German History Vol. 34, No. 1, pp.

113–130

REVIEW ARTICLE

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Why does Music Matter?
Neil Gregor

Defining Deutschtum: Political Ideology, German Identity, and Music-Critical Discourse in Liberal
Vienna. By David Brodbeck. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2014. 392 pp. £30.99 (hardback).

Music, Piety and Propaganda: The Soundscapes of Counter-Reformation Bavaria. By Alexander

J. Fisher. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2014. 384 pp. £37.99 (hardback).

Composing the Canon in the German Democratic Republic: Narratives of Nineteenth-Century

Music. By Elaine Kelly. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2014. 264 pp. £30.49 (hardback).

The Legacy of Johann Strauss: Political Influence and Twentieth-Century Identity. By Zoë
Alexis Lang. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2014. 248 pp. £64.99 (hardback).

Choral Fantasies: Music, Festivity and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Germany. By Ryan 

Minor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2012. 284 pp. £64.99 (hardback)/£22.99 (paper-
back).

Das Publikum macht die Musik: Musikleben in Berlin, London und Wien im 19. Jahrhundert. By
Sven Oliver Müller. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. 2014. 448 pp. €49.99 (hardback).

Convent Music and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Vienna. By Janet K. Page. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press. 2014. 318 pp. £64.99 (hardback).

Over the course of a generation or so there has been a pronounced thickening of the
conversation between historians and musicologists. The coalescence of this conversa-
tion, it bears pointing out, has a long archaeology. Indeed, a moment’s reflection on
the ways in which work published as long ago as the 1970s still echoes through current
debates reminds us that here, as in so many fields, the proclamation of a ‘turn’ has been
somewhat overstated.1 Declaring that ‘music matters’ may have a certain alliterative
elegance, but given that it is some time since anyone has seriously sought to suggest the
opposite this is now little more than a rhetorically empty gesture.2

1 Of English-language literature see, most obviously, William Weber, Music and the Middle Class: The Social Structure
of Concert Life in London, Paris and Vienna between 1830 and 1848 (New York, 1975); more recent, but now
also nearly twenty years old, is the equally pioneering Pamela M. Potter, Most German of the Arts: Musicology and
Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler’s Reich (New Haven, 1998). For discussions of the alleged
‘musical turn’, see Sven Oliver Müller, ‘Analysing Musical Culture in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Towards a Musical
Turn?’, European Review of History, 17 (2010) pp.  833–57; more sceptically Daniel Morat, ‘Zur Geschichte des
Hörens: Ein Forschungsbericht’, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, 51 (2011), pp. 695–716; and Jan-Friedrich Mißfelder,
‘Period Ear: Perspektiven einer Klanggeschichte der Neuzeit’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 38 (2012), pp. 21–47.
2 Sven Oliver Müller, Das Publikum macht die Musik: Musikleben in Berlin, London und Wien im 19. Jahrhundert
(Göttingen, 2014), here p. 373.

© The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the German History Society.
All rights reserved. doi:10.1093/gerhis/ghv144 Advance Access publication 18 January 2016
114 Neil Gregor

Yet if the legitimacy of the object of study scarcely needs arguing for, the insights it
might afford remain unclear. Whether, indeed, a coherent object of study exists at all
is open to question: newly emergent labels such as the ‘cultural history of music’ have

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arguably served to naturalize too swiftly the presence of a distinct field in a manner
which assumes, rather than demonstrates, its existence as a meaningful, recognizable,
bounded and bordered space in which to work. That this demands continued question-
ing, however, is underlined by the fact that the thickening of the conversation referred
to above has taken place against the background of a profound pluralization of the
disciplines of history and musicology. This means that the notion of a single interface
of the two disciplines is, in itself, something of a fiction: there are in fact a number of
such interfaces.3
The focus on the analysis of discourses and the ideologies that ran through them
which animated both the new cultural history and the ‘new musicology’ of the 1980s
and 1990s meant that historians and musicologists tended, initially, to focus their shared
discussion on explorations of the construction of what music ‘meant’.4 These drew
quite straight, bold lines between politics and ideology—conventionally understood—
and culture; the now unmistakeably dated vocabulary of ‘representations’ provided
much of the analytical toolbox.5 Now, by contrast, the coalescence of new subfields
such as the history of the emotions and the history of the senses; the willingness to
reach for the insights of the theory of practice; and the greater engagement with the
insights of music sociology, anthropology and ethnomusicology have rendered visible
the presence of a greater range of problem spaces not obviously owned by one disci-
pline or methodological approach—the most obvious, perhaps, being Sound Studies.
This has empowered scholars to ask whether the various cultural histories of music,
sound and listening they explore are always best pursued by seeking to place them
within such obvious political and ideological frames.6
In musicology in particular this pluralization of method and approach has sometimes
appeared to compound inchoate anxieties over scholarly identity in a discipline that has
always been characterized by a significant degree of intellectual heterogeneity, manifest
in its incorporation of practices ranging from analysis to historical musicology to perfor-
mance studies. Most obviously in Germany it has called forth predictable expressions of
cultural pessimism and declinist laments.7 If such cries can be discounted as reflecting the
conceits of a musical habitus that critical scholarship has the very task of analysing, they
underline further that settling on an agreed understanding of what ‘the cultural history

3 For further reflections see Neil Gregor, ‘Music, Memory, Emotion: Richard Strauss and the Legacies of War’, Music
and Letters, 91, 1 (2015), pp. 55–76.
4 Key texts of the ‘new musicology’ included Susan McClary and Richard Leppert (eds), Music and Society: The
politics of composition, performance and reception (1987); Ruth A. Solie (ed.), Musicology and Difference: Gender
and Sexuality in Music Scholarship (Berkeley, 1993); Richard Leppert, The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation,
and the History of the Body (Berkeley, 1993); Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (eds), Rethinking Music (Oxford,
1999).
5 Emblematic of this approach in a German context is David Dennis, Beethoven in German Politics, 1870–1989 (New
Haven, 1996).
6 Daniel Morat, ‘Introduction’, Sounds of Modern History: Auditory Cultures in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century
Europe (Oxford, 2014), pp. 1–12, here pp. 1–2.
7 See, for example, the essays contained in Laurenz Lütteken (ed.), Musikwissenschaft: Eine Positionsbestimmung
(Kassel, 2007).
 Why does Music Matter?  115

of music’ incorporates remains a challenge. Musicology’s expansion of interest in ‘the

popular’, meanwhile, may appear to historians to be little more than the obvious corol-
lary of their embrace of social history since the 1960s, but while for most historians such

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a move has long been part of the unproblematic ‘common sense’ of what the discipline
legitimately and necessarily attends to, it is less clear that this is uniformly the case among
musicologists. Here—again this appears to be more of an issue in the conservative cor-
ners of German musicology than in its Anglophone counterpart—establishing ‘aesthetic
value’ often remains a supposedly objective precondition for determining the legitimacy
of the object of study, rather than being seen as the product of an ideologically inflected
and historically contingent set of judgements that are themselves open to critique.8
The following reflections thus proceed from the assumptions, first, that there is
not one but a series of conversations to be conducted between exponents of different
branches of the two disciplines, conversations that will, according to need, also incor-
porate the approaches and insights of a variety of cognate disciplines; and, second,
from the assumption that such interfaces as exist remain sites of intellectual tension as
much as sites of smooth cross-fertilization.9 They explore recent work that continues in
the tradition of analysing musical culture as a site at which ideological politics cohere;
studies that examine the ways in which music of the non-canonical kind formed part of
a set of social and cultural practices that served both to mark and cross different kinds
of space; and work that explores how musical life either articulates the presence of, or
serves to constitute, different kinds of community—whether that be membership of
an audience, membership of a subculture or membership of the imagined nation. In
the first two sections of this essay, works that foreground structures of thinking about
music ideologically are contrasted with works that focus on the situated and momentary
quality of musical performance and practice; the third section compares in slightly
greater detail two recent books on the nineteenth century, one by a cultural historian
and one by a scholar trained and socialized academically as a musicologist, to remind
that, whatever intellectual rapprochement may have taken place, clear divisions in our
conceptions of the object of study remain. Finally, some brief concluding remarks ask
whether the fact that the linguistic turn has now largely run its long course may open
up new areas for interdisciplinary discussion, or whether the fading resonance of the
insights upon which this paradigm staked its central claims will encourage musicology
back towards more essentialist habits of thought that militate against an ongoing con-
versation with cultural history.

I.

At least since the publication of David Dennis’s oft-cited study of the German recep-
tion history of Beethoven, a significant strand in the writing of the cultural history
of music has addressed the construction of both composers and their music by the
political cultures of the day, drawing on various practices of discourse analysis to map
the presentation of ideological politics in music analysis, music criticism and popular

8 Robert von Hallberg (ed.), Canons (Chicago, 1983); Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in
the Philosophy of Music (Oxford, 1992); Michael Talbot (ed.), The Musical Work: Reality or Invention? (Liverpool, 2000).
9 Celia Applegate, ‘Music among the Historians’, German History, 30, 3 (2012), pp. 329–49.
116 Neil Gregor

musical literary ephemera.10 Music criticism, in this tradition of historical writing,

becomes a site on which ideological politics are played out by competing actors, and
one on which historians can test the ideological temperature and tone of a period

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through what historical actors are saying about the object in question. As often as not
the music itself is therefore secondary, insofar as the method applies equally to the
visual or plastic arts—a reception history of Schubert need not necessarily demand a
fundamentally different methodological approach from one of Caspar David Friedrich,
any more than discourses that coalesced historically around a Romantic opera need to
be parsed differently from those centred on neo-Gothic architecture.
Both Zoë Alexis Lang’s account of the reception history of Johann Strauss Jnr
and David Brodbeck’s study of German-language music criticism in liberal Vienna
sit broadly within this frame. In Brodbeck’s account, critics are ‘agents in the public
sphere, whose music-critical writing gave voice to distinct, sometimes competing, ideo-
logical positions’.11 Lang’s focus is on competing constructions of Johann Strauss Jnr
as they echoed through Viennese and the wider Austrian political culture from the late
nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. In Lang’s telling, Strauss started as an embodi-
ment of the ‘new Vienna’ that emerged after 1848—in contradistinction to the ‘old
Vienna’ symbolized by his more conservative father; in the 1920s he came to be seen
as an Austrian symbol, both in the sense of a national figure and as an icon of the
Republic; he was gradually appropriated as a German symbol too, and as National
Socialism gained in appeal and influence he was championed by antisemites as an anti-
dote to the Jewish composer Jacques Offenbach. During the National Socialist era the
‘Viennese’ Strauss tended to be supplanted by a more ruralist version of the composer,
as the composer of aristocratic waltzes gave way to the teller of tales from the Vienna
woods; after 1945, the insistence on the ‘lightness’ of his music worked rhetorically to
distinguish him from the ‘seriousness’ of Prusso–German cultural tradition and thus, so
the now very familiar logic runs, to refuse Austrian culpability for Nazism.
In similar vein, David Brodbeck explores
the very great extent to which contemporary political ideology and political developments on the
ground were tied to questions of German identity in late-nineteenth-century Austria, and [shows] how,
in turn, these questions were implicated in the musical culture and above all articulated by Vienna’s
music critics.12

In doing so he builds upon a substantial literature that has examined how politics ech-
oed through the writings of influential critics such as Eduard Hanslick (1825–1904),

10 The most obvious example of this literature is on Beethoven himself—see, in addition to Dennis, Beethoven in
German Politics, Alessandra Comini, The Changing Image of Beethoven: A Study in Mythmaking (New York, 1987);
Nicholas Cook, Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 (Cambridge, 1993); Esteban Buch, Beethoven’s Ninth: A  Political
History (Chicago, 2003); I  have tried to explore this in a particular local context in Neil Gregor, ‘Beethoven,
Bayreuth and the Origins of the Federal Republic of Germany’, English Historical Review, 126 (521) (2011),
pp. 835–77. See also Scott Messing, Schubert in the European imagination, vol. 1: The Romantic and Victorian Era
(Woodbridge, 2006) and vol. 2: Fin-de-Siecle Vienna (Woodbridge, 2007); on the politics of music analysis, see for
example Nicholas Cook, The Schenker Project: Culture, Race, and Music Theory in Fin-de-siècle Vienna (Oxford,
2007); on music criticism see Eckhard John, Musik-Bolschewismus: Die Politisierung der Musik in Deutschland
1918–1938 (Stuttgart, 1994).
11 David Brodbeck, Defining Deutschtum: Political Ideology, German Identity, and Music-Critical Discourse in Liberal
Vienna (Oxford, 2014), p. 16.
12 Ibid., pp.xiii-xiv.
 Why does Music Matter?  117

figures upon whose every word many educated Germans and Austrians hung, and
around whom an aesthetic factionalism raged, the dramas of which were every bit
as exciting as those that played out on Vienna’s stages.13 However, rather than revisit

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Hanslick and others’ familiar writings on Wagner, Brahms and Bruckner and reani-
mate the cultural wars that were fought over these composers, Brodbeck explores the
critical debates that formed around the Habsburg subject composers Carl Goldmark
(1830–1911), a Hungarian-born Jew who lived in Vienna, and the two Czech compos-
ers Bedřich Smetana (1824–84) and Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904).14 Whereas Lang
focuses on the ideological politics transported in discussions of a composer deemed to
belong, therefore, Brodbeck’s concern is to explore how the writings of successive critics
about the proximate ‘other’ uncover the evolving liberal Viennese ‘self ’.15
Focusing on critics Eduard Hanslick and Ludwig Speidel (1830–1906), the somewhat
younger Theodor Helm (1843–1920), and then a range of radical nationalist critics
working as young reviewers at the fin de siècle, Brodbeck discerns three successive itera-
tions of liberal ideology. The first, represented by Hanslick and Speidel, articulated a
liberal nationalism into which non-German subjects, including Jews, could be incor-
porated—an assimilationist model of national identity in which anybody who exhib-
ited, or learnt, supposedly ‘German’ traits could be included. A subsequent generation,
represented by Helm, placed greater emphasis on national difference and drew those
differences in more essentialized terms, embracing a more competitive understanding
of national culture in the process; in the hands of later critics such as August Göllerich
(1859–1923), Camillo Horn (1860–1941) or Joseph Czerny (1869–1942), this essential-
ized view of national difference took on a new ethnic stridency and openly embraced
antisemitism. The longest lived of this cohort often made a comparatively easy transi-
tion into the National Socialist era.
Brodbeck’s highly nuanced argument teases out a series of crucial shifts in the devel-
opment of Viennese liberal discourse and in doing so adds a considerable layer of sub-
tlety to a field in which music criticism has conventionally been understood in terms of
an ongoing liberal/anti-liberal divide. The underlying analytical and narrative frames
are not, however, fundamentally different from those of Lang. It is perhaps worth ask-
ing whether the habit of narrating successive presentations of critical discourse in stud-
ies such as these gives a sense of linearity to the historical account that understates,
in turn, the fluidity, looseness and simultaneity of the wide variety of discourses that
surround the musical object at any given point. For all the presence of contestation in
Lang’s account, the apparent capacity of a dominant discourse to move its successive
iterations in a manner that repeatedly replaces the old tends to silence the presence of
those older voices. Those voices, however, arguably fade rather less than is implied by
an account focused on the leading edge of change and the search for discursive novelty,

13 Of recent literature on Eduard Hanslick see, for example, Kevin C. Karnes, Music, Criticism, and the Challenge
of History: Shaping Modern Musical Thought in Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna (Oxford, 2008); Nicole Grimes,
Siobhán Donovan and Wolfgang Marx (eds), Rethinking Hanslick: Music, Formalism and Expression (Rochester,
2013).
14 On debates surrounding German composers in Viennese culture see, for example, Margaret Notley, Lateness and
Brahms: Music and Culture in the Twilight of Viennese Liberalism (Oxford, 2007).
15 Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz, ‘The Close “Other”: Medieval and Modern Perspectives on Hollanders and the Hanse’,
German History, 31, 4 (2013), pp. 453–72, here pp. 453–5.
118 Neil Gregor

but instead they continue to echo further through the ongoing reception of a composer
and his works. Conservative evocations of the language of Heimat; celebrations of the
urbane and the civic; the coterminous presence of regional, national and supranational

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imaginaries; nostalgic evocations of a lost imperial habitus; and celebrations of the mod-
ern and the new—all of these moved with comparative ease through and across a
succession of political-constitutional-institutional arrangements. They were inflected
by them on occasion (sometimes obviously so) but were as often as not simply passing
through, coexisting rather than obviously contesting one another, resisting a reading
that reduces them to simple emanations of ideological exigencies, or orders them into a
clear linear narrative that maps onto something political in a conventional sense.
Where the essential openness of musical imaginaries poses the greatest challenge for
historians is, of course, dictatorship. For all that Germany’s twentieth-century dictator-
ships pursued, in many respects, an irrefutably homogenizing project, discussion of the
cultural sphere has been historically ill-served by the willingness to reach for clichéd
images of the workings of such regimes, images that transport unspoken assumptions
about the ‘totalitarian’ nature of such operations even as historians claim to have long
since abandoned them. Specifically, that which would be described using a vocabulary
of culture in Weimar Germany becomes ‘propaganda’ under National Socialism or the
GDR; the complex mechanics of cultural production that call forth an opera, a sym-
phony concert or a theatre performance in a democracy are reduced to expressions of the
demands of the Minister of Culture under dictatorship; the equally complex processes
of meaning-making that scholars might discern in respect of a concert in 1932 suddenly
become reflections of willed ideological ‘distortion’ in 1934. Lurking not far beneath the
surface of such accounts of the distorting representations of a dictatorship are assump-
tions concerning the presence of a ‘true’ original, apparently unsullied by ideology. This
perspective serves only to reinscribe its own ideology of the ‘timeless art object’ and thus
closes off its own subject matter from historical critique and contextualisation.16
For all that historians work to recuperate the elements of ideological openness that
existed within National Socialism, in particular, encapsulated in Martina Steber’s recent
acknowledgement of the ‘contained plurality’ of the Third Reich, scholars appear
reluctant to apply these insights to their understanding of how culture operated in
particular spheres.17 This is one of the many reasons why Elaine Kelly’s excellent study
of the construction of the musical canon in the GDR is to be so warmly welcomed.
Like Brodbeck and Lang, she is interested in the workings of ideology—pursued here
through analysis of the construction of the past, not the present—and notes that nar-
ratives of the past ‘reflect the ruling discourse in which they are conceived and serve to
reinforce contemporary value systems’.18 However, her approach is considerably more

16 Such an approach is encapsulated in the title of Erik Levi, Mozart and the Nazis: How the Third Reich Abused a
Cultural Icon (New Haven, 2010).
17 Martina Steber, ‘Regions and National Socialist Ideology: Reflections on Contained Plurality’, in Claus-Christian
W. Szejnmann and Maiken Umbach (eds), Heimat, Region, and Empire: Spatial Identities under National Socialism
(Basingstoke, 2012), pp.  25–42; in similar vein, Lutz Raphael, ‘Pluralities of National Socialist Ideology. New
Perspectives on the Production and Diffusion of National Socialist Weltanschauung’, in Martina Steber and Bernhard
Gotto (eds), Visions of Community in Nazi Germany: Social Engineering and Private Lives (Oxford, 2014), pp. 73–86.
18 Elaine Kelly, Composing the Canon in the German Democratic Republic. Narratives of Nineteenth-Century Music
(Oxford, 2014), p. 1
 Why does Music Matter?  119

subtle than this implies, acknowledging as it does that ‘canons do not . . . just endorse
structures of power, they also expose the tensions that underlie these structures’.19 In
Kelly’s persuasive account, GDR musical life was characterized by the ongoing pres-

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ence of competing versions of Marxist aesthetics underpinned by entirely incompat-
ible understandings of the relationship between past and present. On the one hand, a
Lukácsian aesthetic articulated an account of history as progress, and saw the past as a
repository of progressive cultural forces and actors who were playing out the historical
telos towards the realization of socialism; on the other, Brechtian aesthetics stressed the
historicity of any given cultural work from the period prior to the GDR and demanded
a new socialist cultural programme that broke with, rather than coopted, the histori-
cal past. GDR cultural politics thus oscillated between the desire to reject ‘bourgeois’
culture and the fear of ceding to the West the legitimating capital that it embodied.
Lukács’ aesthetics lent themselves more to the Stalinist project, and tended to gain
ascendancy at moments when they were in tune with that orthodoxy; Brechtian ideas
resonated more strongly at other points, and mostly later. Yet what is striking in Kelly’s
account is how such arguments existed throughout the course of the GDR and cut
across other divisions within the GDR’s intelligentsia and cultural-political apparatus.
As she emphasizes, the ‘seemingly monolithic public sphere often projected a more ide-
alized semblance of unity than was actually the case’.20 For all that the GDR’s cultural
history fell into a broadly discernible ‘early’ and ‘late’ phase, these did not map perfectly
onto other shifts in the political sphere.
What is most compelling, however, is the distinction Kelly draws between canon as
defined by cultural arbiters—the intelligentsia and officialdom, in this context—and
the presence of a canon as manifest in the performing practices of the concert halls
and opera houses of the GDR. In arguments reminiscent of Joseph Kerman’s asser-
tion that while canons are decreed by critics ‘repertoires are determined by perform-
ers’, she insists that the performing canon (that is, the repertoire) ‘was decidedly more
discordant’; moreover ‘it betrayed the resilience of older ideologies, and undermined
the authority of its abstract idealized counterpart’.21 Kelly thus revisits the possibility
of thinking about the cultural history of music not so much in terms of what experts
or semi-professionals such as music critics say about music, and more in terms of a
set of social practices informed by a considerably wider range of assumptions, men-
talities and beliefs. Above all, in seeking to move beyond the ever-changing discursive
construction of music and musical objects by experts and into a consideration of what
music and musical practices may mean for those who perform or consume them, she
implicitly opens up space for exploration of the elusive figure of the historical listener.

II.

The intensification of interdisciplinary exchange between history and musicology has

been particularly fruitful where it has engaged with wider moves in the Humanities and

19 Ibid., p. 1.
20 Ibid., p. 33.
21 Ibid., p. 31; for Kerman’s original intervention, see Joseph Kerman, ‘A Few Canonic Variations’, in von Hallberg,
Canons, pp.177–95, here p. 182; further Goehr, The Imaginary Museum; Katherine Bergeron and Philip V. Bohlman
(eds), Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons (Chicago, 1992).
120 Neil Gregor

beyond to consider the relationship between music and other forms of organized (and
disorganized) sound; the ways in which music and musical listening interacted with
other modes of sensory perception (most obviously, but not exclusively, the visual);22

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and the ways in which music and other forms of sound served, either permanently
or temporarily, to constitute and occupy space and/or function as markers of time.23
All of these moves have doubtless eased the development of interdisciplinary contact
partly because they call for methodological approaches that do not necessarily include
the technical apparatus and capacities of musicology’s more analytical strands of
research, and partly, perhaps, because their far greater engagement with non-canonical
forms of music (non-canonical in terms of western art music and its traditions, that is)
mean that they feel no obligation to pass their musical objects of concern through the
censorious triage of aestheticians before they proceed. Put another way: historians and
musicologists seem to find it easier to find common intellectual ground when discussing
(supposedly) bad, indifferent or musically uninteresting music. Again, such moves have
a long archaeology, with both pioneering attempts to theorize soundscapes and ground-
breaking empirical studies—such as Murray Schafer’s environmentalist-inspired study
of soundscapes or Alain Corbin’s equally famous account of the village bells of rural
France—gradually establishing terrain for others to move across some decades ago.24
The gradual establishment of an infrastructure of journals, conferences and networks,
and, perhaps most tellingly of all, since they bespeak the perception of a market, the
publication of handbooks, attests to a moment of maturation as much as to a dynamic
of emergence.25
Two new books in early modern history exemplify these moves. Alexander Fisher’s
exceptional account of the soundscapes of Counter-Reformation Bavaria and Janet
Page’s thoughtful discussion of the musical life in eighteenth-century Viennese con-
vents both proceed from the assumption that modern understandings of the division of
sacred and secular space, and of the fixity of that division, have distorted our view of
how the relationship between the religious and the profane was configured in the pre-
modern era, when such boundaries were considerably more porous and malleable. The
close physical proximity of Vienna’s secular and many religious sites meant that reli-
gious music was an integral part of the city soundscape; neither was the interior of the
convent reserved as purely devotional space. Rather, as Page demonstrates, Habsburg
rulers routinely processed into convents, where they were treated not only to religiously
observant music but also instructional music and theatre that allegorized and com-
mented upon Habsburg political claims, most notably at moments such as the War of
Spanish Succession. As Fisher also emphasizes, music served temporarily to constitute

22 Michael J.  Schmidt, ‘Visual Music: Jazz, Synaesthesia and the History of the Senses in the Weimar Republic’,
German History 32, 2 (2014), pp. 201–23.
23 See for example the work of Carolyn Birdsall: Carolyn Birdsall, Nazi Soundscapes: Sound, Technology and Urban
Space in Germany, 1933–1945 (Amsterdam, 2012).
24 R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World (New York, 1977); Alain Corbin, Village Bells: The Culture of the
Senses in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside (New York, 1998), originally published as Les Cloches de la
Terre (Paris, 1994).
25 The journal The Senses and Society was established in 2006; The Journal of Sonic Studies in 2011; of handbooks,
see Trevor Pinch and Karen Bijsterveld (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (Oxford, 2011); Jonathan
Sterne (ed.), The Sound Studies Reader (London, 2012).
 Why does Music Matter?  121

religious space when, for example, processions moved through the streets. Not only
music but other elements of sound were central to the temporary occupation of space,
which could be claimed for devotional activity before it reverted to whatever meanings

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it might otherwise have; conversely, even when the site of music-making was physically
fixed (as in the choir of a church) sound served to dissolve or redraw perceived bounda-
ries between the religious and the secular by virtue of the acoustic reach of the noise
concerned.
Fisher’s account has methodological echoes of Brodbeck’s, insofar as music’s capac-
ity to carry a message (in this case confessional) is central to his argument, and insofar
as his concern is not with the reconstruction of historical soundscapes but with the
‘investment of sound with cultural meaning’.26 A core interest is to demonstrate how
Catholic authority mobilized music as part of a wider arsenal of ritual practice in pur-
suit of Counter-Reformation agendas: music sat within and served the wider process
of Confessionalization and was used in the sonic occupation of both localized and
wider territorial space.27 Here it might be argued that the use of the term ‘propaganda’
transports in slightly anachronistic fashion a term borrowed from the twentieth century
and overly freighted with assumptions derived from usage in that context; it would be
unfortunate if, just as scholars of the era of totalitarianism have started to break away
from the crude use of that term and discuss instead how visual or sonic culture created
and transported meaning under conditions of dictatorship, it were to find a new lease
of life among the early modernists.
Yet what is far more important and compelling, in any case, about both these accounts
is how they move beyond consideration of the discursive attribution of meaning to the
musical object under discussion, and consider instead the production and experience
of musical sound as part of an often wider set of ritualized practices that create and
carry meaning in non-verbal ways. This opens up a number of possibilities that are
of relevance not only to early modernists but to scholars working on a wide variety
of fields. Most obviously, it permits the easier integration of musical and non-musical
elements into the study of soundscapes, allowing, for example, the consideration of a
Lutheran chorale less as a discrete musical object governed by particular musical and
theological rules, and one whose meaning is determined by authoritative literary com-
mentators, than as something heard alongside a sermon and punctuated, perhaps, by
sonic disruption in the form of laughter, jeering, or the opening and closing of church
doors. Similarly, the sonic qualities of Corpus Christi processions are to be imagined
not only in terms of the singing of particular songs, with texts that carry an obvious,
authoritative, theology but also as events characterized by musket-fire and cannon-shot.
Yet what is perhaps even more effective is Fisher’s integration of other dimensions
of sensory experience into his account. In common with other recent studies, he argues
for an integrated history of the senses in which music, sound and listening are treated
together with experiences such as smell (in the form, in this case, of incense) or touch
(the use of devotional objects such as rosary beads) and, perhaps above all, the interac-
tion of the senses of sight and sound. Processions were visual spectacles as much as

26 Alexander J.  Fisher, Music, Piety and Propaganda: The Soundscapes of Counter-Reformation Bavaria (Oxford,
2014), p. 9.
27 Compare, for the twentieth century, Birdsall, Nazi Soundscapes.
122 Neil Gregor

sonic events, and gained their force through the interaction of the two; these, in turn,
interacted with other elements of the staging to create their effect. Perhaps most nota-
bly of all, while Corpus Christi processions took place in broad daylight, those for Good

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Friday were conducted in the evening: as Fisher notes, ‘conducted under the cover of
darkness and illuminated by torches, the procession included numerous flagellants: it
is intriguing to imagine the mournful music accompanied by shouting, crying, and the
grisly sound of whips striking bloody backs’.28 Likewise, the ritualized act of clothing
novices as they processed formally into the convents of Vienna to take up life within
their walls points to the highly visual quality of such moments.
Such arguments point, again, to the maturation of the field of sensory history, inso-
far as until recently historians of listening were wont to posit the significance of their
topic against that of visual studies – the hegemony of which they sought to challenge
– or at least to argue for their field as a distinctive space of study, whereas now there
appears to be a growing and welcome consensus that sensory history should proceed
from an understanding of the intersensoriness of human perception and experience.
Both Page and, particularly, Fisher encourage us to think historically about music, and
their emphasis on the temporary quality of musical performance and experience, and
on the particular contexts and moments in which it is performed—contexts which are
spatial and temporal as well as political and ideological—opens up the possibility of
considering the experiences of music’s transitory presence. The anthropological pur-
suit of such questions should make it possible, in turn, to consider theoretically those
issues of aura, emotion and aesthetic experience that are still too often treated, in a
German context, with the mystifying vocabulary of the magical, the irrational and the
demonic.29

III.

As such remarks imply, the search for imagined German peculiarities, rooted in a sin-
gular relationship of Germans to their music, still echoes through historical scholarship
on matters musical, even if the more composer-centred habits of historical musicology
attune us to the ways in which cities, as much as nations or states, formed the locus
of musical activity, and even as musicians’ comparatively high levels of mobility ren-
der them apt material for transnational and migration studies, or treatment within the
frames of histoires croisées.30 Arguably the most compelling scholarship on musical life in
Germany is that which neither assumes nor asks after German peculiarities, but simply
takes musical histories played out in Germany as case studies of problems that played
out, in more or less similar fashion, in a wide variety of other national contexts.
Chief among these concerns remains the question of music’s relationship with
community. As this article has sought to suggest, some strands of scholarship appear

28 Fisher, Music, Piety and Propaganda, p. 267.

29 The capacity of such tropes to move through the most sober of academic work is underlined by the title of a
recent edited collection: Sven Oliver Müller and Sarah Zalfen (eds), Besatzungsmacht Musik: Zur Musik- und
Emotionsgeschichte im Zeitalter der Weltkriege (1914–1949) (Bielefeld, 2012).
30 For example Mary E.  Fransden, Crossing Confessional Boundaries: The Patronage of Italian Sacred Music in
Seventeenth-Century Dresden (Oxford, 2012); Sabine Ehrmann-Herfort und Silke Leopold (eds), Migration und
Identität: Wanderbewegungen und Kulturkontakte in der Musikgeschichte (Kassel, 2013).
 Why does Music Matter?  123

to foreground the ways in which the dominant ideologies of a community articulate

themselves on the site of music, and thus take the presence of that community as a
more or less stable entity, with dominant values and beliefs, for given; others are more

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concerned to consider the transitory experience of community called forth by music
in performance or within a set of social practices (the concert, the church service, the
parade)—be that for the performers or for the listeners, and be that in a manner that
engenders, variously, a shared sense of nation, confession, class, gender, occupation or
something quite different again.31
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the status of the nineteenth century as the locus classicus
of both nation-formation and ‘bourgeois culture’, studies of musical culture in that
period have tended repeatedly to return to questions of national identity and its con-
nection to social practices anchored in something recognizably class-based. Yet as Sven
Oliver Müller’s comparative study of musical publics in nineteenth-century Vienna,
London and Berlin suggests, far from being a site on which German peculiarities may
be detected, opera houses and concerts halls witnessed a marked process of becoming
more similar, not different. Müller seeks to trace the transition from what is conven-
tionally characterized as an eighteenth-century aristocratic culture of music as noise,
entertainment and distraction to one of attentive listening, concentration and bodily
control associated with the emergence of bourgeois culture in the nineteenth century.
Echoing the pioneering (if disputed) work of James Johnson—who argued a generation
or so ago in respect of Paris that with Parisians’ discovery of Beethoven and Romantic
aesthetics audiences embraced the virtues and discipline of silence, listening in reverent
awe in symphony concerts that, in tendency, replaced the entertaining miscellanies of
earlier in the century—Müller traces how in both opera houses and concert halls one
set of audience habits of self-staging, self-display and bodily comportment gave way to
another.32 A culture of coming and going in the middle of acts or movements gave way
to punctuality; a culture of looking at other members of the audience gave way to an
exclusive focus on the performance; music ceased being aural wallpaper for a society
event and became an elevated object of contemplation. Accordingly, as William Weber
has argued, programmes evolved from entertaining miscellanies designed for diver-
sion into seriously considered offerings that demanded reflection.33 Likewise, a culture
of emotional depth replaced one of superficiality, as the transformation of musical
culture incorporated the consolidation of a new bourgeois emotional regime. All the
while, arguments over the significance of such social codes were really surrogates for
something else: if, as liberals argued, aristocrats could not show the necessary discipline
to listen effectively in the concert or opera how could they have the requisite discipline
to govern?

31 See the thoughtful ethnomusicological reflections in Kay Kaufman Shelemay, ‘Musical Communities: Rethinking
the Collective in Music’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 64, 2 (2011), pp. 349–90.
32 James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley, 1994); a more recent iteration, with variations,
of the argument that the governing narrative was one of the transition from courtly to bourgeois culture can be
found in Laurenz Lütteken (ed.), Zwischen Tempel und Verein: Musik und Bürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert (Kassel,
2013); critical of Johnson’s work is Mary Ann Smart, ‘Review: James Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History’,
Nineteenth-Century Music, 20, 3 (1997), pp. 291–7.
33 William Weber, The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms
(Cambridge, 2009).
124 Neil Gregor

There is much to recommend this comparative approach, which argues persuasively

that for all their differences in political culture, the similarities in the experiences of
Vienna, Berlin and London outweighed the differences, which were of degree, not

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kind. Moreover, processes of cultural transfer between the three led to a tendency
towards harmonization and homogenization of hitherto more distinctive civic cultures,
as behavioural codes and musical repertoires became more standardized across states
and cities. The argument regarding transfers and the concomitant Europeanization of
musical culture thus helps to dissolve echoes of the Sonderweg that still cleaved to discus-
sions of Germans and music only a generation ago.34 Müller’s argument that opera
and concert audiences were less distinctive in their behavioural codes than has hitherto
been assumed feels persuasive not least because, as he demonstrates, there was a signifi-
cant degree of overlap between the two publics. Indeed, despite the supposed tension
between a putatively ‘aristocratic’ culture and the new ‘bourgeois’ one there was much
fluidity and crossover, aristocrats sometimes playing a prominent role in the formation
of early philharmonic concert societies, for example.35
Nonetheless, for all his modifications of the inherited explanatory frame of the
transition from aristocratic to bourgeois society, and for all the recognition that things
moved at a different pace in different cities—with the most politically liberal not neces-
sarily the first to embrace the new behavioural codes—there is still something unmis-
takably teleological about the account. If nothing else, it is worth questioning—as other
scholars have begun to do in respect of France, for example, from which example the
initial argument came—whether the behavioural shifts were as profound or complete
as Müller suggests.36 Janet Page’s account of Habsburg monarchs processing solemnly
into convents to listen to didactic and allegorical performances suggests that the image
of the musically inattentive aristocrat seeking distraction may be something of a carica-
ture, or at least not tell the whole story;37 conversely, throughout the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century arguments over the necessity of silence in the symphonic con-
cert hall continued to rage, suggesting that this culture had yet to triumph uniformly.
For one thing, the culture of philharmonic subscription concerts cannot necessarily
be made to stand for the dominant culture or the governing emotional regimes in the
bourgeois habitus of any given city—indeed, in large cities in particular the musical
culture was far more varied, with philharmonic concerts existing alongside a variety of
more popular institutions open to a wider public, such as popular concerts (Volkskonzerte)
of generally slightly more accessible repertoire performed at lower prices, open-air con-
certs or café concerts. For all the sense of social stratification that such a segmented
cultural offer implied, it seems likely that audiences crossed from one genre to another

34 See for example the extensive effort to deconstruct the notion of Germans as the ‘people of music’ that was
still deemed necessary as late as the publication of Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter (eds), Music and German
National Identity (Chicago, 2002).
35 It is instructive to compare Müller’s argument here to that of Thomas Irvine, ‘Das Bürgertum schafft sich ab:
Zur Gründung der Philharmonic Society in London im Jahr 1813’, in Lütteken, Zwischen Tempel und Verein,
pp. 154–67.
36 Katharine Ellis, ‘Who Cares if you Listen? Researching Audience Behaviour(s) in Nineteenth-Century Paris’, in
Christian Thorau und Hansjakob Ziemer (eds), The Oxford Handbook for the History of Music Listening in the
Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Oxford, forthcoming, 2016).
37 Page, Convent Music, pp. 111–91.
 Why does Music Matter?  125

with comparative ease—the figure of the cultural omnivore beloved of sociologists of

late is probably a less recent invention than we may imagine.38
Such scepticism may be even more justified when one considers the limits of the

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extent to which the major metropolises can be made to stand for the experiences of
elsewhere.39 Not only did transitions tend to take place more slowly in the provinces, but
regional towns and cities also hosted cultures that operated according to quite different
rules and were shaped by quite different dynamics of change. This was not simply a
question of the ‘unsimultaneity of the simultaneous’, therefore, in which ‘survivals’ of
an older culture lingered; but, rather, testimony to the presence of a number of coexist-
ing histories unfolding with a greater degree of autonomy than is implied by an account
which assumes that the provinces just followed in the wake of the major cities.
The extent to which audiences did or did not ‘fall silent’ over the course of the nine-
teenth century is, ultimately, a matter for further empirical exploration. The terrain
simply remains open for further research, and Müller’s work will doubtless do much to
stimulate that. More fundamentally, it is worth questioning whether the tools of com-
munication studies on which Müller draws are most suited to answering the questions
regarding music and community that he has set himself. The journalistic ephemera,
much of it satirical, on which he draws do not always sustain the argument about audi-
ence ‘communication’ that he seeks to build, an argument which tends to float above
the sources rather than be driven by close analysis of them; the rather insistent prose
style, which works to assert rather than argue the point, comes across, as the Frankfurt
School might have said, as ‘insufficiently dialectic’.
Perhaps most strikingly of all, though, for a volume whose core contention is that
‘music matters’, the music is oddly absent. There are no sustained discussions of reper-
toire or detailed accounts of ordinary concerts, so that a thick description of listening
experiences does not emerge. This leaves something of a paradox—during the nine-
teenth century a culture of attentive listening to musical objects now conceived of as ‘art
works’ emerged, engendering a culture of bodily discipline focused solely on the music,
and yet the music does not figure in the analysis. Valuable as it is to make audiences the
objects of analysis, they were audiences for something; while the aesthetic experience
was not the entire experience, and musical sound not even the sole element of that—it
also encompassed the architecture, the visual effects of what happened on stage, and
indeed the visual presentation of other audience members—it is hard to argue that it
was not in there somewhere, and did not co-structure audience experience of the event.
This points to the tension that remains at the heart of the interface of history and
musicology—as Celia Applegate put it, the habit of historians of talking around the

38 Richard A.  Peterson and Roger M.  Kern, ‘Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore’, American
Sociological Review, 61 (1996), pp. 900–7.
39 Likewise, most recent work on operetta and popular theatre has also tended to concentrate on major cities: see for
example the insightful work of Tobias Becker, Inszenierte Moderne: Populäres Theater in Berlin und London, 1880–1930
(Munich, 2014); Len Platt, Tobias Becker and David Linton (eds), Popular Musical Theatre in London and Berlin: 1890
to 1939 (Cambridge, 2014). Not the least of the merits of the pioneering study by Hansjakob Ziemer of Frankfurt/
Main is its stress on the significance of symphonic concerts as civic institutions in regional cities. See Hansjakob Ziemer,
Die Moderne Hören: Das Konzert als urbanes Forum 1890–1940 (Frankfurt/Main, 2008); in similar vein, stressing the
civic qualities and characteristics of concert life, is Christian Thorau, Andreas Odenkirchen and Peter Ackermann (eds),
Musik, Bürger, Stadt: Konzertleben und musikalisches Hören im historischen Wandel (Regensburg, 2011).
126 Neil Gregor

music, rather than about it, contrasted with musicologists’ capacity, and still in many
respects their tendency, to argue outwards from the music itself—a tension that reminds
us that the two disciplines approach whatever common terrain exists via opposing tra-

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jectories.40 On the one hand, musicologists’ desire to historicize their musical material
and contextualize it within the circumstances of its emergence, rather than continue
to treat it as transcendental material standing outside of time and space, has engen-
dered a certain scepticism within that discipline towards those who continue to insist
upon reifying TMI (‘the music itself ’)—the very advent of such an acronym carries an
unmistakeable knowingness regarding habits of thought now construed as intellectually
reactionary. Yet for historians, coming at it from the other end of things, it is perhaps
still too easy to sidestep the problems emanating from the musical material’s capacity to
structure the listening experiences of audiences. Listening to a march is not the same as
listening to a cantata, after all, and listening to Gluck is not exactly the same as listen-
ing to Richard Strauss, even as one recognizes that listeners draw on a wide range of
cultural resources external to the musical object to make sense of what they hear.
That historians and musicologists still conceive of the object of study in very dif-
ferent ways is underlined by comparing Müller’s work to that of Ryan Minor, who
explores questions of musical community in the nineteenth century from the opposite
perspective. In focusing on choral singing, Minor is able to explore how national subjec-
tivity was constituted not just through consumption of musical works that came to take
on national significance, but through participation in the performance of the works
themselves. But Minor’s interest is not only in the capacity of singing to generate shared
identity—to engender the ‘communication’ that Müller discerns: rather, that dissolu-
tion of individuality into the identity of the whole through the shared act of singing is
one that is also generated by the specific musical and textual affordances of the actual
objects being sung.
Building on previous explorations of festival culture and associational life, Minor
notes how
from the beerhall to the bourgeois choral society, the private salon to the public festival, and the church
to the concert hall, choral singing marked the contours of the burgeoning nation as perhaps nothing else
could by grafting a rhetoric of communal participation onto the emerging notion that there was a unique
bond between Germans and their music.41

Minor is careful not to reduce choral singing to an expression of national identity,

arguing that such activities were also cut across by questions of confession, music edu-
cation, and the creation of spaces of bourgeois sociability, but insists that ‘if the milieu
of choral music was not exclusively or reductively national, it was a prominent part of
the national imaginary all the same’.42 The choir becomes, in the process, a metaphor
for ‘the people’ or the nation, with both liberal connotations of egalitarian participa-
tion and—in its assumption that individuals were only fully self-realizable within the

40 Applegate, ‘Music among the Historians’, p. 330, talks of historians ‘circling around’ the music.
41 Ryan Minor, Choral Fantasies: Music, Festivity and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge,
2012), p. 2; see also James Garratt, Music, Culture and Social Reform in the Age of Wagner (Cambridge, 2010).
42 Minor, Choral Fantasies, p. 3; compare the multiple frames within which Celia Applegate similarly sets
Mendelssohn’s Bach Revival in Celia Applegate, Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn’s Revival of the
‘St. Matthew Passion’ (Cornell, 2005).
 Why does Music Matter?  127

whole—the potential to mutate into something with more conservative, organicist and
authoritarian encodings. ‘Singing’ simultaneously became a marker of belonging to
the civic sphere and a way of distinguishing oneself from the ‘screaming’ of the unruly

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mob: here, as elsewhere, bourgeois associational life demonstrated its ambivalence
towards a fully inclusive definition of the nation.43
Starting with choral settings of Ernst Moritz Arndt’s 1813 poem Des Deutschen
Vaterland, and moving through Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang (premiered at the 1840
Gutenberg celebrations in Leipzig), Liszt’s cantatas composed for the inauguration of
the Bonn Beethoven monument in 1845 and the centenary of the composer’s death in
1870, and choral songs composed to celebrate Prussian victory and national unifica-
tion in 1870–1971—including the contrasting Triumphlied by Brahms and Kaisermarsch
by Wagner—he argues that ‘the German nation is not simply something that is . . . but
something that is done. Both noun and verb, Germany is sung into existence’.44 What
is perhaps most compelling about the book, and most challenging in its implications
for historians working in this field, is the way in which he locates the constitution of
national subjectivity not just in the social practice of singing itself but in the musical
and textual properties of the material being sung. The occasional nature of such cho-
ral writing, composed as it often was for specific public festivals or to mark particular
historic events, has sometimes predisposed musicologists—trained to privilege ‘abso-
luteness’ and ‘transcendence’ as aesthetic virtues—to frustration at perceived formal
inadequacies in such works. Minor argues, however, that what appears formally inco-
herent by some rules has its own logic by others, a logic supplied in this case by the
music’s need to engender, through its musical effects, a sense of community, history or
monumentality among its performers.
Thus, in a challenge to the habit of constructing ideological polarities between
Brahms and Wagner, Minor reads the score of Brahms’s Triumphlied for its Francophobic
and nationalist underpinnings, attributes which are not only stronger for him than
other critics have been wont to discern, but, crucially, written into the musical object in
a manner that would have been clear primarily to the performers rather than to the lis-
teners, and clearer still to those who studied the score.45 The biblical text upon which it
was based (Revelation) contained references, omitted in the composition but recogniz-
able to a knowing readership, to a whore (the whore of Babylon) which, in a contempo-
rary context, would be understood as embodying France; the names of instruments are
printed in the text in German rather than in Italian; the musical motif of ‘Heil Dir im
Siegerkranz’ is written in submerged manner into the opening movement. For Minor,
the confirmation that the ‘Heil Dir im Siegerkranz’ melody is indeed hidden in the first movement . . .
provides a deeper national ‘content’ to the work than the simple ephemera of its brass fanfares. In other
words, the cultural references and habitus of the German Bildungsbürgertum support the work’s overt mili-
tarism and Francophobia’

rather more than a listening to the surface of the piece would suggest.46

43 Minor, Choral Fantasies, p. 25

44 Ibid., p. 9.
45 Ibid., pp. 117–29.
46 Ibid., p. 126
128 Neil Gregor

Some of these examples rest on quite strong assumptions regarding the presence
of a ‘knowing listenership’ (be that among the performers or the audience) and the
capacity of that listenership to recognize the political encodings that inhere in specific

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musical motifs – not to mention their ability to spot them in the first place; by the same
token, recognizing the ideological script that ran through such compositions demanded
understanding the intertextual referentiality of such motifs within a wider repository of
bourgeois cultural capital, a repository that included not just musical but literary and
other objects too. It is naturally open to question how far participants in such shared
moments of song always had that familiarity, and how far their own interpretative
capacities extended to recognizing such tropes on what may have been a small hand-
ful of experiences of singing or hearing any given piece. This need not, however, be a
problem: as Nicholas Matthew persuasively argued in his recent study of Beethoven’s
occasional works, what matters is less the specific ideological content that any given
piece of such music carries and more ‘the ways in which it addresses its public, and the
kinds of audience attention it consequently encourages’.47 Minor’s highly persuasive
study can be read very similarly with no loss of insight; like Matthews’s work, it reminds
cultural historians forcefully that if they want to argue that ‘music matters’ they need to
find ways of attending to it more closely.

IV.

As this comparison of the works of Müller and Minor implies, the challenge for his-
torians of finding an appropriate methodology to think about the place of organized
sound in the diverse lifeworlds of the past remains. Of recent work specifically in the
field of Austro–German musical culture, Nicholas Matthews’s account of the ‘political
Beethoven’ is indeed perhaps that which gives grounds for optimism that an interdisci-
plinary contact zone is gradually coalescing to which historians will have something to
contribute. As he argues, even that music to which the ideology of musical autonomy has
cleaved most tenaciously in the past is only fully legible when considered within its con-
texts of genesis and performance and contemporary reception. Not only Beethoven’s
much maligned occasional work, he persuasively argues, but also the canonical œuvre
has to be read for its embeddedness in the culture of the Habsburg imperial court and,
more to the point, in the bellicose and martial atmosphere of the Napoleonic wars;
even the supposedly ‘absolute’ symphonic music, he argues, should be read against the
conventions of the contemporary theatre and the tableaux vivants. Given the moves that
scholars such as Minor and Matthews have been making in this regard, for historians
to continue to assert that ‘music matters’ as if there were still something at stake in the
claim is merely to challenge an ideology of music as unpolitical and as unanchored in
the social world that most critically minded musicologists have long since recognized as
the straw man that it is.
And yet of course differences remain, and much work remains to be done before
musicologists and historians can be sure that they are talking about the same thing. For
musicologists seeking dialogue with historians, that may best be pursued by moving
yet further away from still ingrained disciplinary conventions regarding what music is

47 Nicholas Matthew, Political Beethoven (Cambridge, 2013), p. 170.

 Why does Music Matter?  129

(or, at least, music worth thinking about). The issue of aesthetic complicity—that sense
that if one works on the composer or the artist one must somehow like the work—and
the associated penchant for advocacy still appears to constrain musicologists’ capac-

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ity to work as freely as they might on that which the arbiters of taste determine to be
‘bad music’. Yet as historians we need to understand the place of those cheesy ‘hits’
(Schlager) in people’s lives as much as we do that of rock’n’roll. Put another way, histo-
rians and musicologists will surely have a more fruitful dialogue once they recognize
that ‘Culture’ is little more than a ‘term from the sources’ (Quellenbegriff)—and the con-
tainer of our own conceits—while culture in its anthropological sense is what actually
interests us.
Conversely, and to repeat: historians need to understand that it matters whether it
was a march or a waltz. If the disciplinary dynamics of musicology over the last twenty
years are such that ‘the music itself ’ is something that scholars there can justifiably feel
the need to work out from—away from the musical object-as-text and further towards
the contexts of its emergence, performance and reception—historians start from some-
where else, and therefore, logically, need to be heading in a different direction if they
are to arrive at the same intellectual spot. To suggest that the ‘public makes the music’ is
to evoke a form of reader-response theory that literary critics have mostly given up on,
and historians should not use it to gloss over their absent musicological skills. Historians
still need to head more resolutely towards that music: only by doing so will they be able
to move beyond the declarative statement that it matters, and contribute meaningfully
to answering the question of how.
Within the immediate field of German cultural history the ongoing coalescence
of that conversation will doubtless manifest itself in further case studies informed
by the turn towards the transnational and, conversely, by the ongoing parsing of the
category of the ‘national’ through studies of the regional and local; from a musi-
cological perspective, the ongoing parsing of the term ‘music’ itself, and the forms
of organized sound that its definition valorizes and excludes as legitimate objects
of both study and consumption, will doubtless open new possibilities too.48 More
generally, and perhaps more interestingly, it is worth asking how the now very pal-
pably fading intellectual impulses that the linguistic turn gave us for thirty years will
impact upon the ways in which the two disciplines engage with one another in the
future. The increased search for moments of experience that lie anterior to discourse,
and the attendant turn towards more overtly phenomenological concerns, suggest
that the relationship between music and the human body, and the question of both
music-making and musical listening as corporeal, sensory and emotional experience,
may provide an area of particular focus. Given musicology’s growing engagement
with more presentist disciplines such as psychology and neuroscience as it pursues
such questions, it is arguably more important than ever that culturalist readings of
musical experience that stress their historically contingent quality continue to inform
that curiosity.

48 See the perceptive observations in Kate Guthrie, ‘Conference Report: Dreams of Germany. Music and (Trans)
national Imaginaries in the Modern Era’, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute London, 37, 2 (2015)
pp. 108–13.
130 Neil Gregor

Abstract

This essay reviews recent works on the cultural history of music. Arguing that there are not one but sev-

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eral discrete interdisciplinary interfaces at which such work is undertaken, it explores work that analyses
musical culture as a site at which ideological politics cohere; studies that examine the place of music in
social and cultural practices that served to mark and cross different kinds of space; and work that explores
how musical life either articulates the presence of, or serves to constitute, different kinds of community.
It emphasises that while the disciplinary dynamics of musicology are such that a greater interest in the
contexts of emergence, production and consumption of music is reasonable, historians approach the same
problem space from the opposite direction and still need to engage more with problems centred on the
musical material than they usually do.

Keywords: cultural history of music, music, history of the senses, ethnomusicology

University of Southampton
N.Gregor@soton.ac.uk