Johnson, James. Listening in Paris.
Johnson begins with a simple question: why, between 1750 and 1850, did concert audiences stop talking and start listening? Why did audiences quiet down? The answer is not quite so simple, as evidenced by Johnson’s sixteen rich chapters on the evolution of listening in Parisian concert halls and opera houses. Johnson isolates and analyzes what he considers “significant moments in the historical construction of listening” (4) from 1750 to 1850. He starts in the mid-eighteenth century, when the opera was a “rendezvous of the rich,” a social salon for the French aristocracy. At this time, music was also seen as imitative; critics spoke of “musical expression in terms of images or recognizable sounds, with music painting its particular meaning” (36). Throughout the 1770s and 80s, listeners became more attune to music’s effect on and expression of sentiments and emotions. These attitudes toward music, Johnson claims, did not change much with the French Revolution, but the concert repertoire and audiences did. Content became more politicized and censored, and performers worked to dissociate themselves from aristocratic associations. By the first decade of the nineteenth century, the Opéra had become “little more than a tourist attraction” (186). After having slowly lost its regular subscribers, out-of-town single-ticket buyers made up the bulk of the audience (186). This, along with the attempt to squeeze in more bodies to increase revenue, perpetuated a “relative anonymity of the experience” and “urged patrons silently and subtly to focus on the stage and not the boxes” (189). Patrons still roamed around and talked quietly, but remained mostly silent for the opera’s overture and arias. This silencing only intensified as the Opéra became a popular entertainment for France’s bourgeoisie, who brought to the concert halls a sense of propriety and manners.
Most interesting to me, however, is Johnson’s description of a shift toward a distinctly Romantic experience and understanding of music. The years between 1800 and 1820 witnessed a transition in the music listener’s expectations. In the beginning of the century, listeners complained about the “difficulty” of music, claiming that they couldn’t decipher its meaning (the image or emotion the music was supposed to imitate). Haydn was the most popular composer at this time because of the “programmatic, emotionally tangible nature of his symphonies” attractive at a time when “a sizable portion of the public still declared abstract harmonies impenetrable” (212). Yet this eventually gave way to an appreciation of music liberated from words or distinct meaning (273). This turned listening into a more subjective, interior, and personal experience, rather than an intellectual task of decipherment. This listening practice demanded “total absorption,” an absorption that was in part made possible by the opera houses’ architectural changes aimed at eliminating distraction (new lighting systems, ventilation for the latrines).
Johnson’s focus on listening in Paris limits the relevance of his history to my own work. Yet, many (though clearly not all) of the trends he maps carry over onto the English stage. Charles Lamb satirizes the early-nineteenth-century struggle of trying to decipher “difficult” music, for example, in his “Chapter on Ears,” one of his Essays of Elia. I, like many sound scholars before me, also find helpful Johnson’s methodology and his historical approach to sound perception. He claims that meaning resides in a “particular moment of reception,” a moment shaped “by dominant aesthetic and social expectations that are themselves historically constructed” (2). Like Pascoe, Sterne, Schmidt, and Robson, Johnson insists on considering listening as an historically-situated, socio-culturally informed mode of perception: we don’t listen as people did in 1750, 1830, 1910. Even though we can’t listen like Parisians in 1750, we can try to reimagine how they heard differently. In my work, I hope to join Johnson in placing “the perceiver at the center of meaning” (2) while considering how sociocultural forces shape the parameters of that perception.
