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

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.

This Handbook asks 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.

Christian Thorau is Professor of Musicology at the University of Potsdam and author of Vom Klang zur Metapher - Perspektiven der musikalischen Analyse. He has held fellowships at the National Humanities Center, N.C. and at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies in Vienna. His research priorities include the popularisation of musicological knowledge, the history of music listening and the theory and practice of music analysis.


Hansjakob Ziemer is Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and author of Die Moderne hören: Das Konzert als urbanes Forum, 1890-1940. Among his publications are articles on the cultural history of sound, emotions, listening, architecture and journalism.

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

7. Designated Attention: The Transformation of Music Announcements in Leipzig's Concert Life, 1781-1850
Anselma Lanzendörfer

8. Concert Listening the British Way?: Program Notes and Victorian Culture
Christina Bashford

9. "What ought to be heard": Touristic Listening and the Guided Ear
Christian Thorau

Section III: Listening Spaces and Encounters

10. Architectural Acoustics and the Trained Ear in the Arts: A Journey from 1780 to 1830
Viktoria Tkaczyk and Stefan Weinzierl

11. Amateurs and Auditors: Listening to the British Musical Festival, 1810-1835
Charles Edward McGuire

12. The Intimate Art of Listening:
Music in the Private Sphere during the Nineteenth Century
Wolfgang Fuhrmann

13. Symmetries in Spaces, Symmetries in Listening: Musical Theater Buildings in Europe around 1900
Gesa zur Nieden

14. Music in the Air-Listening in the Streets: Popular Music and Urban Listening Habits in Berlin around 1900
Daniel Morat

Section IV: Listening and Technologies

15. From the Music-Telegraph to the Opera-Telephone-Listening to Music in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
Sonja Neumann

16. First Re-Creations: Psychology, Phonographs, and New Cultures of Listening at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century
Alexandra Hui

17. Between Personal Experience and Public Discourse: Reproduced Music and the Politics of Listening in the Twentieth Century
Axel Volmar

Section V: Towards an Art of Listening of the Twenty-First Century

18. Capturing the Landscape Within: On Writing the History of Experience
James H. Johnson

19. Listening and Possessing
Fred Maus

20. Is Listening to Music an Art-or Not?
Wolfgang Gratzer

21. "Performer or listener, everybody in the concert hall should be devoted entirely to the music": On the Actuality of Not Listening to Music in Symphonic Concerts
Christiane Tewinkel