Sense and Senses of the Imagination: Music Listening in England, c. 1660-1750

• Applicant: Dr. Ina Knoth
• Subject Area: Musicology
• Term: since 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 427833835

The project’s aim is to reconstruct for the first time the diversity of music listening in England, c. 1660-1750. With the help of methodological approaches from social history and knowledge history, letters and diaries which can be read as testimonies of music listening will be related to contemporary writings on music and the arts, printed popular media and artefacts.England’s musical culture was the most diverse in Europe around 1700 due to its gradual disentanglement from the court as the countries’ cultural centre: different kinds of music could be heard in the theatre, the opera and – around 50 years prior to the European continent – in concerts which took place in musick houses, ballrooms and pleasure gardens. They added to music making and music listening at court, in church, in the street and in the home. Due to the diversity and intensity of these everyday possibilities to hear music, new practices of listening to music were established. At the same time, the rise of printed media such as books, newspapers and magazines led to broader circulation of knowledge on music. The project focuses on interrelations between music culture, conversational standards and the audience by addressing questions about, on the one hand, the influence of printed knowledge on music and, on the other hand, culture supply on music perception.The project focusses on sources which permit to draw conclusions about the role of the senses and of reason in music perception. A total of around 550 sources comprising writings on music and the arts, magazines, diaries, correspondences, sermons and pamphlets will be taken into account as well music repertoire addressed in these sources and musical images. Many of the diaries and letters which were already gathered for this study are new findings.Substantial preliminary study by the applicant forms the basis to reconstruct the historic music perception as it is depicted in diaries and letters in relation to the complex interdependence of (1) ideas about music knowledge, (2) concepts of the body and its senses and (3) musical life. The diversity of music listening will be narrowed down to practices of music listening which are based on participatory thinking and practices of music listening which focus on forms of distant perception. Different ideas of the imagination play a key role when it comes to how an amateur audience deals with and influences learned as well as popular discussions on music.Results will be published as a monograph available both as an open access e-book and in print. Additionally, all accounts on listening experiences collected from unpublished diaries and letters will be added to the Listening Experience Database (LED; https://led.kmi.open.ac.uk/), the biggest international database for data about music listening experiences.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants