How music created a public

Criticism, Spring, 2004 by Harold Love

III. Writing about Music

The evolution from private to public in any branch of cultural or political activity will also be marked by the creation of forms of reading matter, beginning with those serving simple functional requirements--in this case tutors, and music for performance--followed by explications of theory and advanced practice, such as the harmony textbooks of Morley, Butler, and Simpson, and culminating in historical and philosophical reflections on the activity. This last stage was represented for music by the rival histories of Sir John Hawkins (1776) and Charles Burney (1776-89), the former more anecdotal and a better source for specifically English experience, the latter European in its scope and universal in its vision of the art. A similar trajectory could be traced for the other European national cultures, with the qualification that they were normally ahead of Britain in their arrival at each successive stage and that much British music-related publication was indebted to Continental predecessors. Many British readers of works relating to music did so in other languages: a knowledge of French or Italian was particularly likely to be found among music-loving amateurs, including women, while from 1800 onward an interest in music was a strong incentive to the study of German. Through these publications the musical public acquired both a corporate identity and a status. By defining oneself as a "music-lover," one was entering into a community with well-entrenched institutions, steadily expanding activities, and a range of writing extending from the practical and the evanescent to impressive works of history and scholarship. Non-writers would announce themselves as members of this culture by becoming subscribers to new books or publications of musical works and having their names included in subscription lists.

Two other significant developments in reading matter were the appearance of periodicals directed at the connoisseur and amateur performer and the establishment of regular music reviews in the daily and weekly press. Reviewing is the main manifestation within the musical public of the critical rationality identified by Habermas as the defining characteristic of the bourgeois public sphere. There is no space in this brief summary to consider the way in which reviews, originally little more than a register of events, became more intelligently analytic and evaluative. But the point should be stressed that whatever the public sphere is, and however much its activities may be directed and shaped by print culture, it is primarily a culture of face-to-face discussion. The press was the visible reflection of much of that discussion, but what appeared in print was usually the outcome of conversation and had not performed its desired function until it returned to it. Any model of the public sphere that sees it solely in terms of isolated reflection on the content of written arguments leading to the production of further written arguments is inadequate.