Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Agnew, Vanessa

Titel

Hearing things: music and sounds the traveller heard and didn't hear on the grand tour

Ist Teil von

• Cultural studies review, 2012-12, Vol.18 (3), p.67-84

Ort / Verlag

Carleton: Melbourne University Publishing

Erscheinungsjahr

2012

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

EZB Electronic Journals Library

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Let us begin our sonic grand tour in a northern European city. By convention this was London, but by the late eighteenth century the point of embarkation could have been a provincial English town or a city in Thuringia, equally. Travellers felt the pull of the open road, the lure of the south, the authority of history, the rejuvenating spark of antique culture. The journey was fraught with discomfort and danger - bad roads, uncomfortable inns, bandits; it was also expensive, tiring and potentially lonely. Yet, in the person of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) we find an assured and informative travelling companion. His purpose was not explicitly the pursuit of Italian music, but we find in him an incidental commentator on the unfolding soundscape. This soundscape included concerts, operas, church and street music; it also included conversation, so fundamental to sociability in the eighteenth century and to Goethe's own intellectual modus operandi. The soundscape extended, too, to the contrasting sounds of urban and country life, unsought auditory experiences, and the noises produced by travel itself. We can thus accompany Goethe to examine what the traveller heard and did not hear - a soundscape that was richer than organised music making and conversing, one that was both aleatoric and cacophonic. Via Goethe's Italian Journey (published in 1816), we establish the centrality of sound to the grand tour - little remarked on in the scholarly literature - as well as sound's imbrication in other modes of cultural appreciation and in alternative forms of knowledge making. Since sound and music were central to the eighteenth-century traveller's experience, it will be argued that there is something to be learned by examining the types of auditory experience sought out by the traveller, as well as from the auditory experiences elaborated, imagined or elided in travellers' accounts of their journeys. Finally, this article raises questions about what it meant to listen in the eighteenth century and, by implication, asks what it means for us, in the present, to listen to the past and so participate in a broad and thickly described cultural history of sound and music.