Magnified Vision, Mediated Listening and the ‘Point of Audition’ of Early Romanticism

Abstract

Employing the term ‘point of audition’ to describe the spatial position musical works imply for their listeners, this article examines the use of technologies for extending the senses to define new points of audition in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Popular literature on natural philosophy promoted magnifying instruments as windows onto distant or hidden realms and as tools for acquiring knowledge. On the operatic stage and in writers' metaphorical musings, kindred sensory extensions were imagined for hearing. These contexts connected (magic) mirrors and magnifying instruments to their musical analogues: muted tone and keyboard fantasizing. The development of these associations in opera and literature made it possible for instrumental music to position listeners as eavesdroppers upon unknown realms. Such a point of audition is shown to be implied by the Adagio un poco mosso of Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto. By examining material practices and discourses surrounding sensory extension, this article demonstrates the relevance of technologically mediated observation to musical culture at the turn of the nineteenth century, and its contribution to the otherworldly orientation characteristic of romantic listening.

Sonic affinity

“…The pianola’s popularity around the same time may be likewise understood. These instrumental and technological novelties could be due, at least partially, to the psychological need of assuming and reflecting a wider and more complex and mechanical daily soundscape (see Coates, 2005; Loughridge, 2013).…”