Listeners are the unsung heroes and heroines of classical music. Composers have their reverent biographers, their biopics and statues in the public square; performers have ecstatic fans, the limos and the recordings contracts. But who cares about the poor old listener, the third member of the ‘Holy Trinity’ of music, as Benjamin Britten described him or her?
It’s not as if listeners don’t earn their keep. Listening is a strenuous business. Witness this report of four ardent listeners to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony at the Queen’s Hall, sometime before the First World War: ‘Here Beethoven started decorating his tune [the first variation of the theme], so she [Helen] heard him through once more, and then she smiled at her cousin Frieda.
'But Frieda, listening to Classical Music, could not respond. Herr Liesecke, too, looked as if wild horses could not make him inattentive; there were lines across his forehead, his lips were parted, his pince-nez at right angles to his nose, and he laid a thick, white hand on either knee. And next to her was Aunt Juley, so British, and wanting to tap.’
'Listening isn't just humming along: it's an attempt to divine a vision'
Admittedly, that scene from EM Forster’s Howard’s End is only fiction. But it contains a truth. Listening to classical music isn’t just humming along to the melody; it’s an attempt to divine a vision vouchsafed to the composer, conveyed in patterns of notes to the listener in ways that aren’t obvious. The vision is sometimes hidden, and can be revealed only by attentive listening and patient study.
It’s hard to believe listeners were always so strenuously high-minded, and in recent decades there’s been a concerted effort to find out what really goes on in people’s hearts and minds (and their bodies too) when they listen. Philosophers, psychologists, sociologists and cultural historians have all found this subject fascinating. As, of course, have musicologists.
This interest in how people actually listen to classical music (and other sorts of music)
is a recent phenomenon. Well into the 20th century, discussion about listening was prescriptive, not descriptive – there was a right way to listen and a right way to respond, and woe betide anyone who got it wrong. In 1897, Henry Krehbiel published his How to Listen to Music, a weighty tome full of finger- wagging advice.
'It’s a wonder anyone dared to go to a concert in the late 19th century'
There’s a section on ‘Blunders by Tennyson, Lamb, Coleridge, Mrs Harriet [Beecher Stowe]’, a ‘warning against pedants and rhapsodists’ and this stern reminder in the contents page: ‘Taste and judgement not a birthright – the necessity of antecedent study’.
It’s a wonder anyone dared to go to a concert in the late 19th century. This attitude lingered well into the 20th century, though the writers’ tone was more friendly. Aaron Copland’s What to Listen for in Music and Antony Hopkins’s Talking about Music still assume that listening is a skill, and that without it we miss much that music has to offer.
This determination to prescribe the right way to listen to music was so ingrained that writers yielded to it, even when they thought they were being descriptive. In his 1941 essay On Popular Music, that severe philosopher Theodor Adorno takes a big stick to pop songs for being so perfectly formulaic.
He says this enforces a trivial sort of listening, in contrast to classical music where the details and the whole form are dynamically interrelated. ‘The scheme (of a pop song) emphasises the most primitive harmonic facts no matter what has harmonically intervened,’ he says primly. ‘Complications have no consequences.’ This means that details matter more than the whole and, consequently, ‘the listener becomes prone to evince stronger reactions to the part than to the whole.’
'Look at how people actually listen, rather than telling them how they should listen'
And where’s his evidence for that assertion? There isn’t any – Adorno is setting up a principle, and assuming the facts will obediently follow. That high-handed attitude to reality won’t do any more. Today’s scholars have come round to thinking that a certain humility is in order. Looking into how people actually listen, rather than telling them how they ought to listen, is the order of the day.
To do that requires facts which by their nature are elusive, as listening has become an increasingly private affair. Some researchers focus on the present, doing patient field-work in the places people actually use music: work places, living rooms, at the gym. Some focus on the past, patiently sifting the evidence for clues as to how (or even whether) they listened to music. (The Listening Experience Database, see below, is a project interested in both).
'Listening to Bon Jovi is just as revealing as Beethoven'
For researchers interested in how we listen now, no sort of music is too humdrum, and no music too ephemeral. They are interested in the way music weaves itself into our everyday lives. One fascinating journal article I came across is entitled ‘Personal collections as material assemblages: A comparison of wardrobes and music collections’.
In this world-view, there are no hierarchies. The experience of half-listening to a Bon Jovi album while doing the ironing is just as revealing of the warp and weft of human feelings as a Beethoven string quartet listened to in rapt silence at Wigmore Hall.
Turning to the other sort of research – the sort that examines modes of listening in cultures distant from ours – is if anything even more subversive of received ideas about ‘proper’ ways of listening. If by ‘distant’ we mean non-Western cultures, then we may find that the listening experience is not just elusive but non-existent. In many cultures everyone participates, either by playing, dancing or joining in the ritual which the music articulates. There are no listeners as such.
Before the Romantic era, music's role was social, not private
Even within the field of ‘classical music,’ the presence of rapt, attentive listeners is not a given. If anything it’s the exception, a late flower of an art music culture which could only blossom in the special climate of the Romantic era. Before that, music wasn’t thought of as the vehicle for a special kind of intimate, private experience.
Its role was social, and if people listened, it was so they could display their knowledge and engage in disputes about the quality of this or that singer or player. A writer on Medieval poet-singers named Raimon Vidal declared that ‘one of the most worthy things in the world is to praise what is to be praised and to condemn what is to be condemned’.
Another way of showing skill and expertise was to join in, and the criteria for making a good showing weren’t necessarily musical. The 16th-century Chronicle of Castile suggests that sophisticated art songs, of the kind we would enjoy for their musical value, had a lowly status as background to carousing, whereas popular songs, of the kind we would find monotonous, took centre-stage. Everyone joined in, as the simple repeating structure created a framework for guests to outdo each other in improvised verbal dexterity.
'No one had any desire to listen'
Jump forward to the early-18th century, and we find that listening to music too attentively was actually thought to be vulgar. ‘There is nothing so damnable as listening to a work like a street merchant or a provincial just off the boat,’ says a character in La Morlière’s novel of 1744, Angola.
Forty years later, the writer Fanny Burney describes a concert ‘to which no one of the party but herself had any desire to listen, no sort of attention was paid; the ladies entertaining themselves as if no orchestra was in the room, and the gentlemen, with an equal disregard to it, struggling for a place by the fire, about which they continued hovering till the music was over.’
But a change was in the air. The cult of sensibility which arose later in the century favoured indefinable emotions, the sort that couldn’t be pinned down to a definite image or narrative. Instrumental music was tailor-made to satisfy this new appetite, and now came into its own. A genuine culture of listening came into being, which in turn prompted a respect for the integrity of musical works. Previously these had been chopped into separate movements or mixed and matched into medleys or pasticcios. To clap between movements of a pasticcio was acceptable; to clap between movements of a Beethoven symphony began to seem wrong.
‘No lord or lady dared to interrupt the music by fashionable chatter’
The new cult of reverent silence was exemplified by John Ella’s Musical Union, a concert-giving susbscription society founded in London in 1845 whose motto was ‘the greatest homage to music is to listen in silence’. In his Cyclopaedic Survey of Chamber Music, WW Cobbett recalled that ‘it was a sight for the gods when Ella rose from his gilded seat, held aloft his large, capable hands, clapped them, and called for SILENCE in a stentorian voice.
After this, no lord or lady present, however distinguished, dared to interrupt the music by fashionable or any other kind of chatter.’ It wasn’t long before the new fashion for silence became a norm to be sternly enforced. ‘It is exceedingly vulgar to annoy your neighbours by beating time, humming the tunes, or making unseemly and ridiculous gestures of admiration,’ said George Watson’s Etiquette for All in 1861.
Which is more or less where we’re at today – except that once again, change is in the air. There’s a sense that concert behaviour has become too formal, and that classical music can only win new audiences by relaxing the rules. But in any case, how true is the ideology of ‘pure music’ to the way we actually attend to music?
Don’t we all have mixed motives when going to a concert, which is as much to do with meeting like-minded people as it is to listening to masterworks? To say that isn’t to denigrate music itself. It simply acknowledges that the role of music in our lives is complex, and as varied as human life itself.
Introducing... the Listening Experience Database
Created by researchers at the Open University and the Royal College of Music, and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Listening Experience Database is a publicly accessible, fully searchable historic database containing written records in English of thousands of experiences of listening to music. The focus is on the ‘private, intimate experience’ of every kind of music, from ordinary listeners who had no intention to influence public opinion (as opposed to, say, music critics).
The database includes records across a time-span of five centuries, written in every kind of circumstance. There are reports of an 18th-century Englishman hearing Polynesian music, a New Yorker listening to Leonard Bernstein on the radio while driving across the city, and a witness to psalm-singing used to pacify a woman supposedly possessed of the devil. The oldest record is of a Portuguese Jesuit priest’s impression of Chinese music (in translation).
The database is open for contributions from the public. So, if you have family letters and diaries that, say, enthuse about the Amadeus Quartet at Royal Festival Hall, or pour scorn on Henry Hall’s band on the Home Service, feel free to contribute them.
This article first appeared in the April 2016 issue of BBC Music Magazine