Listening Spaces: Art Music and its Audiences in the Concert Hall and Beyond, c 1850-1945 Event

Since the early nineteenth century the symphonic concert hall has been acknowledged as a key site of sociability, education, discipline and display, in European cities both large and small. Much recent research on what is conventionally taken to be the high era of the bourgeois consumption of art music has sough to complicate the image of the ‘attentive audience’ contemplating the timeless art object in the auratic space of the concert hall, and recuperate instead a wider variety of musical listening experiences located in a greater variety of spatial contexts. This workshop brings together historians, musicologists and cultural geographers to present and discuss the findings of recent work in this inter-disciplinary problem space.