The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries [Hardcover]

An idealized image of European concert-goers has long prevailed in historical overviews of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This act of listening was considered to be an invisible and amorphous phenomenon, a naturally given mode of perception. This narrative influenced the conditions of listening from the selection of repertoire to the construction of concert halls and programmes. However, as listening moved from the concert hall to the opera house, street music, and jazz venues, new and visceral listening traditions evolved. In turn, the art of listening was shaped by phenomena of the modern era including media innovation and commercialization.

ThisHandbookasks whether, how, and why practices of music listening changed as the audience moved from pleasure gardens and concert venues in the eighteenth century to living rooms in the twentieth century, and mobile devices in the twenty-first. Through these questions, chapters enable a differently conceived history of listening and offer an agenda for future research.

The Art of Listening and Its Histories: An Introduction
Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer

Section I: Listening Behaviors and Emotions

1. Who Cares if you Listen? Researching Audience Behavior(s) in Nineteenth-Century Paris
Katharine Ellis

2. The Well-Mannered Auditor: Zones of Attention and the Imposition of Silence in the Salon of the Nineteenth Century
James Deaville

3. The Problem of Eclectic Listening in French and German Concerts, 1860-1910
William Weber

4. The Crisis of Listening in Interwar Germany
Hansjakob Ziemer

5. Listening as a Practice of Everyday Life: The Munich Philharmonic Orchestra and Its Audiences in the Second World War
Neil Gregor

Section II: Listening Ideologies and Instructions

6. Turning Liebhaber into Kenner: Forkel's Lectures on the Art of Listening,
c. 1780-1785
Mark Evan Bonds

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