J. S. BACH Jonathan Berkahn - Victoria University - Victoria ...

intentionally or not recalling the sovereign unpredictability of the Holy Spirit which
‘bloweth where it listeth.’
Dahlhaus describes the situation thus: ‘One of the oddest facts in the early
reception of Beethoven is a type of failure that was apparently new in the history of
music….Audiences were astonished, believing themselves at times to be victims of a
weird or raucous joke….But even those who were disappointed felt basically that the
acoustic phenomenon whose sense they were unable to grasp nevertheless harboured a
meaning which, with sufficient effort, could be made intelligible. The emotions that
Beethoven’s works engendered…were mingled with a challenge to decipher, in patient
exertion, the meaning of what had taken place in the music.’ 73
‘Effort…challenge…patient exertion’: it’s quite clear that what we are talking
about here is work. This conjunction of the categories of leisure (no one is obliged to
listen Beethoven) and work is not as paradoxical as it seems; any musical amateur will
attest to this. What could be more laborious that the hours spent practising one’s
instrument in order to acquire sufficient technique even to entertain oneself? 74 What
was new in the nineteenth century was the idea that the ability to listen to music,
hitherto a faculty taken for granted (given a certain level of general cultivation), was in
fact a skill that could developed and honed in much the same way that one learned an
instrument. For some commentators the priority was reversed: one learned an
instrument in order to understand music better: ‘Through activity in music, through
first-hand experience, comes a deeper penetration in listening .... Whoever has tried to
interpret a piece will get the most from hearing it performed. The one act amplifies the
other. That is why amateur musicians make the keenest concert-goers.’ 75 From this
73 Nineteenth-century music, tr. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989),
p.10.
74 This intensity of labour is of course characteristic of many recreational activities, from chess to
sudoku to mountaineering.
75 E. T. Clarke, Music in everyday life (New York: Norton, 1935), quoted in V. Griffiths, An
experiment in school music making (Christchurch/London: Whitcombe and Tombs/Cambridge
University Press, 1941), p.2.
347