How music created a public

Criticism, Spring, 2004 by Harold Love

What has been suggested about the growth of a public for music, and of forms of rationality characteristic of that public, has been no more than the barest sketch o f salient events in a history which to be of any real use would have to be written in far greater detail. To advance from this sketch of the growth and development of a British musical public and what it meant to be an active member of that public to a usable model of a "public sphere" would require us to conduct a similar analysis of a very considerable body of other publics, each with its own patterns of organization and its own history, of development, and of the mutual intersections and negotiations of these discrete publics. Rather than siting communicative action in some ideal, imaginary social space such as the Habermasian coffeehouse, we should be examining the discursive behavior of individuals as they moved between the engaged spaces of distinct competing publics. It is possible that some of the developmental stages observed for the musical public were also characteristic of other publics, but that can not be assumed in advance. Even so closely related an entity as the theatrical public, despite a strong overlap in membership and the role of the theater as a venue for musical performance, shows a number of striking differences. A theatrical public had already formed by the late sixteenth century. It was much more strongly centered in London, the location of the permanent playhouses: these playhouses were expensive to build and operate, and actors could not hope for lucrative court, church, or domestic employment. There are no identifiable gentry "theatrical families" as there are musical ones, and although there was a growing vogue for amateur theatricals which reached its peak in the "Garrick clubs" of the nineteenth century, such activity was sporadic, whereas that of the amateur musician proceeded by a regular regime of rehearsal and performance. The theater possessed a larger and more ancient tradition of both practical and reflective publication, yet its links with Continental cultures were weaker than that of music prior to the nineteenth century, when the example of Parisian illusionistic dramaturgy swept all before it. Theater was seen as more patriotic than music, with Shakespeare a much more prominent national icon than Byrd or Purcell and most leading London professionals foreign born. Theater criticism reached maturity earlier than music criticism. The theater was scorned by a large number of the devout, who had no such objections to music, and was avoided by many others for its links with crime and prostitution. To define oneself as a devoted theatergoer was to make a very different kind of statement about oneself than to define oneself as a music-lover.

If this was the situation of two closely intertwined publics with a large degree of overlap, what differences might we not expect from publics of a non artistic kind? And yet this essay does not set out to be a counsel of despair. The problem is not that the notion of there being an overarching public sphere is an inane one, or that the discursive attributes held to characterize it did not have a real historical existence; it is rather that, as Zaret has so clearly demonstrated, the historical foundations of the public sphere have never properly been investigated. To adapt a lesson drawn by Michael Prince from Hume and d'Alembert: "The hasty tourist feels uncomfortable in the realm of phenomena; his residence there only serves the larger goal of validating a prior metaphysical hypothesis about the regulation of all chance events by an ultimate Cause." (35) Lazy top-down thinking by hasty tourists has left us with assumptions that are almost bound to mislead when we use them to understand how and why things happened at particular junctures in history: What is required is a new, coordinated attempt to discover how the jumble of mutually interacting publics we call the "public sphere" actually worked.