Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World

17 Loving Music Listeners, Entertainments, and the Origins ofMusic Fandom in Nineteenth-Century America

17 Loving Music Listeners, Entertainments, and the Origins of Music Fandom in Nineteenth-Century America Daniel Cavicchi After having attended the opera four nights in a row in 1884, 24-year-old Lucy Lowell chastised herself by writing in her diary, “I suppose it can’t be good for a person to go to things that excite her so that she can’t fix her mind on anything for days afterwards” (Lowell 1884: April 19).1 Lowell was the daughter of Judge John Lowell and a member of one of the first families of Boston. While many young women of her social standing spent their time attracting appropriate male suitors by acquiring rudimentary skills in singing and piano playing or self-consciously showing themselves off in the boxes of the city’s growing number of concert halls and theaters, Lucy eschewed such social intrigue and instead became truly obsessed with onstage sound and spectacle. She attended performances by almost every touring opera and symphonic star that passed through Boston, every rehearsal and concert of the new Boston Symphony Orchestra, and many local festivals, band concerts, and musical theater productions. In the seven volumes of her diary, which she wrote between 1880 and 1888, she wrote page after page of description about her experiences of hearing music. She only mechanically mentioned attending singing lessons on Mondays and Thursdays; she sometimes referred to expectations about her own socially mandated performances with disdain. “Had a dinner party for Miss Tweedy. Mabel + Hattie were the other girls, John Howard Messers, G. D. Chapin, L. Pierce + R. Loug, gentlemen,” she wrote in 1880. “I had to sing in eve’g. Bah!” (Lowell 1880: January 28). 235 Lowell was not alone; since the mid–nineteenth century, increasing numbers of young people in America’s rapidly growing cities had formed a unique and sustained attachment to the world of public concerts. People had listened to music before the 1850s, of course; indeed, concert going was an activity that a member of the elite in the United States had had the leisure to indulge at least since the American Revolution. But before midcentury , attending a concert more often than not meant attending a special event that was as much social as musical, an opportunity for people in a community to come together in a ritual space. During the 1850s, increasing numbers of national tours by professional virtuosos, supported by new systems of concert management, enabled people to develop new ways of acting musically that were centered less on amateur performance among friends in the privacy of one’s home than on regularly witnessing professional performers in public halls. Young “music lovers,” like Lowell, constituted a group that, for the first time in American history, was able to shape its musical experiences entirely around commercial entertainments like concerts, theater, and public exhibitions. In this chapter, I will outline the ways in which the practices of music lovers not only transformed America’s musical life, setting the ground for a late-nineteenth-century music business based on listening technologies like the phonograph, but also provided models for cultural consumption that would be adopted and extended in twentieth-century mass culture, particularly by those we today call “fans.” For several years, I have studied the diaries, scrapbooks, and letters of people living in the nineteenth-century urban United States in order to learn more about how they understood music. Scattered widely in state and private archives, many of the materials have not been studied as evidence of musical life. Together, however, they offer powerful evidence that, while fandom is often characterized in media studies as a product of mass consumer culture in the twentieth century, the basic practices associated with fandom—idealized connection with a star, strong feelings of memory and nostalgia, use of collecting to develop a sense of self, for example—precede the development of electronic “mass communication” technologies. Music loving suggests that fandom’s origins may have less to do with diffuse and private consumption through modern electronic media than with shared modes of participation in older systems of commodified leisure. 236 s h i f t i n g c o n t e x t s , c h a n g i n g f a n c u lt u r e s Reframing Musical Experience Cities in the United States had slightly different trajectories for developing new entertainment...