to be agreement about the fact that too much pressure on the reader-listener may turn out to be disadvantageous and that all potential concert-goers should be addressed. All this said, none of the above-mentioned authors make it explicit that not listening at tentively to the music performed is an option in its own right or at least a theoretical pos sibility. Some, like Michael Walsh, may refer to it, but it remains a disdained mode of par ticipation in a musical event. Thus, broadening the spectrum has not brought about more realistic accounts of the lis tening experience. Rather, authors seem to agree that experiencing a concert is about paying attention par excellence, be it for the structure of the musical work or for the (p. 488) skills of the performers. Hope’s remark in 2009 that a concert is like an expedi tion of both performers and listeners is a case in point: For this expedition to be success ful, Hope wrote, “performers or listeners” are supposed to be attentive, in other words, “be there for the music.”52 We may, however, ask what “music” means in this context. Al though Hope suggests that the conceptual continuum embracing listeners, musicians, ed itors, and composers alike is still prevalent, his strong focus on the performer’s perspec tive helps at least move our attention away from the core item of that very continuum, the notated musical work. His approach thus constitutes a fundamental way of re-evaluating and broadening our understanding of listening in a sense close to that of Christopher Small, who has pointed at the broad panorama of activities related to music which may
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“Everybody in the Concert Hall should be Devoted Entirely to the Music”: On the Actuality of Not Listening to Music in Symphonic Concerts not directly involve writing, performing, or listening to music in the first place: of “mu sicking.”53 It will come as no surprise that doing away with what seems to be the last bastion of the concert experience, paying attention over long time spans, has challenged those with a more conservative viewpoint and that attempts at educating the audience are perceived as a tightrope walk. In a backlash to recent developments, German music journalist Hol ger Noltze, in his 2010 Die Leichtigkeitslüge (The Lie of Simplicity), a compilation of es says concerning contemporary music education, repeatedly addressed the question of ad equate listening. Noltze paraphrased this way of listening as “creation of attention; knowledge of vocabulary and syntax, therefore of structures; openness in the sense of tol erance of complexity.”54 True, in aiming at a professional readership, Noltze’s book re mains outside the repertoire of introductory books, but he discusses similar questions and problems. According to his view, the protective space that the concert provides for the musical work will be jeopardized if we address, in a realistic display of listening options, other objects of attention or the very interferences and blank spaces that any listener will know of.
Paying No Attention at All and Paying Special Attention The question of what exactly causes attentiveness or inattentiveness in a concert points to a whole series of new questions. It is possible to monitor individual attention physiolog ically, but such monitoring will not account for biographic, aesthetic, and normative con siderations that arouse attention in individual situations or that prevent listeners from be ing attentive at all. As has been mentioned, a performance may be problematic to a de gree that it invites extra attention. Also, the stance that individual listeners take sponta neously, owing to a combination of their mood and their musical training, plays an impor tant role, because even perfectly trained people may sit in a concert and ponder extramu sical thoughts like what to do the next day or how to fix the dishwashing machine at home. Then, if we think of the way composers deal with the audience’s urge to (p. 489) ap plaud, as Joseph Haydn did in the final movement of his string quartet op. 33, no. 2, or with extremely long time spans, as Morton Feldman did in his second string quartet (which is several hours long), changes in the level of attention can be motivated by the specific structure of a musical work. Last but not least, compositions or performances may unintentionally cause the attention of an otherwise willing audience to wander. Feldman was deliberately putting a strain on his future listeners, playing his part in the game of reflection about the concept of the musical work. But is it legitimate to demand a certain level of attentiveness from the audience in the first place, and more, can atten tiveness be actively inscribed into a musical work? This question is related to another one scarcely discussed in introductory literature on music and only touched on above, namely, that of genuinely bromidic pieces. In a generally apologetic manner and an effort to not address difficult traits of concert life, authors of guidebooks of the twentieth and twentyPage 12 of 25
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“Everybody in the Concert Hall should be Devoted Entirely to the Music”: On the Actuality of Not Listening to Music in Symphonic Concerts first centuries avoid becoming as explicit as did theoreticians and practitioners of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The latter were outspoken about what mattered to an audience craving good music, Carl Czerny’s remark that it is necessary for a good composer to “know when to end”55 being a case in point. To summarize, the construction of listening as a whole remains factitious and fragile. As suming that an audience of attentive listeners will pay maximal tribute to the representa tion of a musical work that deserves full attention means contemplating a utopian situa tion. Less formal discourses do not only challenge this concept, they also provide evi dence that there is a greater variety of ways to actively engage in a concert. For a more recent and explicit assessment of what or who exactly is affected by inattentiveness, I turned to the German composer Moritz Eggert (b. 1965) for a comment about concert-go ers not listening: “What does it mean for you as a composer to know that your audience is being inattentive?” Eggert passed on the following to me: Inattentiveness is the liberty a concert-goer may take to not follow up on what is performed to him. I myself took that liberty in numberless concerts, for different reasons. If I deprived the concert-goer of this liberty forcefully, his listening would be no success but instead would be a punishment for him. If I am successful in arousing his curiosity, even if he has been reluctant before, his listening is my suc cess and his reward. The latter is, of course, the most beautiful, and a challenge to any composer.56 Eggert’s refusal to complain about the lack of willingness in concert-goers, and his hint at the omnipresence of inattentive listening even among professionals, reaffirm the under representation of the topic in scholarly and popular writings about music while reminding us of the intricate web of communication processes taking place during a concert. As the last stop on our walk through the long conceptual history of seemingly adequate listening, we need to turn to the counter-model for the inwardly distracted, inattentive lis tener: a shining yet almost menacing figure that most writers of introductory books do not comment on, either. Fine historical examples of this type are the inhabitants of the socalled Fourth Gallery in the Vienna Hofoper circa 1910, a (p. 490) conspiratorial, some times snobbish group of students high up in the hall that used the remoteness of this spe cial seating (or rather, standing) area to intensely listen and communicate about the musi cal performance. Referring to that specific group of Viennese students, Christopher Hailey has written of “one of the premises of the Vienna avant-garde around 1910,”57 and the composer, pi anist, and writer Carl Lafite wrote in hindsight that “everybody should have seen the young men and women bent, folded, and clamped to the brass railing between stalls and stances, how they bore up [during] the longest acts by the sweat of their brows.”58 The “level of performance was nowhere else as tightly controlled as here,”59 as Hailey writes in reference to the habits of the Fourth Gallery visitors, who anxiously watched over cor rect or incorrect entries or immersed themselves in the written score.60 Consequently, the benevolence of those listening from above was deemed essential for the success of indi Page 13 of 25
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“Everybody in the Concert Hall should be Devoted Entirely to the Music”: On the Actuality of Not Listening to Music in Symphonic Concerts vidual careers. Hailey even relates the disciplining of the audience in Schönberg’s Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen to the “immanent snobbism” of the Fourth Gallery.61 It seems to have been well-nigh impossible, however, to stay in the Fourth Gallery for good. Johann Nepomuk Fuchs, director of the Vienna conservatory and Vize hofkapellmeister (vice principal conductor) at the opera, had negotiated favorable condi tions for the students of the conservatory, and the majority of visitors stayed up there on ly during their time as music students. It is probably safe to assume that as individual ca reers proceeded and listeners moved down into the lower tiers or the parquet, they did not only give up their previous position in the house but the offensive devotion to the mu sical work, as well. With regard to this relocation, Hailey has spoken of “[e]in Zeichen der Reife” (a sign of maturity),62 reminding us again of the fact that a maximum of attentive ness can only episodically be maintained and that ideal settings must always arouse sus picion. While this holds true for a life-long preoccupation with music, it applies to attending a single concert, too. True, the reluctance of authors to comment on inattentiveness and the emphasis that publications by both German and American authors have placed on lis tening for the compositional layout of a musical work are reminiscent of the lasting im pact of late nineteenth-century genres of commentary. Also, there are strong political and ideological undercurrents to “correct” listening skills, as is obvious from post-war en deavors to move away from ideological implications and train listeners to care for musical structure rather than for (programmatic) content or for their own reactions and inclina tions. Yet not listening at all may be as meaningful an activity as listening attentively. Whatever our approach to “music” is, whether we are listeners, spectators, performers, or writers on music, we are well advised to realize that inattentiveness bears a productive potential in that it is able to point at the very flaws of the musical work-concept with its strong fo cus on the structure of the work, its disregard of idiosyncratic performances, and its un derlying bias against potentially unskilled listeners. Indeed, embracing inattentiveness as a natural part of diverse experiences and expectations in a concert could turn out to be a fruitful way of addressing trained listeners as well as newcomers to the listening scene.
References Adorno, Theodor W. 1975. Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Berg, Alban.1984. “Prospekt des ‘Vereins für musikalische Privataufführungen’ (Präsident und musikalischer Leiter: Arnold Schönberg).” In Musik-Konzepte Heft 36: Schönbergs Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen, edited by Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn. Munich: Text und Kritik. Brinkmann, Reinhold. 2000. Arnold Schönberg: Drei Klavierstücke, op. 11; Studien zur frühen Atonalität bei Schönberg. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner. Page 14 of 25
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“Everybody in the Concert Hall should be Devoted Entirely to the Music”: On the Actuality of Not Listening to Music in Symphonic Concerts Burnham, Scott. 1995. Beethoven Hero. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Clarke, Eric. 2002. “Listening to Performance.” In Musical Performance: A Guide to Un derstanding, edited by John Rink, 185–196. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Copland, Aaron. 1939. What to Listen for in Music. New York: Whittlesey House, McGrawHill. Czerny, Carl. (1832) 1986. “Über die Formen und den Bau jedes Tonstücks.” Musiktheorie 1 (3): 261–276. Dahlhaus, Carl. 1974. “Das musikalische Kunstwerk als Gegenstand der Soziologie.” In ternational Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 5 (1): 11–26. de la Motte, Helga, Heinz von Loesch, Günther Rötter, and Christian Utz, eds. 2010. Lexikon der systematischen Musikwissenschaft. Laaber: Laaber-Verlag. de la Motte-Haber, Helga, and Günther Rötter, eds. 2005. “Formwahrnehmung.” In Musikpsychologie, 263–267. Laaber: Laaber-Verlag. Dollase, Rainer. 2006. “Wer sind die Musikkonsumenten?” In Musik und Kulturbe trieb: Medien, Märkte, Institutionen. Handbuch der Musik im 20. Jahrhundert. Vol. 10, (p. 496)
edited by Arnold Jacobshagen and Frieder Reininghaus, 115–142. Laaber: Laaber-Verlag. Dollase, Rainer, Michael Rüsenberg, and Hans J. Stollenwerk. 1986. Demoskopie im Konz ertsaal. Mainz: Schott. Fuhrimann, Daniel. 2005. “Herzohren für die Tonkunst.” Opern- und Konzertpublikum in der deutschen Literatur des langen 19. Jahrhunderts. Freiburg: Rombach. Gay, Peter. 1995. The Bourgeois Experience. Victoria to Freud, Vol. IV: The Naked Heart. New York: Oxford University Press. Goehr, Lydia. 1992. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music. Oxford: Clarendon. Hailey, Christopher. 1986. “Die vierte Galerie: Voraussetzungen für die Wiener Avant garde um 1910.” In Bericht über den 2. Kongreß der Internationalen SchönbergGesellschaft “Die Wiener Schule in der Musikgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts.” Wien, 12. bis 15. Juni 1984, edited by Rudolf Stephan and Sigrid Wiesmann, 242–247. Vienna: Lafite. Heister, Hanns-Werner. 1983. Das Konzert: Theorie einer Kulturform. Wilhelmshaven: Heinrichshofen. Hope, Daniel, and Wolfgang Knauer. 2009. Wann darf ich klatschen? Ein Wegweiser für Konzertgänger. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt. Illustrirte Zeitung. 1874. June 6 (no. 1614): 431, 434, 436. Page 15 of 25
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“Everybody in the Concert Hall should be Devoted Entirely to the Music”: On the Actuality of Not Listening to Music in Symphonic Concerts Johnson, James. 1995. Listening in Paris: A Cultural History. Berkeley: University of Cali fornia Press. Kleinen, Günter, and Thomas H. Stoffer. 1998. “Wahrnehmung.” In Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 2nd ed., edited by Ludwig Finscher, Sachteil, vol. 9, col. 1837–1865. Kas sel: Bärenreiter. Knopf, Kurt. 1956. Wege zur Musik: Eine Einführung für den Musikfreund. Heidelberg: Kemperer. Kreutziger-Herr, Annette, and Winfried Böning, eds. 2009. Die 101 wichtigsten Fragen: Klassische Musik. Munich: Beck. Lafite, Carl. 1962. “Auf der vierten Galerie der Oper.” Österreichische Musikzeitschrift 17 (11): 533–536. Levinson, Jerrold. 1997. Music in the Moment. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus. 1962. Briefe und Aufzeichnungen. Gesamtausgabe 2, 1777– 1779, edited by Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum Salzburg. Kassel: Bärenreiter. Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus. 1964. Briefe und Aufzeichnungen. Gesamtausgabe 4, 1787– 1857, edited by Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum Salzburg. Kassel: Bärenreiter. Noltze, Holger. 2010. Die Leichtigkeitslüge: Über Musik, Medien und Komplexität. Hamburg: Edition Körber-Stiftung. Pogue, David, and Scott Speck. 1997. Classical Music for Dummies. Foster City, CA: IDG Books. Rochlitz, Friedrich. 1799. “Die Verschiedenheit der Urtheile über Werke der Tonkunst.” Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 1:497–506. Rochlitz, Friedrich. (1831) 1868. “Kunstgenuss,” In Für Freunde der Tonkunst. 3rd ed., edited by Friedrich Rochlitz, 4:3–8. Leipzig: Cnobloch. Schaub, Stefan. 1988. Ewig fernes Paradies: Eine Einführung in klassische Musik. Zurich: Schweizer Verlags-Haus. Schönberg, Arnold. 1909. “Über Musikkritik.” Der Merker 1 (2): 62. Small, Christopher. 1998. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. (p. 497)
Stege, Fritz. 1962. Musik hören, verstehen, erleben. Eine Einführung. Vienna: Wancura. Tewinkel, Christiane. 2016. Muss ich das Programmheft lesen? Zur populärwis senschaftlichen Darstellung von Musik seit 1945. Kassel: Bärenreiter.
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“Everybody in the Concert Hall should be Devoted Entirely to the Music”: On the Actuality of Not Listening to Music in Symphonic Concerts Vojtech, Ivan. 2000. “Einige Anmerkungen zur Idee des ‘Vereins für musikalische Pri vataufführungen’ in Wien.” In Arnold Schönbergs Wiener Kreis. Bericht zum Symposium 12.–15. September 1999, edited by Christian Meyer, 107–113. Vienna: Arnold Schönberg Center. Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich. 1991. Sämtliche Werke und Briefe. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, edited by Richard Littlejohns. Vol. 4. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsver lag. Walsh, Michael.1989. Who’s Afraid of Classical Music? A Highly Arbitrary, Thoroughly Opinionated Guide to Listening to and Enjoying Symphony, Opera, and Chamber Music. New York: Simon and Schuster. Walsh, Michael. 1997. Keine Angst vor klassischer Musik. Translated and edited by Corin na Steinbach. Munich: Piper.
Appendix 1 An excerpt from the Illustrirte Zeitung, June 6, 1874: 431 and 434. “Es ist also nur ein kleines, aber in gewissem Sinne exquisites Völklein, das an dieser Art von Kunstproductionen regelmäßig Antheil nimmt und für sie die erhaltende Grundlage abgibt. Dieses Völkchen ist auf dem beigegebenen Bild durch seine Typen vertreten und im ganzen entsprechend klassificirt. Da sind zuerst die Kunstjünger und Enthusiasten. Glückliche Menschen! Sie alle sind jetzt in den Zustand versetzt, in welchem Gefühl und Einbildungskraft concentrisch-wirksam nur nach einer Idee hinstreben: die Musik erhebt sie jetzt über die Außenwelt, ja über sich selbst; sie tauchen in ihren rein- oder trüb wogenden Strom; sie trinken ihre Töne, sie stillen und reinigen sich in ihren harmonis chen oder disharmonischen Fluten und vergehen in Seligkeiten und Wonne. Auf sie übt die Musik ihre volle Wirkung. . . . Es folgen die Kenner und Kritiker. Ein kritisches Geschlecht mit höhern Ansprüche und daher nicht leicht zu befriedigen. Hören obige Leutchen die Musik mit ganzer Seele, mit vollem Herzen, so hören diese sie nur mit dem Verstand, für den bloß das Schwierige Interesse und Werth hat. Der Kenner oder häufiger Scheinkenner kommt meist nur, um sein Urtheil abzugeben, d.h. um sein Licht leuchten zu lassen, auch wenn es nur Talglicht ist. Der eigentliche Kritiker dagegen kommt von Berufs wegen, meist ungern, weil gezwungen. Was für andere erhebender, erquickender Genuß, ist für ihn harte, ernste Arbeit. Er horcht mit oppositionellen Anwandlungen; er begegnet den Schönheiten der Kunst wie der Unfehlbarkeit des Papstes vorweg und grundsätzlich mit einme gewissen Mistrauen; er ist dem Schlechten rasch auf der Spur, mäkelt aber auch an dem Guten, er findet immer und immer wieder ein Haar in der Suppe. Kurz, der Kritiker ist ein (p. 498) meist mürrischer, verdrießlicher Kauz; man kann es ihm selten recht machen. Das ‘Vergnügen’ genießt er mit—Geduld. Geradezu einen Gegensatz zu den zwei vorstehenden Gruppen bildet die elegante Mod ewelt, die da kommt, ins Concert wie ins Theater, in die Kirche wie auf die Promenade, Page 17 of 25
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“Everybody in the Concert Hall should be Devoted Entirely to the Music”: On the Actuality of Not Listening to Music in Symphonic Concerts immer in der Hauptsache mit ein und derselben Absicht: sie will nur sehen und gesehen werden. Damen von oft stark angefochtener Schönheit, aber immer pyramidaler Eitelkeit; Männer, die ihre Unwiderstehlichkeit nicht leicht in Frage stellen lassen, und wieder an dere, die es zufrieden sind, sich an den weiblichen Reizen gerade dort, wo sie dem Za uber der Kunst Conkurrenz machen, satt zu sehen. Ein im Grunde harmloses Völklein. Es schadet der Kunst weder durch Enthusiasmus noch durch Kritik; es nutzt ihr nur mit dem Eintrittsgeld. Weniger harmlos sind dafür die Pietätlosen. Sie kommen nur, weil sie auch mit dabei sein wollen, wie sie eben nichts besseres zu thun haben. Sie könnten ebensogut zu Hause bleiben, um zu schlummern, zu gähnen oder zu schwatzen. Allein die Mode ver langt es und ruft sie in den Kunsttempel, um dort andere Leute gelegentlich niederzuren nen oder sonst im Kunstgenuß zu stören. Sie thun, was sie nicht lassen können, thun sich aber im übrigen keine Gewalt an. Von irgendwelchen Affecten kann bei diesen Musikphilistern nicht die Rede sein, ja sie strengen sich nicht einmal an, irgendwelches Gefühl auch nur pro forma zu affectiren.” (It is a small but, in a certain sense exquisite group that regularly takes part in those pro ductions of art and thereby provides their necessary fundament. This populace, with its formative types and their respective classification, can be seen on the appended image. First, there are the disciples of art and enthusiasts. Lucky people! They find themselves in a state in which emotion and imagination center around one single idea: music ele vates them above the outer world, and even above themselves; they plunge in its pure or murky tide; they drink its tones, they nurse and purge themselves in its harmonic or disharmonious floods and die away in blissfulness and delight. Music exerts its full power upon them. . . . Next are the connoisseurs and critics. A critical dynasty with higher de mands and therefore not easily satisfied. While the above-mentioned folk listen to music with their full soul and their full heart, these people listen merely with that very compre hension that finds interest and value only in difficult things. The connoisseur, or, more fre quently, the pseudo-connoisseur mostly comes to judge, i.e., to let his light shine, even if it is only a tallow candle. The actual critic, however, comes for professional reasons, for the most part reluctantly as he is under constraint. What is uplifting and revitalizing plea sure to others is hard, serious work for him. He listens with oppositional inclinations; he confronts the beauties of art just like he would the pope’s infallibility with a certain dis trust, a priori and in principle; he quickly traces what is bad and grumbles at what is good, he finds a fly in the ointment again and again. In short, the critic is a mostly cantan kerous, fractious old fogey; he can rarely be pleased. He enjoys the “pleasure” with—en durance. Opposite these two groups there is the elegant monde de la mode, who, be it the concert or the theater, the church or the promenade, essentially come with the selfsame inten tion: they wish to see and be seen. Ladies of frequently impugned beauty, yet always of pyramidal conceitedness; men who will not have their irresistibility easily challenged, (p. 499) and others who are content to gaze at female attraction especially when it is com peting with the allure of art. A profoundly harmless group. They don’t do harm to art, nei ther by enthusiasm nor by critique; they simply benefit it with the entrance fee. Less in nocuous are those without piety. They only come because they want to be there as well, Page 18 of 25
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“Everybody in the Concert Hall should be Devoted Entirely to the Music”: On the Actuality of Not Listening to Music in Symphonic Concerts as they don’t have anything better to do. They could as well stay at home to doze, to yawn, or twaddle. However, fashion demands it and summons them to the temple of art where they occasionally run people over or otherwise disturb their enjoyment of art. They do what they have to do, but don’t force themselves to do anything. Regarding those Philistines of music we cannot speak of affects, for they do not even try to fabricate an emotion pro forma.)
Notes: (1.) The original quotation in the chapter title is from: Hope, Daniel, and Wolfgang Knauer. 2009. Wann darf ich klatschen? Ein Wegweiser für Konzertgänger. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 212; the German original reads: “[J]eder sollte ganz für die Musik da sein.” Unless mentioned otherwise, all translations were provided by the author. (2.) “[W]as mich aber am meisten freuet, ist, der Stille beifall!” Mozart to his wife, Vien na, October 7 and 8, 1791. In Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus. 1964. Briefe und Aufzeichnun gen. Gesamtausgabe 4, 1787–1857, edited by Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum Salzburg. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 157. (3.) In regard to the usage of “concert-goers” it is certainly tempting to yield to the re quirement of stylistic variation and take “listeners” for “concert-goers.” In this specific context as in many others, however, we need to be aware of the implications brought about by the quest for synonyms. There are certainly concert-goers who cannot be called listeners, but the reverse is impossible. This said, both terms will be used throughout this chapter. (4.) “[E]inen fokussierten Zustand auf einzelne Wahrnehmungsgegenstände . . . “ de la Motte, Helga, et al. 2010. Lexikon der systematischen Musikwissenschaft. Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 54. (5.) “Beiwohnende einer Aufführung zur selben Zeit im selben Raum.” Dollase, Rainer. 2006. “Wer sind die Musikkonsumenten?” In Musik und Kulturbetrieb: Medien, Märkte, Institutionen. Handbuch der Musik im 20. Jahrhundert. Vol. 10, edited by Arnold Jacob shagen and Frieder Reininghaus, 115–142. Laaber: Laaber Verlag, 118. (6.) Johnson, James H. 1995. Listening in Paris: A Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 285. (7.) Dollase (2006): 118. (8.) Goehr, Lydia. 1992. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philos ophy of Music. Oxford: Clarendon, 253. (9.) “Man braucht das auch als Künstler, dass nicht alle so dasitzen . . . , sondern dass sie bereit sind, aufmerksam zu sein und auch etwas zu geben.” Sabine Meyer, personal con versation with the author, September 26, 2003.
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“Everybody in the Concert Hall should be Devoted Entirely to the Music”: On the Actuality of Not Listening to Music in Symphonic Concerts (10.) “Um einen Kunsteindruck empfangen zu können, muß die eigene Phantasie schöpferisch mitwirken. . . . Nur die Wärme, die man selbst abzugeben imstande ist, gibt das Kunstwerk, und schließlich ist eigentlich fast jeder Kunstausdruck ein von der Phan tasie der Zuhörer Geschaffenes.” Schönberg, Arnold. 1909. “Über Musikkritik.” Der Merker 1 (2): 62. (11.) Berg, Alban. 1984. “Prospekt des ‘Vereins für musikalische Privataufführungen’ (Präsident und musikalischer Leiter: Arnold Schönberg).” In MusikKonzepte Heft 36: Schönbergs Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen, edited by Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn, 4–7. Munich: Text und Kritik, 5. (12.) “Die Pflege des entwickelten strukturellen Hörens, welches ein adäquates Durch hören des Werkes . . . absichern . . . soll, hängt mit der Vereinsidee und ihren institu tionell gegebenen Bedingungen im höheren Sinne zusammen.” Vojtech, Ivan. 2000. “Einige Anmerkungen zur Idee des ‘Vereins für musikalische Privataufführungen’ in Wien.” In Arnold Schönbergs Wiener Kreis. Bericht zum Symposium 12.–15. September 1999, edited by Christian Meyer, 107–113. Vienna: Arnold Schönberg Center, 110. The original statement by Alban Berg in “Prospekt des ‘Vereins für musikalische Privatauf führungen’ ” points out that the Verein asks from its members “sich vorschnelles Urteilen abzugewöhnen” (to break the habit of judging prematurely) and it speaks of “Beifalls-, Mißfalls- und Dankesbezeugungen.” (applause, signs of discontent, and gratitude). Berg (1984): 5. (13.) Johnson (1995): 284. (14.) Levinson, Jerrold. 1997. Music in the Moment. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Scott Burnham has addressed the same question in Burnham, Scott. 1995. Beethoven Hero. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 163–164. (15.) “Nicht das Hören von musikalischen Formen steht normalerweise im Zentrum der Aufmerksamkeit, sondern andere musikalische Vorgänge.” de la Motte-Haber, Helga, and Günther Rötter. 2005. “Formwahrnehmung.” In Musikpsychologie, edited by Helga de la Motte-Haber and Günther Rötter, 263–267. Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 267. (16.) “[N]icht die logische Struktur des Musikwerks, sondern . . . dessen Subjektbezug.” Kleinen, Günter, and Thomas H. Stoffer. 1998. “Wahrnehmung.” In Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. 2nd ed., edited by Ludwig Finscher, vol. 9, col. 1837–1865. Kassel: Bärenreiter. (17.) For a discussion of this see Clarke, Eric. 2002. “Listening to Performance.” In Musi cal Performance: A Guide to Understanding, edited by John Rink, 185–196. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clarke concentrates on recordings. (18.) “Der Streß ist größer, je kundiger das Publikum eingeschätzt wird.” Dolls(2006): 127.
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“Everybody in the Concert Hall should be Devoted Entirely to the Music”: On the Actuality of Not Listening to Music in Symphonic Concerts (19.) Dahlhaus, Carl. 1974. “Das musikalische Kunstwerk als Gegenstand der Soziologie.” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 5 (1): 17. The complete sentence reads: “Die ästhetische Kontemplation, die nur selten ungetrübt gelingt, verzer rt sich unter dem Blick ihrer Verächter zu einem Ästhetizismus, der das ganze Dasein durchsetzt.” (20.) “Innerlich revoltierend gegen die aufgezwungene Monotonie der Längen . . . können [die Hörer] sich diese durch ‘Bearbeitung’ im Hören verkürzen und durch solche ‘Frag mentation’ des Werkganzen in ‘Themenhören,’ Achten nur auf ‘schöne Stellen’ u.ä., ihren pragmatischen, ‘kulinarischen’ Bedürfnissen entgegen den Idealen nachgeben. . . . Ob sich das Werk als Ganzes tatsächlich realisiert, hängt so schließlich auch von der syn thetisierenden Anstrengung der und des Rezipienten ab.” Heister, Hanns-Werner. 1983. Das Konzert: Theorie einer Kulturform. Wilhelmshaven: Heinrichshofen, 439–440. (21.) Goehr (1992): 205. (22.) These are books that are aimed at an adult readership, excluding concert guides, dictionaries, encyclopedias, music-theoretical treatises, and histories of music. (23.) The following remarks present a short summary of an extensive project about popu lar writings on music published since 1945 in Western Germany (Tewinkel, Christiane. 2016. Muss ich das Programmheft lesen? Zur populärwissenschaftlichen Darstellung von Musik seit 1945. Kassel: Bärenreiter). The second part of the project was devoted to pro gram notes. (24.) “[D]ie Zuhörer ich meyne diejenigen, die würdig sind so genannt zu werden.” Post scriptum to letter from Mozart to Maria Anna Mozart, Mannheim, January 17, 1778. In Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus. 1962. Briefe und Aufzeichnungen. Gesamtausgabe 2, 1777– 1779, edited by Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum Salzburg. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 228. (25.) Quoted in Dollase, Rainer, Michael Rüsenberg, and Hans J. Stollenwerk. 1986. Demoskopie im Konzertsaal. Mainz: Schott, 7. At that time Janowski was director of music at the Cologne Gürzenich orchestra. (26.) Adorno, Theodor W. 1975. Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 14–34. Adorno stated that he had designed his typology already in the late 1930s; see Adorno (1975): 9. (27.) Fuhrimann, Daniel. 2005. “Herzohren für die Tonkunst”: Opern- und Konzertpub likum in der deutschen Literatur des langen 19. Jahrhunderts. Freiburg: Rombach, 46. Then again, we need to bear in mind that Adorno’s text originated before the war and therefore may also be understood as a résumé of listening modes described and comment ed on in the previous century. (28.) Fuhrimann (2005): 47–55. Rochlitz’s texts were originally published in 1799: Rochlitz, Friedrich. 1799. “Die Verschiedenheit der Urtheile über Werke der Tonkunst.”
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“Everybody in the Concert Hall should be Devoted Entirely to the Music”: On the Actuality of Not Listening to Music in Symphonic Concerts Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 1:497–506); and in 1831: Rochlitz, Friedrich. (1831) 1868. “Kunstgenuss.” In Für Freunde der Tonkunst. 3rd ed. Vol. 4. Leipzig: Cnobloch, 3–8. (29.) Illustrirte Zeitung. 1874. June 6 (No. 1614): 431, 434; 436 (for illustration). The author’s name appears in abbreviation only (F. St.). For a longer version of the German text see Appendix. (30.) Illustrirte Zeitung (1874). (31.) Illustrirte Zeitung (1874). (32.) Illustrirte Zeitung (1874). (33.) “[D]er voll bewußte Hörer, dem tendenziell nichts entgeht und der zugleich in jedem Augenblick über das Gehörte Rechenschaft sich abgibt.” Adorno (1975): 18. (34.) Illustrirte Zeitung (1874): 434. (35.) See Fuhrimann (2005): 59. (36.) “Nur die eine Art des Genußes ist die wahre: sie besteht in der aufmerksamsten Beobachtung der Töne u ihrer Fortschreitung; in der völligen Hingebung der Seele, in diesen / fortreißenden Strohm von Empfindungen; in der Entfernung und Abgezogenheit von jedem störenden Gedanken und von allen fremdartigen sinnlichen Eindrücken. Dieses geizige Einschlürfen der Töne, ist mit einer gewissen Anstrengung verbunden, die man nicht allzulange aushält. Eben daher glaub’ ich behaupten zu können, daß man höchstens eine Stunde lang Musik mit Theilnehmung zu empfinden vermöge, und daß daher Konz erte u Opern u Operetten, das Maaß der Natur überschreiten.” Wackenroder to Ludwig Tieck, May 5, 1792. In Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich. 1991. Sämtliche Werke und Briefe. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, edited by Richard Littlejohns. Vol. 4. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 29. (37.) Wackenroder (1991): 29. (38.) “[M]eine Gedanken und Phantasieen werden gleichsam auf den Wellen des Gesanges entführt, und verlieren sich oft in entfernte Schlupfwinkel. Es ist sonderbar, daß ich, in diese Stimmung versetzt, auch am beßten über Musik als Aesthetiker nach denken kann, wenn ich Musik höre: es scheint, als rissen sich da von den Empfindungen die das Tonstück einflößt, allgemeine Ideen los, die sich mir dann schnell u deutlich vor die Seele stellen.” Wackenroder (1991): 29. (39.) A prominent example is the publication What to Listen for in Music by the American composer Aaron Copland, which had appeared in New York and London in 1939 and was issued in Munich and Berlin in 1948 in German translation. (40.) As regards other authors of the same period such as Kurt Pahlen and Leonard Bern stein, see Tewinkel (2016).
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“Everybody in the Concert Hall should be Devoted Entirely to the Music”: On the Actuality of Not Listening to Music in Symphonic Concerts (41.) “[E]ine intensive, ins kompositorische Detail eindringende musikalische Analyse.” Brinkmann, Reinhold. 2000. Arnold Schönberg: Drei Klavierstücke, op. 11; Studien zur frühen Atonalität bei Schönberg. 2nd ed. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, ix. (42.) “Nach Möglichkeit sollte man sich einen Eindruck von dem ganzen Werk . . . ver schaffen, damit das Hören der Werke im Konzertsaal . . . zum dauernden Gewinn wird.” Knopf, Kurt. 1956. Wege zur Musik: Eine Einführung für den Musikfreund. Heidelberg: Kemperer, 11. (43.) “Das Verstehen eines Musikwerkes setzt die tätige Mitarbeit des Musikfreundes vo raus.” Stege, Fritz. 1962. Musik hören, verstehen, erleben. Eine Einführung. Vienna: Wan cura, 11. On the same page, Stege quotes Hans Pfitzner as having said: “Es ist eine Kun st, Publikum zu sein.” (44.) “Wer frustriert in einem Konzert sitzt, weil er in seiner Lieblingssinfonie das zweite Thema nicht gefunden hat, bestraft sich selbst. Wem allerdings beim Registrieren dieses Themas ein ‘Aha-Erlebnis’ zuteil wird, weiß sich im Kreise der ‘Kenner und Lieb haber.’ . . . Und das ist doch schon ein bißchen etwas, wenn man einmal geglaubt hat, zu denen zu zählen, die halt ‘nur’ hören.” Schaub, Stefan. 1988. Ewig fernes Paradies: Eine Einführung in klassische Musik. Zurich: Schweizer Verlags-Haus, 20. (45.) Walsh, Michael. 1989. Who’s Afraid of Classical Music? A Highly Arbitrary, Thor oughly Opinionated Guide to Listening to and Enjoying Symphony, Opera, and Chamber Music. New York: Simon and Schuster, 52. For a German translation, see Walsh, Michael. 1997. Keine Angst vor klassischer Musik. Translated and edited by Corinna Steinbach. Munich: Piper, 49. (46.) Pogue, David, and Scott Speck. 1997. Classical Music for Dummies. Foster City, CA: IDG Books, 115. (47.) Walsh (1989): 52. (48.) See n. 1. It is probably not coincidental that Hope, who was born in South Africa and graduated from the Royal Academy of Music, has an Anglophone background, as well. (49.) Hope (2009): 210. (50.) “[D]ass ihr Spiel die Zuhörer erreicht, dass die Musik das Publikum in ihren Bann zieht und ihre ganze Wirkung entfaltet, ist das Unternehmen Konzert gelungen.” Hope (2009): 125. (51.) “Von sich als einem interessierten Laien alle diese Stufen oder doch möglichst viele beim Hören zu verlangen, bedeutet, sich unnötig unter Stress zu setzen.” KreutzigerHerr, Annette, and Winfried Böning, eds. 2009. Die 101 wichtigsten Fragen: Klassische Musik. Munich: Beck, 67. The complete paragraph reads: “Da ist zum einen das klan gliche Gewand des Stückes, es klingt dramatisch, romantisch, rhythmisch, hell, dunkel, weich oder hart—welche Assoziationen auch immer im Hörer geweckt werden, sie sind Page 23 of 25
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“Everybody in the Concert Hall should be Devoted Entirely to the Music”: On the Actuality of Not Listening to Music in Symphonic Concerts für die meisten Konzertbesucher deutlich und verständlich. Weiterhin, und für das verste hende Hören schon etwas anspruchsvoller, vermittelt die Musik eine äußere Struktur. Ob Symphonie, Konzert, Fuge oder Arie—das Werk kann einer traditionellen Form folgen, sie ändern oder sogar sprengen. Noch komplizierter wird es mit dem strukturellen Erfassen, bei dem es um das Nachvollziehen der Stimmverläufe oder der motivischen Verästelun gen geht. Wer dann noch raffinierte harmonische Wendungen wirklich verstehen will, ist auf ein perfekt geschultes relatives oder gar auf ein absolutes Gehör angewiesen. Von sich als einem interessierten Laien alle diese Stufen oder doch möglichst viele beim Hören zu verlangen, bedeutet, sich unnötig unter Stress zu setzen.” (52.) “Ob Spieler oder Zuhörer, jeder sollte ganz für die Musik da sein.” Hope (2009): 212. (53.) Small, Christopher. 1998. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. (54.) “Herstellung von Aufmerksamkeit; Kenntnis des Vokabulars und der Syntax, also von Strukturen; Offenheit im Sinne von Komplexitätstoleranz.” Noltze, Holger. 2010. Die Leichtigkeitslüge: Über Musik, Medien und Komplexität. Hamburg: Edition KörberStiftung, 272. (55.) “[Z]u rechter Zeit aufzuhören zu wissen.” Czerny, Carl. (1832) 1986. “Über die For men und den Bau jedes Tonstücks.” Musiktheorie 1 (3): 261–276, here 264. (56.) “Unaufmerksamkeit ist die Freiheit des Zuhörers, dem ihm Vorgeführten nicht fol gen zu müssen. Ich selber habe mir diese Freiheit in zahllosen Konzerten genommen, aus den verschiedensten Gründen. Würde ich ihm diese Freiheit durch Zwang nehmen, wäre sein Zuhören kein Erfolg sondern seine Bestrafung. Gelingt es mir, ihn auf das Vorge führte trotz anfänglichen Widerwillens seinerseits neugierig zu machen, ist sein Zuhören mein Erfolg und seine Belohnung. Letzteres ist natürlich am Schönsten, und die Heraus forderung jeden Komponierens.” Moritz Eggert, email to the author, June 25, 2012. (57.) This gallery is mentioned in the very title of his article: Hailey, Christopher. 1986. “Die vierte Galerie: Voraussetzungen für die Wiener Avantgarde um 1910.” In Bericht über den 2. Kongreß der Internationalen Schönberg-Gesellschaft “Die Wiener Schule in der Musikgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts.” Wien, 12. bis 15. Juni 1984, edited by Rudolf Stephan and Sigrid Wiesmann, 242–247. Vienna: Lafite. (58.) “Man muß die Männlein und Weiblein gesehen haben, wie sie, oft in ganz unglaub würdigen Stellungen, um die Messingstäbe an der Grenze zwischen Sperrsitzen und Stehplätzen gekrümmt, gebogen, geklammert, die längsten Akte im Schweiße ihres An gesichts ohne einen Muckser durchhielten.” Lafite, Carl. 1962. “Auf der vierten Galerie der Oper.” Österreichische Musikzeitschrift 17 (11): 533. (59.) “Nirgends . . . war die Aufführungspraxis so vertraut und das Aufführungsniveau so scharf kontrolliert.” Hailey (1986): 243. Page 24 of 25
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“Everybody in the Concert Hall should be Devoted Entirely to the Music”: On the Actuality of Not Listening to Music in Symphonic Concerts (60.) See Lafite (1962): 533. (61.) Hailey speaks of an “Auswuchs [outgrowth] eines der Vierten Galerie immanenten Snobismus.” Hailey (1986): 246. (62.) Hailey (1986): 245.
Christiane Tewinkel
Christiane Tewinkel, Universität der Künste Berlin
Page 25 of 25
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Index
Index The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries Edited by Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer Print Publication Date: Jan 2019 Subject: Music Online Publication Date: Nov 2018
(p. 500)
(p. 501)
Index
Note: Page numbers with “c,” “f,” and “n” refer to charts, illustrations, and notes, respec tively. “academies,” 232, 233, 234 accommodation, in hearing, 378 Account of the Grand Musical Festival, An (Crosse), 261, 261f, 264–66, 271n7, 273n28 “Accuracy of Musical Taste in Regard to Architectural Acoustics, The” (Sabine), 231 Ackerknecht, Erwin, 467 acoustemology, 21 acoustic communication, 21 acoustics of music vs. speech, 361–62 Sabine’s contributions to, 231, 244, 328n36 theoretical foundations for, 235–36, 361 acoustics, architectural discourse on, 234–37 early innovations in, 234–37, 243–44 emergence of, 13, 243 of German concert halls during WWII, 127–28, 133–34 musical taste and, 231–32, 242, 244 science of, 234–37, 243–44 secondary structures and, 236, 238, 239 social class and, 236, 320 for spoken word performances, 235, 243 symmetry and, 320, 328n33, 328n37 Adam, Adolphe, 45, 82 Adorno, Theodor on crisis in listening culture, 97, 99, 102, 111–12, 395–96 discourse about history of music listening, 19 on instruments and gramophones as furniture, 402 on music-making experience, 302n42 on popular music, 442–43 radio as threat to authority of, 399 Page 1 of 40
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Index radio criticized and embraced by, 398–99, 407–8, 411 on recognition and possession, 442–43, 444, 453, 455n6 structural listening, 395–96, 410 on technological mediations, 396, 398–99, 407–8, 411 typology of listeners, 13, 111, 466, 482–83, 492n27 aedificatoria, De re (Alberti), 245n11 aesthetic narcissism, 433 “affordances,” 292, 396, 405 Akustik, Die (Chladni), 237 Alard, Delphin, 43, 46 Alberti, Leon Battista, 245n11 Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek (Reichardt), 154 Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik (Forkel), 158n29 Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 172 Always: A Manual of Etiquette (Urner), 60 “amateur,” 3, 256, 270n5, 271nn6–7, 272n10 Ammer, Andreas, 462 Andante de la Symphonie en La (Lami), 40 Anders, Günther (a.k.a. Günther Stern), 108, 466 Antheil, George, 432 Appel an meine Nation (Heinzmann), 428 Applegate, Celia, 11, 20 architectura, De (Pollio), 234 architecture of performance spaces acoustic design and (see acoustics, architectural) attentiveness supported by, 61, 64, 65, 479 (p. 502) audience capacity, 313, 320, 324 audience organized by, 13, 259–61, 262–64, 263f, 270, 273n27 Beethoven’s concert venues, 232–34 for British musical festivals, 259–64 class, social (see under class, social) concert halls, 17, 38–39, 39f genre differentiation in, 237, 238, 243, 244, 318 geometry in, 235–36, 246n21, 321–22, 327n32 listening styles shaped by, 322–23, 324 musical criticism and, 153 music education and, 323, 330n52 for opera and symphony listening, 12–13, 324 optimal sizes, 237, 243 Parisian influence on, 313–14 Patte’s contribution to, 235–36, 238, 244, 246n21 for salon performances, 61, 64–65, 67–68 Saunders’s contribution to, 235, 236, 244, 246n24 Schauspielhaus, 238–41 social aspects of, 319–21 symmetry in, 317, 320, 321–22, 323, 327n30, 328n33 touristic listening and, 17 Aristotle, 463 Page 2 of 40
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Index Arnheim, Rudolf, 465 Arnold, Samuel, 265, 273n30 art vs. entertainment, 38, 40, 46–50 meaning of, 3, 463 public dissemination of, 433 term usage, 462–63 Art and Anarchy (Wind), 433 art music democratization of, 50 loss of cultural significance, 412 vs. popular music, 335–37, 342 Art of Listening, The (Back), 465 Art of Listening, The (Bamberger, Brofsky), 465 Art of Listening, The (Die Kunst des Hörens, Liessmann), 466 Art of Listening, The (Fromm), 463 Art of Listening, The (Korthase), 466 Art of Listening, The (Schmid), 465 “art of listening” as aesthetic norm, 9–10, 111 audience role as art, 486 Cage’s expansion of, 8, 434 as close or intense listening, 278, 288 defining aspects of, 3–8 education in (see education, music listening) first systematic approach to, 146 formal connotations of, 336 heuristic function of concept, 1, 4, 8, 10 history of, 10–18 jazz listening standards, 16 meaning of, 3–10, 23n7 modern attitudes toward, 149, 155 multicultural nature of, 8, 23n14 other senses and arts related to, 4, 5, 8, 212, 256 peak of (Weißmann), 103 rational vs. emotional, 9–10 relevance to social space, 281 for spoken word performances, 235 technology and, 15–16 in therapeutic practices, 463–64 threats to, 461–62, 466–67 usage and contexts for, 1, 463–67, 470 Aster, Jane, 59 Atkinson and Sharp (architectural firm), 262 attention. See attentiveness attentiveness. See also inattentiveness as active process, 145–46, 486 audience resistance and submission to, 38, 40, 41, 43–46 Page 3 of 40
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Index vs. background listening, 367 chamber concert origins of, 41–42 of contemporary listeners, 479–81 as contribution to performance, 479 crisis of, 15, 60, 67, 68, 97, 99, 102, 111–12, 395–96, 432 vs. daydreaming, 480, 481 democratization of art music and, 50 distraction on continuum with, 60–61, 65 etiquette manuals’ prescriptions for, 61, 62–63, 66–68 factors contributing to, 488–89 feigned, 63 “gold standard” for, 10 (p. 503) implicit listening and, 9 motivations for concert attendance and, 478–79 movement hindering (see “walking”) in musical criticism, 152 to musical structure, 479, 480–82, 486 musicians’ perspectives on, 479, 481, 487, 488 noise and distractions hindering, 101, 433 (see also talking) norms controlling, 56, 61–63, 64, 67, 68 opera audience trends and, 48–49 to recorded music, 399, 407, 411 redefined by Cage, 434 vs. silence, 477, 478 social class and, 41, 46 supported by architecture and design, 61, 64, 65, 479 Aubert, Jean Ernest, 429 audience. See also listeners architectural organization of, 13, 259–61, 262–64, 263f, 270, 273n27 attentiveness of (see attentiveness; inattentiveness; distracted listening) behavior of (see behavior, audience) decline in, 102, 103 instruction of (see education, music listening) ownership of repertoire, 41, 42 social composition of, 12 auditors, at British musical festivals, 256, 259, 260, 264–65, 266, 268 (see also listener types) “auditor” usage vs. “amateur,” 256, 272n10 applied to multiple listeners, 267, 268 as “assister,” 273n38 vs. composer/musician, 266 defined, 266, 267, 272n9 knowledge bias in, 267–68 as middle-class listener, 256–57, 264 Austria, musical intimacy in, 299n19 authenticity of sound (see fidelity) of touristic experience, 214, 217 Page 4 of 40
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Index Bach, Johann Sebastian, 81, 182n53, 452–53 Back, Les, 465 Bad Homburg, 85 Baedeker, Karl, 196–98, 211 Baggers, Marius, 322 Bagier, Guido, 110 Baillot, Pierre on music announcements, 165, 167, 169, 176–77 piano trios avoided by, 80 quoted in English program notes, 188 themed programming, 41 Baillot Quartet, 41–42 Ballet Méchanique (Antheil), 432 Bannelier, Charles, 46 Barbedette, Hippolyte, 43 barrel organs, 341 Barry, Eric, 405 Bashford, Christina, 5, 187 on 19th-century listening etiquette, 58 on concert programs, 11, 222n2 on modes of listening, 14 use of “intimacy,” 302n43 bataille de Marignan, La (Jannequin), 45, 52n28 Bateson, Gregory, 469 Baudelaire, Charles, 421–22, 423, 426, 435, 435n7 Bayreuth Festival, 38, 211, 216 Bayreuth Festspielhaus, 61, 134 Becker, Judith, 21 Becker, Tobias, 341 Beethoven, Ludwig van in concert programs and announcements, 85, 170, 171–74, 195, 220 concert venues, 232–34 cultural images of, 365, 370n27 deification of, 195 Fifth Symphony, 220, 221 influence on music concepts, 171 in Opera-Telephone promotions, 358f, 365 “Beethoven paradigm,” 171–72, 482 Beethoven Quartett Society, 195, 201n11 behavior, audience attentiveness (see attentiveness) of children, 62 composers’ influence on, 488–89 early departure, 44–45, 101–2 etiquette books guiding, 55, 57, 60 (p. 504) gender and, 39, 49–50 lighting cues for, 38, 43, 106 music’s influence on, 376 Page 5 of 40
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Index at opera performances, 11, 38, 40, 48 in Paris, 38, 41–42, 43, 49–50 physical movement (see “walking”) policing of, 61–63, 64, 67, 68 punctuality, 44, 106–7 religious practices and, 8, 10–11 repetitive listening (see music listening, repetitive) silence (see silence) social class and, 40, 41, 42 talking (see talking) touristic, 213–14 Bekker, Paul, 101, 104, 105, 106, 108, 109–10 Bel ami (Maupassant), 50 Bell, Alexander Graham, 362 belonging, collective, 41–42, 46 benefit concerts, 80–84 Benjamin, Walter, 398 Bennett, Tony, 79 Berg, Alban, 491n12 Bergk, Johann Adam, 428 Bériot, Charles Auguste de, 82 Berlin cosmopolitan status of, 346 military music in, 337–40, 339f, 340f popular music in, 340–46 urban identity in, 344 Berliner Bilder (Cucuel), 5, 6–7f Berliner Lokalpossen, 344 “Berliner Luft” (Lincke), 340–41 Berliner Schnauze, 344 Berlin Philharmonic, concert programs, 85–87, 96 Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, 212–13 Berlioz, Hector, 42, 322, 323 Besseler, Heinrich, 19, 110 Betzler, Emil, 105 Biard, François Auguste, 428, 429f Biedermann, Karl, 288–89 Billington, Elizabeth, 267 Bilse, Benjamin, 84 Bingham, Walter Van Dyke career, 379 Edison’s ambivalence about work of, 387–88 effects of music on mood studied by, 378, 379–81, 379f, 383, 384–86 functional listening created by, 388 marketing innovations of, 388 music classification by emotional effect, 381–82, 388 Birth of Tragedy, The (Nietzsche), 426 Bischoff, Friedrich, 466 Page 6 of 40
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Index Bishop, Henry, 267, 274n43 Björnberg, Alf, 405, 406 Blaukopf, Kurt, 407 Blondel, François, 246n21 Bodinus, Heinrich, 340 body. See also gender, musical intimacy closeness of four hands piano, 291 gestures, 58, 110 music making and, 302n42 physical movement (see “walking”) Boilly, Louis, 428 Bonds, Mark Evan, 9, 145 Bönig, Winfried, 487 Botstein, Leon, 5, 129, 181n31, 212, 256, 427 Boulez, Pierre, 177n2 Boumann, Johann, 247n33 Bourdieu, Pierre, 79, 200 bourgeois dramas, 235 Bourgeois Experience, The (Gay), 2 Brahms, Johannes intimacy in music of, 12, 293–96, 294f, 295f relationship with Herzogenbergs, 289, 290 women’s judgment preferred by, 290–91 Brainerd, Gertrude, 382 Breien, Bård, 462 Brinkmann, Reinhold, 485 Britain culture in (see Victorian culture) music festivals (see music festivals, British) program notes originating in, 187, 188–89, 193–99, 210–11 Brodbeck, Karl-Heinz, 469 Bruckner, Anton, 130 Bülow, Hans von, 86–87 Bürgerlichkeit, 11–12 Burney, Charles, 154–55, 158n29, 270n5, 273n38 (p. 505) Burns, William, 383–84 Busby, Thomas, 267 Buzard, James, 214 cafés-concerts, 46–50, 77, 82 Cage, John, 8, 434 Calm Sea (Mendelssohn), 284–85, 287 Calvelli-Adorno, Franz, 111 Campos, Rémy, 45 canonization, 79, 191, 218, 219, 220 Capitol Records, 404 Capturing Sound (Katz), 396 Cascade (Pauer), 85 Case, Anna, 373, 377–78 Page 7 of 40
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Index Cassatt, Mary and Lydia, 428–29 Cassel’s Household Guide (1869), 64, 72n57 Castil-Blaze, 155 Catalani, Angelica, 255–56, 265–66, 272n10 Catel, Louis, 238 Cavalleria Rusticana (Mascagni), 324 cell phones, 434, 479 chamber music applause in, 43 gender and, 304n49 intimacy of, 42, 292–93, 302n43 silence rooted in, 41–42 Chamber Music Today blog, 292, 305n62 Charlton, David, 11 Chartier, Roger, 428 Chéreau, Patrice, 301n29 Chester, Andrew, 455n6 Chevaillier, Lucien, 317–19, 326n12 Chevillard, Camille, 84 Chevillards, les, 84 children, behavior of, 62 Chladni, Ernst Florens Friedrich, 237, 243 Chopin, Frédéric, 285, 285f, 286f Chorale Le Grix, 84 Ciardi, Cesare, 86 CI Games, 462 civic theaters, German, 127 Civilizing Process, The (Elias), 56 Clarke, Eric, 21, 396 class, social in “art of listening,” 2–3 in auditor-vs.-amateur designations, 256–57, 264 bourgeois authority and identity, 2–3, 399, 403, 410, 411, 486 in British musical festivals, 255, 256–64, 258t, 263f, 270, 273n27 collective ownership and, 41 in European theater architecture, 313, 320, 321, 323 gramophone acceptance and, 401–2, 403 in hi-fi culture and discourse, 16, 409–10 income and, 272n16 integration of, 42, 50, 79, 255, 256–57, 258–59, 258t listening behaviors and, 40, 41, 42 listening ideals and, 399, 403, 410, 411, 486 music genres and, 14 in 1920s concert reform efforts, 104, 105–6 physical separation of, 259–61, 262–64, 263f, 270, 273n27 salon etiquette and, 57, 58, 63, 68, 280 separation of sounds and, 335, 347n4 in WWII German concert audiences, 132 Page 8 of 40
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Index classical concert programming, 77, 78 classical music, Western, 454n1 Classical Music for Dummies (Pogue, Speck), 486 Clement, Franz, 233 Clemenza di Tito, La (Mozart), 85 Client-Centered Therapy (Rodgers), 463–64 close (intense) listening, 12, 278, 287, 296, 299n29 Cohen, Sara, 450 collective belonging, 41–42, 46 Colonne, Édouard, 43, 323 Columbia Records, 402, 404 Combarieu, Jules, 316 Comini, Alessandra, 40 Commentar (Forkel), 147–50, 148f commercialization of music by Gewandhaus announcements, 165, 178n12 by phonograph industry, 13, 376, 378, 382, 383, 385–87 of popular music, 336–37, 342 composers audience behavior influenced by, 488–89 on inattentiveness, 489 music title choices, 172 (p. 506) prestige transfer and reception of, 163, 177n2, 177n3, 183n57 shifting emphasis on performance, 487 temperaments of, 152 composition, music evolution of, 318 for intimacy, 291–97 vs. performance, 153 symmetry in, 317–19, 322 concert attendance motivations for, 478–79 social needs satisfied by, 480, 483 concert aux Champs-Elysées, Le (Pelocq), 47, 48f “concert-goers,” 491n3 concert halls acoustics of, 127–28, 133–34 (see also acoustics, architectural) architecture of, 17, 38–39, 39f (see also architecture of performance spaces) art as focus of, 38 audience and (see audience) behavior and (see behavior) changing role in arts culture, 97, 100–101, 111 crisis of listening and, 15, 100, 103 decoration of, 134 establishment of, 235 listening practices exported by, 8 as prime listening location, 14–15 as tourist attractions, 216, 221 Page 9 of 40
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Index concert Musard aux Champs-Elysées, Le, 47, 47f concert programs. See also music announcements; program notes addenda to, 182n45 Beethoven’s influence on, 172–74 for benefit concerts, 81, 82 for cafés-concerts, 77, 82 collection of, 192–93, 217 eclectic musical taste reflected in, 80–86 Gewandhaus (see Gewandhaus music announcements) as instructional, 5, 169, 172, 174 Kursaal, 85, 94–95 listening experience shaped by, 209 Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, 128–31 as musico-touristic markers, 215, 215c, 216–17, 218–19, 221 as part of musical discourse, 174–77 promenade concerts, 85 research value of, 222n2 Salle Herz, 81, 81f, 91 Salle Pleyel, 82, 84, 91, 93 scholarly neglect of, 207 Singspiel-Halle, 85, 86f, 95 source material, 182n43 21st-century persistence of, 207 Concertpublikum (Reinicke), 4–5, 4f concert repertoire audience ownership of, 41, 42 for band concerts, 47–48 chamber music, 41 eclectic, 77, 82 in French and German concerts (1860–1910), 77, 80–87, 91–96 Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, 128, 130 in salon performances, 65, 66 Concerts Colonne, 322, 323 Concerts Populaires, 42–43 Concerts Spirituels, 234 Congress Hall, Munich, 133 “connoisseur,” 3, 256, 271n7 Conradi, August, 85 Conservatorium für Musikhörende, Frankfurt, 109 Cook, Emory, 405 Cook, Nicholas, 20, 40 Copland, Aaron, 146, 493n39 Corot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille, 428, 429f “Correspondences” (Baudelaire), 422, 423, 435n7 Costanzi, Domenico, 321 Cours Chevillard, 84 court concerts, 280 Crabb, George, 284 Page 10 of 40
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Index Crary, Jonathan, 15, 60–61 creare, 469 “creative listening,” 469–70 “crisis of attentiveness,” 15, 60, 67, 68 Crosse, John An Account, 261, 261f, 264–66, 271n7, 273n28 on auditor experiences, 267–68, 274n43 on Catalani festival performance, 265–66 (p. 507) on expressive silence, 273n20 on “Holy! Holy! Holy!” aria, 265, 273n30 on interior constructions for musical festivals, 261–62 listener terms used by, 267–68, 271n7, 274n40 Crotch, William, 155 Crystal Palace, 189, 191, 192f, 211 Cucuel, Eduard, 5, 6–7f “cultural capital,” 200 cultural fields, 19th-century, 79, 80, 87 culture emotions and, 427 high vs. low, 335, 336, 365, 367 “Curves of the Needle, The” (Adorno), 398, 402 Czerny, Carl, 489 Dahlhaus, Carl, 427, 481 d’Alembert, Jean-Baptiste Le Rond, 8 Damnation de Faust (Berlioz), 323 dance, 16, 379–80 Danneley, John Feltham, 271n7, 272n8 Dauphin, Claude, 168 Davioud, Gabriel, 320, 327n30, 328n33 Deaville, James, 12, 55 Debussy, Claude, 84, 425 Decca Records, 404 de Certeau, Michel, 124, 125 De-Deification of Music, The (Weißmann), 15 Degas, Edgar, 428–29 Delacroix, Ferdinand Victor Eugène, 285, 285f, 286f de la Motte-Haber, Helga, 465, 480 Dell’Antonio, Andrew, 11, 203n35 DeNora, Tia, 21, 107, 292 departure, early, 44–45, 101–2 Diamon, Linda Eve, 464 Diamond, Neil, 448–50 Diamond Disc (New Edison) system, 373–74, 378, 390, 403 “dilettante,” 271n7 d’Indy, Vincent, 317 Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 57 discourses. See music listening discourses distracted listening. See also inattentiveness; talking; “walking” Page 11 of 40
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Index background music for, 66 on continuum with attentiveness, 60–61, 65 increase in, 66, 67–68 sound reproduction technologies blamed for, 396, 401, 407 technological changes and, 434 “docile bodies” hypothesis (Foucault), 56, 57, 68 Dollase, Rainer, 481 Dömling, Wolfgang, 19–20 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 428 Dörffel, Alfred, 164, 165–66, 180n23 drama. See theater drama, bourgeois, 235 du Maurier, George, 63f Dunkler, François, 86 Durkheim, Émile, 56 eclecticism, in French and German concerts, 77, 78–79, 80–86 “ecology of listening,” 21, 396 Edison, Thomas on choice of recording artists, 377, 390 mood research used by, 383, 385, 387–88 scientific interests, 362 sound quality complaints received by, 390n18 Edison-Carnegie Music Research Program, 380, 382, 383, 387, 388, 390n25, 391n44 Edison Phonograph Company Diamond Disc (New Edison) system, 373, 390, 403 listeners trained by, 378–79, 387 marketing strategy of, 374–76, 383, 385, 387 mood research used by, 379, 380–83, 385–86 recording catalog, 377–78, 390n16 Re-Creation Recitals, 373, 374–75, 376, 377–78, 403 success and decline of, 388, 389n4 Tone Tests (see Tone Tests, Edison) Edition Zuhören, 466 education, music listening British musical festivals and, 264–66, 273n28 concert-going as, 42–44, 46 of gramophone listeners, 401–3 of hi-fi consumers, 405–8 (p. 508) mixed listening styles and, 50 on musical criticism, 154–55 as ongoing process, 479–80 in post-war Germany, 485 theater architecture and, 323, 330n52 through concert programs, 5, 169, 172, 174 through etiquette books (see etiquette books) through guide books, 5, 211–12 through program notes, 193, 194–95, 196, 199, 218–21 through spoken-word performances, 235 Page 12 of 40
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Index as Victorian cultural value, 193, 194–95, 196, 203n36 “effective,” 267 Eggert, Moritz, 489 Ehrenberg, Carl, 133–34 Ein politischer Hausknecht, 85 electronics industry, 410 Elias, Nobert, 56 Ella, John audience etiquette, 58 Musical Union (see Musical Union) political activity, 194 program notes distributed early by, 202n33 program notes written by, 188, 189–91, 190f, 193, 202n18, 209, 210 “Synoptical Analysis,” 188, 202n18, 203n36, 209, 210, 218 Ellis, Katharine, 10, 11, 14, 37 emotions. See also mood in commercialization of functional music, 376, 382, 383, 385, 387 contagion of, 427 disposition of, 133 history of, 426 language and, 427 memory and nostalgia, 17 moods affected by music, 378–79, 381, 385–86, 387, 388, 449 program notes and, 108–9, 199 rational vs. emotional listening, 9–10 repetitive listening and, 449, 450–51, 452 in social functions of music, 444 in understanding of music, 468, 469 Encyclopedia of Etiquette (Holt), 66 enfants Frémaux, les, 82 English Tourists in the Roman Campagna (Spitzweg), 208–9, 208f entertainment, vs. art, 38, 40, 46–50 Entgötterung der Musik, Die (Weißmann), 103 “épouseux du Berry, Les” (Lhuillier), 82, 92 Eroica (Beethoven), 172, 182n54 Esquisse d’une esthétique musicale scientifique (Lalo), 316–17 Essai sur l’Architecture Théatrale (Patte), 235 “Essay on Musical Criticism” (Burney), 154–55 etiquette books, on 19th-century salon listening attentiveness, 61, 62–63, 66–68 avoiding social blunders, 57, 60 crisis of manners and, 66–67, 68 permeable sound spaces, 64–65, 67–68 policing of behavior, 61–63, 64, 67, 68 power of, 57 public vs. parlor performances, 57–58 repertoire choices guided by, 65, 66 silence, 55–56 Page 13 of 40
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Index social behavior guided by, 55, 57, 60 everyday, sociology of, 21 everyday life, music integrated with, 336, 337, 342–44, 346. See also Gassenhauer Ewig fernes Paradies (Schaub), 486 “executant,” 266, 272n8 fantasy, possession/ownership and, 442, 443, 445, 446, 447, 451, 452, 455n18 Fantin-Latour, Henri, 428 Fauquet, Joël-Marie, 42 Feld, Steven, 21 Feldman, Morton, 489 Ferris, Jean, 465 Fétis, François-Joseph, 155 FFRR (full frequency range response), 404 fidelity, sound culture around (see hi-fi culture) demonstration of, 373–78 (see also Re-Creation Recitals; Tone Tests) discourse around, 405–8 in gramophone marketing, 402–3 high fidelity, 404–8 improvements in, 390n18, 404 modern listening formed by, 378–79, 387 in training of gramophone listeners, 402–3 (p. 509) Fiedler, Conrad, 60 Fiehler, Karl, 123 Fifth Symphony (Beethoven), 220, 221 finger-tapping studies, 379–80, 379f Flaubert, Gustave, 423 Flegeljahre (Paul), 461 Fontane, Theodor, 282 Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier de, 8–9, 145–46, 155 Ford, Andrew, 465–66 Forkel, Johann Nikolaus Burney plagiarized by, 158n29 lecture source texts, 147–49, 148f on listener engagement, 11, 149 musical criticism survey, 150–54 Ueber die Theorieder Musik, 146–50, 154, 158n29, 183n57 “Form of the Phonograph Record, The” (Adorno), 398 Förster, Heinz von, 469, 473n47 Foucault, Michel, 56, 57, 68 four hands piano, 291 Fourth Gallery, Vienna Hofoper, 489–90 Frajese, Vittorio, 324 France. See also Paris history of emotion in, 426 program notes in, 199 symmetry in aesthetics of, 315–19 Franchomme, Auguste, 43, 46 Page 14 of 40
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Index Frankfurt (am Main), Germany, 99, 101, 102, 103, 105–6 Fraser, Nancy, 57, 303n49 Frédéric Chopin (Delacroix), 286f Frederick William III, 238 Freihaustheater, 232 Fried, Michael, 429 Frith, Simon, 443–44, 447, 453 Fromm, Erich, 462, 463 Fuchs, Johann Nepomuk, 490 Führer durch den Konzertsaal (Kretzschmar), 212 Fuhrimann, Daniel, 483 Fuhrmann, Wolfgang, 12, 277 full frequency range response (FFRR), 404 Gasperini, Auguste de, 43 Gassenhauer, 342–46, 345f, 349n32 Gatewood, Esther, 382, 383, 390n25 Gay, Peter, 2–3, 58, 298n8 Gemeinschaft für Musik (Community for Music), 101, 104, 105 Gems of Deportment and Hints of Etiquette (Rayne), 57 gender hi-fi culture bias, 16, 405, 408–9 listening behaviors and, 39, 49–50 listening ideals and, 403 public vs. private roles and, 288–89, 303n49 salon performances and, 58–59, 70n28, 279–80 General History of Music (Burney), 158n29 General History of the Science and Practice of Music, A (Hawkins), 265 genres. See music genres George Sand (Delacroix), 286f Germany. See also Berlin; Munich; Frankfurt (a.M.) crisis of listening in (see listening culture crisis) denazification and music reeducation, 485, 490 eclecticism in, 84–86 musical intimacy in, 296–97, 299n19, 300n20 music reviews in, 199 National Socialism in, 110–11, 134, 485, 486 opera listening guides in, 211 preparatory opera articles in, 212 program notes and listening styles in, 196, 199, 203n36, 210, 211 sense of interiority common in, 296–97, 299n19, 300n20 travel handbooks in, 197–98 Gershwin, George, 425 Gershwin, Ira, 425 Gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork), 365 Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, 234 Gewandhaus music announcements authorship of, 165–66, 180n23 canonical value of, 220 Page 15 of 40
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Index commercial nature of, 165, 178n12 content of, 165, 173f, 175f delivery of, 165, 166, 172, 179n15 key designations in, 167, 169–70, 170c, 171c, 180n29, 181n31, 220 (p. 510) listening shaped by, 164 movement designations in, 169, 172–73, 181nn40–41, 182n53 music designations in, 166–67, 174–77, 180nn24–25 running number designations in, 167–68, 170c, 171c, 173–74, 181n35, 181n37, 220 titles of works in, 172 Giesbrecht-Schutte, Sabine, 336–37 Gigout, Eugène, 45, 46 Gilly, David, 239 Girdner, John, 67 Goehr, Lydia, 171–72, 478, 479, 480, 482 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 240 Goodman, Steve, 21 Good Manners (1889), 62 Gordon, Thomas, 464 Gould, Glenn, 433, 434 Gounod, Charles, 81 Goyon, Eugène de, 45–46 Gräfle, Albert, 365, 366f Graham, George Farquhar, 267 Grajeda, Tony, 391n44 Gramit, David, 20, 111–12 gramophone listeners, education of, 401–3 gramophones. See also phonographs class bias and, 401–2, 403 gender bias and, 401, 403 listening discourse shaped by, 403 marketing of, 402, 403 vs. Opera-Telephones, 367 solitary listening via, 401 Grand Casino de Paris, 82, 83f, 92 Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona, 314, 316f, 319, 320–21, 324 Grateful Dead, 451–52 Gratzer, Wolfgang, 3, 23n7, 461 Gray, Elisha, 369n9 Great Divide, 302n43 Great Transformation of Musical Taste, The (Weber), 77 Greenhill, Larry, 409 Gregor, Neil, 16–17, 123 Gropius, Martin, 244 Grove, George on Britishness of program notes, 188, 211 program note structure and function, 218, 219–20, 225n36 program notes written by, 198, 211 Guate Bu’a, Der, 85 Page 16 of 40
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Index Guck, Marion, 457n63 Guillaume Tell (Osborne, Bériot), 82 Guilmant, Alexandre, 45 Gumbert, Ferdinand, 82 Habermas, Jürgen, 11 habitus, 21, 79 Hagen Quartet of Austria, 23n14 Hailey, Christopher, 490 Haindl, Georg, 462 Hall-Witt, Jennifer, 274n40 “halo effect,” 177n3 Handbook for Travellers (Murray), 196, 197f, 203n36 Handel, George Frideric, 265, 273n30 Hanfstaengel, Franz, 365, 370n27 Hans Castorp, 400–401, 404, 408, 411, 412 Hanslick, Eduard active vs. passive listening, 365, 370n28 art of listening as aesthetic norm, 9–10, 111 on British listening and program notes, 188, 196, 199, 209–10, 211, 215 concept of well understood dynamic, 326n11 on forms used by Mascagni, 324, 330n55 musical formalism of, 315–17 music-centered approach of, 111 on role of concert hall, 101 on travel handbooks, 196–98, 209–10, 214 Hartley, Florence, 58, 62 Hausegger, Siegmund von, 100, 126, 133, 134 Hausmusik, 277, 299n17, 402 Haussmann, Georges Eugène, 313, 320 Hawkins, John, 265 Hay, Cecil, 65 Haydn, Franz Joseph, 268, 274n40, 488–89 headphones, 357, 358–59, 358f, 362, 364, 365 hearing accommodation in, 378 vs. active listening, 365 vs. listening, 467 Heide, Alfred, 4f Heinzmann, Johann Georg, 428 Heister, Hanns-Werner, 168, 222n2, 481 (p. 511) Helmholtz, Hermann von, 361, 362 Henkel, Heinrich, 85 Henry, Joseph, 246n24 Hensel, Fanny, 280, 284–85, 287, 301n33 Hensel, Wilhelm, 287 Hentoff, Nat, 16 Hérold, Ferdinand, 82 Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (Wackenroder, Tieck), 483 Page 17 of 40
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Index Herzogenberg, Elisabeth von, 289, 290, 291, 295–96 Herzogenberg, Heinrich von, 289, 290, 291 hi-fi culture authority of science and technology in, 412 class and gender bias in, 16, 405, 408–10 listening discourse in, 405–8 listening ideals in, 404–5, 408, 410, 411 rise of, 15–16 Hifi Hören (Listening to Hi-Fi), 409 high fidelity, 404–8. See also hi-fi culture Hiller, Ferdinand, 288 Hiller, Johann Adam, 146 Hindemith, Paul categories of listeners, 108, 479 education emphasized by, 105 listener-performer community valued by, 101 on loss of “old” audience, 103 mechanically produced sounds embraced by, 110 on need for evolving listening methods, 108 upper class excluded by, 104 Hirsch, Paul, 105 Hirschfeld, Robert, 213 Hochzeitsmarsch (Mendelssohn Bartholdy), 86 Höckner, Hilmar, 102 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 40, 51n6, 282, 422 Hohlwein, Ludwig, 364, 365 holidays, religious, 232, 244n5 Holl, Karl, 102, 103, 106 Holt, Emily, 66 “Holy! Holy! Holy!” aria (Redemption, Handel), 265, 273n30 Hope, Daniel, 486, 487, 488, 494n48 Hottmann, Katharina, 303n49 Howards End (Forster), 198 Hui, Alexandra, 13, 373 Hummel, Johann Nepomuk, 81 Humphry, Charlotte Eliza, 63 Hurtado, Aida, 303n49 Huxley, Aldous, 433 identity. See also music listening bourgeois, 2–3, 399 musical taste and, 12 nationalistic, 134 possession and, 443, 444 urban, 344, 346 ideology expert listener biases, 408 German music and, 110–11, 134, 485, 486, 490 perceived cultural threats and, 473n41 Page 18 of 40
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Index Iffland, August Wilhelm, 238, 239 Illustrirte Zeitung, 483, 484f, 497–99 Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, The (Goehr), 171 implicit listener trope, 8–9 Impression III: Concert (Kandinsky), 430–31, 431f Improvisations and Compositions (Kandinsky), 431 inattentiveness. See also attentiveness; behavior acknowledged in music listening literature, 486–90 causes of, 432, 488–89 composers’ perspectives on, 488–89 concert formats catering to, 47–48, 259, 480 daydreaming, 480, 481 implicit listening and, 9 neglected in scholarly literature, 481–86, 487, 489–90 nonstandard listening modes and, 480, 481, 483–85 industrialization, 432 inner experience. See also emotion; mood German interiority, 296–97, 299n19, 300n20 history of emotions and, 426–27 in music listening, 421–22, 423–24, 423f, 430 repeated listening and, 445, 446, 448–53 in silent reading, 427–28 social class and, 298n8 (p. 512) theoretical context for, 445–47, 453, 454 variability across time, 429 in visual art, 423–26, 428–32, 429f “inner urbanization,” 344, 346 intense (close) listening, 12, 278, 287, 296, 299n29 International Electrical Exhibition (1882), 363 International Listening Association, 464 Interrupted Reading (Corot), 428, 429f Intimacy (2001), 301n29 “intimacy,” 284, 287–88, 301n29, 302n43. See also musical intimacy Intimen bei Beethoven, Die (Gräfle), 365, 366f Istel, Edgar, 100 Jannequin, Clément, 45 Janowski, Marek, 482 Jardin-Turc concerts, 46–48 jazz, 16 Jelavich, Peter, 344 Johnson, James, 1, 4, 421 on attentiveness, 11, 37, 38, 40, 477 on bourgeois identity, 399 idealism vs. virtuosity, 79 on silence, 77–78, 477 Johnson, Samuel, 266, 272n9 Jullien, Adolphe, 80 Jullien, Louis, 46 Page 19 of 40
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Index Jung-Stilling, Johann Heinrich, 463 Kabasta, Oswald, 126, 130, 133, 134 Kalbeck, Max, 289 Kandinsky, Wassily, 430–31, 431f, 432 Kant, Immanuel, 463 Kaschuba, Wolfgang, 11 Katz, Mark, 396, 413n4 Keightley, Keir, 404–5, 408–9 Keil, Charles, 441, 453, 455n6. See also My Music Kerman, Joseph, 441 keys, of musical works designation in music announcements in, 167, 169–70, 170c, 171c, 180n29, 181n31, 220 inner character of, 151 Khnopff, Fernand, 40, 425, 425f, 428 Kiaulehn, Walter, 340 Kittler, Friedrich, 404 Kladderadatsch, 357 Klangweltwunder (Sound wonder of the world), 17, 18f, 221 Klassische Musik (Kreutziger-Herr, Bönig), 487 Klein, Franz, 370n27 Klein, James, 344 Klein, Melanie, 445, 446, 455nn17–19, 457n55 Kleinert, Günter, 480–81 Klengel, Julius, 283 Klengel, Moritz Gotthold, 283 Knopf, Kurt, 485–86 Kollo, Walter, 344 Königliches Nationaltheater, Berlin, 238, 239, 247n33 Korff, Gottfried, 344 Korthase, Karin, 466 Koselleck, Reinhart, 98, 110 Krauss, Clemens, 105, 124, 128 Kreisler, Johann, 422 Kreisleriana (Hoffmann), 282, 422 Kretzschmar, Hermann, 108, 212, 218, 219, 225n36 “Kreutzer” Sonata (Beethoven), 85 Kreutziger-Herr, Annette, 487 Kritische Briefe über die Tonkunst (Marpurg), 146 Kunst des Hörens, Die (Liessmann), 466 Kursaal, concert programs, 85, 94–95 Lacey, Kate, 67 Lachenmann, Helmut, 487 Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Pocket Companion, 62 Lafite, Carl, 490 Lalo, Charles, 316–19, 326n9, 326n11 Lami, Eugène, 40 La Moskowa, Prince de, 45, 46 Lamoureux, Charles, 42, 43, 84 Page 20 of 40
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Index Langhans, Carl Ferdinand, 238–39 Langhans, Carl Gotthard, 238 Lanzendörfer, Anselma, 5, 163, 220 Laokoön (Lessing), 149 L’art du violon (Baillot), 165, 169 “Latest Fashion in Music at Home, The” (du Maurier), 63f Latour, Bruno, 299n18 Le Grix, les, 84 (p. 513) Lehár, Franz, 341 Leichtigkeitslüge, Die (Noltze), 488 Leitfaden, 211, 212 leitmotifs, 211 Leonard, Anne, 429 Leppert, Richard, 432 Lessing, Theodor, 149, 335–36 Levin, Thomas, 407 Levinson, Jerrold, 480 Lhuillier, Edmond, 82 Liessmann, Konrad Paul, 466, 467 lighting attentiveness and, 38, 43 musical intimacy and, 284–85, 296 punctuality enforced with, 106 Lincke, Paul, 340 Lindahl, Kay, 464 Lissa, Zofia, 20 Listen (Kerman), 441 listeners Adorno’s typology of, 13, 111, 466, 482–83, 492n27 expert, 399, 403, 407, 408, 410 genre typologies and, 14 idealized, 14, 364–65, 367 Illustrirte Zeitung categories, 483, 484f “tuned,” 285, 287, 301n33 “listeners,” usage of, 491n3 listening. See music listening Listening as Spiritual Practice (Dell’Antonio), 203n35 listening culture crisis, in interwar Germany audience perspectives on, 99, 105, 106 audience punctuality, 106 declining audiences, 102 evolving listening styles, 108–10 financial troubles, 102 journalistic perspectives on, 98–99, 100–103, 104–5 as part of larger social crisis, 100, 110–11 reform attempts, 103–7 scholarly perspectives on, 97–98, 111 urgency of, 110 Page 21 of 40
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Index Listening in Paris (Johnson), 37, 423, 426 “listening through reading,” 5, 212, 256 Listening to Schumann (Khnopff), 40, 425–26, 425f, 428 Liszt, Franz, 82, 288, 421–22 Lohengrin (Wagner), 47, 48, 52n34, 422 London Philharmonic Society, 189, 202n23 long-playing records (LPs), 404, 407, 411 Lorenzkowski, Barbara, 63 Lost Art of Listening, The (Nichols), 463 Lott, Sumner, 304n49 Lucie de Lammermoor (Donizetti), 51n8 Lutz, Hans, 467, 473n41 Maase, Kaspar, 342 MacCannell, Dean, 214, 215 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 463 Magic Mountain, The (Mann), 15, 400–401, 412 Maitland, J. A. Fuller, 274n43 Mann, Thomas, 15, 400, 412 Mantz, Paul, 423–24 Mara, Gertrud Elisabeth, 267 markers, musico-touristic, 215, 215c, 216–17, 218–19, 221 marketing. See commercialization of music Marpurg, Friedrich Wilhelm, 146 Martini, Pietro, 428 Mascagni, Pietro, 324 Mattheson, Johann, 11, 150 Mauclair, Camille, 322, 426 Maupassant, Guy de, 50 Maurin, Pierre, 41 Maus, Fred Everett, 10, 441 Maxwell, William, 377, 380, 381, 383, 387, 390n18 Mayseder, Joseph, 82 McClary, Susan, 305n59 McGuire, Charles Edward, 3, 12, 255 Meisterbernd, Max, 101–2, 109 Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Fanny. See Hensel, Fanny Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Felix in eclectic repertoires, 86 intimate performances of, 288 movement designations, 182n54 on performance visibility and frequency, 166, 179n22 program creation by, 166, 182n53 salon culture critiqued by, 300n20 sociable music making by, 183 Wanderjahre, 287, 302n40 (p. 514) Mendelssohn, Lea, 280 Mersmann, Hans, 110 Merten, Reinhold, 104 Page 22 of 40
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Index Metamorphosen (Strauss), 17 Métra, Olivier, 86 Metzger, Heinz-Klaus, 470 Meyer, Sabine, 479, 487 Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 199 middle-class culture average income, 272n16 bourgeois authority and identity, 2–3, 399, 403, 410, 411, 486 at British music festivals, 255, 256–57, 258–59, 258t separation of sounds in, 335, 347n4 migration, music and, 23n14 military concerts, 337–41, 339f, 340f Miller, Oskar von, 363–64, 369n21 misogyny, 408–9 Missfelder, Jan Friedrich, 19 modernity, 98, 100 Monnais, Edouard, 42 mood attention and, 480 commercialization of music and, 13, 376, 382, 383, 385–87 music’s effects on, 378–79, 381, 385–86, 387, 388, 449 research, 380–85 Mood Change Charts, 383, 384f, 385, 386 Mood Change Parties, 383 Mood Change Test, 383–85 Mood Music (Edison Company), 376, 378–79, 385–86, 388 Morat, Daniel, 14, 335 Motta, F. C., 245n12 movements, designation in music announcements, 169, 172–73, 181nn40–41, 182n53 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 80, 85, 170, 220, 477, 482 Müller, Adam Heinrich, 461–62, 470 Munich Opera Telephone. See Opera-Telephone Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, during World War II Civic Concerts series, 131 concert attendance, 125–27 concert programs and reviews, 128–31 listener experience, 131–35 performances after bombing raids, 123–25 programming repertoire, 128, 130 social stratification within audiences, 132 Murray, John, 196, 197f, 203n36, 209, 210, 221 Musard, Philippe, 46, 47, 80 Museums-Gesellschaft (Museum Society, Frankfurt), 101, 102, 105, 106–7, 114n28 music behavior influenced by, 376 classification by mood effect, 381, 386, 387, 388 commercialization of (see commercialization of music) contemporary ubiquity of, 433 Page 23 of 40
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Index education (see education) functional, 376, 386, 388 making, 277–78, 282–83, 302n42, 402, 468 (see also Gassenhauer; performance of music) meaning of, 467, 469 mood affected by, 378–79, 381, 385–86, 387, 388, 449 mood-related research, 380–85 motor effects of, 379–81, 386 ownership/possession of, 41–42, 442–48, 453, 455n6 psychological understanding of, 376, 379–83, 388 public and private concepts shaped by, 291 radio and trivialization of, 15 relationships to, 441–42 rhetoric of, 150 as school of listening, 5 social class and (see class, social) societal function of (see music, social role of) sociocultural semantics of, 291, 305n59 understanding by listening, 467–70 music, social role of. See also behavior, audience concert halls and, 97, 100–101, 111 crisis and (see listening culture crisis, in interwar Germany; music listening, crisis of) (p. 515)
in interwar Germany, 100–103, 104–5 popular music, 337, 342–44, 346 possession as, 444 unification as, 100–103, 104–5 musical criticism crisis and (see listening culture crisis, in interwar Germany; music listening, crisis of) critiques of education efforts, 154, 158n29 factors influencing, 163, 177n2, 177n3 Forkel’s survey of, 150–54 need for education, 154–55 observation and, 13 as source for listening research, 12, 21 musical culture, study of, 20 musical festivals, British aesthetic-educational structures, 264–66, 273n28 charities supported by, 255, 257–58 event-driven, 272n13 linguistic-verbal structures, 266–68 middle-class expansion of, 255, 258–59, 258t, 268–69, 277 physical-spatial structures, 259–64, 260f, 261f, 263f, 269–70, 273nn26–27 social structure of audiences, 257–59 speculative festivals, 272n13 ticket prices, 259, 262, 263, 264 musical formalism, 315–17, 318–19, 324 “musical images,” 445 musical intimacy Page 24 of 40
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Index in chamber music performance, 292–93 composing music for, 291–97 in discourse, 290–91, 296 erotic/sexual connotations, 284, 287, 290, 296 in Germany and Austria, 299n19 of Hausmusik, 277–78 intense listening, 287 interiority and, 287, 290, 297 lighting for, 284–85, 296 musician–listener distance, 287–88 performance restraint and, 287–88 social frame for, 285–87, 290, 296 term usage, 278, 281 vs. virtuosity and self-representation, 282, 287–88, 296 musical literacy “listening through reading,” 5, 212, 256 in Victorian culture, 191–92, 194–95, 202n20 Musical Manual (Busby), 267 “musical public sphere,” 279 “musical sights,” 216, 218, 220 musical societies, 280, 281 musical styles, 151 musical taste architectural acoustics and, 231–32, 242, 244 of auditors at musical festivals, 256, 259, 264–65, 268 bourgeois identity and, 12 eclectic, 78, 79, 80–86 factors influencing, 151 in musical criticism, 151, 152 musical theater, 77, 79, 82, 87 Musical Union Ella’s purpose for, 194, 195 listening styles at, 195 music sacralized at, 195 program notes, 179n15, 189–91, 193, 195, 196, 196f, 202n33, 210 Music and Reason (Smith), 466 music announcements. See also concert programs; program notes asynchronous development of, 174 Beethoven’s influence on, 171–74 Gewandhaus (see Gewandhaus music announcements) listening process influenced by, 163–64, 167, 169, 174–77 music designations in, 165–71, 180nn24–25, 220 music appreciation, 146 music genres architectural differentiation of, 237, 238, 243, 244, 318 art music, 50, 335–37, 342, 412 chamber music, 41–42, 43, 292–93, 302n43, 304n49 cultural fields crossed by, 80 Page 25 of 40
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Index designation in music announcements, 166–67, 180n25 hierarchies of, 14 inner character of, 151 intimacy of, 292–93, 302n43 (p. 516) in musical criticism, 151, 152 popular music (see popular music) relating to music and, 441 social class and, 14 Western classical music, 454n1 musicians. See also performance of music on audience attentiveness, 479, 481, 487, 488 critical bias of, 153 “musicking,” 21, 336, 346, 488 music listening as active engagement, 145–46, 147, 149, 153, 203n35, 433–34, 463–64, 486 active vs. passive, 365, 370n28, 486 as art, 486 (see also “art of listening”) attentiveness in (see attentiveness) changes in, 432–35 close/intense, 12, 278, 287, 296, 299n29 creative, 469–70 crisis of, 15, 60, 67, 68, 97–98, 395–96 (see also “crisis of attentiveness”; listening culture crisis) by critics, 152, 154–55 cultural and intellectual influences on, 432 defined, 19 depicted in paintings and drawings, 4–5, 4f, 6–7f, 38–40, 39f discourses about (see music listening discourses) distracted (see distracted listening) eclectic, 77, 78–79, 80–86 ecology of, 21, 396 education for (see education, music listening) emotional vs. rational, 9–10, 154, 199 as everyday practice, 336, 337, 342–44, 346 (see also Gassenhauer) Forkel’s strategies for, 152–53, 183n57 functional, 386, 388 guided (see touristic listening) habits (see behavior) vs. hearing, 3, 365, 467 history of, 10–18, 19, 20–21, 111 idealized, 14, 364–65, 367, 406, 408–10 ideological biases affecting (see ideology) implicit, 8–9 inner experience of, 421–22, 423–24, 423f, 426, 430, 435, 435n7 instruction (see education; etiquette books; program notes) “listening through reading,” 5, 212, 256 lighting and (see lighting) modes of (see music listening, modes of) Page 26 of 40
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Index multisensory practices, 4 music announcements/concert programs and, 163–64, 167, 169, 174–77, 209 “new” vs. 19th-century, 107–8, 111 nonlinear/nondual changes in, 19 other arts as context for, 4 ownership/possession and, 41–42, 442–48, 453, 455n6 personal temperament in, 152 phonograph industry’s influence on, 378–79, 383, 385, 387 popular music and, 443 to popular vs. art music, 335–36, 342 prestige transfer and, 163, 177n2, 177n3, 183n57 in private settings (see musical intimacy; private music performance) program notes and, 188, 198, 200 psychological understanding of, 163, 174, 376, 379–83, 388, 463–64 as “pure” aesthetic perception, 3–4 radio’s influence on, 367, 399 as reciprocal process vs. stimulus-response, 111 religious connotations of, 195, 203n35 repetitive (see music listening, repetitive) scholarly perspectives on, 1–2, 18–22 silence (see silence) social class and (see class, social) in solitude, 400–401, 402 sound reproduction’s influence on, 217, 396, 399, 400–403, 405, 406–7, 411 spatial layout and, 322–23, 324 technological tools for, 433–34 through Opera-Telephone, 358f, 363, 364–65, 367 touristic (see touristic listening) understanding music and, 467–70 in urban appropriation of popular music, 342, 346, 349n32 (see also Gassenhauer) in WWII Germany, 131–35 (p. 517) music listening, modes of hierarchy of, 10, 14, 483, 487 literary treatment of, 481–88 multiplicity of listening habits, 5, 10, 13, 14, 18 nonstandard, 480, 481, 483–85 music listening, repetitive emotions evoked by, 449, 450–51, 452 interviews, 448–53 ownership fantasies and, 444–48, 449 theoretical context for, 445–47, 453, 454 music listening discourses in concert programs and reviews, 130, 174–77 musical intimacy in, 290–91, 296 normative listening ideals in, 408, 410, 411 shaped by sound reproduction technologies, 403, 405–10, 411 music making. See also performance of music bodily experience of, 302n42 Page 27 of 40
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Index Hausmusik, 277–78, 402 informal (see Gassenhauer) sociable, 282–83 understanding music and, 468 musicology. See also work-concept critique on the work concept, 20 new/critical , 410, 415n65 work-centered approach, 218 music psychology, 163 Music: The Art of Listening (Ferris, Worster), 5, 465 Musikalische Akademie, 126 Musikalische Nachrichten und Anmerkungen (Hiller), 146 Musikhören, verstehen, erleben (Stege), 486 Musikvereinssaal, 234, 245n9 musique mise, La (Fétis), 155 My Music (Keil), 441, 448, 454, 456n31 Nabokov, Vladimir, 462 Naked Heart, The (Gay), 2 National Socialism, in Germany, 110–11, 134, 485, 486. See also World War II Nationaltheater, Berlin, 238, 239, 247n33 Navigation of Feeling, The (Reddy), 426–27 Nead, Lynda, 56 “neue Hören, Das” (Westphal), 107 “neueren Apparate der Akustik, Die” (Pisko), 360–61 Neue Sachlichkeit (New Sobriety), 107, 109 Neues Gewandhaus, 241, 244 Neumann, Sonja, 15, 357 Newark, Cormac, 40, 41, 44 New Edison (Diamond Disc system), 373–74, 378, 390, 403. See also Re-Creation Recitals; Tone Tests “new musicologists,” 410 New Sobriety (Neue Sachlichkeit), 107, 109 Ney, Joseph-Napoléon, 45 Nichols, Michael, 463 Nieden, Gesa zur, 13, 313 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 426 Nisius, Heinz Joseph, 406, 409 noise, 101, 432–33. See also talking Noltze, Holger, 488 Notturno (Spohr), 182n53 Nußbaumeder, Christoph, 462 Obelkevich, James, 20 Obert, Simon, 470 O’Connell, Joseph, 409 Offenbach, Jacques, 49, 341 1000 Places to See Before You Die (Murray), 221 Ono, Yoko, 434 “On the Fetish Character in Music” (Adorno), 395 Page 28 of 40
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Index On the Sensation of Tone (Helmholtz), 361 opera. See also Opera-Telephone architecture for, 13, 320–21, 324 (see also symmetry) art-entertainment distinction muddied by, 38 compositional symmetry, 317–18, 322, 323 concert programming, 77, 78 as cultural field, 79, 80, 87 cultural identity and, 365, 367 declining interest in, 48–49 guidebooks and articles for, 211, 212, 213 houses, 11, 38 late arrival and early departure from, 44–45 listening behaviors, 11, 38, 40, 48 vs. symphonic music in WWII Germany, 124 21st-century technology used by, 368 virtuosity, 79, 80, 82 (p. 518) “Opera and the Long-Playing Record” (Adorno), 407 “opera galas,” 81 opera houses, 11, 38 Opera-Telephone decline of, 366–67 disembodied nature of, 360 introduction of, 357–60, 358f, 363 vs. radio, 360 subscriptions to, 359–60, 359f, 364, 366 as technical innovation, 15, 360, 361f, 364, 367–68 operetta, 49–50, 340–41 orchestras, Viennese, 232, 233, 234, 245n6 organ grinders, 341 Osborne, George, 82 Ottmer, Carl Theodor, 244 ownership/possession of music collective, 41–42 as fantasy, 442, 443, 444, 446 identity and, 443, 444 legal, 442 recognition and, 442–43, 444, 453, 455n6 repeated listening and, 444–48 as social function of music, 444 sound reproduction and, 444 Pacific Phonograph Company, 362 Pailleron, Edouard, 50 Palais Garnier, 40 Pander, Oscar von, 130 Parent Effectiveness Training (Gordon), 464 Paris architectural influence of, 313–14 collective belonging in, 41 Page 29 of 40
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Index eclecticism in, 80–84 listening behaviors in, 38, 41–42, 43, 49–50 opera in, 48–49 parlor performances, 57–58. See also salon performances Pasdeloup, Jules, 42, 43 Patte, Pierre, 235–36, 238, 244, 246n21 Pauer, Ernst, 85 Paul, Jean, 461 Pelocq, Jules, 47, 48f, 49f Perfall, Karl von, 364 performance of music bodily closeness of four hands piano, 291 criticism of, 151, 152, 153 in intimate settings, 282–83, 287–88, 291 public vs. private, 279–83 shift in attention to, 487, 488 spaces for (see architecture of performance spaces) “period ear,” 19 Peukert, Detlev, 98 Pfitzner, Hans, 486 philosophy, as listening art, 465 “phonograph effect,” 396 phonographs. See also gramophones choice offered by, 388 Edison (see Edison Phonograph Company; New Edison) invention of, 362 marketing and promotion of, 373–78, 379 (see also Re-Creation Recitals; Tone Tests) musical practice influenced by, 396, 413n4 noise tuned out by, 378 recordings as “real music,” 376, 403 Phryné (Saint-Saëns), 84 piano trios, 80 Pisko, Franz Josef, 360–61 “Playing Piano Four Hands” (Adorno), 112 Pogue, David, 486, 487 Pohlenz, Christian August, 166 politics, 16–17, 490. See also ideology popular music appropriated by people, 342, 346, 349n32 (see also Gassenhauer) vs. art music, 335–37, 342 in benefit concert programs, 82 commercialization and democratization of, 336–37, 342 emergence of, 77, 78, 87 Gassenhauer, 342–46, 345f, 349n32 military music and, 337–41 operettas, 340–41 radio programming dominated by, 367 recognition and possession of, 442–43 Page 30 of 40
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Index revolution, 336, 337 Schlager music, 340–41 silence vs. noise in, 335 societal function of, 337, 342–44, 346 (p. 519) possession of music. See ownership/possession of music Pozzo, Andrea, 320 prestige transfer, 163, 177n2, 177n3, 183n57 private music performance gender roles and, 58–59, 70n28, 279–80, 288–89, 303n49 intimacy of (see musical intimacy) vs. public performance, 279–83 salon performances, 58–59, 70n28 social spaces for, 281–83, 297 “private sphere,” 279 program notes. See also concert programs; music announcements as argument for investment in music, 194 British origins of, 187, 188–89, 193–99, 210–11 content of, 191, 198, 202n17 criticism of, 198–99 defined, 187 emergence of, 210–11 geographical spread of, 199–200, 213 listening experiences shaped by, 188, 198, 200 musical literacy assumed by, 191–92, 202n20 names and descriptors for, 191, 202n18, 220 sacralization of music and, 195 sale of, 189, 193, 202n25 style of, 191, 202n19 Victorian culture and (see Victorian culture) program notes, touristic listening and canonizing function of, 218, 219, 220–21 framing function of, 218 guiding function of, 218, 219–21 language of, 219–20 “leading motives” and, 211 as markers, 215, 215c, 216–17 structure of, 218 touristic knowledge and, 218–19, 220, 225n36 travel guide parallels, 196–98, 209–10, 211–12 promenade concerts, 37–38, 80, 85 Prommers, 37–38 P.-S. Germain, Salle des Concerts du Conservatoire, 38–40, 39f psychology active listening, 463–64 in understanding of music, 376, 379–83, 388 public opinion, eclectic tastes and, 78, 79 “public sphere,” 279 public vs. private music performance, 279–83 Page 31 of 40
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Index Puccini, Giacomo, 84 punctuality, audience, 44, 106–7 Quartet Party at the Musical Union, 196f, 210 Raabe, Peter, 124 radio Adorno’s criticism and embrace of, 398–99, 407–8, 411 “art of listening” and, 15, 466 concert hall decline and, 103 decline of critical music listening blamed on, 398–99 dynamic range compromised by, 398–99 listening styles shaped by, 367, 399 vs. Opera-Telephone, 360, 366 popularity of, 367 popular music programming, 367 as threat to musical experts, 399 “Radio Symphony, The” (Adorno), 398 RAF Coastal Command, 404 reading art of, 5, 8, 212, 256 silently vs. aloud, 427–28 recognition, 442–43, 444, 453, 455n6 recording. See sound reproduction Re-Creation Discs, 381, 382, 385, 386 Re-Creation Recitals, 373, 374–75, 376, 377–78, 403 Reddy, William, 426–27 Redlich, Hans, 110 Reez, Leslie, 466–67 reflection, understanding music and, 468–69 Reichardt, Johann Friedrich, 154 Reinecke, Carl, 180n23 Reinhard, Max, 134 Reinicke, René, 4 Reis, Philipp, 360 Religion and Music (Mauclair), 426 Religion de la Musique, La (Mauclair), 322 religious music, 255–56 (p. 520) religious practices holidays, 232, 244n5 listening to spoken word, 10–11 music listening behaviors correlating with, 8, 10–11 Victorian music listening and, 195 repertoire. See concert repertoire Représentation d’un ballet dans un café-concertdes Champs-Elysées (Pelocq), 49f reverberation, 237, 238, 250n59 reverberation times, 231, 237, 240–42, 249n52 Reverie (Aubert), 429 Rhapsody in Blue (Gershwin), 425, 433 rhetoric of music, 150 Page 32 of 40
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Index Rhode, Johann Gottlieb, 237 Richter, Ludwig, 299n17 Richter, Lukas, 342 Ridge, Ruppert, 222n2 Riehl, Wilhelm Heinrich, 278, 297 Ries, Ferdinand, 182n53 Rochlitz, Friedrich, 13, 483 Rodgers, Carl, 463–64 Rondo brillante (Weber), 85 Ronnefeldt, Emily, 108 Rötter, Günther, 480 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 8–9, 266, 270n5, 271n7, 272n10 Rubinstein, Anton, 85 Ruhbaum, Antje, 289, 290 running numbers, of musical works, 167–68, 170c, 171c, 173–74, 181n35, 181n37, 220 Russolo, Luigi, 432 Sabine, Wallace Clement, 231, 244, 328n36 Sacred Art of Listening, The (Lindahl), 464 Saenger, Paul, 427–28 Saint-Saëns, Camille, 82, 84 Salle Herz, 44, 44f, 81, 81f, 91 Salle Pleyel, 82, 84, 91, 93 “salon,” 69n3, 280–81 Salon at 4:00 p.m., The (Biard), 428, 430f Salon of 1785 (Martini), 428 salon performances etiquette books for (see etiquette books) gender bias in, 279–80 hostess roles, 58–59, 70n28 as hybrid public-private settings, 55, 58, 280–81 impromptu music performance issues, 59–60, 70n28, 70n30 musical intimacy of, 281–82, 297 sonic terrains in, 61–63 Sand, George, 285, 285f, 286f Sängerfeste, 277 Saunders, George, 235, 236, 244, 246n24 Schafer, R. Murray, 5–8, 347n4, 470 Schaub, Stefan, 486 Schauspielhaus, Berlin, 238–42, 240f, 241f, 244, 249n52 Scherchen, Hermann, 101, 107, 114n28 Schering, Arnold, 19 Schicht, Johann Gottfried, 165 Schilt, Katelijne, 163 Schinkel, Karl Friedrich, 239, 244 Schlager music, 340–41, 342, 348n20 Schmid, Holger, 465 Schönberg, Arnold, 105, 200, 430, 431, 479, 490 Schöpfung, Die (Haydn), 268 Page 33 of 40
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Index Schubert, Franz, 80, 81, 177n2 Schulz, Johann Philipp Christian, 165 Schumann, Clara, 166, 290, 291, 304n49 Schumann, Robert, 182n54 Schwartze, Theodor, 362 sciences, self-conception of, 464–65 Scott, Derek, 336, 337 Scudo, Paul, 421 secondary structures, 236, 238, 239 “seeing and being seen,” 319, 321, 483 Seidl, Arthur, 100 self-help practices, 464, 469–70 senses, 5, 19, 60, 66 “sensibility,” 266, 267 Shaw, George Bernard, 198–99, 223n15 Sheehan, James, 104 sheet music, 341, 342, 343f, 387 Sighicelli, Antonio, 81, 81f, 82 silence vs. attentiveness, 477, 478, 479 at British musical festivals, 259, 273n20 in close listening, 278 compromises and resistance to, 40, 44–46, 66–67, 77–78, 101 (see also talking) of contemporary listeners, 479 (p. 521) enforcement of, 58, 70n20, 235 expressive, 273n20 in high- vs. low-culture, 335 imperfect, 67 late 18th-century adoption of, 145 as listening standard, 58 prescribed by etiquette books, 62–63 program notes and, 195, 209 rise of, 11, 13–14 sacralization of music and, 195 Simmel, Georg, 66, 318–19, 346 Simmons, Jack, 198 Simon, Heinrich, 104, 109 Simon, Yannick, 43 Singakademie, Berlin, 241, 244, 249n52 Singspiel-Halle, concert programs, 85, 86f, 95 Sisman, Elaine, 271n7 Small, Christopher, 19, 21, 346, 488 Smith, Charles, 466 Smith, Mark, 19 “sociability of listening,” 78 “social spaces,” 278, 281 Société des Concerts, 39, 40, 42, 44 societies of music, 280, 281 Page 34 of 40
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Index sociology, as listening art, 465 sociology of the everyday, 21 Soldat-Roeger, Marie, 304n49 “Sonata, what do you want of me?,” 8–9, 145–46, 155 Sonata for Violoncello and Piano in F major (Brahms), 293–96, 294f, 295f sonic spaces, 61–68, 72n57 Sonntagsmusiken (Mendelssohn), 280 sounding markers, musico-touristic, 216–17 sound reflection, 237, 238 sound reproduction features of, 396 gramophones, 367, 401–3 (see also phonographs) high fidelity, 404–8 military applications for, 404 musical practice influenced by, 396, 413n4 music listening discourse shaped by, 403, 405–10, 411 music listening influenced by, 396, 400–403, 405, 406–7, 411 Opera-Telephone (see Opera-Telephone) phonographs (see phonographs) possession and, 444 radio (see radio) repeated listening enabled by, 444, 445, 446, 447, 448 stereophonic recording, 404 soundscapes, high- and low-fi, 347n4 sound signals, audience guided by, 106 Sound wonder of the world, 17, 18f Soziologische Ästhetik (Simmel), 318 Space Between Worlds (Saenger), 427 Speck, Scott, 486, 487 Spitta, Philipp, 291 Spitzweg, Carl, 208, 208f Spohr, Louis, 182n53 spoken word performances acoustics of, 235, 243, 361–62 education and moral influence through, 235 listening practices, 10–11 Staatsoper (State Opera), 124 Staatsorchester (State Orchestra), 126 Städtische Konzerte (Civic Concerts), 131 Stege, Fritz, 486 Stephan, Heinrich von, 362 Stephens, Catherine, 267 Stereophile magazine, 409 stereophonic recording, 404 Stern, Günther, 108, 466 Sterne, Jonathan, 98, 387, 402–3, 404 Stockhausen, Elisabeth von (a.k.a. Elisabeth von Herzogenberg), 289, 290 Stoffer, Thomas, 480–81 Page 35 of 40
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Index Storck, Karl, 342 Straus, Oscar, 341–42 Strauß, Johann, 341 Strauss, Richard, 17, 124 structural listening among modes of listening, 487 criticized as cultural hegemony, 410 decline in, 395–96, 412 hi-fi recordings and, 408 vs. “pure” aesthetic perception, 4 Verein standards and, 479 Stuck, Franz von, 365, 370n27 Stuckenschmidt, Hans Heinz, 102 Studies in Melody (Bingham), 379 Sun Tzu, 463 (p. 522) symmetry in architecture, 317, 320, 321–22, 323, 327n30, 328n33 in musical composition, 317–18, 322, 323 musical genres differentiated by, 318 Symphony Hall, Boston, 242, 242f, 244 “symphony,” meaning of, 166, 180n24 Symphony no. 1 (Beethoven), 232 Symphony no. 2 (Ries), 182n53 synaesthesia, 423, 431 “Synoptical Analysis,” 188, 202n18, 203n36, 209, 210, 218 Tackley, Catherine, 16 talking, by audiences acoustic design and, 235 audience ownership and, 41 at British musical festivals, 259 at café-concerts, 46–50 at contemporary performances, 480 in high- vs. low-culture divide, 335 in 1920s Germany, 101, 102 at opera performances, 40, 43 in salon and parlor performances, 57, 61, 64–65, 66, 67–68 social class and, 40, 43 vs. understanding music, 145–46 Tannhäuser March, 52n34, 84, 421–22 TAPE PIECE III/Snow Piece (Ono), 434 Taruskin, Richard, 40 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich, 86 Teatro Costanzi, Rome, 314, 315f, 319, 321, 324, 328n41 techne, 463, 469 technology Adorno’s criticism and embrace of, 396, 398–99, 407–8, 411 listeners as music-making participants through, 433–34 listening transformed by, 15 Page 36 of 40
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Index Opera-Telephone (see Opera-Telephone) 21st-century, 368 “Telephon, Mikrophon und Radiophon” (Schwartze), 362 telephone, 360–64, 362, 366 Tewinkel, Christiane, 9, 17, 477 theater. See also opera architectural acoustics for, 235 architecture (see architecture) bourgeois drama, 235 civic, 127 education and, 235, 323, 330n52 musical, 77, 79, 82, 87 religious holidays and, 244n5 social class and, 313, 320, 321, 323 Viennese, 232–34 “theater police,” 235 Theater an der Wien, 232, 233, 233f Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris, 313, 314f, 319, 320, 321–23, 327n30 Théâtrophone, Paris, 362–63 Thelen-Frölich, Andrea, 133 Theorie der Verbreitung des Schalles für Baukünstler (Rhode), 237 therapeutic practices, 463–64 Thompson, Emily, 15, 376, 377, 402, 403 Thorau, Christian, 1, 5, 128–29, 207, 222n2 Tieck, Ludwig, 483 titles of works, 172 Tkaczyk, Viktoria, 12–13, 231 Tone Tests, Edison. See also Re-Creation Recitals as accommodative listening experience, 378 commercial effectiveness of, 377 consumer education through, 403 critical listening during, 403 format of, 373, 374f, 375f, 377, 389n9, 389n14 marketing strategy behind, 374–76 Tosca (Puccini), 84 “touristic ear,” development of, 211, 212 touristic listening architecture and, 17 authenticity and, 214, 217 defined, 213 “leading motives” and, 211 markers for, 215, 215c, 216–17 musical sights, 216, 218, 220 program notes as guides for (see program notes, touristic listening and) touristic behavior and, 213–14 touristic knowledge and, 5, 218–19, 220, 225n36 Town Hall, Birmingham, 269, 269f Traité de l’instrumentation (Berlioz), 322 Page 37 of 40
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Index travel guide literature, 196–98, 209–10, 211, 213 Treatise on Theatres (Saunders), 236 Trummer, Carl, 147 “tuned” listeners, 285, 287, 301n33 Turnerfeste, 277 Ueber die Theorieder Musik (Forkel), 146–50, 154, 158n29, 183n57 Ueber Theater, oder Bemerkungen über Katakustik in Beziehung auf Theater (Ferdinand), 238 Ungers, Georg Christian, 247n33 United Airlines, 433 “univore,” 78, 79 Urner, Nathan, 60 Valebrègue, Paul, 272n13 van Creveld, Martin, 462, 463 Varela, María do Mar Castro, 470 vaudevilles, 322, 329n48 verbal markers, musico-touristic, 216, 218 Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen, 105, 479, 490, 491n12 Verhaeren, Emile, 425–26 Victorian culture collection of programs, 192–93 etiquette during, 56 literacy in, 194–95 as market-driven, 193 musical literacy in, 191–92 musical presence in, 194 religious practice in, 195 science and technology in, 198 self-improvement and education valued in, 193, 194–95, 196, 200, 203n36, 210 social networks in, 194 Victor Talking Machine Company, 402 Victrolas, 377, 402 Vienna as cultural center, 232 orchestras, 232, 233, 234, 245n6 theaters, 232–34 touristic marketing, 217 “Vierhändig, noch einmal” (Adorno), 302n42 Viewing David’s Coronation (Boilly), 428 Violin Concerto (Beethoven), 233 Vitruvius (Marcus Vitruvius Pollio), 234, 245n11 Vogler, Georg Josef, 466 Vojtech, Ivan, 479 Volkslied, 342 Volmar, Axel, 15–16, 395 Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (Hanslick), 9–10, 315 Von der Kunst des Hörens (Müller), 461 “Von der Kunst des Hörens” (Reez), 466–67 Vorschlägezur Verbesserung der Schauspielhäuser (Catel), 238 (p. 523)
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Index Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich, 483–85 Waddington, Mary King, 40 Wagner, Richard art of “translation,” 422 audience contestation of, 43 in benefit concert repertoire, 82 control of audience attention, 61 on Italian theater architecture, 319 Jardin-Turc concerts, 47–48 listener education critiqued by, 154 listening guides for, 211 in Opera-Telephone promotions, 358f, 365 on Prelude to Lohengrin, 421, 422 Waldoff, Claire, 344–46 “walking” during performances by audiences in 19th-century Paris, 37–38, 41, 45, 46–50 by audiences in 1920s Germany, 101, 102 Walsh, Michael, 486, 487 Waring, William, 266, 271n7 “Was ist modern?” (Seidl), 100 Waters, Roger, 450–52 Watzlawick, Paul, 469 Weber, Carl Maria von, 80, 85 Weber, Max, 279 Weber, William, 11, 14, 77 Webern, Karl Emil von, 283 Wechselnde Erscheinung (Obert), 470 Wege zur Musik (Knopf), 485–86 Wegman, Rob, 111 Weimar Republic, 102 Weinzierl, Stefan, 12–13, 231 Weissenburg, Adolf, 239–40 Weißmann, Adolf, 15, 103 (p. 524) Western classical music, 454n1 Westminster Abbey, 260–61, 260f Westphal, Kurt, 107, 108 Wetter, Johannes, 243 What to Listen for in Music (Copland), 493n39 Whistler, James McNeill, 423–24, 424f Who’s Afraid of Classical Music? (Walsh), 486 Wiener Zeitung, 199 Wieprecht, Wilhelm, 338–40 “wife appeal factor,” 409 Williams, William Carlos, 432 Wind, Edgar, 433 Winnicott, D. W., 446–48, 455n18 Wolzogen, Hans von, 211, 212 Wordsworth, William, 427 Page 39 of 40
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Index work-concept critique of, 20 inattentiveness and, 478, 479, 480, 482, 490 origin of, 478 touristic listening and, 216, 218 “Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, The” (Benjamin), 398 World Music Exhibition (1927), 99 World War II (Germany). See also Munich Philharmonic Orchestra concert attendance, 125–27 concert programs and reviews, 128–31 listening experience during, 125, 131–35 music reeducation after, 485, 490 new ideal listener model, 133 orchestra instability during, 128 performance continuity, 123–25 Wortmann, Clara (a.k.a. Claire Woldoff), 344–46 Writing Good Sense About Music (Ford), 465–66 Wyatt, James, 260–61 York Minster, 262–63, 263f Yorkshire Grand Musical Festivals audience lists, 258–59, 258t interior constructions for, 261–62, 261f, 273nn26–27 ticket prices, 259, 262, 263, 264 Zarlino, Gioseffo, 163 Zelter, Carl Friedrich, 240 Zender, Hans, 470 Zentner, Wilhelm, 129–30 Ziemer, Hansjakob, 1, 14, 87, 97 Zille, Heinrich, 342, 343f, 344–46, 345f zones of attention/audition, 61, 62, 64–65, 67–68 Zuhören, 466 Zwölf Reden (Twelve Lectures, Müller), 461
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