Summary: | This handbook takes on the task of examining the history of music listening over the past two hundred years. It uses the "art of listening" as a leitmotif encompassing an entanglement of interdependent practices and discourses about a learnable mode of perception. The art of listening first emerged around 1800 and was adopted and adapted across the public realm to suit a wide range of collective listening situations from popular to serious art forms up to the present day. Because this is a relatively new subject in historical research, the volume combines case studies from several disciplines in order to investigate whether, how, and why practices of music listening changed. Focusing on a diverse set of locations and actors and using a range of historical sources, it attempts to historicize and reconstruct the evolution of listening styles to show the wealth of variants in listening
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