This themed issue focuses on the study of listeners in history. The articles address the personal responses to music of ‘ordinary listeners’ – that is, people whose experiences of music are recorded in personal documents and third-party descriptions (as opposed, say, to music critics who wrote about music in order to influence the ideas and tastes of a public readership). This overview essay proposes that the testimony of ordinary listeners can cast new light on musical practices, the way music has been heard and its role in past societies. It points to a perceived gap in historical musicology, whereby the evidence left by listeners in the past has been the subject of little targeted research and has generally been relegated to a supporting role. The themed issue emerges from work conducted as part of the Listening Experience Database project, a research project set up to address that gap, and focuses on empirical historical research.

This overview essay discusses the types of evidence on which the articles are based and some of the issues and cautions they raise, and sets out to demonstrate the unique quality and value of the evidence through the exploration of five topics in the history of British music in the long nineteenth century. The approach they exemplify has potential to shed light on music as part of the experience of ordinary people, often in contexts and places that have not featured prominently either in nineteenth-century music history or in musicological study generally.

On 1 September 1887, the Musical Times printed a list of pieces published during the previous month by Novello, Ewer and Co. As Novello's house journal, with a wide circulation across Britain, the Musical Times regularly listed new publications in the knowledge that such advertisements would reach a large and enthusiastic readership. In this particular issue, one of the pieces advertised was an anthem titled Hear my cry O God, composed by Dr C.G. Verrinder (see Fig. 1, highlighted). To anyone unfamiliar with Verrinder, his name blends in with the other composers on the list – one of the now largely forgotten majority of Victorian composers trying to make a living through writing sacred works or parlour music. The most renowned figure here is probably Ignaz Moscheles (listed here as ‘J. Moscheles’), whose work Domestic Life featured posthumously in one of Novello's collections of piano pieces; another name of note is that of Rosalind F. Ellicott, one of the era's more prominent female composers and particularly striking here among so many men.

Two years after completing his overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1826), Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy began to write of another vision: visiting his friend, the composer Adolf Fredrik Lindblad, in Sweden. Over the coming years, as Mendelssohn continually returned to this idea, additional reasons to make such a journey presented themselves: performances of his works in that city, including the Shakespearean overture, were well received; he became personally acquainted with Crown Prince Oscar, to whom he dedicated the op. 44 string quartets; he was elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Music; his first cousin, Josephine (‘Peppi’) Benedicks, lived in Stockholm; and his friendship with Jenny Lind in the last years of his life only strengthened his interest in the north.

While Mendelssohn’s letters to Lindblad have long been known to scholars, the Gegenbriefe from Lindblad remain unpublished. For the first time, his voice is now fully restored to the conversation in an extensive correspondence that contributes to knowledge of Mendelssohn’s interpretations of his own music and his early reverence for the late Beethoven string quartets. In addition, this article also uncovers epistolary evidence of a cluster of related compositions by Mendelssohn and Lindblad spawned by Mendelssohn’s interest in the quartet in F Major (op. 135), including a little-known song that Lindblad dedicated to Felix on the occasion of his marriage.

Mendelssohn’s journeys to Scotland and Italy inspired his musical imagination in ways that have richly benefitted the concert repertoire. How might he have translated his impressions of Nordic history, culture and geography into new aural atmospheres, had he followed his dream to travel northwards?

Evidence from diaries and correspondence shows how 44 individual listeners experienced music in Britain during the years c. 1780–1830. The individuals were not united by social class, but each of them had the financial resources to gain access to operas, concerts and other performances enjoyed by the wealthiest in society. Crucial to an understanding of these listeners’ reactions to music is an evaluation of their personal documents, which demonstrates how their evidence is shaped by genre, readership and a variety of cultural factors. Their descriptions of performances are used to show how London audiences, characterized in general by noise and commotion, contained a wide variety of listeners, ranging from those who appear to have attended largely for social reasons to those who reacted deeply to the music they heard. The evidence shows that those who listened intensely found greater satisfaction in more exclusive, private performances. It also shows that some listeners were deeply moved by what they heard, sometimes expressing their emotions through tears, in keeping with the culture of sensibility which thrived throughout the period. Other themes that emerge from the evidence include the role played by reminiscence in intensifying listeners’ listening, and the strong reactions that were often elicited by the experience of novelty or otherness. Some listeners are shown to have had different reactions to music according to the social context in which it was heard or the repertoire that was performed.

When Franz Liszt died, the world lost an innovative composer, mentor, and pianist. Although his influence did not die with him, few of his successors can claim to have walked in his footsteps – to have lived and taught in the same rooms – and to have shared many of his ideals. Ferruccio Busoni did just that when the Grand Duke Carl Alexander invited him to hold piano master classes in Weimar in 1900 and 1901, just as he had invited Liszt to do nearly two decades earlier (1881–1885).

This article shows how Liszt's activities in Weimar as Pedagogue and as Kapellmeister (1848–1861) became models for Busoni as he sought to position himself as a prominent ‘musical polymath’ at the turn of the century. Yet Busoni not only emulated Liszt, he also promoted him in an age when the older composer was considered of only tangential importance.

By producing authoritative editions of Liszt's music, and perhaps more significantly, by emulating Liszt's activities as a transcriber and composer, Busoni enhanced piano sonority while extending Liszt's ideas about the future of music. In that way, he shared attitudes associated with the Zukunftsmusik movement, and his outlook was rooted in Liszt's compositions, as opposed to Richard Wagner's. At the same time, he helped foster a lineage of young musicians who patterned their careers and music after Liszt.

Drawing on surviving memoirs, letters, scores, essays and concert programmes, this article thus explores Liszt's impact on Busoni and his mentees. It reveals a musician not only emulating Liszt, but also expanding upon his ideas and promoting them to others.

From the 1850s, Saint-Saëns regularly employed cyclic form: the practice of establishing large-scale relationships (especially in symphonies, chamber works, etc.) by reintroducing materials from earlier movements in later ones. Nonetheless, he became weary of such procedures following the Third Symphony (1886) for cultural-political reasons: Franck's most important cyclic works date from the 1880s, d'Indy declared la forme cyclique a historically determined canon, and period writers considered cyclic form a franckiste hallmark – all while Saint-Saëns's relationship with Franck's followers deteriorated.

In this essay, I argue that Saint-Saëns's First String Quartet (1899) ‘misreads’ his rivals’ approaches to cyclic form as exemplified by d'Indy's Second Quartet of 1897 (in which a four-note cell suffuses most themes) and Franck's Quartet (in which themes from previous movements climactically accumulate in the final coda). Saint-Saëns's themes abound with miniscule motivic connections, which catch listeners’ ears but seem too fleeting and insubstantial to register as binding elements comparable to d'Indy's pellucid cell. Such relationships straddle the threshold of apprehensibility, and they produce a distinctive affective quality: where d'Indy fosters perceptions of genetic relationships, Saint-Saëns elicits a sensation of déjà entendu. The final coda similarly teases by reintroducing fragments from the slow introduction, encouraging anticipation of a Franck-like apotheosis. What follows is a mirage of one: timbres and textures of previous movements return, but incipient citations of themes dissolve. Where Franck delivers a full-blooded synthesis, Saint-Saëns follows through with trompe l'oreille.

Saint-Saëns's misreadings of franckiste technique point to broader aesthetic conflicts. D'Indy enlisted cyclic form as a means to monumentality, which served the enseignement he esteemed as art's purpose. Déjà entendu and trompe l'oreille, on the other hand, register as classicising attributes which diverge from d'Indy's didactic objectives and which Saint-Saëns grouped under the rubric of ‘charm’, a conduit to what he considered an ideologically neutral ‘aesthetic sense’.

This article reads Thomas Hardy's many musical instrument poems as the meeting point for the concerns of several critical fields: material culture, memory studies and the emerging interdisciplinary field of musical haptics. Close readings illuminate not only their relevance to such enquiries, but also how Hardy's manipulation of poetic form engenders a tactile musicality or ‘poetics of touch’ (as Marion Thain puts it). This article focuses on the aspects of these poems which have undergone least exploration: the depiction of the bodily effort involved in music-playing. While some of the poems are critical favourites (‘Old Furniture’) many of those studied here are routinely overlooked.

A mnemonically-minded poet, Hardy wrote about the memories objects hold and the memories that may be mediated through them. For Hardy, the history of objects is inseparable from that of their now-dead owners: person and thing are tied together in memory. This is in part due to an object's inherent tangibility, and musical instruments are particularly tactile objects, benefiting from the further mnemonic of music itself.

The core of the article considers Hardy's late poem ‘Haunting Fingers: A Phantasy in a Museum of Musical Instruments’, which hears instruments speak out their memories of being touched, and through memory feel ‘old muscles travel/Over their tense contours’. Revisions to the manuscript show Hardy removing ‘death’ and privileging instead the immediacy of remembered touch.

Paying attention to the reading and note-taking Hardy did within nineteenth-century science, this article traces Hardy's imaginative explorations of the processes involved in playing musical instruments back to discoveries about the workings of the unconscious. Saleeby, James, Maudesley and Bastian informed Hardy's knowledge of the science behind music-playing, while musical haptics helps this study unpack why Hardy attends to the interactions which take place at the point of mechanical contact: finger to key, and to string.

This article uses Jeff Astley's concept of ordinary theology (Jeff Astley, Ordinary Theology: Looking, Listening and Learning in Theology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002)) to examine and interpret listening experiences from nineteenth-century Methodist sources. It argues that the participatory experiences of singing together with fellow believers were crucial to the development and sustenance of personal faith, and that believers shared accounts of such experiences in ways that they knew would be understood by their readers as indicative of the depth and sincerity of their spirituality. It further contends that the widely recognized importance of hymnody in Methodism demands attention to its practice as well its content, and that while the lyrics of hymns set out Methodist theology and doctrine, the participative experience of communal singing was itself invested with meaning and value by many lay Methodists. Ordinary theology provides a framework through which common features of these accounts are identified and discussed, emphasizing the importance of various forms of life writing in understanding the ways in which religious practice shaped the lives and interactions of individual believers. The article also explores differences between different types of published and unpublished life writing. While examples are drawn from different branches of nineteenth-century Methodism, it is argued that hymnody's potential for creating spiritually intense experiences was commonly recognized and affirmed across them. This article contributes to the wider discussion of the significance of listening experiences by emphasizing music's vital role in the construction and communication of meaning between individuals on matters of deeply personal value.

Listening to music found a new context during the early nineteenth century, in the shape of large, closed institutions set up to house and treat the insane. In response to social reform as well as a growing problem of mental health, lunatic asylums for paupers were set up across Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century. Replacing the previous practices of restraint and containment, a system of ‘moral management’ dominated the new asylums. Patients’ lives were kept busy and ordered, with careful attention given to their employment, their diet and their recreational activities. Music played an important part in establishing the routine of the new institutions. Formal dances offered a social occasion and a controlled environment within which the two sexes could meet. Both dances and concerts were used as a reward for patient behaviour, encouraging the kind of self-control which was seen as crucial to recovery and rehabilitation. Musical events acted as a diversion from the grim realities of institutional life and played an important role in allowing patients to engage with religious observance. Musical experience could be active or passive; patients might engage by dancing or making music of their own, and their music might be symptomatic of illness or wellbeing. Using documents including formal records, patient notes and newspaper reports, it is possible to investigate some of the ways in which listening to music played a therapeutic role, and the place of musical experience in the lives of asylum patients.

The role and importance of military musicians changed and intensified in the late eighteenth century through two important processes. The first was the culture of display that took root in both the home-based army and units in the colonies. The second was the result of successive militia acts which effectively ensured that military units with bands would be systematically placed in every corner of the British Isles.

It became evident that music as a component of military display served an important diplomatic purpose. Music performed in public spaces was heard by a population deeply sceptical of the army and with an essentially local sense of identity. The experience of the sight and sound of military music raised entirely new perceptions of nation and of the state as a benign power.

Two important and related themes emerge here. The first is the historical process that led, almost accidentally, to a realization that music as part of military display had potential to influence populations across the country and in the colonies. The second, more challenging, theme concerns the nature of the evidence for this idea and how it is to be treated. It is an idea that is totally convincing if the experience of hearing and seeing military spectacle by the mass of the people can be shown to have had impact. What is the evidence of listening to music by those people at whom it was targeted, how robust is it and what can be made of it?

The title quotation from Under Milk Wood encapsulates a widely held belief in the innate musicality of the Welsh and its religious roots. These roots were put down deeply during the nineteenth century, in a huge expansion of choral and congregational singing across Wales and particularly in the industrial communities. This development has been described as ‘a democratic popular choral culture rooted in the lives of ordinary people’, and central to it was the cymanfa ganu, the mass hymn-singing festival. Choral and congregational singing, typified by the cymanfa ganu, underpinned the perception of Wales by the Welsh and by many non-Welsh people as ‘the land of song’.

Alongside this phenomenon ran the tradition of the plygain, a Welsh Christmas carol service. While the cymanfa developed in nonconformist chapels in the mid to late nineteenth century, and on a large – often massive – scale, the plygain is a tradition dating from a period much further back, when Welsh Christianity was Catholic; it belonged to agricultural workers rather than the industrial communities; and the singers sang in much smaller groups – often just twos or threes.

This article describes the nature and origins of these contrasting traditions, and looks at the responses of listeners both Welsh and non-Welsh, and the extent to which they perceived these practices as expressive of a peculiarly Welsh identity. It also considers some of the problems of gathering evidence of working-class responses, and how far the sources give an insight into working-class listening experiences.