One gorgeously warm and sunny August day in 1869, the Scottish-born American naturalist John Muir was wandering among the waterfalls, deep rocky valleys and ancient giant sequoias of the Yosemite National Park in the Californian Sierra Nevada. It was a place he adored. But on this particular day, instead of thoroughly enjoying himself as usual, he was thoroughly distracted, unable to settle or relax. As he explained in his diary the following day, what had troubled him was the way other people who had come to the park had been behaving:
It seems strange that visitors to Yosemite should be so little influenced by its novel grandeur, as if their eyes were bandaged and their ears stopped. Most of those I saw yesterday were looking down as if wholly unconscious of anything going on about them, while the sublime rocks were trembling with the tones of the mighty chanting congregation of waters gathered from all the mountains round about, making music that might draw angels out of heaven.
The birdsong, the ‘wind-music’ of the trees, the ‘joyous hum’ of insects, the ‘glad streams singing their way to the sea’: the sublime wonders of nature were all around, freely available to be seen and heard – perhaps especially to be heard. For as Muir once wrote, so rich in sounds was a park such as Yosemite that ‘even the blind must enjoy these woods’. Yet most visitors – busy catching fish, distracted by each other’s company, driving animals away with their chatter and their mules and horses – simply weren’t able to appreciate them. If only they could be ‘devout, silent, open-eyed, looking and listening with love’, he complained, their lives would surely be so much richer.
John Muir’s call for a ‘devout’ and ‘silent’ form of listening echoed a cry which reverberated right across the nineteenth century: a need for the sublime power of particular sounds to be experienced to their full effect. The pattern was set as the century opened and the Romantics talked up the virtue of listening closely to nature. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote of ‘the thunders and howlings of the breaking ice’ one winter’s night on the Lake of Ratzeburg, and how they had convinced him that there were ‘sounds more sublime than any sight can be’. In 1828 William Wordsworth even wrote a whole poem ‘On the Power of Sound’.
In the hands of the Romantics, and in the minds of naturalists such as John Muir, this reverence for close listening usually came across as reasonable, organic, even democratic and liberating, but it also contained the seeds of an attitude to sound that was darker and more authoritarian. In order for the sublime to be appreciated, people everywhere, whether in the countryside or the city, would have to reform their ways. And as the century progressed, it was this darker, controlling side to the art of listening that seemed to take root.
Just a few years after John Muir had written of his experience in California, in Bayreuth in Germany the foundation stones were being laid for the town’s magnificent Festival Theatre opera house. When it was finished in 1876, the Bayreuth theatre established itself as one of the world’s great temples of music and, in particular, as a mecca for those who worshipped the composer Richard Wagner, to whose work it was dedicated. And it really was worship in which they indulged. As Cosima Wagner put it when speaking of her husband’s compositions, ‘Our art – I dare say it – is religion.’ In the nineteenth century, many music aficionados, and not just the Wagnerites, came to regard their art in the same way. Yet, as it turned out, giving music a religious aura came at a price. Its most devoted followers would soon start creating their own dogma about how it should be heard, eventually crushing any behaviour that smacked of heresy. The new art of listening would turn out to be a rather uncomfortable mixture of wonder, politeness and brutal discrimination.
Only a century before, listening to music – even classical music – had been a surprisingly relaxed affair. This was largely because many people were not actually listening at all. Concerts were often held in restaurants. As Peter Gay has shown, even if musicians performed in the mansions and stately homes of the rich, it was often as ‘an agreeable backdrop for flirting, gossiping, dining’, and if they ever got the chance to perform in an opera house, they would still have faced a restless auditorium. There was no firm etiquette about arriving on time or leaving quietly at the end; instead, there was a constant stream of noisy toing and froing. A handful of music-lovers, clutching their librettos, might be conscientiously following the action on stage, but most of the audience would be chatting away throughout the performance, ‘as liveried servants hawked carafes of wine and oranges’ all around them. In the remote reaches of the upper balconies, prostitutes would also be plying their trade.
One could easily imagine the musicians themselves being in utter despair at this hubbub. Yet so used to it were they that silence unsettled them more. When Mozart performed in Vienna in 1781, he wrote to his father about how pleased he was at the screams of ‘bravo’ coming from the audience as he was playing. Orchestras rarely objected to their final bars being covered with shouting and applause. Indeed, usually neither performer nor composer could bear to wait until the very end of a piece before hearing of their audience’s approval: they would have taken silence as a sign of rejection.
Even in the eighteenth century, however, there were stirrings of change. Instead of offering merely a pleasing background entertainment, music was increasingly thought of as something capable of offering a sublime and deeply personal experience. For Charles Burney, who in the late 1770s was just beginning his epic General History of Music, music was – or at least should be – about being moved. Every listener, he wrote, had this right: ‘a right to give way to his feelings, and be pleased or dissatisfied without knowledge, experience, or the fiat of critics’. The critics, of course, continued to be influential in guiding wider public taste, and for many it was Beethoven who promised listeners the most sublime experience of all. The French writer George Sand, for instance, told Liszt of how she herself responded to the German composer’s music: ‘Beethoven makes you enter once again into the most intimate depths of the self; everything you have felt, experienced, your loves, your suffering, your dreams, all are revived by the breath of his genius and throw you into an infinite reverie.’
What, though, did treating music in this reverential way mean for the ‘ordinary’ music listener? A clue can be found in a painting now hanging at the Museo Revoltella in Trieste but which, right at the end of the nineteenth century, became something of an international sensation, travelling from country to country in the form of popular engravings and copies. Lionello Balestrieri’s Beethoven depicts a pianist and a violinist playing in a small, sparsely furnished room to an audience of five people. None of them, it seems, is making a sound or even engaging with the other four. Two men stare intently in the direction of the musicians – though are looking through them rather than at them, as if they’re hardly there; another man leans against a wall on which Beethoven’s death mask hangs, hands in pockets and looking down at the floor; a fourth sits bent forward, head in hands and eyes covered; a woman leans against one of the men, but ignores him as she stares into space, transfixed. These five people do not just remain silent; they are virtually unconscious of the world about them, swept away to the spiritual realm of the infinite. In other words, they are listening as if it were a sacred task.
‘Worshipful silence’ was being depicted on canvas because it was now the ideal form of listening. To reach a state of ecstasy, one needed to establish a direct and pure relationship with the music, and that meant concentrating. Silence wasn’t the same as passivity. It had an intensity to it. It was work. The listener was engaged in a monumental lifelong task of self-realisation and cultural improvement – what the Germans referred to as Bildung. And this meant, of course, that anyone who shattered the silence would be guilty of destroying the purity of the moment upon which this hard task depended. It was certainly acceptable to weep as you listened; indeed, why on earth would you not, given how beautifully a piece of music would evoke the depths of despair or the heights of love? But you needed to weep quietly, to let a tear roll down your cheek rather than wail out loud.
~~Noise: A Human History of Sound and Listening -by- David Hendy
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