Concert Cultures

Sometime in the 1760s, an orchestral musician named Jean-Jacques Ducharger sent the prince of Condé a proposal to found a new concert organization in his provincial capital, Dijon. It begins with an amusing story about a Russian traveler who is sent to France to learn how things are done in the West. He meets the _premier violon_ of a local concert society who has just been injured in a carriage accident. He therefore goes to a performance alone. Returning, he recounts a series of disasters, and the Frenchman explains how things could have been better managed. Two chapters in a more serious vein follow: one on the principles of concert administration, and one on the state of music and the arts in Dijon.


A presentation copy of Ducharger's manuscript is preserved in the Musée Condé at Chantilly, the prince's ancestral home; parts of it were later published. Since the concert description is clearly satirical, it has rarely been used in musicological research on performance practice, the history of conducting, reception, organology, or the Mozarts, whom the prince invited to Dijon in 1766. Yet Ducharger's work is rich in details: thirty pages on a fictional performance by a good-sized chorus and orchestra; six on behind-the-scenes arts administration, four on _subordination entre les musiciens_, and a highly insulting description of the director's poor taste, autocratic methods, and narcissistic personality. Our problem in using it as a historical source is to distinguish fact, exaggeration, and fiction.


I propose a framework, based loosely on methodology articulated by the cultural historian Jacques Barzun and political historian Henry Graff, for extracting reliable facts from literary satire. I test it first on Ducharger's passages that describe different forms of conducting for symphonies, concertos, vocal solos with orchestral accompaniment, and opera choruses, then on better-known musical satires such as Baron Grimm's _Le petit prophète de Boehmischbroda_, and finally, on non-fiction by opinionated and/or otherwise unreliable writers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Charles Burney.

Brazil underwent intense change during its belle époque, as it became a republic, abolished slavery, and adopted positivist ideas of progress and civilization. The aristocratic monarchy gave way to a new social order founded on bourgeois values. Rio de Janeiro, then the nation's capital, rapidly urbanized. Clubs, often segregated by gender, were significant socialization spaces for the new bourgeoisie, who gathered there to play chess or sports, read European periodicals, and listen to (and play) the most up-to-date music. The era ended in 1922 with the Week of Modern Art (February 11-18 in São Paulo), which ushered in Brazilian Modernism. The first radio broadcast in Brazil also happened that same year, marking shifts in the modes of music consumption in the country.
This paper examines how the creation and proliferation of music clubs actively contributed to the building of a concert culture in Rio de Janeiro. Prior to the belle époque, recitals and other musical practices were circumscribed to events sponsored by royalty, to Italian opera and light music theaters, or to private spaces where parlor piano music was the primary option. The advent of music clubs enabled members of Brazil's growing middle class to experience a diversification of repertory, following European tendencies that preferred "serious" German music over easy-listening arias and songs. They chose this repertory due to its alleged civilizing powers in a society perceived as an evolving organism (based on theories by Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer). Given limitations of funding and physical space, these clubs also initiated a system of patronage that privileged chamber music. In addition to drawing on archival records in Brazil, the paper will cite Brazilian musicologists Avelino Pereira, Cristina Magaldi, Maria Alice Volpe, and Monica Vermes, as well as contemporary periodicals to illuminate the belief that cultivating music had an elevating influence in society, and to show how the clubs stimulated the establishment of official music schools, created a market for professional musicians, and built an audience for concert music in the city.

The production and consumption of culture has been a central theme for researchers of the long eighteenth century. Hume and Milhouse focus on the business practices of opera in London during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while McVeigh explores the benefit and public concert series of the same period.  However, the business practices of one of Georgian London's most prestigious subscription concerts series, run by two of its most formidable musicians - Johann Christian Bach and Carl Fredrick Abel - has received little scholarly attention over the past three decades.  A set of account ledgers held at the Royal Bank of Scotland Archives in Edinburgh relating to the Bach-Abel concerts for the period from 1773 to 1775, and J. C. Bach's personal account ledgers from 1767 to 1780, provides a unique opportunity to look inside the books of one of the most important musical business ventures in late eighteenth-century London.
This paper provides the first in-depth critical analysis of the information contained within these underexplored financial documents: investigating the economic realities of cultural production, such as who could truly access this cultural product and who the composers wanted to have access; how much the jobbing musicians earned compared to the 'star' performers; and whether Bach and Abel made a profit (and if so, how big was that profit? And was it all about profit?).  As part of the research, I will draw on new thinking put forward by Hume on the buying power of money and the employment of spread-figure multipliers to convey more realistic approximations of value. Hume's work applies this methodology to books, collections of plays, and chapbooks; I will be extending this in a new direction to subscription concerts, and with the existence of the Bach-Abel account ledgers there is an exciting opportunity to apply this methodology to one of the most significant cultural events of the period and place. This information is valuable not just for itself but for what it tells us about the wider cultural and economic realities, and how and by whom various forms of culture were acquired and enjoyed.

The silence that gradually descended on nineteenth-century concert halls is normally presented as an indication of newly attentive forms of public listening. Musical experience, the story goes, became more intense, more personal, increasingly defined by rapture and transcendence (Johnson 1995). In telling such tales, we make nineteenth-century listeners more virtuous than ourselves. With few exceptions (e.g. Newark 2013; Ellis 2019), our accounts of these listeners rarely do justice to the slipperiness of aural attention, which may ebb and flow, giving us not only moments of consuming rapture but also extended periods of mind-numbing tedium.
My paper examines how, in the midst of new attentional demands from concert-hall regimes built on complete works and strict silence, oratorio audiences in Britain began reading cheap vocal scores during concerts. Among the many motivations for this behavior - enhancing literacy with staff notation, increasing familiarity with choral parts for popular pieces, a sense of proximity to the work as a scriptural entity -  I focus on the more archivally submerged, because less virtuous, uses of the vocal score as an attentional prop for the severely distracted. Drawing on scattered evidence from adverts, journalism, and diaries, I examine how scores offered listeners the chance to use sight to control their wayward aural attention over the protracted hours of oratorio performances. At the same time, these scores also offer the possibility of absorbing that attentional energy themselves, as visually stimulating aesthetic objects, often attached to abundant paratextual elements of catalogues and prefaces. Crucially, holding one of these books in one's lap offered a range of attentional possibilities – extending from daydreaming to devotion - while always broadcasting a bodily pose of dutifully reverent listening.
I reveal listening with a score to be an understudied "audile technique" (Sterne 2003) practiced by huge numbers of music-lovers in nineteenth-century Britain. The use of vocal scores as listening tools adds to an increasingly detailed and complex cultural history of these scores and other reductions (Christensen 2000; Lockhart 2012; Daub 2014). By approaching this audience behavior from the perspective of boredom, I contribute to a more rounded, realistic portrait of nineteenth-century listeners.