Extending the inquiry of his early groundbreaking books, Christopher Small strikes at the heart of traditional studies of Western music by asserting that music is not a thing, but rather an activity. This new work outlines a theory of what Small terms "musicking, " a verb that encompasses all musical activity from composing to performing to listening to a Walkman to singing in the shower. Using Gregory Bateson's philosophy of mind and a Geertzian thick description of a typical concert in a typical symphony hall, Small demonstrates how musicking forms a ritual through which all the participants explore and celebrate the relationships that constitute their social identity. This trip through the concert hall will have readers rethinking every aspect of their musical worlds.

Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening

The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition

taking as his central theme the problem of the declining hold of the church on late nineteenth-century Europe. The reasons for this recession are multiple, as is obvious, and they include the new technology, German materialism, a cheap press, the organization of the working man, together with the impact of Marx, evolutionary science, scientific history and politics. \"Secularization\" is the term selected by the author to describe this phenomenon, and it denotes \"a process, a fundamental change in attitudes and ways of life\". As is to be expected, this is a brilliant work of scholarship, which deals lucidly with an enormous and complex topic; it represents intellectual history at its best, with ideas and suggestions leaping from almost every page. The author traces the many strands which make up the pattern, one of them being the outstanding polemic of science versus religion (pp. 161-188), and the revolution incited by Darwin. This technique renders the book episodic in nature, but this is inevitable and does not detract from its overall worth. For the historian of science and of medicine of the nineteenth century Professor Chadwick's book will be essential reading, for it helps to provide the\"external\" background to the \"internals\" minutiae of his research if he is studying technical advances. For the student of the social aspects of Victorian science or medicine a close acquaintance with this book will be even more mandatory. They explore the competing claims of innovation and tradition amongst the mostly illiterate peasants and artisans of sixteenth-century France, in a series of case studies linked historically. A great deal of literature and source material providing data on them has been surveyed, and they first deal with the social, vocational and sexual context of the Reformation, in so doing revealing the consequences for urban women and the new attitudes to poverty which, for example, were common in Catholic or Protestant in Lyons. Other essays consider the political and social uses made by festive occasions, and analyse the meaning of symbols in cultural play, the festive reversal of sex roles, and the ritualistic and dramatic structure of religious riots. The last two discuss the interaction between literate and oral culture, the impact of printing on the lower orders. This leads to a survey of the collecting of proverbs and medical folklore: 'Proverbial wisdom and popular error'. The second of these, and other parts of this scholarly work, will be …

Society and Culture in Early Modern France

A coherent account of emotional change must find a dynamic, a vector of alteration, outside the discursive structures and normative practices that have monopolized ethnographic attention in research on affect. But this dynamic can be found in the very character of emotional expression. Emotion talk and emotional gestures are not well characterized by the notion of “discourse” derived from the poststructuralist theories of Foucault or by that of “practice” derived from the theoretical writings of Bourdieu, Giddens, and others. These concepts do not capture the two‐way character of emotional utterances and acts, their unique capacity to alter what they “refer” to or what they “represent”–‐a capacity which makes them neither “constative” nor “performative” utterances but a third type of communicative utterance entirely, one that has never received adequate theoretical formulation. An attempt is made to formulate a framework for emotional utterances, and the framework is applied to a number of examples.

Against Constructionism: The Historical Ethnography of Emotions

Beginning with the simple question, 'Why did audiences grow silent?' \"Listening in Paris\" gives a spectator's-eye view of opera and concert life from the Old Regime to the Romantic era, describing the transformation in musical experience from social event to profound aesthetic encounter. James H. Johnson recreates the experience of audiences during these rich decades with brio and wit. Woven into the narrative is an analysis of the political, musical, and aesthetic factors that produced more engaged listening. Johnson shows the gradual pacification of audiences from loud and unruly listeners to the attentive public we know today. Drawing from a wide range of sources - novels, memoirs, police files, personal correspondence, newspaper reviews, architectural plans, and the like - Johnson brings the performances to life: the hubbub of eighteenth-century opera, the exuberance of Revolutionary audiences, Napoleon's musical authoritarianism, the bourgeoisie's polite consideration. He singles out the music of Gluck, Haydn, Rossini, and Beethoven as especially important in forging new ways of hearing. This book's theoretical edge will appeal to cultural and intellectual historians in many fields and periods.

Listening in Paris: A Cultural History.

Beginning with the simple question, 'Why did audiences grow silent?' "Listening in Paris" gives a spectator's-eye view of opera and concert life from the Old Regime to the Romantic era, describing the transformation in musical experience from social event to profound aesthetic encounter. James H. Johnson recreates the experience of audiences during these rich decades with brio and wit. Woven into the narrative is an analysis of the political, musical, and aesthetic factors that produced more engaged listening. Johnson shows the gradual pacification of audiences from loud and unruly listeners to the attentive public we know today. Drawing from a wide range of sources - novels, memoirs, police files, personal correspondence, newspaper reviews, architectural plans, and the like - Johnson brings the performances to life: the hubbub of eighteenth-century opera, the exuberance of Revolutionary audiences, Napoleon's musical authoritarianism, the bourgeoisie's polite consideration. He singles out the music of Gluck, Haydn, Rossini, and Beethoven as especially important in forging new ways of hearing. This book's theoretical edge will appeal to cultural and intellectual historians in many fields and periods.

Listening in Paris: A Cultural History

In the heat of the pamphlet war between Gluckists and Piccinists in the closing years of the 1770s, a partisan of Gluck dashed off a letter to the Journal de musique excoriating his opponents as fools and tyrants. 1 The tone was nothing new, for the quarrel-at heart a musical disagreement over whether the Italianate melodies of Piccini or the rich and stately harmonies of the German Gluck had the more powerful effect-had long since turned personal. What was notable about this letter, however, was the author's claim that the "public" was the only true judge of musical merit. "Be content, gentlemen, to tyrannize your petites societes with the false wit of your so-called genius; be the oracle of busybodies," he wrote. "But be assured that the public has nothing to do with your opinion, and even less with your judgments and false erudition.' 2 This appeal to public opinion, although fairly typical in the pamphlets that raged between Gluckists and Piccinists, had until then been unknown in French musical criticism. Implying a collective, impersonal, and authoritative voice, it defined itself in opposition to the "petites societes" of mere opinion. But if proponents of Piccini and Gluck both claimed to possess the support of the public, the term was no simple creation of the quarrel. In eighteenthcentury France, "public" judgment in musical issues, no less than in political or literary matters, was a rhetorical claim made possible only as a result of certain long-term institutional changes and ideological shifts within the larger context of absolutism. Cultural and intellectual historians have identified the 1770s and 1780s in France as the crucial period for the emergence of a public sphere of judgment

Musical Experience and the Formation of a French Musical Public

This article links the nature of commercial masked balls in Paris in the 1830s and 1840s to urban development during these decades. The raucous and often destructive character of the balls, which united elites and popular classes under the mask's anonymity, coincided with a society undergoing social and political upheaval. The dress and conduct of revellers were expressions of their ambitions, fears and resentments. Changes in the urban landscape of the 1820s and 1830s – in particular, the construction of the grands boulevards and alignment of theatres sponsoring masked balls along this axis – sharpened potential conflict at such events by placing them in one of the most socially charged corridors of the city.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0963926813000205

James H. Johnson

Papers

Listening in Paris: A Cultural History.

Listening in Paris: A Cultural History

Musical Experience and the Formation of a French Musical Public

Listening in Paris: A Cultural History

Urban development and the culture of masked balls in nineteenth-century Paris