How music created a public

Criticism, Spring, 2004 by Harold Love

The interdependence of print and conversation can be illustrated by a single brief snapshot from the mid-nineteenth century of reviewing in what we would recognize as its modern form, in which the major daily papers maintained regular musical critics who provided substantial notices in the number of the day following the performance.

This writing was nearly all done in a single place, a front room at the Albion Tavern, where, having sent off their copy, the critical corps would settle down to drinking and gossip which lasted into the early hours. (33) This clique of journalists clearly had an enormous influence on both the opinions and the self-image of the musical public; yet their own communal identity was that of the more primitive form of organization, the club. Moreover, once their opinions had appeared in print, they would be argued over in other clubs, in musical families, in chance encounters between music-lovers, and, needless to say, among professionals, including the givers of the performance. (One of the topics of these discussions may well have been the widely known venality of the critics.) Argument, originating in the reasoned defense of personal taste, lay at the heart of the experience of being part of the musical public, which, far from being a unified discourse community, was an often fractious coalition of dispersed and competing viewpoints and interests. It also had to adjust itself to the demands of an art that was strongly progressive and incessantly revising the conditions of its existence. (On the Continent audiences might well be promoters of these advances, creating new demands that musicians had to meet, but in Britain and America the process was usually one of catching up with innovations imported from the Continent.) The very movement from the hall itself to the foyer or entrance hall was likely to stimulate dispute over the merits of what had just been experienced. Roger North lamented the tendency of listeners to "strive mordicitus in favour of one singer against another and so transitur in partes." (34) Partisanship also manifested itself as support or denigration of particular composers--Handel or Bononcini, Piccini or Gluck, Mozart or Salieri--and allegiance to the antique (Corelli and Purcell) or the modern. Such disagreements grew from deeper ones over whether the art was to be valued for its emotional power, its sensuousness, its manipulation of abstract forms, or its enactment of "improving" ethical values. It was through debate of this kind, conducted within a distinct, separatist social formation, that the musical public became a lifeworld engaged in Habermasian communicative action. While political and religious discussion might be banned from musical meetings, the freedom to dispute over matters of taste was one of their great attractions and would often be a way of addressing what were really ideological issues by indirect means.