Sanctioned Daydreams: Music, Pictures, and Architecture

Abstract

The experience of viewing any commercial motion picture, whether a film classic or forgettable recent release, can remind one of the historic links between the sound film—in fact all moving-image entertainment—and nineteenth-century concert life. That link rests in a habit of visual thinking and narrative imaging spurred by listening that lent concerts their popularity in the late nineteenth century. The popularity of going to the movies and movie and television watching since the mid-twentieth century are phenomena that emerged from the widespread success of the central public high art of the nineteenth century: concert music (inclusive of opera). Whatever popularity concert life enjoyed rested on the unintended uses to which the literate and largely prosperous urban public put listening. The sonic variety and range of the Wagnerian and post-Wagnerian orchestra (e.g., Mahler, Debussy, Strauss) and the prior development of rhetoric and symbolism within musical practices and forms evocative of conventional narrative—including the suggestion of interior rumination and description of external reality—lent themselves to a species of visual listening and daydreaming based on a complex pattern of correspondence between musical expression and experience. 1 By the turn of the century, individuals with sufficient means and education flocked to concerts to experience something fantastic, psychologically potent, and therefore desirable: the opportunity to free themselves, albeit briefly, from the relentless quotidian routine mirrored in the conventional allocation and construct of time. The concert offered a temporal experience in which time was recalibrated beyond the clock. Music expanded and contracted time; it lent the elapse of time an intensity unavailable through speech and everyday life. Symphonic instrumental music—whether as brief as Mussorgsky’s twelve-minute Night on Bald Mountain or as lengthy as Mahler’s eighty-minute Sixth Symphony—created a space for a subjective experience of time defined by an internal stream of mental pictures or images crafted by each