Drawing on interviews with 60 audience members and two seasons’ participant observation, this thesis provides an ethnographic account of ’still and silent listening’ at the BBC Proms. In doing so, it locates concert going within the everyday lives of listeners and argues that, for some, attending concerts is a resource for what Tia DeNora has called "aesthetic agency". These concert goers appropriate both the norm of still and silent audience behaviour, and the particular institutional conditions of the Proms, in order to cultivate versions of themselves. Perhaps surprisingly, listeners use the concert hall for purposes comparable to the ways in which DeNora and Michael Bull have each shown more malleable and mobile music technologies being employed by music users: to organize experience, and as ’technologies of self. And yet at the same time as individual and potentially individuating practices are taking place, concert listening, and attending the Proms in particular, is a collective activity. The thesis documents and explores the ways in which concert goers experience both enjoyment and discomfort in listening together. Here I show the Proms to be a site of ambivalent pleasures, but also argue that Richard Sennett’s influential characterization of still and silent listening as a symptom of ’t he fall of public man’ is inadequate to the varied modes of collective experience found amongst audiences. Running through the thesis is the argument that many concert goers use the norm of still and silent listening and the institutional provisions of the Proms as a ’holding environment’: a predictable and enduring set of conditions which allows for unpredictable and rich experiences to take place. In this way, the thesis has implications for understanding both the ambivalent enjoyments of concert going, and the purposes to which cultural institutions can be put by their users.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:685336 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Gross, Jonathan |
| Publisher | Birkbeck (University of London) |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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