Music Listening und Music Seeing. Historical Reciprocities between the 17th and the 21st Centuries

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Anne Holzmüller; Professor Dr. Christian Thorau; Dr. Hansjakob Ziemer
• Subject Area: Musicology
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 536927166

For centuries, the role of vision in listening to music has preoccupied people who make, compose, listen to, reflect on, and communicate music. It has helped determine what "music" has meant and what status it has been granted. In the historical process of the development of musical listening as a cultural technique, the separation of the sense of hearing from other sensory perceptions such as seeing proved to be an effective mechanism. To better understand the interactions, intentional or not, between hearing and seeing in specific historical constellations is the concern of this collaborative project. It aims at a new, multisensory understanding of a history of music listening. Its main objects are listening situations, media, discourses, and strategies in the history and present of music listening. The focus of our research is the question of how music listening emerged as a learnable art of listening in distinction to seeing, and what roles "music seeing" played in these reciprocal, historical processes. Our understanding is that a history of music listening can only be understood in connection with a history of "music seeing", in which strategies for a de-visualization of listening have often led to their opposite, a renewed visualization. The concept of "music seeing" serves us as an analytical tool to analyze the role of visual perception in listening situations of vocal and instrumental music. Thus, our interest lies not in audiovisual genres such as music theater and music video. Rather, we are concerned with vision as an elementary phenomenological component of the musical listening experience, as it becomes particularly palpable in artificially produced, supposedly 'pure' listening situations, but also through its cultural and scholarly contexts. We consult different sources that have received little attention so far, including material artifacts (compositions, images, decorations, architecture, digital formats), practices (performances, rituals, instructions for listening and seeing, listening reports), and theoretical reflections (perception theory, audience sociology, philosophy of music). The project focuses on three exemplary historical constellations in the early modern, modern, and contemporary periods and their visualization or de-visualization strategies: (1) musical spaces and aristocratic theater buildings in the 17th and 18th centuries, (2) the concert reform movement around 1900 with its references to theories of perception in the social and human sciences, and (3) audiovisual formats for music listeners in the 20th and early 21st centuries. An interdisciplinary working group (4) will integrate the subprojects and deepen the approach of the overall project by involving further scholars in a cross-cultural and cross-epochal way.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants