In Search of the Listener

Abstract

Can music really be said to exist without someone to listen to it? Anyone reading the works of musicologists – and even of social historians of music – might be forgiven for thinking so. Listeners had no place on Guido Adler's original agenda for musicology and they have had little attention since. While we have learnt much about composers and composition, performers and performing practice, patrons and impresarios, publishers and publishing, the ordinary listener has hardly had a look-in. (William Weber's pioneering work,Music and the Middle Class, is an important exception.) In the current vogue for analysis they are replaced by a kind of ideal listener, or in effect disappear altogether; whatever else it is, analysts' music is not music as it is heard by most actual listeners, with their ‘favourite passages’ and emotional reactions. And if not simply ignored, listeners are often regarded as pitiably unadventurous, indifferent to ‘form’, easily seduced by catchy tunes, extra-musical programmes and flamboyant personalities; the notion that music history is made by listeners as well as by composers and performers seems almost perverse. Almost the only audiences which have been studied with anv degree of sophistication are those for rock and pop. We have learnt much about the producers of music; the listeners remain a great unknown.

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