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Johnson James H.. Listening in Paris: A Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Studies in the History of Society and Culture, 21. xvi + 384 pp.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2008

Abstract

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Type
Review
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

1 John, McCormick includes a chapter on audiences in his study of lower-class Boulevard theatres in Popular Theatres of Nineteenth-Century France (London and New York, 1993), 7688.Google ScholarMore than a third of Hemmings's, F. W. J., The Theatre Industry in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, 1993) is devoted specifically to ‘the audience’. Hemmings's approach to Parisian theatres is particularly laudable in that he avoids dividing the topic either on the basis of class or of the presence or absence of music. As he states, orchestras were ‘de rzgueur even in theatres specializing in straight drama’, thus the idea of theatre without music was unimaginable (Hemmings, 1–2). And even in the eighteenth century, lower-status fair and Boulevard theatrical events influenced the offerings of theatres aimed primarily at the leisure classes.CrossRefGoogle ScholarOn this subject, see Michéle, Root-Bernstein, Boulevard Theatre and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Paris. (Ann Arbor, 1984).Google Scholar

2 For two very different discussions of the marginalisation of women within the public sphere after the revolution, see Landes, Joan B., Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, 1988)Google Scholar and Genevievé, Fraisse, Reason's Muse: Sexual Difference and the Birth of Democray, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago, 1994).Google Scholar

3 McCormick suggests that popular audiences engaged deeply and attentively with productions at theatres like the Funambules, Gaîté and Ambigu, despite occasionally rowdy behaviour. It is unclear whether popular practices relate to those that Johnson describes. See McCormick, , Popular Theatres of Nineteenth-Century France, 81–8.Google Scholar

4 For one study of an opera ‘translated’ both musically and textually into French, see Mark, Everist, ‘Lindoro in Lyon: Rossini's Le Barbier de Séville’, Acta Musicologica, 64 (1992), 5085.Google Scholar

5 Gary Tomlinson suggests that the Gadamerian approach to history, with its fusion of horizons of expectation over time, allows the historian to collapse the distance between the present and the past, a process that takes place in Listening in Paris. As opposed to Johnson, who locates the horizon of expectations between the musical performance and the listener, Tomlinson places it between the historian and the people who are the subject of historical study. Despite this difference, Tomlinson's critique of Gadamer seems relevant to Johnson's study. See Tomlinson, , Music in Renaissance Magic: Towards a Historiography of Others (Chicago, 1993), 20–4.Google Scholar

6 The elephants had not just arrived from India, as the book states, but from Holland, where they had been in captivity in a Dutch zoo before their acquisition by the Jardin des Plantes. See McClellan, Michael E., ‘“If We Could Talk with the Animals.” Elephants and Musical Performance during the French Revolution’, in Sue-Ellen, Case, Philip, Brett and Susan, Leigh Foster, eds., Cruising the Performative (Bloomington, 1995), 237.Google Scholar

7 See McClellan, , ‘If We Could Talk with the Animals’, 237–48, which reveals the ways these scientists reified their musical ideologies through scientific experimentation. Jeffrey Kallberg discusses the elephants in ‘Voyeurism and Voice: Convergences of Sex and Music in France around 1800’, a paper presented at the conference ‘Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera’, held on 14–17 September 1995 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His paper places the elephant experiments in the larger context of music and pornography.Google Scholar

8 Lynn, Hunt describes this same problem in the work of Foucault in ‘Foucault's Subject in The History of Sexuality’, in Stanton, Domna C., ed., Discourses of Sexualityfrom Aristotle to AIDS (Ann Arbor, 1992), 7893.Google Scholar

9 See discussions of reception history by Carl, Dahihaus in Foundations of Music History, trans. Robinson, J. B. (Cambridge, 1983), 150–65Google Scholar; Zofia, Lissa, ‘Zur Theorie der musikalischen Rezeption’, Archiu für Musikwissenschaft, 31(1974), 157–69, ‘Prolegomena zur Theorie der Tradition in der Musik’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, 27 (1970), 153–72Google Scholar; Martin, Zenck, ‘Entwurf einer Soziologie der Musikrezeption’, Die Musikforschung 33 (1980), 253–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Friedheim, Krummacher, ‘Rezeptionsgeschichte als Problem der Musikwissenschaft’, Jahrbuch des Staatlichen Instituts für Musikforschuug Preussischer Kulturbesitz (19791980), 154–70.Google Scholar. Thomas, Sipe discusses these writings in Chapter One of his dissertation, ‘Interpreting Beethoven: History, Aesthetics, and Critical Reception’, Ph.D. diss. (University of Pennsylvania, 1992).Google ScholarSee also Mark, Everist, ‘Giacomo Meyerbeer, the Théâtre Royale de l'Odéon, and Music Drama in Restoration Paris’, 19th-Century Music, 17 (1993), 124–48, and his ‘Lindoro in Lyon’ for further studies that employ reception theory as an interpretative strategy.Google Scholar

10 Wolf, Eugene K. convincingly argues that the surprise restatement of the opening bars of this symphony six bars from the end of the first movement inspired the audience's cries of ‘da capo’; see his ‘Mannheimer Symphonik um 1777/1778 und ihr Einfluss auf Mozarts symphonischen Stil’, in Ludwig, Finscher, Bärbel, Pelker and Jochen, Reutter, eds, Mozart und Mannheim. Kongressbericht Mannheim 1991 (Frankfurt am Main, 1994), 325.Google Scholar