Musicking in Early America

I woke up this snowy morning to check my email and sleepily surf through my usual list of journals and sites, and what did I find? An entire issue of the online journal Common-Place devoted to "Music and Meaning in Early America." Exciting! The articles explore a wide range of issues and topics from musical representations of King Philip's War to sacred music and Southern nationalism after the Civil War. (There is also a review of Listening and Longing by historian David W. Stowe). One of the guest editors, Nikos Pappas, explains: 

...Rather than trying to define American music according to a narrow understanding and definition, the contributors to this special issue of Common-place explore the multivalent world of British North America and the United States for its first three centuries of existence. They reveal uniquely American trends in music performance, composition, and the climate for musicking, especially in the period predating recorded sound as well as the replication of European practice in the Western Hemisphere and its resonance and use in its new environment. Together, their essays explore the many ways in which music existed in the United States. The result reveals how disparate and quirky American music was in that period.

Have a look, if you get a chance.

Beatlemania Emerges in U.S.

It was 48 years ago today...

The O Say Can You See blog, run by the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, has an interesting post about the Beatles' first concert in America, which took place on February 11, 1964, featuring some the artifacts from the concert in the NMAH collections.

Beatlemania used to be the subject of much head-scratching, and even derision, both in the press and in academia, so I'm glad to see it recognized, here, as a significant moment in history. "Maniacal" audiences existed long before 1964, of course, but the behavior of American Beatles fans was significant as clear evidence for the vast commercial potential of teen culture (see, for example, this great collection of 1964 magazines capitalizing on the Beatles phenomenon) and also, somewhat contrarily, of the grassroots political potential of rock'n'roll, including an empowerment of young women's public expression (see Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, Gloria Jacobs, "Beatlemania: Girls Just Want to Have Fun").

In the end, it remains an iconic moment of rock'n'roll audiencing.

Give the People What They Want, Seriously

Sixth Symphony Concert, Greek Theatre, Berkeley, California, 1906. Library of Congress.

There is an interesting article by Norman Lebrecht on the demise of urban symphony orchestras over at Standpoint. While this is a theme that has been repeated for at least the past several decades, things do seem to be more dire than usual this year.

He talks about why orchestras have mattered, in terms of civic boosterism and social cohesion, but one thing he adds, which in my view is probably the most important factor, is that people wanted them. As he notes, orchestras have survived historically because they signified valuable meanings for listeners: in the 1830s, they were part of "a rising demand for entertainment from a growing middle class;" in the 1900s, after both World Wars, they were symbols of hope and a better, civilized future. "It was both 'the done thing' in English cities to go to symphony concerts and a refuge from the otherwise inescapable gloom of postwar austerity. In America, GIs returning from war to a free college education and a small-town life demanded orchestral concerts of the kind they had heard abroad."

Lebrecht goes on to make an argument for orchestras today as a much-needed antidote to our hyperculture of communication: "...In a lifestyle of wall-to-wall wi-fi and instant tweets, the concert hall is one of the few places where we become reachable, where we can switch off our lifelines and surrender to a form that will not let us go for an hour or more. The symphony orchestra is our relief from the communicative addiction. It forces us, willy-nilly, to resist the responsive urge. It is a cold-turkey cure for our reactive insanity, our self-destroying restlessness. The more concerts I attend, the more I see how they restore balance to over-busy lives. It may well be that we, as a society, need the symphony orchestra now more than ever before."

I suppose this is true for some people but probably not the people orchestras need to reach in order to survive. In my view, this describes a perceived cultural need but not a popular want. Orchestras can be a part of people's daily lives but only if they become more vital to people's actual desires and enthusiasms. The instinct to pose the arts as a corrective to society, as a distinct alternative to a speeding world, is not the way I'd think about it, however much I might sympathize with the sentiment on occasion. While Lebrecht turns to 1940s post-war audiences' desire for contrast and redirection as his model for how to revive orchestras, I think our "over-busy" lives are more like those of the music lovers of the 1850s, who were, in their way, also people of "busi-ness," in awe of technology, living in topsy-turvy urbanized environments. Before genteel reformers got to them, they saw a symphony orchestra concert as an exciting extension of the exuberance, sophistication, and progressive promise of urban life. Concerts were part of going-out and moving up, of being with thousands of strangers, of participating in a world of sensation.

How can orchestras and their public concerts more actively and dynamically connect to this new age of technology, migration, and urbanization? What's the new role for art music in civic boosterism? How can the sonic palette of symphony orchestras truly create excitement for potential audiences, on the move and on the keyboard?

A Wilco concert--I'm there. A BSO concert--questions, hesitation, memories of discomfort. That's the problem.

Becoming a Fan of Mahler

Michael Tilson Thomas at Mahler's house in Maiernnig, Austria.

In Tramps Like Us, I wrote about the "becoming-a-fan" stories shared among Bruce Springsteen fans. They were essentially conversion narratives, articulating an intense realization of Springsteen's music. Fans reported that their discovery of Springsteen felt like a lasting dividing line in their lives, creating a transformative "before-and-after" that didn't exist previous to their conversion experiences.

I was reminded of such becoming-a-fan stories last night while watching Michael Tilson Thomas on public television hosting a documentary on composer Gustav Mahler. Mahler is an interesting figure in his own right, but what was most engaging about the program (part of the San Francisco Symphony's "Keeping Score" series) was Thomas's palpable enthusiasm for the man and his music. He just seemed so delighted to be talking about Mahler with you, the viewer, it was almost impossible not to get swept up in the whole thing. And unlike many documentaries on composers, which over-emphasize the otherworldly talent of an individual, this one actually opened with a string of becoming-a-fan stories from listeners: Thomas, Susan Graham, Frank Gehry, Patrick Stewart, and Yo-Yo Ma. (Thomas also did an interview last year in which he told his Mahler becoming-a-fan story, noting at the :50 mark that "I divide my life between before I heard that recording...and after).

Springsteen fans share their stories of becoming-a-fan to both confirm their membership in a wider community and to help others, just discovering Springsteen, to frame their experiences in understandable ways. It seemed to me that Thomas was doing something similar, except for a television audience. Thomas used his passion for Mahler as a basis for organizing the program's content; it helped to make Mahler's greatness not simply an abstraction but real, relatable, felt. By earnestly offering his life-changing discovery of Mahler, he made himself a little vulnerable--not the distant scholar or elitist expert but someone who was unexpectedly blown away by a recording when he was thirteen years old. Personally, I've never really connected with Mahler's music, but encountering Thomas's obvious love for it made me want to go back and listen again.

PBS's typical soft-spoken erudition isn't going to bring new audiences to Mahler, but Thomas's fandom just might.

Journals Focusing on Music, Audiences, and Fandom

I'm on a slight break while I finish up the semester. In the meantime, check out what my colleagues from England are up to! Dr. Lucy Bennett is guest-editing a special issue of the journal Participations, on music and audiences, while Dr. Mark Duffett is guest-editing a special issue of Popular Music & Society, focusing on fandom. As an old fogey who remembers a time when human fans (instead of decorative fans or industrial blowers) were almost completely absent in scholarship, this is fantastic. There much to discuss--I hope that some of you out there will consider submitting a proposal. Each call for papers follows below.

Proposals are sought for a special issue of Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies on music and audiences. The theme of this issue will be an examination of the music audience from a range of perspectives, with both theoretical and empirical research welcomed on all aspects of music and reception. The issue would also particularly be interested in proposals that consider music audiences in the context of debates over technology and the Internet, and in articles which focus on issues of genre, different music fan cultures, or the specifics and particularities of music audiences, due to contexts such as sexuality, generation or nationality.

Proposals are welcomed on, but not limited to, the following possible topics:

-Music fandom (s);
-Music audiences, technology and the Internet;
-Music audiences in regional, local, national and international contexts;
-Representations of, and audience responses to, gender and sexuality;
-Film, television and the music audience;
-Music taste(s) and genres;
-Responses to political engagement in music;
-Generational music audiences;
-Celebrity and stardom;
-The live music experience;
-Discussions of music engagement and meaning.

Please submit article proposals of no more than 300 words, along with a 200 word author biography to Dr Lucy Bennett (BennettL@cf.ac.uk) by 11 July 2011. Please also contact Lucy with any queries or requests for further information. Completed articles will have a submission deadline of 10 January 2012. Please note that Participations operates an open-refereeing policy. For more information see the website (http://www.participations.org).

Popular Music and Society invites article proposals for a new special issue. Fandom is both a personal expression of emotional conviction and a complex, changing, multi-faceted social phenomenon that now encompasses both online and offline activity. The study of fandom is a scholarly niche that exists at the intersection of a wide range of interests and connections. It can be contextualized by wider media research (theory by scholars such as Henry Jenkins and Matt Hills; reception analysis; celebrity studies; ethnography; subcultural theory) and by direct research into popular music culture (ethnomusicology; research on listening; live music audiences; studies of music in everyday life). We invite papers with themes that may include, but are not limited to:

• Fans as musicians / musicians as fans
• The consumer marketplace, perceptions of the music industry
• Collecting, listening, and other fan practices
• Live music, local scenes, and fandom as living culture
• Stereotyping, self-awareness, media representation, literature and fiction
• Fandom and social identities (such as gender, age, disability, race)
• Methodology, research practice, cultural theory
• Histories, critiques of fandom as a response to mass culture
• Taste, cultural capital, and the canon
• Online participatory cultures
• Case studies and ethnographies; personal narratives, memories, and investments
• Stardom and celebrity; identification, reading, and textuality
• Legacies of key representations (e.g., Fred Vermorel and Judy Vermorel's book Starlust)
• Modernity, religion, pathology, and the "cult" analogy
• Differing fandoms / specific music genres
• The fan community: insiders, outsiders, and the "ordinary" audience
• Fan culture and the paradigm of performance
• The uses of fandom: political activism, heritage, and tourism
• Fandom, the family, and / or the life cycle

Send proposals of up to 500 words in the first instance. Contributions will be peer-reviewed for potential inclusion in the main section of the journal. Polemical papers will also be considered for inclusion in the Forum section. Indicate the name under which you would wish to be published, your professional/academic affiliations, a postal address, and preferred email contact. Deadline for submission of proposals is October 31, 2011. We would hope to commission articles by December 31, 2011, and deadline for submission of the articles will be July 31, 2012. Please email proposals to guest editor Mark Duffett at m.duffett@chester.ac.uk

Watching Jazz

An NPR Radio piece yesterday featured a fascinating new project, by musicians Jason Moran and Me'Shell Ndegeocello, to revive the dance music of Fats Waller. Moran and Ndegeocello talk about the ways in which jazz has moved away from its party-oriented entertainment origins in Waller's day. Moran explained, ""You know, the '20s [and] '30s, people dancing to music wasn't seen as bizarre or crazy. Now, if I play some Fats Waller music in a gig and someone starts dancing, they're the freak." Ndegeocello went further and noted something in jazz that she calls the "fishbowl complex": "You know, 'I'm going to come watch you.' I don't know how it got to be that way. It just has a specific historical reference now. And people forget that it started in brothels."

While Ndegeocello was likely referring to "jazz" with her pronoun "it," I heard the sentence as: "And people forget that [watching] started in brothels." I have no idea whether that is even historically accurate (when was the first brothel?), but the extent to which music served as a means for 20th-century prostitutes to display themselves before clients made me follow that mis-hearing a bit further and consider the framework of, say, a turn-of-the-century New Orleans brothel for understanding modern audiencing. Certainly a major theme in the history of audiencing in the United States has to be the development of the "gaze," with all the sexual, racial, political, and behavioral complexities involved in that action. We have created elaborate rules, buildings, institutions, technologies, and markets which explicitly support practices of exhibition and spectatorship and which often reinforce ideologies of social difference.

On the other hand, I'm a little hesitant about a broadly-applied "gaze" thesis in this case, because I do not agree that dancing to music is inherently better than witnessing music. Moran and Ndegeocello go so far as to oppose dancing to watching, implying that the former is active and participatory and will break down social barriers, while the latter is passive and distant, locking people into structures of inequality. Instead, I think there is a strong case to be made that playing, singing, watching, and dancing are all part of performance and have taken on various meanings (good and bad) in different social and historical contexts. It may be useful to encourage people to dance at jazz shows and revive the days of Fats Waller, but it might also be useful to remember why people stopped dancing at jazz shows in the first place. Namely, in the 1940s, bebop sidemen, distancing themselves from what they saw as an exploitive entertainment market and seeking a different kind of recognition in segregated America, sought to develop jazz in new, modernist directions. Their audiences--beats, bohemians, hipsters, students, and intellectuals--were motivated to participate as listeners in this new subculture of virtuosity, recognizing its avant-garde irreverence as a powerful reflection of their own rebellion against "middlebrow" America. In other words, in 1950, it made sense to some people not to dance.

Perhaps the more pertinent question in all this is why has the fishbowl model of jazz performance remained with us for so long? Why are contemporary jazz audiences reverently listening rather than exuberantly dancing? Waller's legacy depends on the answer to that question as much as it does on the impressive efforts of Moran and Ndegeocello to recover the bodily joy of his performances.

Storing All That Sheet Music

Orchard House, Concord, Massachusetts: Dining Room. (The rack is on left).

On a recent visit with my family to Orchard House, the home of Louisa May Alcott, I noticed a curious piece of furniture in the corner of the dining room that look a bit like an oversized dish-drying rack; it was a finely-finished platform, on bowed legs, topped with a frame intersected by large vertical slots. After the guide suggested that it might have held sheet music, I became curious about "sheet music furniture." Was there such a thing? How far did people go to organize their home sheet music collections in the 19th century? 

This may seem like a bizarre topic to research, but in the age of the memory chip, we have a weakened understanding of the extent to which collecting music before the 21st century required a good deal of physical space and material organization. Besides the piano, one of the most successful consumer products for music in the 19th century was sheet music. (In fact, they often went together: getting a piano invariably meant starting a sheet music collection). Music publishers offered diverse forms of music, including lesson books for instrument and voice, souvenir versions of songs from the musical stage, hymns, minstrel songs, simplified versions of operas and symphonies. An enthusiast's sheet music could quickly number into hundreds of pieces, requiring some sort of cataloguing system for retrieval. As one writer lamented, "We so frequently go into homes and find sheet music thrown about in all sorts of confusion. One family has on old square piano and beneath it is a disorderly heap." (Locomotive Firemen's Magazine, October 1899, 420). How people dealt with issues of storage, organization, and display said a lot about how they consumed, valued, and understood music in general.

Some music-lovers started by identifying their collection with book-plates, similar to those used in home libraries. Music book-plates, as Sheldon Cheney has explained, were often specially-designed to both indicate a person's idiosyncratic interests and to fit in the margins of sheet music pages. 

Many people paid to have their collections of sheet music bound in leather and personalized with their names embossed in gold on the covers. The binders purposefully indicated the individual preferences of their owners through variations in content and organization--by year, by style, by publisher, and by favorite pieces. they could be bulky, but when stored with other books in one's library shelf, they added a sense of refinement and personal achievement to the room.

iPod Culture and the History of Listening

Slate excerpted an essay from the journal n+1 this week, on the iPod and its historical meaning, by Nikil Saval. It caught my attention, especially since I just spent the past eight years writing a book (Listening and Longing, coming Fall 2011 from Wesleyan University Press) about music listening in the 19th century. Certainly, we live in a music culture in which listening has long had a distinct role, and in the past decade or so, that role appears to have become more visible. Have mp3 devices like the iPod changed us? How might we measure such a change?

Saval approaches the iPod from the perspective of social theory, something that’s clear from his statement that “in the 20th century, the two most considered attempts to connect music and society were those of the philosopher Theodor Adorno and the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.” No ethnomusicology, here--nor more recent sociological work by Tia DeNora or Michael Bull. While he rightly notes that Adorno avoided empirical evidence, and that Bourdieu failed to see how music pluralism might create its own kind of class hierarchy, these criticisms appear to be only a polite deference to skeptical readers; in the last instance, he agrees with Adorno (and Allan Bloom, for that matter): We live in “a counterfeit heaven where music plays all the time," but “we're not even listening.”

The judgments of social theory don’t involve actual people, which, I suppose, makes this sort of assertion safe from the messiness of accounting for experience. Nevermind that there are people on the street right now, to whom one could ask, “Why do you listen to your iPod so much?,” and from whom one would receive many considered and richly complex answers that may contradict the notion that people are “not even listening.”

My main criticism, however, is actually with the history presented in the essay. I very much appreciate Saval’s serious attention to the cultural behavior of music listening (something, as he points out, almost entirely absent from both academic and journalistic music criticism). And I am impressed with his emphasis on the fact that listening is always historical--that is, not a biological given but a complex set of interpretive moves on the part of listeners, which are themselves influenced by changing ideologies and institutions. But in his attempt to place iPod listening in that history, I would argue that he oversimplifies.

For Saval, it all comes down to Berliner’s Gramophone. In particular, he says, “Before the invention of the record and the gramophone (1887), the only form of listening people knew was social; the closest thing to a private musical experience was playing an instrument for yourself, or silently looking over a score. More often, if you had the means, you got to sit in the panopticon of the concert hall, seeing and being seen to the accompaniment of Verdi.” The gramophone, in his view, facilitated a new era of “solitary hyper-listening,” broken only by a brief and failed utopian moment in the 1960s, when  members of the counterculture believed that music could be a means to bring people together for social change.

This is not a new historical formulation; the advent of sound recording figures as a significant epochal dividing line in most textbooks on communications history, as well as the history of American music. But besides the fact that it is doubtful that the mere novelty of the phonograph was powerful enough to unilaterally determine lasting shifts in people’s daily behavior, (or that no music motivated 20th century social movements outside of the 1960s counterculture), I think we really need to interrogate the notion that recording technology was primarily a source of private and introverted musicality and that the public concert was primarily a source of shared experience and sociality.

The 19th-century music lovers I’ve studied, for example, frequently reported feeling alone in their passion for music. While they listened at concerts in the midst of friends and family, they insisted that their listening was individual; their friends did not hear the same sounds and were not moved in the same way. The longing music lovers felt, as they awaited the next visit of an orchestra, was a little embarrassing; rather than risk condemnation or ridicule, they recorded their concert experiences privately in their diaries.

Even if we accept that music listening in the 19th century was more fundamentally social compared to iPod use in the  21st century, the question remains: social how? There were different kinds of social relationships between audiences and performers, between audiences and works, and among audience members at urban concerts from their emergence in the 1830s through the early 20th century. Elites coyly displaying the latest fashion at a recital, young clerks sitting in an astonished hush while witnessing a virtuoso, and bourgeois reformers enacting the ideal of an educated citizenry through reverent listening were all participating socially in music events but with different motivations and beliefs about what that participation entailed and what it meant.

Our analyses of iPod listening ought to at least hold open the possibility that what’s going on is as equally layered as concert listening in the 19th century. Saval rightly asks, "We need a way to find out what all this music listening is doing to us, or what we're doing with it." But his discussion doesn't quite get at the latter as much as it might. The essay ends with his own dismay at “ubiquitous music” and a call to reject "the obscure social injunction that condemns us to a lifetime of listening." This strikes me as little different than John Philip Sousa's call for Americans to reject the phonograph back in 1906. Sousa couldn't see the point of canned music, relative to amateur performance, but his readers did; the phonograph did not, as he predicted, end the piano lesson or the marching band or, for that matter, Americans' interest in music. In the case of the iPod, the same might be true. People may be listening to more music than ever, and frequently doing so through earbuds, but they are likely making sense of that behavior, relative to other forms of musical participation, in ways that scholars are only beginning to explain.

The Canon of Great Fans

Canons of great authors, artists, and composers have fallen out of favor in some humanities disciplines lately; judging some work as better than others, once the core work of criticism, has become a bit old-fashioned in the wake of post-structuralism. At least, how scholars understand the power of "good" art has changed. After the first wave of reception-theory in the 1970s, which pointed out the complexity, diversity, unpredictability, and even perversity of audiences as they received and "decoded" creative expression, the Arnoldian idea that a person would simply need to expose himself to works of genius in order to become educated or "cultured," or the modernist notion that structural complexity is a primary marker of artistic significance, needs to be understood with a degree of skepticism. "Canon formation," or how we evaluate the best works in a society, has turned out to involve more than just merit.

Our Great Authors, 1865

I don't really believe that we should abandon the idea of a canon in humanities scholarship, even as we expose its politics. Judgments about worth, after all, are vital for defining shared values and for democratic decision-making. And working through the process of judging is a key component of learning, and doing that through the evaluation of artistic works is useful. However, I do think that canonicity is often too narrowly-focused on authorship. Great works are almost always attributed to the great minds that conceived them. That's why musicologists or literary scholars still tend to develop expertise in particular authors deemed worthy of in-depth study (especially if they want a faculty appointment and/or tenure), or why textbook cultural histories continue to organize their narratives around moments of creative production, conveniently offering decontextualized lineages of creative influence, as if all great artists in history are really just part of one, big, family of geniuses.

It seems to me that if we are going to go through the effort of canonization, we ought to open up the process to all aspects of artistic culture. We can have a canon of great authors, as long as we also have canons of great bookbinders, concert promoters, instrument manufacturers, and audience members. Certainly, judgments could be made in those areas, too. In fact, I've been thinking a lot lately of whether it might be possible to create a canon of great fans, audience members who we might deem as having been the best and the brightest readers, listeners, and spectators of their times.

Some names immediately come to mind from the American nineteenth century (which where I've been spending most of my time for the past eight years). Walt Whitman, for instance, is good initial candidate.

As a young journalist and man-about-town, Whitman was an especially active participant in New York City’s rapidly growing number of theaters, lectures, exhibitions, and concerts in the 1840s. He was a regular at the Bowery Theater and loved the intense emotionalism of actors like Junius Brutus Booth and Edwin Forrest. He was an enthusiastic follower of oratory, attending political rallies and abolitionist meetings at Broadway Tabernacle to study the fiery rhetoric of reformers; he especially was eager for lectures by Brooklyn preacher Henry Ward Beecher or temperance speaker John Gough. Perhaps most of all, Whitman was huge opera fan, following what he called his "musical passion." His status as a journalist put him on the “free-list” for concerts in the city, he heard most of the major virtuosos that passed through in the late 1840s and early 1850s. In Specimen Days, he recounts, for instance:

I heard, these years, well render'd, all the Italian and other operas in vogue, "Somnambula," "The Puritans," "Der Freischutz," "Huguenots," "Fille d'Regiment," "Faus," "Etoile du Nord," "Poliuto," and others. Verdi's "Ernani," "Rigoletto," and "Trovatore," with Donizetti's "Lucia" or "Favorita" or "Lucrezia," and Auber's "Massaniello," or Rossini's "William Tell" and "Gazza Ladra," were among my special enjoyments. I heard Alboni every time she sang in New York and vicinity--also Grisi, the tenor Mario, and the baritone Badiali, the finest in the world.

In addition to his obsessive attendance at the cultural events of the city, he had a consistent, almost unbridled excitement about those experiences--his ardent listening, participation, and spectatorship shaped many of the descriptive passages of urban life in Leaves of Grass and shone through his criticism, essays, and reminiscences. Such experiences were important enough for him to note at the end of his life, in "Good-Bye My Fancy" (Complete Prose Works, 511): 

Seems to me I ought to acknowledge my debt to actors, singers, public speakers, conventions, and the stage in New York, my youthful days, from 1835--say to '60 or '61--and to plays and operas generally....Seems to me now when I look back, the Italian contralto Alboni (she is living yet, in Paris, 1891, in good condition, good voice yet, considering) with the then prominent histrions Booth, Edwin Forrest, and Fanny Kemble and the Italian singer Bettini, have had the deepest and most lasting effect upon me. I should like well if Madame Alboni and the old composer Verdi (and Bettini the tenor, if he is living), could know how much noble pleasure and happiness they gave me then, and how deeply I always remember them and thank them to this day.

Of course, there are other great fans in history for whom we have evidence, some famous and some unknown, and I hope to highlight some of them in the coming months on this blog. (James Boswell ought to be here!) The larger point, here, is that thinking about a canon of fans, however reactionary, can re-orient our understanding of what's significant when we think about how art works in society and how we might account for its history. And that re-orientation is worth pursuing further.

Canned Enthusiasm

We tend to think of enthusiastic audiences as spontaneously reacting with fervor and admiration to performers, but of course enthusiasm can also be manufactured by clever entrepreneurs for the purposes of manipulation and profit. In the music world of the 19th century, for example, tricks of the ticket trade include “deadheading,” which created demand for a concert ticket by giving away most seats for an opening night to associates to create an irresistible “full house.” Other managers paid carriage drivers to line the curb outside their theaters, suggesting that people must be fascinated with something going on inside. Most deceptive were claqueurs, professional applauders, in the audience for 18th century Parisian opera. As a travel writer in Harper’s Monthly (February 1854: 310) explained,

After one has been led by the contagious force of example to join in a round of uproarious applause, with which some favorite actor or piquant speech has been greeted, and perhaps been simple enough to add a bouquet to the pile cast at the feet of a pretty actress, whose emotions of gratitude, too powerful for speech, can only be expressed by a well-studied pantomime, it is as killing to sentiment as frost to flowers, to hear a cynical Frenchman beside you, with a latent smile at your greenness just discernible on his otherwise polite features, coolly remark, “that cost fifty francs.” You turn to him and ask an explanation. Monsieur is always happy to enlighten strangers, even when the information conveys no compliment to his own institutions. In the first place, he tells you never to take a seat in the centre of the parquette, just under the chandelier. You wonder at this, as it is really the best place in the house to see the stage and audience, but after the explanation you avoid it as you would one of the plagues of Egypt. It is the locality of the “claqueurs.” Remark that group immediately under the chandelier, some fifty persons, they are called “Les Chevaliers du lustre.” See how periodically they applaud; how well they are drilled; a hundred hands clapping in perfect unison. They are like soldiers, and have their corporals and captains, who motions they follow with all the regularity that a flock of geese follows its leader.

In this context, true admiration was always relative to the false kind:

It is reasonable to suppose when a French audience has a mercenary band to execute gratis for them all the clapping, stamping, and shouting, they do not trouble themselves much with such fatiguing ceremonies. If they are so far carried out of their dignified contempt for the claqueurs as to join in applause, it must be by something decidedly good in their estimation.

Audience Engineering

In the mid-19th century, the popularity of tours by European virtuoso performers (Fanny Elssler, Jenny Lind, Leopold de Meyer, Ole Bull, etc.) had promoters and city leaders scrambling to find venues large enough to accommodate the increasingly large audiences. Older cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and New Orleans typically had standing theaters or churches that could hold large numbers of people, but many towns and smaller cities had to improvise. Jenny Lind, to the embarrassment of genteel Boston observers, for example, performed in the Fitchburg, Massachusetts, railway station.

Mass meetings of all kinds soon became in demand. Audiences marvelled at the emotions created by huge crowds, especially in urban communities, where residents could suspend their normal isolation and anonymity and see themselves literally gathered, as a single entity. Boston’s National Peace Jubilee, for instance, developed by band leader Patrick Gilmore in 1869, to celebrate the end of the Civil War, was the largest single concert gathering in the United States, including an orchestra of 1,000 (along with a total of 11,000 singers) and an audience of 50,000, all in a temporary coliseum, constructed entirely out of wood.

Interior of the Coliseum of the 1869 National Peace Jubilee

In 1872, Gilmore did it again in the World Peace Jubilee. Architect William G. Preston redesigned the since demolished 1869 coliseum on an even bigger scale, with a seating capacity of 100,000 (and a 2,000-pice orchestra and a chorus of 20,000). 

At events like this, the thunder of applause was as interesting as any performer; indeed, the physicality of the moment created excitement out of risk as much as pleasure. Flyers for the 1869 Jubilee advertised "AN IMMENSE COLISEUM, The largest structure in America, capable of accommodating FIFTY THOUSAND PERSONS, has been erected especially for this occasion." And, as one writer said about the Peace Jubilee in 1872: “Not the least moral feature of the Festival is the applause,--so overwhelming in its demonstration that timid souls have said their prayers and trusted blindly in the stability of wooden rafters.”

Gilmore tried to downplay this risky excitement in his own accounts of the festivals, but clearly it was part of the appeal: “The builders, contractors, architects, and building committee were all gentlemen of great experience, and fully appreciated the responsibility of their task. They knew that the safety and security of Fifty Thousand lives were in their hands, and they took every precaution to guard against accident by making the structure strong and solid enough to bear ten times the weight and pressure to which it would ever be subjected…From morning till night, for weeks and months, the Building Committee, one or all, were almost constantly on the ground, watching every inch of progress made. Fully satisfied that everything possible was being done which the knowledge and experience of the builders and their own foresight could suggest to make the structure safe beyond a doubt, they turned a deaf ear to the malicious rumors that would have swept away all confidence…” (From Patrick Gilmore, History of the National Peach Jubilee and Great Musical Festival, 1871: 277).

Big audiences didn’t disappear—you start to see the impact of mass meetings and concerts, especially, in sports, where stadium construction increases to accommodate audiences for baseball and football. As an article from a gymnasium construction company states, "It is announced in the newspaper column that the Yale football management is to make determined effort to accommodate all the spectators who may wish to attend the Yale-Harvard football game this fall, a condition of affairs which has not existed in previous years. Some 4,000 additional seats are to be erected, giving the gridiron stands a seating capacity of about 31,000. The new stands will be so erected as to close the corners and fill in the sides. Comparison with the Harvard stadium, used for the first time last year, still shows a greater capacity at Cambridge. The Harvard stadium proper seats about 25,000 persons, but by means of additional stands 35,000 can be accommodated. (American Gymnasia and Athletic Record, Vol 1, September 1904-August 1905. Boston: American Gymnasia Company: 11)

Temporary “stands” were one thing; it became clear by the 1890s that the lasting appeal of sports would require more scientific examination of how create solid, safe, and enduring audience structures. I’m only beginning the exploration of this particular science, but here’s a glimpse, from a paper on “live loads”—another term for audience!--delivered at the meeting of the American Society of Civil Engineers in 1904:

"It is freely admitted the writer’s results give figures greatly in excess of those given by the accepted authorities (outside of some municipal building laws), both in the United States and in Europe, but the experiment is one very easily tried by anyone who may feel unconvinced. Doubtless, mixed crowds of men and women, such as football spectators, may weigh less per square foot, with an equal degree of personal discomfort, than the body of students in the writer’s experiments. It should be remembered that a closely packed crowd is not likely to be in a mood to take calmly any undue deflection or appearance of weakness in the floor, and the result of such seeming insecurity is not pleasant to contemplate. In the writer’s opinion, such floors as those of passageways, corridors, standing-room in theaters, assembly rooms without fixed seats, ballrooms, etc., should be calculated for a weight closely approaching 150 lb. per sq. ft., or, in some cases even more, without exceeding the unit stresses of Mr. Schneider’s Paragraph 17. Possibly, a large standing assemblage, such as is common at political meetings, likely to applaud by stamping; or, a throng of dances; or a body of drilling soldier, might call for an additional impact provision."(C. C. Schneider, “The Structural Design of Buildings.” Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Paper No. 997: 443-444)

An image from C. C. Schneider's 1904 paper on "live loads."

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.?