Tag-Team Audiencing

We tend to think of audiencing as a rather prescribed set of activities: purchasing a ticket, entering a theater of some kind, and watching/hearing a performance. But there are all kinds of alternative audience practices that challenge this model, either out of necessity or defiance. In Listening and Longing, for instance, I wrote about the practice of lingering outside concert halls to catch the muted strains of performed music inside, or drawing out the experience of a performance through various kinds of reproduction: writing and re-reading detailed descriptions in diaries, or purchasing sheet music or scripts of works and trying to re-create them.

I just realized the significance of another alternative practice. Harry Belafonte, in his new autobiography, My Song, writes about how he and Sidney Poitier, as young struggling actors in post-War 1940s Harlem, would go to the theater: "We started going to the theater once or twice a week, splitting the cost of a single ticket. One of us would go in for the first half, come out at intermission and pass the stub, along with a plot summary to the other. We saw some theater that way, and agreed that seeing half of each play taught us more than not seeing a play at all." (60)

Remarkably, I had just read Patti Smith's account of the same practice when she was living with Robert Mapplethorpe in New York City in the 1970s. This is a fascinating way to encounter a performance. All audiences set up a performance and then collectively interpret it afterward through conversation and criticism--but in this scenario, the performance itself is a dialogic construction, made from individually-experienced fragments, imagined together. If you believe that audiences are secondary, only receiving the primary event of performance, then this sort of tag-teaming is simply a clever way to report "what happened" among those who can't afford more than a ticket. However, if you believe that audiences in some way constitute the performances they encounter, then tag-teaming presents some very interesting questions about how texts might be understood, crafted, and made meaningful in their re-telling. 

Of course, we do this all the time. When a group of people is watching television and one person leaves for a moment to get a snack or use the bathroom and then asks, upon returning, "What did I miss?," he will piece together the narrative from experience, memory, and whatever irritated descriptions he receives. What I like about tag-team audiencing is the positive investment in the process; both Belafonte and Poitier planned to relate half the play to the other and knew that their collective understanding depended on it.

Jonathan Sterne has described the phonograph as "a machine to hear for us." In many ways, tag-team audiencing functions similarly; both Belafonte and Poitier provided playback for each other. Belafonte doesn't talk about how he, or Poitier, grew to enjoy the descriptions they gave each other as much as seeing plays, but that wouldn't be impossible to imagine. 

The Ardent Audience Is Back

Well, that break was a little longer than I expected. Sorry. To get things going again, I thought I would just sort through a few odds and ends: news and pages in the world of audience that I've briefly noticed over the past couple of months while I've been busy wrapping up the academic year.

First--and I'm not sure why I didn't see this before--the Victoria and Albert Museum has put up a wonderful web page titled "A History of a Night at the Theatre." It summarizes the culture of theatre-going from 1500 to the present, including a focus on artifacts from the Museum's collections, from depictions of audiences in paintings and photographs to objects like a "box-renters fan." It's definitely something to which I will return in the future. Please check it out.

Back in February, Henrik Bo Nielsen, CEO of the Danish Film Institute, in a blog post titled "Is The Audience Always Right?," proposed a "reverse audience award" in film. He explained that "the award would go to the movie audience that has the curiosity, courage and energy to seek out challenging movie experiences." He made the proposal while lamenting the apparent boorishness of film audiences, as they follow the latest trend, demand action over substance, and generally think about movies as a quick and pleasurable escape from everyday life. While I think that problem may be due to broader socio-economic pressures more than lack of imagination, his idea of an audience award is something I'd definitely support. Recognizing great audiences (Most Engaged, Longest Applause, Deepest Post-Screening Discussion, Best Heckle, etc.) would be a good way to recognize the crucial participatory role of readers, listeners, and viewers in the arts.

At the beginning of June, the NPR jazz blog, A Blog Supreme, had a guest post, titled "'It Can't Be Done': The Difficulty of Growing a Jazz Audience, from Kurt Ellenberger. There has been considerable hand-wringing about jazz lately (which makes me wonder: is jazz dying any more now than it was after Coltrane died? Or in the 1980s?); it got a lot of attention. Personally, I thought that Ellenberger glaringly ignored the very group he was discussing--there was no engagement with actual audience members, just speculation about how to reach "them." At any rate, a summary of the comments and discussion is here. 

Have you been following the brouhaha around intern Emily White's post about her music collection at the All Songs Considered blog and the withering response from David Lowery? A summary of the firestorm is here. Maybe it's because I work with students everyday, but the "debate" all seems a little rehashed to me. Is it really news that people are putting together digital music collections from a variety of sources, including file-sharing and legal and illegal downloading? Didn't we have this debate twelve years ago with Napster? At least Robin Hilton wrote, "Let's be clear: The debate over compensation doesn't break down along generational lines, and didn't begin with Emily's essay. We know people have been downloading and sharing music — legally and illegally — for years. The 21st century models for recording music, getting it to fans and compensating everyone involved remain works in progress." Exactly.

Related to the subject of changing models of delivery, there was an interesting post yesterday at NPR on the literal legacy of the e-book, titled "Will Your Children Inherit Your E-Books?" Good article--and I'm not one to disparage the beauty, practicality, and endurance of the physical book--but I think one commenter on Facebook summed up the main criticism: "My child has already inherited my love of reading, which is worth far much more than the actual books." That's a point of view that I can embrace, and it's one, actually, that continues to give me hope. 

Romanticism, The Voice, and the History of Listening

One of the problems of studying historical audiences is evidence. Listeners, readers, and theater-goers don’t leave many traces. While the scores, scripts, journals, account books, and correspondence of professional writers, composers, and performers have been preserved and deposited in public archives, the everyday experiences and activities of audience members have not enjoyed the same recognition, and thus potential evidence for their engagement—descriptive letters, scrapbooks, tickets, or souvenirs, for example—have been undervalued, overlooked, and often lost. Scholars of historical reception seek to recover such audience experiences. It’s painstaking and frequently frustrating work, requiring a good deal of creative interpretation. It’s far more like archeology than history, a matter of piecing together found fragments—a single diary description, or obscure periodical image--with educated assumptions about past cultural institutions and ideological expectations.

Judith Pascoe, in her new book, The Sarah Siddons Audio Files: Romanticism and the Lost Voice, writes engagingly and humorously about this process of historical recovery. Pascoe became intrigued by enthusiastic Romantic-era accounts of London stage actress Sarah Siddons, who manipulated audiences with her command of Shakespeare and had a voice which, as contemporary Joseph Severn explained, “thrilled the air with melodious tones, and at the same time touched the heart with such deep pathos that the audience seemed to think it a merit to shed tears and thus appropriately accompany such sublime acting.” Pascoe realized, however, that while Siddons’s "most celebrated roles all seemed to contain sonic highlights that were anticipated with pleasure,” and while paintings almost always showed Siddons poised to speak, she had no idea how Siddons actually sounded. So she resolved to find out. As she explained, “If I could figure out how Siddons sounded, I might also understand how people listened in the romantic period and how that style of listening influenced what they heard.” (14)

While the book is, in part about Siddons, much of the narrative, written in the first-person, is driven by Pascoe’s own search for an auditory past that always seems just out of reach. She explores Siddons’s life story, the world of London theater in 1775-76, and the acoustic design of theaters like Covent Garden and Drury Lane. She takes an acting class to learn more about vocal technique, reads Barthes on the voice, probes the history of recording, and studies Gilbert Austin’s 1806 Chironomia; or, A Treatise on Rhetorical Delivery: Comprehending Many Precepts, Both Ancient and Modern, for the Proper Regulation of the Voice, the Countenance, and Gesture. Along the way, she offers some wonderful insights in Romantic-era theater-going. As she explains at one point:

Romantic theatergoers not only enjoyed performances that we would find overwrought, they enjoyed watching these performances over and over and over again. In fact, the intensity of their pleasure seemed to stem partly from the repetition, which allowed for a deep familiarity with the lines and gestures associated with particular plays….And serving as a further aide-memoire was the condensation of the romantic theatrical experience to a collection of emotionally, visually, or sonically intense scenes that helped to imprint these plays on the memory. The memorization of these ‘points’ made theatergoing more intensely pleasurable, as audience members anticipated these particular moments, watched them play out, and compared them to versions they had already experiences or even enacted themselves. (72)

Pascoe has a great sense of humor about herself and her objective, which, as she herself quickly recognized, was doomed to failure. As she explains, “I had wanted to find out how Siddons made [audience member Joseph] Severn want to change his life, or, failing that, how she caused so many people to go into conniptions when she stepped out on stage, but this meant, of course, and I’d known this all along, that I really had to be there.” (108). In the end, though, Pascoe's frustrations are her readers' gain. Her book is a funny and meaningful meditation on historical methodology, written with both clarity and verve. Its sheer inventiveness reminded me most of Bruce R. Smith’s attempts to discover how the performance of Shakespeare’s plays "actually" sounded in The Acoustic World of Early Modern England. Both Smith and Pascoe acknowledge that we can’t positively know how the past sounded. But through careful historicization of diverse contexts of listening and hearing, and analysis of the fragments of evidence still with us, we can discover faint but tantalizing suggestions of how audiencing had the power to shape lives.

Fans Crossing the Line

The news in the world of "Glee" is that during a recent live performance in the TV show's national tour, an overly enthusiastic fan pulled one of the performers off the stage. It was almost a repeat of an incident a couple of weeks ago, during Rihanna's "Today Show" appearance, where a fan hugged her during the performance and wouldn't let go. These moments are clear breaches of etiquette; there are fairly strict rules today that separate music performers and audiences at concerts, from the presumed "fourth wall" of the stage to the security personnel that are sometimes hired to police it. Nevertheless, such breaches happen quite frequently.

Last month, it happened to U2 in Mexico City. It also happened to Shakira:

Recently, Lady Gaga encountered a fan gesturing along with a song on stage in Japan:

Brittany Spears had something similar happen the year before:

Matinee Girl

A recent article by Stefany Anne Golberg in The Smart Set, contemplating the waning interest in live performance, reminded me of the matinee girl, a type of audience member who was intensely interested in the stage. A fixture of urban theater culture in the late 19th century, matinee girls were young women who attended the cheaper afternoon performances of plays and, unlike "ordinary" audience members, found pleasure and meaning by engaging with the offstage personas of actors rather than the aesthetic content of the dramatic works. She was among the first widely-identified consumer types in American history, and, until the arrival of the flapper and then the bobbysoxer later in the 20th century, the most visible of America's female fans.

Charles Reade Bacon in "The Reporter's Nosegay" of 1896 said of matinee girls:

The eccentricities of the callow youths who haunt the stage doors of the theatres are well known. Most of them are regarded as harmless, and if they get any enjoyment out of ogling chorus girls as they leave the theatres it is nobody's business. There is another species of stage-door habitues, however, possessing far more interest, in the persons of matinee girls. The stage entrances to most of the Philadelphia theatres are located in dark, dirty and altogether uninviting alleys, but the environments do not deter hosts of nicely-dressed young women from repairing thither immediately after a Wednesday or Saturday matinee. Some of them are regulars, and they are slightly blase, unless some particularly strong matinee hero is the attraction. But it is amusing to watch the actions of those to whom the experience is novel. Their excitement is intense, and occasionally almost hysterical. The matinee stage door girl never speaks to the object of her adoration. She dreams of doing so someday, and in the meantime contents herself with writing him perfumed notes, which come in handy for shaving paper.

Bacon's description of backstage door culture raises issues that are still at work in contemporary fan culture--the hierarchy of more experienced fans and overly-excited neophytes, the reluctance to actually engage with stars, etc. Interestingly, it also pathologizes this kind of audience behavior in ways that are still current. While boys are just being boys while ogling chorus girls, women audience members who long for matinee heroes are portrayed as dreamy and deluded.

The matinee girl was a regular subject for derision in the press. Matinees were created by entrepreneurs in 1870s to move theater away from its reputation as an uncontrolled and dangerous environment and create new, safe entertainment. In fact, matinee performances were meant to help women fulfill the feminine ideal of Victorian culture and to develop their emotional sensibility through participation in the arts. Of course, this was a kind of trap; while it cultivated the feminine ideal, it also enforced that ideal. Genteel women easily slipped into the caricature of the overly-excitable, overly-emotional, easily-manipulated girl, given to romantic fantasy. And for male critics worried about the increasing emasculation wrought by industrialization and urban life in the late 19th century, female consumers were a symbol of everything that was wrong with America's commercialized society. Matinee girls made clear suspected associations between femininity, passivity, and lifeless bourgeois “Culture.”

However, there was also something else going on, here. For many women participating in theater at the turn-of-the-century, the matinee became a source of new power. It provided a rare shared space in which they could gather and express themselves freely in ways forbidden in everyday life—in Peter Rabinowitz’s phrase, with their “own dominant passions.” The matinee girl was commonly portrayed in the press as prone to fantasy and hysteria, but in reality she was also independent, single, unaccompanied by a male escort, and openly displaying desire outside of the usual prescriptions of middle-class courtship. Another thing I didn't know until recently was that apparently matinee girls were as equally fascinated by women actors as men. Thus a 1900 article in Metropolitan Magazine (Vol. XI, No. 6, 611) could state, "Margaret Anglin, the leading lady at the Empire, maintains that she is always at her best at a Saturday matinee. She declares that the sea of uplifted faces, eager, mobile, and attentive, is a source of inspiration...the real matinee girl is more deeply fascinated by young women who depict the lighter emotions of every-day life."

The rise and fall of "matinee girl" as a term between 1890 to 1940.

The height of matinee girl culture in the United States was around 1910. Of course, one can follow the matinee girl into cultural forms beyond theater, including film, popular music, and television. Fred and Judy Vermorel, writing in Fandemonium (1989), argued that the marked cultural position of “the girl” broadly serves as “the key sign for desire itself. The GIRL acts out for all of us our consumerist deliriums of possession and ecstasy.” Perhaps the recent blow-up about the problem of the tween girl audience for American Idol is a good example of that. “Matinee girls” will remain with us as long as public discourse links popular culture consumption and irrationality and then, in turn, portrays irrationality as a marker of nascent femininity.

Of course, girls themselves may have something else to say about it all, which remains an important area of fan research.

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.

Panoramic Audiences

The "panorama," a wide all-encompassing view of a subject (usually a landscape or a battle), was a regular feature of urban popular culture for much of the 19th century. Panoramas were painted on wide and sometimes cylindrical canvases and some had mechanisms that allowed them to rotate, but all offered spectators the illusion of immersion in a scene. Once photography became more common in the late 19th century, more "realistic" panoramas of cities and national parks were created by placing several wide-angle shots side-by-side; by 1900, specially-designed panoramic cameras were used by professional photographers to depict large structures, geographical expanses, and groups of people.

Panoramic photographers seemed especially interested in the increasingly large audiences for political rallies, sporting events, and concerts at the turn of the century. A stadium or theater audience was difficult to reproduce with an ordinary camera, since it typically stretched beyond the viewing field. But the panoramic camera could capture the entire seating area of a hall or amphitheater (albeit with slight distortion). And by representing the whole of that audience from a fixed position, something that was not possible to the normal eye, the panorama artfully enhanced the audience's significance. Such photographs are an untapped resource for audience studies in terms of the detail they offer about performance spaces, as well as audience behavior, public decorum, and the vital role of spectators and listeners in American popular culture.

The Library of Congress has an excellent collection that is available online. A few samples of the photographs follow.

New Theatre, Chicago, 1906

President Wilson addressing Associated Ad Clubs, Independence Square, Philadelphia

Harvard-Dartmouth Game, 1903

Rubenstein Club, 1908

The next three are too big to depict properly, but the detail is amazing. You can find them here and here and here....

Squires-Burns Fight, 1907

Arbor Day 1908

President Taft, State Fair, Detroit, 1911

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."

Recreating Performance Environments

There are many excellent histories of urban theater architecture; there are few that give us an understanding of actually being a concert or theater-goer on a particular night in 1855 or 1870 or 1903. What was playing? How did the inside of a theater look from various viewpoints? What was it like to sit with others in a crowded house?

Of course, scholarship and narrative description can represent such experience. For example, Thomas Forrest Kelly’s First Nights and First Nights at the Opera address some of these questions for specific premieres of musical works and operas. Vera Brodsky Lawrence’s monumental multi-volume Strong on Music re-creates the whole world of music and theater in New York City between 1840 and 1860, using George T. Strong’s mid-19^th century diary and a detailed mining of journalism from the period.

However, there are also a number of digital approaches, a few of which I will note here:

Mapping the Moment is an interesting interactive map of theater and entertainment in Nottingham, England, in the 19^th century, including performance venues, performances, and census information.

The Lost Museum, is an archive and re-creation of P. T. Barnum’s American Museum in New York City. The simulation lets you see and hear the museum's rooms, some of which contain historical commentary.

Virtual Vaudeville engagingly recreates New York City’s Union Square Theater in 1895. It’s a sophisticated simulation that allows you to experience a vaudeville show, in “real” time, while also exploring the space of theater. 

For a related but different take on virtual recreation of entertainment venues, the Urban Simulation Team of UCLA creatied an architectural simulation of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. It needs people, but it's still pretty cool. 

I’m only beginning to explore all this. If Ubisoft can bring 15th-century Italy to life, with attention to historical accuracy, in Assassin's Creed II, why not a night out in an antebellum city? For a scholarly summary of the issues, see Hugh Denard.