Giveaway Winner!

Thanks again to everyone who participated in the Listening and Longing Giveaway. (Clearly I'm going to have to start watching "Downton Abbey" and "Sherlock Holmes"). I'm going to turn things over to my daughter Lulu, now, who is going to announce the winner, which was determined by giving a number to each entry and then sorting them with the random number generator at random.org.

Hi, this is Lulu. The winner of the contest is: Marc! Because you are at RISD, my dad says that he will bring it to you in person. Congratulations!

Marc, you have won a new paperback copy of Listening and Longing: Music Lovers in the Age of Barnum, published by Wesleyan University Press in December. The book traces the emergence of music listening in the United States, from the antebellum era, when entrepreneurs first packaged and sold the experience of hearing musical performance, to the Gilded Age, when genteel critics succeeded in redefining the cultural value of listening to music. Its publication is supported by grants from both the American Musicological Society and the Professional Development Fund of Rhode Island School of Design.

“Impeccably researched, Listening and Longing shows us how Jenny Lind was the Lady Gaga of her day. Cavicchi’s excellent use of primary materials, such as 19th-century diary entries and periodicals, document how the seeds were germinated for today’s music-fan culture.”
—Holly George-Warren, author of The Road to Woodstock

“Cavicchi's book is a richly detailed, lucid account of how and why music-listening is an active, participatory aspect of music-loving. Listening and Longing has changed fundamentally the way I think about the development of America’s musical culture.”
—Dale Cockrell, author of Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World

 “With grace and insight, Daniel Cavicchi demonstrates how the first modern ‘cultures of hearing’ emerged in relation to new markets and venues, new urban environments, and new moral taxonomies surrounding the very categories of ‘music,’ ‘audience,’ and ‘listening.’ Pushing well beyond the conventional terrain of early American music studies, this is a work that helps us reconnect the notoriously subjective acts of ‘listening’ and ‘longing’ to their much broader historical contexts.”
¬--James W. Cook, author of The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum

Literary Pilgrimage

I see that University of Cambridge classicist Simon Goldhill has discovered fandom in his new book, Freud's Couch, Scott's Buttocks, and Bronte's Grave, which was the subject of a recent profile in the Chronicle of Higher Education's PageView blog. His discomfort with readers who make pilgrimages to author-related sites is interesting; if anything, it shows why critics and fans, reading the same books, often exist in completely different universes.

I shouldn't show him, I guess, the photo of me, during a trip to New Orleans in 1989, casually reading a newspaper outside the French Quarter residence of William Faulkner (where he began his career as a writer):

Perhaps, however, my family will sympathize with Goldhill's skepticism. When I suggested a vacation trip to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, this summer, so we could visit the home of Herman Melville, they laughed, and then, with some alarm, asked if I was serious. I was.

Literary tourism is a big business, big enough to get a featured in O Magazine articles like "5 Legendary Writers' Homes." It has also been a hot topic in literary studies, where it is generally equated with superficiality and commercialism, the equivalent of taking a pre-packaged bus tour of a city rather than living in a neighborhood and learning the language. Literary pilgrimage has been the subject of satiric novels (like Brocke Clarke's An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England), as well as condemnatory papers about the public's naive obsession with authenticity or the emotional reality of texts (discussed previously in a Chronicle review, "You've Read the Book, Now Take a Look!," from 2009). Tourism, more generally, has been a hot topic in cultural studies for much of the last decade, the subject of journals like Tourist Studies, or research collectives like UC Berkeley's Tourism Studies Working Group, and also the subject of books in anthropology, literature, history, and music, from Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (U. California Press, 1998) to Stephen A. King's I'm Feeling the Blues Right Now: Blues Tourism and the Mississippi Delta (University Press of Mississippi, 2011).

From the standpoint of fans, visiting sites associated with various performers, works, or characters is a key element of how they decode works, aesthetize their lives, and shape cultural experience. As far as I can tell, however, work in fan studies has not had any explicit impact on the study of tourism. It might be time to connect that gap by holding some kind of meeting that will enable a sharing of perspectives from anthropology, history, literature, media studies, and religion on fandom and the power of place. Sounds like a good panel, at least, no?

Do Jazz Musicians Need to Know How to Write Criticism?

The Boston Jazz Blog poses the question, "Do jazz critics need to know how to play jazz?" There are interesting answers, though I would question the question by asking, "Do jazz musicians need to know how to write criticism?" I'm not joking. I've written about this before, and it has been a subject of tension in ethnomusicology since the days of Mantle Hood argued for the primacy of "bimusicality" as a mode of understanding, but I don't agree that musicality comes automatically from playing or singing, or that it is necessarily greater among musicians than among, say, listeners or dancers--or critics. Rather than narrowly value only composers and performers (relegating all the other people that make music meaningful, from engineers and critics to retailers and fans, to secondary status), I'd rather understand music as a complex ecology of participation.

Classics of Fan History: The Frenzy of Renown

Okay, so it's not really about fan history, at least not throughout. But Leo Braudy's The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History, published in 1986 by Oxford University Press, was one of the first scholarly books I had ever encountered that placed fame and its role in popular culture into an historical framework. When I first encountered the book in the late 1980s, I was struggling with how to make a living as a "music writer" and looking for a new path, and it convinced me of the legitimacy of studying popular culture at the graduate level. (The book's length alone--598 pages--was part of that. So much to learn! So much to argue about!). Soon I was off to earn a Ph.D.

This is not to say that I agree with everything Braudy says in the book. Braudy is a literary scholar (Leo S. Bing Chair in English and American Literature at the University of Southern California), so the book's main arguments are based on the authority and logic of his interpretations of various historical and social texts. He's a great wit (“In a self-made country, who had not the potential to be self-made himself, with the help of an equally self-made audience?”), and often insightful, but the historical scope of the work also leads him to generalize about the motivations of entire groups of readers or audiences and to make broad declarations about "our" society. The ethnographer in me questions statements like: "The ease with which we allow ourselves to be absorbed by such images, the desires to be that way ourselves, confirms that the essential lure of the famous is that they are somehow more real than we and that our insubstantial physical reality needs that immortal substance for support." (6)

Despite such misgivings, however, I have always appreciated Braudy's recognition of audiences as a significant part of both culture and Culture; The Frenzy of Renown is one of the first modern scholarly works to recognize fandom as a phenomenon existing before the 20th century. In a remarkable section of the book, titled "The Advent of the Fan," Braudy pinpoints a significant shift in audience attitude and agency in the 18th century, especially with respect to authors who were availing themselves of new models of publishing that allowed the "rapid diffusion of books and pamphlets, portraits and caricatures." More and more facsimile texts available to more and more readers was a situation crucial in fostering new means for "introducing the famous to the fan." As Braudy says, "The most unprecedented element in the crucial changes the eighteenth century makes in the concept of fame is the appearance of an audience that, instead of passively responding to its idols, takes an active role in defining them, an audience that is willing to be manipulated but eager to convey how that ought to be done more expertly."

He writes specifically about the curious readers of Rousseau in the late 1700s, who used to seek him out at his home for conversation and to whom he responded with confusion and horror (Braudy's take is similar to Robert Darnton's acccount in The Great Cat Massacre, which was published around the same time as Frenzy of Renown, in 1984). Braudy also highlights James Boswell, the reader/fan/writer who continually crossed "the line between admiring and wanting to be like his idols." (382). Boswell, Braudy argues, was a "quintessential representative of the new audience," who, in celebrating an author like Samuel Johnson in his Life of Johnson, sought to join or even replace him. 

His [Boswell's] personal and explicit response to fame two hundred years ago so well lays out a syndrome of aspiration, achievement, and disgust with achievement that has become so familiar. Boswell's elaborate self-examination makes him a prime modern case of those who believe that fame and recognition will satisfy their desires to be complete, "uniform," and filled with character, only to discover that nothing is really sufficient to satisfy the hunger within.

After discussing the "democratization of fame" and the "natural performers" of the 19th century, Braudy discusses the consequences of such shifts in the United States of the 20th century, where selfhood, publicity, and worth are finally and intensely fused into a widespread competitive desire for self-recognition on the part of both the famous and their audiences. Fandom, in such a context, is a bellwether, because it:

mediates the disparity between the aspirations fostered by the culture and the relatively small increments of personal status possible in a mass society...even for the nonfan, there is a larger sense in which the expansion of the possibility for fame and the preoccupation with those who achieve it indicates a deep-seated uncertainty about the survival of individuality itself. Does the increasing complexity and sheer connectedness of the world--the question might run--mean more uniformity or does it mean that self-assertion might be taking on different shapes, unforeseen in the individualities of the past but somehow linked to them? 

I appreciate the linkage of fandom to changing ideas of selfhood, but because we don't actually hear from audience members in this book, it is difficult to evaluate Braudy's assertion about their uncertainty. In other ways, too, I would argue that Braudy's take on fandom is, ultimately, incomplete, because it is consistently positioned as a response to "emblematic figures" in history. (I don't think it is a coincidence that this book came out at a time when the "star system" was gaining currency in film studies). Fans of creative genres, styles, or of groups of people are not here. Nor is fandom perceived as anything other than a relationship with the object of one's fandom. 

Still, fandom emerges as a significant social force begging to be understood. For which publics, exactly, have the renowned displayed and enacted their selves? How have audiences paid attention and why? The intellectual breadth of this work, and its audacious linking of diverse "public men" and "performers" over centuries through the complex ideological framework of "fame," represents an impressive and lasting example of scholarly cultural history. 

The Erotic Economy of Fandom

Cultural studies scholars have long recognized the defiant nature of fandom; in early fan studies, fans are always somehow negotiating hegemony, or poaching texts, or resisting the mainstream. While writing Tramps Like Us, I reacted warily to these characterizations. While creative re-use of texts and resistance to producers' intentions were certainly elements of music fan culture, defining fans' experiences in that way did not quite fully characterize the appeal of fandom for fans themselves, who talked mostly about strong feelings of connection, knowing, and transformation.

There is a complex relationship between fan practices and the context of late capitalism in which those practices have been made most meaningful. I still believe, as I stated in Tramps Like Us, that fandom is inextricably linked to the commodification of culture since the late 1700s. And in my new work, Listening and Longing, I spend much time describing public, commercial, musical entertainment and its appeal to early consumer/listeners. But I remain convinced that we need to remain open to ways of thinking about what fandom is, and why it matters, beyond mere oppositional politics (however sympathetic one might be with the goal of that approach). I think it's the only way to accurately work out the entirety of fandom's history and significance.

Fans love stars, works, styles, culture. How do we think about that love more fully? I have, in the past, written about the passion of fans in terms of religious discourse. Another way to think about it, perhaps, is the "commerce of the creative spirit" as explained in Lewis Hyde's The Gift. First published in 1983, it was released in a 25th anniversary edition in 2007. It's essentially a series of essays that probe the idea of gifting in non- or pre-capitalist cultures, using the knowledge built from that exercise to better understand the value of creativity in Western industrial-capitalism.

Hyde's book begins by setting up a dichotomy of an “economy of eros” against an “economy of logos” (vaguely reminiscent of Ferdinand Tonnies's Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft), where “cash exchange is to gift exchange what reason is to enthusiasm.” Hyde then places artistic expression into this framework, arguing that artistic expression functions in the realm of eros and enthusiasm, having value not in the monetary power of contracted ownership but rather in the social bonds created by its ritual release and circulation. As he says,

The art that matters to us--which moves the heart, or revives the soul, or delights the senses, or offers courage for living, however we choose to describe the experience--that work is received by us as a gift is received. Even if we have paid a fee at the door of the museum or concert hall, when we are touched by a work of art something comes to us which has nothing to do with price...

Later, he explains:

It is the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people, while the sale of a commodity leaves no necessary connection.

Hyde means to give courage to those who live and work at the margins of the market economy and outside of the framework of achievement (making money) that has characterized much of American capitalism. What I really like about the book in terms of fan studies is the way in which his articulation of the gift—as the establishment of a bond that powerfully endures by being passed on—touches on many of the ways that fans describe their love of cultural commodities. And, in the end, Hyde is open to thinking about gifting as multilateral. When he's thinking only about artists, he reductively opposes them (in ideology and condition) to capitalists; when he's thinking about consumers, he better recognizes how messy things can be and how, sometimes, despite one’s surroundings or the origins of the roles they inhabit, one’s emotions can imbue unexpected meaning to any action. As he says, “The conflict between freedom and the bonds that gifts establish is not absolute, of course. To begin with, gifts do not bring us attachment unless they move us.” Or: “Within certain limits, gift wealth may be rationalized and market wealth may be eroticized.” In other words, people in a capitalist culture--especially in a capitalist culture—must work out, in each moment, the extent to which their actions will be erotic or rational. It seems to me that, at the experiential level, this is a useful way to think about the history of audience enthusiasm.

Talk at UT Austin

On February 7th, I'll be giving a talk in the Department of Radio, Television, and Film at the University of Texas, Austin. Hope to see my one blog follower there--you know who you are. Seriously, the topic will be "Music Audiences, Ethnographic History, and the Construction of New Pasts." I'm basing it on my latest work about the avid audiences for urban music concerts, exhibitions, and shows between 1840 and 1880. The topic necessarily addresses sound and hearing (which leaves little historical evidence, as currently defined), and it involves people who have, for the most part, remained anonymous in American history. I will talk about the methodological challenges of locating and investigating the experiences of such people and the ramifications of bringing their world to light. 

Teaching Audience

I’ve been teaching reception theory at Rhode Island School of Design since 1998. If reception theory is still a bit marginalized in humanities disciplines, it’s definitely an odd approach in an art and design school, where students are primarily focused on learning how to create and produce. However, that is the reason why I think it’s important to teach it: it provides a small counterweight to the power of intention (“This work articulates my struggle to make sense of my upbringing”), or, conversely, to its casual abandonment (“People can feel whatever they feel.”). I want my students to glimpse that creativity and meaning are far more complex and non-linear, far more deeply contextualized (in moments, communities, and pasts), than most would like to acknowledge. 

In some semesters, I have been more provocative than in others: 

Mostly, I’ve just tried to introduce undergraduates to the classics in the field. From the early to the mid-2000s, I focused on theories about different forms of cultural expression: literature, film, television, and music. We read Iser and Radway, Eisenstein and Staiger, Kubey and Katz, Adorno and Hebdige. As I wrote in the catalog description for "Reception Theory and Popular Culture" in Fall 2000:

In this course, we will explore the ways various scholars have conceived of popular culture audiences, from early psychological analyses of reading to current historical and ethnographic investigations of popular music. By focusing on the differing ideas of audience and methods of audience research within and across these disciplines, we will discuss the impact of, and problems with, ideas of reception, consumption, and resistance. 

To the extent that reception studies and debates have unfolded in separate disciplines, this comparative framework was useful. Studying reception this way, though, was also limiting. I found, over time, that students did not necessarily have access to a meta-discourse that would enable them to move outside of disciplinary conceptions. There was also a lot of repetition that made the course into a kind of "parade of theories," with the students passively watching the authors march triumphantly by. That led me to start thinking about reception more anthropologically—not as a response to particular forms of expression, or even particular works (as reception is often conceived in literature and music), but rather as a culturally- and historically-contingent behavior that merges consumption, attention, sensation, association, memory, and enthusiasm—in short, what we might call “audiencing.”

For the past several incarnations of my reception theory course, I’ve moved to a different structure that avoids my previous formalism for a new focus on themes and debates around the whole notion of “receiving” art. I don’t know if the students care, but personally, I find not having to think about reception in strict disciplinary terms quite freeing. (Of course, doing so is the luxury of someone teaching in a department called “History, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences”). At any rate, this spring I will give it another try: 

Audience (Spring 2011)

Stemming from developments in literary criticism and media studies in the 60s and 70s, the field of audience studies examines the complex ways that people read, view, and hear---or “receive”—artistic expression. Its radical emphasis on audiencing as a primary source of meaning has been controversial, challenging fundamental concepts of authorship, creativity, critical authority, and the work. In this course, we will analyze classic audience studies from across fields in the arts and humanities and explore the ramifications of those studies for disciplinary practices in art and design.

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Reactions

In this brief introductory section of the course, we will examine the concepts of “authorship” and “intention” against which reception theory is traditionally defined.

Introduction

      February 21

Authorship

February 23: Martha Woodmansee, “The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of ‘The Author,’” Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 17, No. 4, (Summer, 1984), pp. 425-448.

February 28: Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Aspen, Nos. 5 & 6 (1968) www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen5and6/; Michael North, “Authorship and Autography,” PMLA, Vol. 116, No. 5. (Oct., 2001), pp. 1377-1385.

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Frameworks

How do audiences—readers, spectators, listeners—make sense of artistic expression? We will consider “audiencing” from a number of perspectives: phenomenology, biology, history, psychology, and sociology.

Interpretive Moves

March 2: Wolgang Iser, “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach,” New Literary History, Vol. 3, No. 2, On Interpretation: I (Winter, 1972), pp. 279-299.

March 7: Stanley Fish, “Interpreting the Variorum,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Spring, 1976), pp. 465-485.

Rhetoric and the Senses

March 9-14: Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O Factor. University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Emotion, Cognition, and Response

March 16 Roger Pouivet, “On the Cognitive Functioning of Aesthetic Emotions,” Leonardo, Vol. 33, No. 1 (2000), pp. 49-53.

March 21 Noel Carroll, "Toward a Theory of Point-of-View Editing: Communication, Emotion, and the Movies," Poetics Today, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Spring 1993), pp. 123-141; Charles Carson, "'Whole New Worlds': Music and the Disney Theme Park Experience," Ethnomusicology Forum, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Nov. 2004), pp. 228-235.

Sum: Frameworks of Interpretation

March 23 Paper #1 Due

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Issues

We will evaluate reception theory by looking at particular problems and debates in audience studies, including fandom, participation, and politics.

Popular Culture and Politics

April 4: Adorno, “The Culture Industry” (at: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm.

April 6: Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) at https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/display/MarkTribe/Visual+Pleasure+and+Narrative+Cinema.

Fandom

April 11 Daniel Cavicchi, “Loving Music: Listeners, Entertainments, and the Origins of Music Fandom in the 19^th Century,” in Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, Cornell Sandvoss, Jonathan Gray, and C. Lee Harrington, editors. New York: New York University Press, June 2007.

April 13 Jonathan Gray and Jason Mittell, 'Speculation on Spoilers: Lost Fandom, Narrative Consumption and Rethinking Textuality' from Participations  -http://www.participations.org/Volume%204/Issue%201/4_01_graymittell.htm

Participation and Technology

April 18-20 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. NYU Press, 2008.

Sum: Issues in Reception

April 25 Paper #2 Due

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Practices

What’s the use of audience studies? We will think about the implications of reception theory for various fields of art and design.

Provocations and Challenges

      April 27-May 2 Michael Kammen, Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in 

            American Culture. Random House, 2007.

Your Own Art and Design

May 9 Steven W. Dykstra, “The Artist's Intentions and the Intentional Fallacy in Fine Arts Conservation,” Journal of the American Institute for Conservation, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Autumn - Winter, 1996), pp. 197-218.

May 11 Jeffrey L. Meikle, “Material Virtues: On the Ideal and the Real in Design History,” Journal of Design History, Vol. 11, No. 3 (1998), pp. 191-199.

Sum: Audience Research and Practice

May 16 Presentations

May 18 Presentations

Paper #3 Due on Liberal Arts Exam Day – May 23

Invisibility & Traces

In American cultural history, there is very little attention given to audiences, even enthusiastic ones. Why?

First, most historians of the arts focus on making, either in aesthetic terms that account for notable authors, performers, and styles; or in production terms that focus on manufacturing, technology, and distribution. Creative lineages and changing styles are primary; diverse people reading, listening, or viewing is secondary.

Second, there is little evidence of audiences’ experiences. In the context of the Western star system, creators and performers in the public eye have been expected to attend to the legacy of their work; their notes, manuscripts, journals, account books, and personal correspondence have been preserved and deposited in public archives. The everyday experiences of audience members remain anonymous. Why would an ordinary theater-goer record his enjoyment of a show? To whom, exactly, would an avid reader share the logic behind the organization of her bedroom bookshelf?

Of course, these conditions are related: not looking for evidence of audience practices means that you never find any. My research is about trying. When you do so, the first thing you learn is that the readiest glimpses of audiences in the public record come from critics amused or alarmed at popular audiences' intensity, unfashionable behavior, or excess. Audience exuberance is sometimes an ignorant mania to be mocked, sometimes a dangerous disease to be cured; it is always distortedly described, from the outside, from above, and at arms-length.

The second thing you learn is that, if you are patient, audience members reveal themselves in other places: on ticket stubs or programs, a page in a family scrapbook, hints in letters and diaries, the design of buildings. I spent eight years reading old diaries, one by one, for traces of music audiencing—any reference or phrase or description. After reading multiple diaries about farming or accounting, stumbling on an entry like “She played ‘Old Folks at Home,’ with variations, which quite carried me away” can be positively magical! (Historical research is all about the small triumphs).

Patiently accumulating those glimpses, one at time, over years, eventually reveals patterns--representations of audiences in the past. Like stepping back from random pixels on a screen and seeing an image.

To Begin...

Since 2003, I've been working on a new book, Listening and Longing: Music Lovers in the Age of Barnum, which will be published in Fall 2011 by Wesleyan University Press. This blog is my next step. While I've explored the history of music fans, I've always been interested, too, in fans for literature, theater, sports, oratory, cinema. When and where does each group emerge and develop as a social phenomenon? Is it even useful to talk about them as separate groups? Overall, what can such historical fans tell us about changing circumstances of culture, consumerism, manipulation, identity, and participation in the U.S.?