The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries ed. by Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer (review)

In two foundational studies on the history of music listening published in the 1990s, Leon Botstein and James H. Johnson established something of a high-water mark for attentive listening in the late romantic era. Pointing to the many publications that taught audiences how to listen during concerts, Botstein argued for a culture of “listening through reading” (Leon Botstein, “Listening through Reading: Musical Literacy and the Concert Audience,” 19th-Century Music 16, no. 2 [Autumn 1992]: 129–45). Such attentiveness, Johnson further maintained, came about through a long historical process of epistemic shifts wherein audiences in Paris stopped being noisy and distracted and fell silent around 1830 (James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995]). The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries now aims— according to editors Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer—to pick up the thread of audience studies twenty-five years later, taking “the art of listening” as a “leitmotif” whose developments over time are understood predominantly through the lens of “cultural history” (pp. 1–2).

A prismatic collection of essays, the handbook explores many different cultural, social, intellectual, and material circumstances that have shaped listening in Europe between 1760 and 2010. In the first chapter, Katharine Ellis shatters Johnson’s concept of a silent audience in Paris after 1830 with 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” (p. 37). Christina Bash-ford’s chapter places further limits on the earlier studies by arguing for the specifically Victorian origins of silently reading program notes, thus inscribing Botstein’s “listening through reading” in place and time. Ziemer, in his discussion of the “crisis of listening” (p. 97) in 1920s Germany, then demonstrates how the belief that concert audiences had given up on attentive listening—they may have never really practiced it to begin with—inspired Arnold Schoenberg and Paul Hindemith to create alternative concert experiences, private and elite from one and public and egalitarian from the other. Thus the inherited 1990s narrative about audience behavior gives way to a complex of layers and nuance that may well be taken as the thesis of the whole handbook.

One example of growing complexity is the discursive segmentation of audiences. Excavating the eighteenth-century motives and origins of the modern art of listening, Mark Evan Bonds argues that Johann Nikolaus Forkel’s lectures on music appreciation aimed to turn musical “dilettantes” into “connoisseurs” (p. 147) in response to M. de Fontenelle’s notorious outburst, “Sonata, what do you want of me?” (p. 146). Forkel’s division of the audience into knowledgeable connoisseur and naïve dilettante proves sustaining, as Bonds points out; taxonomies of the audience, though, continued to fracture. In his chapter on the etiquette of listening in nineteenth-century England, James Deaville reveals a species of mere participants who are admonished in manners books to remain silent and “feign attention, if not enjoyment” (p. 63) in certain zones of the salon so as not to disturb real music lovers. Two pejorative and somewhat offhand comments from Eduard Hanslick—which Thorau extrapolates into an entire mode of listening—indicate yet another audience species: the tourists who need their guidebooks (that is, program notes).

Such discursive constructions of audience segments were supported and subverted by the construction of concert spaces that literally segmented audiences, adding more nuance to the conversation. Charles Edward McGuire illustrates how English writers categorized “auditors” (who ranged from silent participants to knowledgeable yet naïve listeners) based on where they listened in the class-segregated architecture constructed for music festivals; writers then maintained this category of “auditor...