Musical Listening between Immersion and Detachment

Abstract

Abstract The ideal of contemplative listening emerged around 1800, in the context of the Romantic notion of Kunstreligion (art religion); this model was cemented and invested with a moral dimension in Eduard Hanslick’s treatise On the Musically Beautiful (1854), which emphasized the need to listen attentively rather than in a passive and ‘culinary’ fashion. In the early twentieth century the perceived gradual decline of sustained listening diagnosed by Hanslick turned into a full-blown crisis as new, popular and casual musical formats took hold in modern culture. However, responses to this shift were far from uniform. While some music critics and practitioners tried to restore contemplative listening in their audiences and bring classical music to new social groups, the musicologist and Heidegger pupil Heinrich Besseler pursued a different route. An advocate of Gebrauchsmusik, which breaks down the divide between performers and listeners, he turned to examples of embodied, only semi-attentive listening practices in the early modern period as a model for musical culture in the twentieth century.