How music created a public

Criticism, Spring, 2004 by Harold Love

We must guard against a similar misreading of the early newspaper, assuming a modern discipline of accuracy in reporting and the enjoyment of public trust, when most such publications were regarded in their own time as inferior sources of information to manuscript newsletters or oral testimony from reliable informants. The notion of the press as impartial and evenhanded and of journalists as responsible, professional validators of information came to be accepted only in the nineteenth century, and even then only for a few major journals. (8) Addison in Spectator 154 poked fun at newspapers' pretensions (and his own) with a comic account of a reader desperately trying to reconcile conflicting versions of events in Constantinople. At least in this case the reader was considering a variety of sources, but none could be regarded as reliable. Journalistic incompetence and the tyranny of distance aside, the early Enlightenment newspaper was correctly regarded as the mouthpiece of the administration then in power or of factions opposed to it. This situation continued as long as the dominant tone of controversial writing remained hectoring and antagonistic or--in an innovation of the early eighteenth century--dismissively ironic, rather than one of respect for the opponent's sincerity. Much eighteenth-century pamphleteering is only marginally removed from satire.

So where are we to seek communality in the pursuit of public understanding? Certainly not in a single ahistorical sphere but rather in the existence of a considerable number of discrete publics and the fact that members of these publics were usually also members of other publics. Having so concretized our notion of a "public," we would then need to investigate how each of these discrete publics evolved and was structured, resisting any temptation to regard them as either simple or static, or to assume that what held good for one necessarily did so for another, or that the same public in France necessarily functioned in the same way as that in Britain, the Austrian empire, or North America. In practice this means breaking down the notion of a public sphere into the lesser domains, agencies, and practices out of which it perpetually composed and recomposed itself. As a modest contribution to such an enterprise, I will now sketch in some salient stages in the development of a public in Britain for music.

I. From Amateur to "Music-lover"

Music has always been performed publicly In Tudor and Jacobean times it might be heard as part of church services, in association with state and municipal ceremonies, and, toward the end of the period, as an element of theater performances; but even when certain performances were undoubtedly public, there was no such thing as a "public for music." What we might describe today as "music-lovers" had no simple and obvious way of identifying themselves as a community. (9) Instead they had to encounter the art by becoming surrogate members of other communities, or sing madrigals or play viols or the virginals at home. Great composer-performers existed, such as Tallis, Byrd, Morley, and Gibbons, but their livelihood depended on their being servants of the church, the court, or the playhouse. The archetypal music-lover of the Jacobean age was Francis Tregian, a state prisoner who transcribed the compositions of these masters into personal collections for his own very private performance in the solitude of his cell. He can also serve as our starting point for plotting the growth of organizations out of which a musical public was eventually to be constituted.