Musicology of Listening – New Ways to Hear and Understand the Musical Past

Abstract

Research in music from the perspective of musicology has in listening its main tool for knowledge production. When the object of research is the music of the past, we are talking about a chain of successive receptions to which the musicologist needs to exert some “historical imagination” (Treitler 1989), that is, to explore the signs of “presentification” - music is always listened to in the present – recorded in (usually written) documents they have access to. Additionally, successive receptions mean also a chain of listening practices or “audile technique” (Sterne 2003) that historically mediated what is music or noise. My hypothesis is that new listenings can be made by an “acoustically tuned” (Ochoa Gautier 2014) investigation, not only of canonized historical narratives, but also by revisiting primary sources. The case study is entertainment related musical practices recorded in Rio de Janeiro nineteenth century newspapers, especially after Brazilian proclamation of independence from Portugal. Preliminary results show the imperial capital as a cosmopolitan city, consuming a wide variety of music, among them waltzes and exotic dances such as the Spanish Cachucha. The transmission/reception of the later will be the focus of the presentation.