Listening and Longing: Music Lovers in the Age of Barnum
Daniel Cavicchi takes a detailed look at 19th-century music consumers.
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Cavicchi acknowledges this methodological bias, which for him is overwhelmed by its advantages: the factual data it provides about a rapidly developing middle class all too easy to overgeneralize, its focus on what his mentor Charles Keil called "consumer listening" as opposed to "player listening," and its ability to bring empirically verifiable reception theory to a musicology still dominated by the hidebound spawn of William Foster Apthorp. These advantages are real. It's galling that major musicologists Keil and Cavicchi were constrained to make their academic home not in ethnomusicology, much less the fancy kind, but in American studies. They deserve any foothold they can carve out. And like Cavicchi but not Keil, I believe all musicology undervalues consumer listening. Still, as a partisan of what Cavicchi gingerly designates "the realm of 'popular' culture," I note that even the Springsteen fans of "Tramps Like Us" tend to talk about their man's lyrical ramifications rather than the E Street Band rave-ups that send them like they do everyone else in the arena – about what Cavicchi, once again citing Keil, calls "the individual achievement of perfection" rather than the "social play and abandon" Keil has spent a lifetime theorizing.
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"Listening and Longing" tells us many things we didn't know about music in the 19th century. But if you're really interested, I'd suggest three even more engaging and provocative books, works of speculative research whose absence from Cavicchi's bibliography saddened me. English prof W. T. Lhamon's Raising Cain and Jump Jim Crow paint a picture of minstrel-show fans warmer than Cavicchi or any of his sources would venture; art historian T. J. Clark's "The Painting of Modern Life" includes a stunning chapter on the Parisian café singer Thérésa that thinks rather captiously about the class prejudices of both the swells and the clerks who cheered a directness as vulgar as Jenny Lind's was pure. Each provides more musical detail than Cavicchi. And like Cavicchi and Keil, each proves in his own way that music is much too good a thing to be left to musicologists.
Robert Christgau is a critic at All Things Considered, writes for the National Arts Journalism Program's ARTicles blog, teaches in NYU's Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music, and has published five books.
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