1

The Musicality of Listening

Daniel Cavicchi
Rhode Island School of Design
As a professor, I often find myself in social situations where I am meeting new
peopleeither at a conference like this one, a reception, a dinner, etc. You know how
these things arepeople usually congregate in pairs or in groups of threes, and everyone
exchanges small talk about who they are and what they are working on. Naturally, when
people ask me what I study, I answer, music. The problem, though, is that when I tell
them this, without exception, they always ask, Oh, really? What do you play?
Now, this may not seem strange on the surface, but its a difficult question for me
to answer and, actually, it raises for me all sorts of issues. I grew up taking years of piano
lessons, I like to play guitar for my children, and I joined a local community orchestra as
a trumpeter. But I wouldnt say that playing musical instruments has, really, much to do
with my interest in music.
Instead, I trace that back to my first experience with stereo equipment, around
1979. I used to baby sit for my aunt, and after getting my little cousins to bed, I would
just sit and marvel at her Marantz 2220 receiver, with its gleaming silver finish and fancy
black lettering. It was the most modern thing Id seen; its smooth-turning knobs changed
sound quality with the slightest touch, and its blue-lighted gauges gave it the feel of a
spaceship control panel. My aunt had an extensive record collection to go along with her
stereo equipment, and I remember lying between the giant floor speakers, studying album
covers, and listening to Fleetwood Macs Rumours, Jefferson Starships Red Octopus,
and Santanas first album late into the night. I remember marveling at the way songs
developed; the interactions of the instruments; the solos; the different textures of the
singers voices. I had not heard these songs before, but with the modern equipment and
full sound they seemed to come alive, become connected to me and to the moment in
ways I couldnt explain.
To this day, I am far more of a listener than a performer: I love to attend concerts
of all different kinds of music, go to record stores and spend hours browsing the bins, and
2
relax at night by playing CDs really loud and letting the music wash over me. I avidly
program and reprogram all the stations on my car radio, survey the latest hits when I
commute to work, and revel in chance encounters with a favorite song. I keep up with the
latest music magazines and books, participate on music discussion groups on the Web,
and argue with friends about the worth of various musical performers and their works.
How, then, do I answer the question, What do you play? When Ive admitted
that I have training on the piano or the trumpet, I usually find myself awash in
complimentsBoth? Thats simply wonderful! the person respondsor I become
stuck in a conversation about with whom and where I play. In both situations, I feel quite
uncomfortable and out-of-place. I have replied that I actually play the radio a couple of
times, making a little pun to hide my discomfort, but the look I receive is usually both
perplexed and slightly amused, as if I told a joke whose punch line was a little too
ambiguous. Where does this question come from? Why is musicality automatically
associated with performing on an instrument, with creating musical sound? What about
me, the listener, the audience member, the music consumer? Am I not just as musical?
***
In the United States, music listening, as a distinct cultural activity or behavior,
goes back to the mid-nineteenth century. Before the Civil War, musical life was based on
amateur performanceeveryone knew how to manage a little on an instrument and
people would often gather in homes to play and sing and listen togetherperforming and
listening were not distinct actions but rather mixed up together. But the increasing
number of touring opera stars, famous virtuosos, and professional orchestras after 1860
led many people to lose touch with the amateur dialectic of player/listener. The growing
idea of the musical work, combined with the ideology of professionalism, promoted the
idea that there was little need for amateur players to bother creating inferior versions of
musical pieces; instead many amateur musicians came to identify themselves solely as
regular audience members, as listeners.
1
Walt Whitman was one of the first self-identified
listeners; with no musical training whatsoever, he spent much of his time at mid-century
seeking out the soul-rousing experience of opera, which served as inspiration for much
of his poetry.
2
Similarly, George Templeton Strong, a New York lawyer at mid-century,
3
traded amateur performance for attendance at every public musical event he could find,
chronicling his listening experiences in his journal.
3

The rise of recording technology between 1900 and 1920, in the form of the
phonograph, further eroded amateur playing and solidified the new, distinct class of
listeners. People didnt need to learn to play a concerto by Beethoven on the piano in
order to experience music; instead, they could simply put on a record and hear a touring
soloist give a flawless performance. Not only that, they could make the soloist play that
piece again and again. Instead of gatherings of friends and family in the parlor to sing
songs and share in playing bits of orchestral works or popular songs on the few
instruments at hand, there were the gatherings of phonograph societies, groups of people
who met at someones house and sat in a circle before a phonograph to listen to various
recorded performances. These societies had their own newsletters--the forerunners of
todays pop music magazines--in which they reviewed recordings, discussed the latest
phonograph equipment, planned get-togethers, and generally enthused about different
orchestras, ensembles, conductors, divas, soloists, and music personalities. It was an
entire new culture built not around instrument playing but record playing.
4

Today, I would argue that the United States is a nation of listeners. From
phonograph societies to fan clubs, from families sitting around the radio to college
students downlaiding songs from natpster, from vaudeville to stadium concerts, the act of
listening has constituted the main form of musical behavior for a majority of Americans
in the 20
th
century. More people buy stereos and computers on which to hear music than
buy musical instruments; the music business is centered on the consumption of
recordings. Not only that, but recent work in sociology and ethnomusicology shows that
listening has come to serve a number of meaningful functions in daily life, including
developing self identity, managing emotion, and establishing social relationships. As Tia
Denora says, we aesthetize ourselves through listeningwe bring ourselves to life.
5
***
Whats curious to meand what, I suppose, bothers me most about that question,
What do you play?is that, despite the fact that the U.S. has been a nation of listeners
for quite some time, despite the fact that many listeners derive what they consider
4
meaningful and useful effects from their activities as listeners, many people in the U.S.
particularly educators, those that control the ideological apparatus of musiccontinue to
characterize listening to music as a passive or secondary act, a symbol of peoples
decreasing musical literacy and even of their lack of interest in music.
John Phillips Sousa first outlined the problem of listeningwith particular
reference to the newly invented phonograph-- in 1906:
I foresee a marked deterioration in American music and musical taste, an
interruption in the musical development of the country.[There are] more pianos,
violins, guitars, mandolins, and banjos among the working classes of America
than in all the rest of the world, but once the talking machine is in a home, the
child wont practice.
6

In 1916, Alice Clark Cook echoed this sentiment by arguing that playing musical
instruments enhanced concentration, patience, precision, feeling and imagination while
listening to the phonograph was idle behavior that weakened the mental muscles.
7
In
1929, Sociologists Richard and Helen Lynd provided evidence for an increasingly
passive, listening public in their influential study of a Midwestern town:
Thirty-five years ago diffusion of musical knowledge was entirely in the
handicraft stage; today it has entered a machine stage. The first phonograph was
exhibited locally in 1890 and was reported as drawing large crowdsAnd yet
although more music is available to Middletown than ever before and children are
taught music with more organized zeal than formerly, the question arises, as in the
case of reading, as to whether music actually bulks larger as a form of leisure-
time enjoyment than in the nineties. If one boy in each six or seven in high school
enjoys music more than any other leisure-time home activity, this enthusiasm
evaporates between high school and his active life as one of those getting
Middletowns living.
8
Today, music textbooks do not sound that different. In the conclusion to his latest
book on music in the daily lives of Americans between 1800 and 1861, musicologist
Nicholas Tawa writes that similarities between then and nowexist. Music is still
ubiquitous throughout the country. However, the tendency is toward more passive
5
listening, not active participation.
9
A well-known music education text from the nineties
explains the change in more detail, in a section titled passive listening:
The richness of American concert life led to passive participation.
Music became a connoisseur art heard in concert halls, rather than an integral part
of everyday life in which great numbers of people participated. School bands,
orchestras, and choruses changed this somewhat throughout the twentieth century.
Even so, despite their wealth of performing experiences as students, most of the
children who participated did not continue to do so after completing their
schooling.For a time (until the 1930s) it was common for industry to sponsor
choruses, bands, and orchestras comprised of its own employees; some industrial
music ensembles still exist, but not to the extent of earlier years. This was a
generous and humanistic aspect of some American industrial corporations, but
most of these organizations have been replaced by piped-in canned music,
selected for its ability to create an environment conducive to greater productivity.
The loss of so many of these participative activities is a loss to American
society.
10

There is only one acceptable definition of musical behavior in these excerpts:
performing in a chorus, band, or orchestra. Playing an instrument or singing is
dramatically characterized as a home activity creating enjoyment and enthusiasm, or
something which is rich, generous, and humanist. Listening to a phonograph or at a
concert, conversely, is not an integral part of everyday life and dismissed as a fad or
some sort of mechanical action.
This kind of juxtaposition between active playing and passive listening happens
all the time in the academic world of music. Despite the continuing historical importance
of musicology in the history of music education in the United States, particularly its
dedication to fostering an understanding about music through listening and analysis,
college music programs are primarily derived from the curricula of conservatories and
music schools. Consequently, most music programs across age levels in the United States
are vocational, focusing on the production of professional musicians and dismissing
through requirements and teaching techniquesknowledge of music created by listening.
Music is idealized as a craft. As E. Eugene Helm explained in a survey of musicology
and ethnomusicology programs in America,
6
The main message of all undergraduate music curricula endorsed by the National
Association of Schools of Music is that the student must be trained first as a
practical musicianIf an undergraduate already happens to be an accomplished
practical musician and wishes to set performance aside in order to take more
courses in such subjects as foreign languages and history, NASM makes it very
difficult for him or her to do so, as long as the university wants to keep its NASM
accreditation.
11

For the most part, you cant get a job teaching anything having to do with music
in the United States if you are not proficient on an instrument. Job advertisements listed
under music in the Chronicle of Higher Education regularly call for scholars that are
able to teach clarinet or lead the university chorus and whose performance tapes should
only be sent upon request. In my naivet shortly after receiving my Ph.D., I regularly
applied for such jobs, thinking that my investigation of music culture in the United States
would nevertheless place me in a music departmentwhere else would I go? But I
learned quickly that, despite my publications and awards, I was not at all qualified.
Once, I even got a rejection letter wishing me the very best in my future as a musician.
It was kindly worded, and Im sure it was meant to be encouraging, but the only problem
was that I never mentioned having any performance ability or any interest in being a
musician.
The field of ethnomusicology, which was founded in the United States as an
alternative to traditional approaches to music in the university, and which you would
think would be open to different sorts of musical experience, is also wedded to this ideal
of performance. This became especially clear to me in the summer of 1998, when, on the
Internet discussion group run by the Society for Ethnomusicology, several scholars
argued that the prevalence of music listening had made Americans less musical than
people in other countries. As one said, I think we tend to believe there are more people
out there who can perform music or at least know something about it because we are
constantly around people who can. Go meet people in the corporate world, down at the
local Little League game, a restaurant, a small town church...you will find the majority of
people there are lacking in musical knowledge.
12
A few others and I tried to argue in
favor of the folk musical knowledge of popular music fans, but as another colleague
7
replied: It cannot be denied that actually performing music, playing an instrument or
singing, opens up vast vistas of musical understanding.Does a childhood spent
surrounded by musical wallpaper in a shopping centre really inform a person IN THE
SAME WAY as actually learning an instrument as a child? Should we really try to
compare that kind of musical experience with that of an Aboriginal child who may spend
a significant part of his or her life surrounded by parents, grandparents, uncles, brothers,
and other assorted kin, all frequently involved in musical performance for weeks at a
time?
13
The argument here is clear: it cannot be denied that those who play, really
understand music. Those who only listen (characterized as time spent surrounded by
musical wallpaper) are unable to have a complete musical experience.
Just a couple of weeks ago, on the EMP discussion list, PopTalk, some folks
made the same sort of argument, talking about how both classical and pop music listeners
dont understand how music is made and implying that such lack of understanding meant
that the public is only superficially engaged with the music they hear and are thus apt to
make questionable listening choices.
***
To portray music listening as an inherently passive state of affairs (in contrast to
the inherent activity of music making) is nonsense, since one can easily play passively
(practicing scales, doing unwanted studio work to pay the bills, plucking aimlessly while
sitting on the porch on a hot day) and listen actively (vigorous dancing, concentrated
listening at a concert hall, editing music for film). So, where does the distinction come
from? It has roots in common grammatical rules, and it was first used to describe cultural
participation during Victorian debates about the feminization of culture in the 1880s
and 90s. Current references to passive listening, however, derive meaning from the
particular use of the term passive in critiques of mass culture.
14
Passivity is meant to
imply a loss of control of music production: where music used to be an organic,
spontaneous part of human community, it is often now a carefully pre-packaged product
to be marketed and sold. Listening, as the only behavior allowed music consumers--and
8
an act that is artificially abstracted from its integral connection with playing and
dancing--is seen as synonymous with this loss.
Such an understanding of listening, however, makes several false assumptions.
First, characterizations of listening as passive assume that music listening is a single
behavior. This couldnt be further from the truth. The work of a small number of scholars
who are exploring music listening across different periods of history and culture points
clearly to the fact that music listening, like music playing, is a complicated and varied
behavior that changes according to a wide range of historical, social, and biological
contexts.
15
In my own research, Ive charted the emergence of seven broad modes of
listening in United States since 1700: performative (listening while singing or playing an
instrument); visceral (listening while dancing); functional (listening in the context of non-
musical events: political speeches, marches, etc.); distracted (listening as accompaniment
to social interaction); formal (listening silently to the unfolding of a musical work);
controlled (listening mediated by technology); and background (listening as one of many
simultaneous activities).
16
While these modes emerged due to the material and ideological
contexts of musicking in different periods of American history, they have been
nevertheless cumulative, offering an increasing variety of participatory options to modern
listeners, who have tended to mix and match available modes in any single encounter
with musical sound. Add to that the ethnic, racial, age, and regional variations at any
given historical moment, which may value one mode over another, and listening turns out
to be a very complex cultural and social action.
Second, characterizations of listening as passive assume musical performance is
primary and listening is merely a secondary response to that performance. This is an
increasingly problematic stance, in light of recent styles of music, including reggae, rap,
techno, and electronica. Reggae and rap, in particular, could only have been created in the
2
nd
half of the twentieth century after listening to music had become the main form of
musical behavior in the western world. Both cultures of music, with their emphases on
listening technologies, dancing, and samples of obscure tracks from the recorded history
of music are essentially listeners musics, dependent on a fan/listeners sensibility. Not
9
only that, but these musics have depended on and fostered the development of
recycling communication technologies, which have complicated categories of
performance, performer and audience. Wheres the performance when you play a
CD with sampled music and beatsin the original performance that was sampled, the
performance of that sample, or the playing of the sampled music in ones living room?
Whos the audience and whos the performer at a rave, where the DJ responds to the
dancers as much as the dancers respond to the DJ?
17

Third, the characterization of listening as passive clings to a long-dead social
model of non-commercialized musical life. In particular, it reveals a deep distrust of the
media and its potential to supplant face-to-face human interaction.
18
There is certainly
some truth to statements that various forms of mediated communication have negative
effects on the quality of peoples lives (the isolation of listening alone on a Walkman,
Internet addiction, etc.) but there is also lots of evidence that mediated communication
creates new kinds of positive effects. I learned in my research with music fans that they
are not the warped, alienated consumers that they are commonly portrayed to be in the
popular press and in academic works on mass culture. Rather they use music--mediated
to them through radio, CDs, and computers-- to deepen personal values, to help shape
lasting senses of self, and to create and maintain significant communal and personal
relationships. In fact, the idea of non-mediated musicking is quite foreign to many
Americansespecially of the younger generations. They have never experienced a world
without cable television and compact discs and computers and would not understand
music without such technologies. (I honestly have trouble getting my post-1960 brain
around antebellum musickingYou mean, everybody had to learn a song on an
instrument if they wanted to hear some music?). Rather than yearning for a world that
can never be recreated, most people are sensibly engaging in the world they know, using
the ubiquitous media entertainment industry to create musical behavior.
Finally, characterizations of playing as active and listening as passive ignore the
possibility that the ability to play music is no longer a widely shared, a priori definition of
musicality. The label passive doesnt take listening at face value, as it is practiced
10
and experienced, but instead subtly reduces listening to an abstract anti-category--not-
playing or not-singingthat has little connection with the attributes of the behavior
itself and automatically taints its potential value.
19
Some scholars, it seems to me,
actually harbor a willful indifference toward the work that listening does for people in
their daily lives; however, on the whole, the denigration of listening is more the result of
professional theories, (espoused in music departments, schools, and arts organizations)
that no longer match the vernacular realities (in the bedrooms and rec-rooms of the
western world) the theories are meant to address and shape. Specifically, if musicologists
and ethnomusicologists and music educators are judging contemporary listening by using
a definition of musicality that favors performance, style, and technique, they are certainly
bound to miss the very elements of listeningperception, memory, identity --that might
make it valuable. Only by accepting and valuing the given experiential realities of
ordinary peopleand not interpreting their experiences as really something elsecan
scholars see what listening does.
One could use the term active to talk about listening, I suppose, following the
revisionist cue of cultural studies, but that term, too, is probably not one that listeners
would use. It is directly derived from the use of the term passive and continues to focus
the meaning of listening on the commercialization of musical production, an event that
many people today simply accept as a fact of life. A more useful approach might be to
think about listening according to the experiences of listeners, to understand the work of
listening in its own terms before judging its worth in any other terms. How do individual
listeners characterize their listening? What does it do for them? Is that doing valuable
to them? After establishing a clear understanding of how listeners value their own
listening practices, we can then begin to make more useful comparisons between those
uses and values and the uses and values of other kinds of musical experience, like singing
or playing an instrument.
***
Now, of course, I am not the first person to defend music listening in American
history. Music educators and phonograph manufacturers at the turn of the nineteenth
century, for instance, extolled phonograph listening as an act that was as equally musical
11
as playing an instrument.

But such arguments were for a singular brand of listening
centered around formal knowledge of the 18
th
and 19
th
century European art music and
the allegedly uplifting qualities of learned principles like structure, order, and refinement.
20
I am aiming for a movement that is more radically open to all kinds of listening, to all
forms of music, a movement that will explore and investigate the act of listening as a
general and accepted form of musical behavior, a personal and creative act on par with
performance.
Other arts disciplines, like literature, media, and film, have been moving in this
direction for the last thirty years or so. Frankly, the music disciplines (musicology,
ethnomusicology, folklore, popular music studies) are an embarrassment when it comes
to addressing the intricacies of audience behavior and beliefs, and the accumulated
theories of audience in music pale in comparison to the understandings of audience
developed in reader-response theory, the history of the book, television effects research,
fan ethnography, and spectatorship theory.
21
Where are the reception theorists like
Jonathan Culler, Robert Darnton, Cathy Davidson, Stanley Fish, Norman Holland,
Wolgang Iser, Janice Radway, and Jane Tompkins in music?
Of course, over the past several decades, some people have begun to promote a
phenomenological understanding of music reception in which listening is not simply the
unpacking of a sound text but rather a dialectical merging of musical and non-musical
meanings over time, a connecting of sound and the constantly changing ideologies,
associations, circumstances, and situations which themselves constitute the sound in the
first place. Ethnomusicologist Steven Feld has argued that listening is an entangling
of a dialectical object and a situated interlocutor, involving all sorts of musical and
extramusical interpretive moves.
22
Music historians Peter J. Rabinowitz and Jay Reise
likewise have argued for different sorts of associations (technical, attributive, synthetic)
that constitute the musical object through listening.
23
More recently, Swedish music
scholar Ola Stockfelt identified adequate modes of listening for different encounters
with music that are based on conditions of repertoire, situation, music, and strategy.
24
Unfortunately, given the entrenched reification of music and its attendant methods
of formalism--not only in academia but among fans and music lovers-- seeing music as
12
an open process and not a closed object remains a radical idea. Despite Christopher
Smalls decades-long attempt to redefine music as musicking,
25
and all the theories of
listening already mentioned, people still buy music in pre-packaged plastic cases and then
play it on their stereos and react to it, something that effectively masks their own part
in constituting that music and that constitutions place in broader social processes. But I
believe that an historical awareness of the integrated processes of performing and
listening could truly enhance the study of music and of culture generally. Music studies,
rather than literary studies, could potentially provide the basis of a new understanding of
human society: instead of a jumble of texts to be read, or a series of sites to be
negotiated, we could all be talking about modes of participation, about grooves to be
joined in various ways.
Of course, I clearly have my own bias, here, as someone who grew up immersed
in the world of commercial music and still can spend enthusiastic hours in Tower
Records just browsing, chatting, and soaking up the vibe. And I dont want to simply
dismiss the world of musicians and performance--a lot of listening involves admiration
of, and devotion to, performers. But I cant erase the fact that the fans I've met have an
extraordinary understanding about the genesis of popular songs, about song
arrangements, about the details of performances, and about the meanings of the music
they hear, and that they use that knowledge to shape their personal histories, to initiate
friendships, to maintain family relations, to get through the day, to heal emotional
wounds, and to create tangible community and fellowship. The idea that such activity is
passive and not fully musical, is simply baffling to me. It is quite contrary to the
musical experience of many people in the United States and automatically prevents a
deeper understanding of what their musical experience entails. The study of American
musical life suffers for it.
1
See Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). For a detailed account of this transformation in
Europe, see Leon Botstein, Music and its Public: Habits of Listening and the Crisis of Musical
Modernism in Vienna, 1870-1914 (Ph.D. dissertation, History, Harvard University, 1985).
2
John Dizikes, Opera in America: A Cultural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993): 184-
188; Robert D. Faner, Walt Whitman and Opera. (Southern Illinois University Press, 1972).
3
Vera Brodsky Lawrence, ed., Strong on Music [in three volumes] (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1988-1999). Other evidence of listening as a distinct activity in the nineteenth century includes
the diary of William Steinway, discussed by Edwin M. Good in William Steinway and Music in New
York, 1861-1871 in Michael Saffle, ed., Music and Culture in America, 1861-1918 (New York,
Garland Press, 1998): 3-27; Peter J. Rabinowitz, With Out Own Dominant Passions: Gottschalk,
Gender, and the Power of Listening, 19
th
Century Music Vol. XVI, No. 3 (Spring 1993): 242-252; and
Katherine Preston, Music for Hire: A Study of Professional Musicians in Washington, 1877-1900
(Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1992).
4
William H. Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890-
1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999): 3-22.
5
See Daniel Cavicchi, Tramps Like Us: Music and Meaning Among Springsteen Fans (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1998) and Tia DeNora, Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000.
6
John Philips Sousa, quoted in William H. Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life: The
Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999): 57.
7
Also quoted in Kenney, pg. 57.
8
Richard and Helen Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Contemporary Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace
and Company, 1929): 244.
9
Nicholas Tawa, High-Minded and Low-Down: Music in the Lives of Americans, 1800-1861 (Boston:
Northeastern University Press, 2000): 297.
10
Michael L. Mark, Contemporary Music Education (New York: Schirmer Books, 1996): 10
11
E. Eugene Helm, The Canon and the Curricula: A Study of Musicology and Ethnomusicology
Programs in America (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1994): 96.
12
Tommy Shapard, Subject: Re: Outsider Take on Western Music, SEM-List, July 22, 1998.
13
Peter G. Toner, Re: Americans Alleged Ignorance of Music, SEM-List, July 24, 1998.
14
The condition of passivity in American history is often linked to both femininity and the
individuation of aesthetic experience. See Alan J. Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America:
Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982): 140-153; and Richard
Butsch, The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television, 1750-1990 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2000): 1-19.
15
See, for example: Leon Botstein, Music and its Public: Habits of Listening and the Crisis of Musical
Modernism in Vienna, 1870-1914 (Ph.D. dissertation, History, Harvard University, 1985, 3 vols.);
Timothy Day, A Century of Recorded Music: Listening to Musical History ; (Peter Gay, Bourgeois
Experiences, IV: The Art of Listening in The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud (NY: W. W.
Norton & Co., 1995); James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1995); Peter J. Rabinowitz and Jay Reise, The Phonograph Behind the Door:
Some Thoughts on Musical Literacy in Sarah Lawall, ed., Reading World Literature (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1994): 287-308; Ola Stockfelt, Musik som lyssnandets konst, an excerpt of
which was translated as Adequate Modes of Listening, in Keeping Score: Music, Disciplinarity,
Culture, edited by David Schwarz et al.; Emily Ann Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity:
Architectural Acoustics and the culture of Listening in America, 1900-1930 (Cambridge: MIT Press,
2002. See also the recent special issues of journals devoted to listening: The World of Music, Cultural
Concepts of Hearing and Listening, vol 2 1997; The World of Music, Hearing and Listening in
Cultural Contexts, vol 1 1999; and Musical Quarterly, Music as Heard, vol 82 no. 3/4 (Fall/Winter
1988), edited by musicologist Rob C. Wegman.
16
I use the term modes in the same sense as Ola Stockfelt in Adequate Modes of Listening, in
Keeping Score: Music, Disciplinarity, Culture, edited by David Schwarz et al.
17
For a discussion of the complexities of musical roles at a rave, see Tim Becker and Raphael Woebs,
Back to the Future: Hearing, Rituality, and Techno, The World of Music, Vol. 1 (1999): 53-71.
18
For a discussion of this tendency among media critics more generally, see Joli Jensen, Redeeming
Modernity (New York: Sage Publications, 1990).
19
See Joli Jensen, Redeeming Modernity (New York: Sage Publications, 1990) for further elaboration
of this critique of mass culture criticism.
20
Mark Katz, Making America More Musical Through the Phonograph, American Music (Winter
1998): 448-475.
21
The work of reception studies across the disciplines is voluminous; Janet Staiger nicely sums it up, as
of 1990 or so, in Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. For a summary of contemporary debates, especially
among media scholars, see James Hay, Lawrence Grossberg, and Ellen Wartella, eds., The Audience
and its Landscape (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996).
22
Steven Feld, Communication, Music, and Speech About Music in Charles Keil and Steven Feld,
Music Grooves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) 77-95.
23
Peter J. Rabinowitz and Jay Reise, The Phonograph behind the Door: some Thoughts on Musical
Literacy in Sarah Lawall, ed., Reading World Literature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994)
287-308.
24
Ola Stockfelt, Adequate Modes of Listening in David Schwarz, Anahid Kassabian, and Lawrence
Siegel, Keeping Score: Music, Disciplinarity, Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia,
1997) 129-146. English translation by Anahid Kassabian and Leo G. Svendsen.
25
Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press, 1998).