12 A year later the Musical Quarterly went a step further still with a double issue concentrating on early western music.
In the same year another journal, The World of Music, focused a whole issue on listening practice, including articles on a wide variety of geographical and cultural repertoires. 10 This article was itself part of an Early Music 11 issue published in 1997 and devoted to an exploration of historical listening which took into account a variety of physical (buildings), religious and social contexts. William Weber’s article ‘Did people listen in the 18 th century?’ questioned whether listening habits had changed in the nineteenth century as radically as Johnson had suggested.
Johnson’s claim that audiences of the nineteenth century began to listen more intently provoked extensive comment in reviews and sparked debate elsewhere. One of the most important texts that emerged at this time was James Johnson’s Listening in Paris (1995), 9 which highlighted a significant change in the behaviour of audiences from 1750 to 1850 studied in their social and aesthetic contexts. It was much later, in the 1990s, that musicologists began to direct attention to the listeners themselves, in particular the emergence of silence as a context for listening, as well as how listening was shaped by listeners’ mind-sets and environments. 8 But here again, the focus was on listening as a means of understanding the musical work. Christina Bashford has published a number of works on the role of mid-nineteenth-century musicians who set out to inform individuals about the music to which they were listening by means of programme notes and other educational tools.
7Īrguably, the musicological literature of listening goes back further still, for example, in texts that were designed to educate audiences in how to listen.
This form of hearing is presented as a logical activity – and a strenuous one at that, which requires the full concentration of the listener. Riemann’s musical thought was centrally concerned with the aesthetic perception of the work under the category of a structural ‘musical hearing’. 5 Riemann was followed by Heinrich Besseler in the first half of the twentieth century, 6 but neither prompted any great awakening of interest in the scholarship of listening, and their texts encouraged listening in the context of understanding the structure and characteristics of a work. The musicological literature of listening goes at least as far back as 1874, when Hugo Riemann published his dissertation ‘Über das musikalische Hören’. 3 Social and cultural historians and musicologists use texts such as diaries, correspondence, published reviews, theoretical writings and the music itself in the course of their studies.
2 Observation (including participant observation), interviews and questionnaires provide the evidence used by anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, social scientists and musicians. Experiments with human subjects have provided evidence for psychologists and neuroscientists, who study the effects of listening on behaviour and on the brain. 1 Within studies relating to music, a variety of lines of enquiry have emerged. The field of ‘sound studies’, for example, examines the impact of sounds (including musical ones) made by vehicles, machines, humans and other agents on environments such as cities, workplaces and homes. Small wonder, then, that this range of activities is studied in so many different ways and in so many seemingly disparate academic disciplines. ‘Listening’ can have a range of meanings, from barely-conscious ‘hearing’ of sounds that daily surround us to the intensely-concentrated experience of those who set aside dedicated time for listening to concerts or recordings in controlled surroundings.