The present thesis is a study on the listener in music historiography. More specifically, it presents an investigation – based on the analysis of a selected group of texts – of the various contexts in which the listener appears during a span of approximately 150 years from the late 18th century to the early 20th century. The primary sources of my study are the music histories of John Hawkins (1776), Charles Burney (1776), Johann Nikolaus Forkel (1788 & 1801) and August Wilhelm Ambros (1862), as well as three journal articles by Arnold Schering (1922 & 1928) and Heinrich Besseler (1926).
There are a number of different issues that converge on the figure of the listener. Apart from the activity of listening, the listener also provides the focal point of ideas on musical effect, taste, judgment etc., all of which, in different ways, refer to the relation between listener and music. Another set of issues arises when “the listener” merges into various transpersonal categories, like an age, a people, a religion and so on. The aim of my investigation has been to map how these two levels interact and form different constellations in the music historical literature. My study positions itself within the history of ideas broadly defined, and delivers an original contribution to the understanding of the role of the listener in music historiography.