The history of musical listening has become one of the most fertile and complex fields of research within musicology over the past few decades. Although the first attempts
to conceptualize the listener date back to the mid-twentieth century—with Heinrich Besseler’s pioneering study on listening in the Early Modern era (1959)—the true methodological turn took place in the 1990s. Seminal works such as Listening in Paris by James H. Johnson (1995) and Musicking by Christopher Small (1998) played a decisive role in placing the listener at the centre of the process of musical signification, challenging the near-exclusive primacy that had until then been attributed to the figure of the composer and the score. These studies opened the way to understanding listening not as a passive act, but as a historically situated cultural and social practice.
In this vein, recent research has emphasized the need to provide the history of listening with a broader and more diverse documentary foundation. The monumental Oxford
Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries (2018), edited by Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer, marks a crucial milestone by systematizing different
approaches—from the behaviour and emotions of listeners to the ideologies and norms that shape listening, the architectural and acoustic spaces, and the influence
and conditioning of technological devices—that converge in listening as a central object of study. However, unlike research focused on a composer, a work, or an
institution, fields that generally have their own materials, there is scarcely any documentation directly derived from or related to historical listening practices. The
methodological question is thorny: What sources allow us to reconstruct modes of listening in past contexts? How can we avoid the risk of projecting contemporary
categories onto fragmentary testimonies?
In this respect, the periodical press emerges as a privileged, though challenging, field of study. Newspapers and magazines are spaces where norms of behaviour, listening
expectations, and models of sociability are negotiated and shaped. Reviews, advertisements, letters from readers, and social reports not only inform us about what
took place at concerts, but also prescribe how one ought to listen, which conducts were acceptable, and which were deemed inappropriate. A careful analysis of this
material—always mindful of its discursive, ideological, and propagandistic biases—can shed light on the cultural dimension of musical audition and enrich our understanding
of the aesthetic experience of listeners in the past.