Building Musical Culture in Nineteenth-Century Amsterdam

When people attend classical music concerts today, they sit and listen in silence, offering no audible reactions to what they're hearing. We think of that as normal-but, as Darryl Cressman shows in this book, it's the product of a long history of interrelationships between music, social norms, and technology. Using the example of Amsterdam's Concertgebouw in the nineteenth century, Cressman shows how its design was in part intended to help discipline and educate concert audiences to listen attentively - and analysis of its creation and use offers rich insights into sound studies, media history, science and technology studies, classical music, and much more.

Darryl Cressman received his PhD from the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University and is a lecturer in the Philosophy of Technology at Maastricht University. He has published articles on media theory and the philosophy of technology.

List of Illustrations, Acknowledgements, 1. The Concert Hall as a Medium of Musical Culture, 2. Listening, Attentive Listening, and Musical Meaning, 3. Patronage, Class, and Buildings for Music: Aristocratic Opera Houses and Bourgeois Concert Halls, 4. Acoustic Architecture Before Science: Designing the Sound of the Concertgebouw, 5. Frisia Non Cantat: The Unmusicality of the Dutch, 6. Listening to Media History, References, Index