This themed issue focuses on the study of listeners in history. The articles address the personal responses to music of ‘ordinary listeners’ – that is, people whose experiences of music are recorded in personal documents and third-party descriptions (as opposed, say, to music critics who wrote about music in order to influence the ideas and tastes of a public readership). This overview essay proposes that the testimony of ordinary listeners can cast new light on musical practices, the way music has been heard and its role in past societies. It points to a perceived gap in historical musicology, whereby the evidence left by listeners in the past has been the subject of little targeted research and has generally been relegated to a supporting role. The themed issue emerges from work conducted as part of the Listening Experience Database project, a research project set up to address that gap, and focuses on empirical historical research.

This overview essay discusses the types of evidence on which the articles are based and some of the issues and cautions they raise, and sets out to demonstrate the unique quality and value of the evidence through the exploration of five topics in the history of British music in the long nineteenth century. The approach they exemplify has potential to shed light on music as part of the experience of ordinary people, often in contexts and places that have not featured prominently either in nineteenth-century music history or in musicological study generally.

Evidence from diaries and correspondence shows how 44 individual listeners experienced music in Britain during the years c. 1780–1830. The individuals were not united by social class, but each of them had the financial resources to gain access to operas, concerts and other performances enjoyed by the wealthiest in society. Crucial to an understanding of these listeners’ reactions to music is an evaluation of their personal documents, which demonstrates how their evidence is shaped by genre, readership and a variety of cultural factors. Their descriptions of performances are used to show how London audiences, characterized in general by noise and commotion, contained a wide variety of listeners, ranging from those who appear to have attended largely for social reasons to those who reacted deeply to the music they heard. The evidence shows that those who listened intensely found greater satisfaction in more exclusive, private performances. It also shows that some listeners were deeply moved by what they heard, sometimes expressing their emotions through tears, in keeping with the culture of sensibility which thrived throughout the period. Other themes that emerge from the evidence include the role played by reminiscence in intensifying listeners’ listening, and the strong reactions that were often elicited by the experience of novelty or otherness. Some listeners are shown to have had different reactions to music according to the social context in which it was heard or the repertoire that was performed.

This article uses Jeff Astley's concept of ordinary theology (Jeff Astley, Ordinary Theology: Looking, Listening and Learning in Theology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002)) to examine and interpret listening experiences from nineteenth-century Methodist sources. It argues that the participatory experiences of singing together with fellow believers were crucial to the development and sustenance of personal faith, and that believers shared accounts of such experiences in ways that they knew would be understood by their readers as indicative of the depth and sincerity of their spirituality. It further contends that the widely recognized importance of hymnody in Methodism demands attention to its practice as well its content, and that while the lyrics of hymns set out Methodist theology and doctrine, the participative experience of communal singing was itself invested with meaning and value by many lay Methodists. Ordinary theology provides a framework through which common features of these accounts are identified and discussed, emphasizing the importance of various forms of life writing in understanding the ways in which religious practice shaped the lives and interactions of individual believers. The article also explores differences between different types of published and unpublished life writing. While examples are drawn from different branches of nineteenth-century Methodism, it is argued that hymnody's potential for creating spiritually intense experiences was commonly recognized and affirmed across them. This article contributes to the wider discussion of the significance of listening experiences by emphasizing music's vital role in the construction and communication of meaning between individuals on matters of deeply personal value.

Listening to music found a new context during the early nineteenth century, in the shape of large, closed institutions set up to house and treat the insane. In response to social reform as well as a growing problem of mental health, lunatic asylums for paupers were set up across Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century. Replacing the previous practices of restraint and containment, a system of ‘moral management’ dominated the new asylums. Patients’ lives were kept busy and ordered, with careful attention given to their employment, their diet and their recreational activities. Music played an important part in establishing the routine of the new institutions. Formal dances offered a social occasion and a controlled environment within which the two sexes could meet. Both dances and concerts were used as a reward for patient behaviour, encouraging the kind of self-control which was seen as crucial to recovery and rehabilitation. Musical events acted as a diversion from the grim realities of institutional life and played an important role in allowing patients to engage with religious observance. Musical experience could be active or passive; patients might engage by dancing or making music of their own, and their music might be symptomatic of illness or wellbeing. Using documents including formal records, patient notes and newspaper reports, it is possible to investigate some of the ways in which listening to music played a therapeutic role, and the place of musical experience in the lives of asylum patients.

The role and importance of military musicians changed and intensified in the late eighteenth century through two important processes. The first was the culture of display that took root in both the home-based army and units in the colonies. The second was the result of successive militia acts which effectively ensured that military units with bands would be systematically placed in every corner of the British Isles.

It became evident that music as a component of military display served an important diplomatic purpose. Music performed in public spaces was heard by a population deeply sceptical of the army and with an essentially local sense of identity. The experience of the sight and sound of military music raised entirely new perceptions of nation and of the state as a benign power.

Two important and related themes emerge here. The first is the historical process that led, almost accidentally, to a realization that music as part of military display had potential to influence populations across the country and in the colonies. The second, more challenging, theme concerns the nature of the evidence for this idea and how it is to be treated. It is an idea that is totally convincing if the experience of hearing and seeing military spectacle by the mass of the people can be shown to have had impact. What is the evidence of listening to music by those people at whom it was targeted, how robust is it and what can be made of it?

The title quotation from Under Milk Wood encapsulates a widely held belief in the innate musicality of the Welsh and its religious roots. These roots were put down deeply during the nineteenth century, in a huge expansion of choral and congregational singing across Wales and particularly in the industrial communities. This development has been described as ‘a democratic popular choral culture rooted in the lives of ordinary people’, and central to it was the cymanfa ganu, the mass hymn-singing festival. Choral and congregational singing, typified by the cymanfa ganu, underpinned the perception of Wales by the Welsh and by many non-Welsh people as ‘the land of song’.

Alongside this phenomenon ran the tradition of the plygain, a Welsh Christmas carol service. While the cymanfa developed in nonconformist chapels in the mid to late nineteenth century, and on a large – often massive – scale, the plygain is a tradition dating from a period much further back, when Welsh Christianity was Catholic; it belonged to agricultural workers rather than the industrial communities; and the singers sang in much smaller groups – often just twos or threes.

This article describes the nature and origins of these contrasting traditions, and looks at the responses of listeners both Welsh and non-Welsh, and the extent to which they perceived these practices as expressive of a peculiarly Welsh identity. It also considers some of the problems of gathering evidence of working-class responses, and how far the sources give an insight into working-class listening experiences.