Introduction: Sound Attentions

Francesca Brittan and Carmel Raz

. . . it often comes about, being occupied with another thought, we do not in conversation seem to have heard even ourselves.

—Augustine, ca. 3891

. . . when the mind is strongly occupied in contemplating certain objects, it is in no way aware of the impression that certain bodies make on the organ of hearing, although the impression is quite strong. But no perception comes from it, if the soul takes no knowledge of it.

—Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, 1704/17652

. . . While two persons are engaged in interesting discourse, the clock strikes within their hearing, to which they give no attention. What is the consequence? The next minute they know not whether the clock struck or not. Yet their ears were not shut.

—Thomas Reid, 17883

It is a well known fact that when the mind is strongly preoccupied and attention engaged, many vague feelings and ideas flit about consciousness without leaving in memory any durable traces of their visit. And more than this, nervous processes which would under ordinary circumstances yield distinct and strong impressions, remain during such mental preoccupation without any appreciable effect. Thus moderate sounds fail to have any disturbing effect on a mind deeply absorbed in reading.

—James Sully, 18744

Perception depends on attention. From Augustine, writing ca. 389, to Leibniz and Reid in the 1700s, to Sully in the late nineteenth century, philosophers and psychologists have made this claim, often with recourse to sonic examples. The unattended sound, they point out, remains “unheard.” Sensation may be present—we may be awash in acoustic vibration—and yet, as Leibniz puts it, “no perception comes from it,” thus an epistemological gap is created: “The soul takes no knowledge of it.” Acknowledgment and understanding occur only when we stretch toward a sound, honoring the “tendere” at the Latin root of attention. But to do so, we must withdraw our focus from other stimuli—from our visual surroundings, our book, the tangle of thoughts in our head, the chatter in the room. To attend fully to the choir on stage, we must allow other voices to retreat into faint or non-perception. To listen attentively to one instrument in the orchestra means “making it dominant,” allowing all others to fade in our awareness such that they “produce only vague sensations.”5

Attention, then, is contingent on inattention. And both, historically, are caught up with psychologies and philosophies of listening: Etymologically, “to listen” overlaps directly with “to attend,” “to accompany,” “to mind,” and even “to obey.”6 The cognitive questions arising from this are manifold: In what ways does listening cultivate, mold, or discipline attention? The ethical queries are equally obvious: To which sounds should we listen? To which voices? instruments? landscapes? And what happens to those that fall into inattention and therefore nonperception? Add to these a spate of economic and empirical concerns: How much psychic bandwidth do we have? How much giving over—or stretching toward, or minding—can we do? There are also social-environmental quandaries: In noisy or chaotic environments, can we truly attend to anything? What happens when, as English physician John Mason Good puts it, “the attention is suffered to wander to something of stronger attraction; or the imagination is left to the play of its own capricious ideas”?7 This leads to even trickier conundrums: Is there an unconscious attention? And what are we to make of ambient, involuntary, or passive forms of noticing?

Interest in these issues has galvanized an outpouring of literature on attention over the past few decades, including work across the fields of psychology, cognitive science, philosophy, history, economics, art history, and literary criticism. Studies unpacking the attentional politics of our own moment have intertwined with a growing body of scholarship interrogating modes of focus back through classical antiquity. In some accounts, attention emerges as a neural or cognitive process, in others as a physical act, an ethical stance, a commodity, a psychic web, or a form of purposeful selfhood.8 Attention’s relationship to both consciousness and volition remains undecided, as do the particularities of its mechanisms (bottlenecking, filtering, spotlighting, selecting, enhancing, inhibiting, etc.).9 Rather than a stable concept, “a faculty of some already formed subject,” as Jonathan Crary puts it, attention has tended to operate as a “sign,” a discursive trope by which “new conditions of subjectivity [are] articulated.”10 Culturally constructed and historically bounded, attention is also profoundly mediated, channeled through, and defined by the technology of the moment—material, digital, scientific, social. As such, it is difficult to apprehend in any pure or abstracted form; indeed, apperception (the act of paying attention to attentiveness itself) involves an overriding of enculturated habit and a vertiginous calling into question of the nature of perception itself. We might think of such an effort as thinking about thinking—contemplating the psychic glue that holds us in relation to ourselves, to one another, and to the systems of interaction, exchange, and care that sustain or constrain us.

Key work in the arenas of art history and literary criticism has demonstrated how modes of alertness determine, and arise from, ways of seeing and reading—but even more obviously (as our opening quotes suggest), conceptions of attention are marked by experiences of hearing and listening. We can choose to look away or put down our book, but our defenses against sound are more porous (we have no earlids, as has often been pointed out), thus questions of attentional agency are especially urgent in sonic environments. This observation was made explicit in 1866 by German philosopher Hermann Ulrici in his text Leib und Seele: Grundzüge einer Psychologie des Menschen:

This possibility of preventing certain sensory perceptions from entering our consciousness, of annulling them, as it were, is of particular importance for [the sense of] hearing, since we cannot voluntarily shut our ears (as we can close our eyes), to avoid the effects of the outside world. This is perhaps why attention is even more important in the domain of auditory perception.11

Over the course of the long nineteenth century the role of audition in studies of alertness and distraction became increasingly central, particularly in experimental domains. Psychologist Carl Stumpf, writing in 1883, positioned this outcome as inevitable: “It is only natural that attention, on which all mental activity ultimately depends, develops its nature and effect particularly richly in auditory judgments, and that it is here that a theory of attention can best be developed.”12 In and outside of Europe, Stumpf’s prognostication held true: Listening became a key index of attentional depth and subtlety as well as a testing ground for functional, structural, psychophysical, and social theories of focus/unfocus. As imperial expansion accelerated through the late century, pedagogies of auditory attentiveness emerged as powerful tools for enforcing cognitive receptivity and therefore mechanisms of valuation and control. Widening webs of communication and exchange generated interactive networks within which competing modes of auditory alertness—heedfulness, passivity, absorption, vigilance—reinforced and challenged one another with increasing insistence. In what follows, we unpick several strands of this mesh, offering meditations on some of the most prominent attentional orientations of the long nineteenth century. These are not exhaustive—many others exist—nor are they sealed off from one another. Rather than a static taxonomy, attentional regimes existed within a fluid system of attraction, investment, and mutual modulation whose complexities remain to be fully explored. Here, we begin to imagine how this ecology operated—essentially, what it might look like to rethink auditory culture ca. 1780–1930 in cognitive terms—offering a series of starting points, which are also invitations to extension, reexamination, and new inquiry.

Concentration

Among the most characteristic attentional attitudes of the period 1780–1930 was that of concentration. Urgent requests for narrowed and sustained auditory focus resonate across the period, often inextricable from spiritual, intellectual, and aesthetic imperatives. Heinrich Wilhelm Wackenroder’s famous insistence on the “true” way of listening as entailing “the complete surrender of the soul to this sweeping stream of sensations; in the distance and detachment from every disturbing thought and from all foreign sensory impressions” (1792) is echoed in Hermann von Helmholtz’s call for “undisturbed and concentrated [auditory] attention” (1877) and, a decade later, in music theorist Salomon Jadassohn’s definition of “earnest listening” (Anstrengung des Hörens) as “the shutting off and guarding one’s self as perfectly as possible against all other impressions” (1888).13 This fetishization of concentration can be traced to Enlightenment philosophy and aesthetic theory, which placed the focused mind at the epicenter of rational, productive, and fully volitional selfhood. As Georg Friedrich Meier put it in 1733, attention was “as it were, the hand with which the soul grasps a dark idea in its depths, raises it up, and thereby brings it into the light of day.”14

Mid-century debates across Britain and continental Europe over the nature and extent of attention embraced a variety of modalities and gradations, but general trends can be identified. Among these was a gradual shift from John Locke’s notion of attention as an involuntary or automatic function (the mind passively receiving ideas that “offer themselves”) to Dugald Stewart’s conception of attention as a voluntary and active power (“the effort of the mind, to detain the idea or the perception”).15 Conceptions of multifocal attention (the notion of paying attention to several things simultaneously) were gradually overtaken by a valorization of unifocal attention (the steady concentration on a single object or train of thought). In the expanding media and information markets of the late eighteenth century, distractions (musical entertainments, the popular press, advertisements, public fairs), posed an increasing threat to this narrowed focus. Partly in response, strident warnings against mental wandering became common, including James Beattie’s 1783 claim that distraction produced the “absent” man and Stewart’s insistence that “attention consists partly (perhaps entirely) in the effort of the mind, to detain the idea or the perception, and to exclude the other object that solicits its notice.”16

The process of selection valorized by Beattie, Stewart, and others was often explained in terms of listening. As early as 1782, Thomas Reid compared focalized attention to the action of isolating either the bass or the treble of a two-voice tune; and Stewart himself argued that “in a concert of music, a good ear can attend to the different parts of the music separately.”17 Musical analogy extended seamlessly into compositional theory. As Matthew Riley has shown, both Johann Georg Sulzer and Johann Nikolaus Forkel highlighted attentional management as a key aspect of compositional craft in their aesthetic writings. These theorists described musical structures (phrases, sentences, periods) as tools for the careful calibrating and sustaining of listener focus, and offered advice for the use of surprising or unusual musical effects to refresh flagging alertness.18 Similar advice was dispensed in the Scottish context by music theorist Walter Young, who observed in 1790 that “a considerable variety, both of movement and of measure . . . when skilfully managed, enliven the music, surprise the hearer, and excite his attention.”19 Such strategies might be seen as reflections of an “enlightened” monofocal regime—technologies of attentional capture in line with the goals of sustained and reasoned thought. But equally so, they were symptoms of the erosion of such a regime in the face of the widening diversions of the public sphere, and in this sense, operated as savvy guides to an emerging attention economy whose strategies of focalization were also bids for cognitive investment.20

The cult of auditory concentration was shored up—indeed, reached an apex—with the rise of romantic idealist philosophy. No longer just an act of discipline, musical absorption was now recast as a form of theological obeisance with a sublime payoff. Alongside Wackenroder, E. T. A. Hoffmann drew on the language of both analysis and philosophy to describe musical attentiveness: “The captivating siren song” of Beethoven’s varied musical phrases, as he put it, “entices me [to go] deeper and deeper.”21 Once completely absorbed, the organic mysteries of Beethovenian construction were revealed and, along with them, a glimpse of the divine macrocosm. This line of discourse was extended, famously, through A. B. Marx and Eduard Hanslick, for whom listening was an act of reasoned contemplation predicated on sustained alertness. Truly aesthetic audition, as Hanslick argued in his landmark Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (1854), was to be separated from mere passive receptivity. The latter was the mark of the Liebhaber, the musical amateur whose mind moved only on the surface of the work, distracted by superficial features and indistinct emotional reactions. The Kenner (the devotee), on the other hand, gave his mind fully to the deep intricacies of musical form and thus to higher meaning and metaphysical truth.22 Revelation (access to beauty, spiritual insight, and substance) came only at the cost of full attentive investment.

This brand of formalism, and the regime of auditory vigilance on which it relied, exercised a powerful sway over the following several generations, its attentional economics inextricable from German nationalism and cultural-imperial ambition. Dogged insistence on totalized musical focus echoes down through psychological treatises, music theoretical tracts, “appreciation” guides, and school tutors well into the twentieth century, exemplified by Theodor Adorno’s exhortation that “everything has to be drawn into the field of attention lest the meaning of the musical work should be missed altogether.23 To listen properly was to give full attention and, in turn, full attention could be cultivated by listening properly—a relentlessly circular logic. Not confined to Europe and America, the concentrative ideal also infiltrated burgeoning European colonies as far afield as Bengal (see Richard David Williams), bringing with it an insistence on musical alertness as a purely mental phenomenon divorced from embodied or kinesthetic forms of attending.24 Over time, the ubiquitousness and stridency of demands for musical concentration began to suggest a certain resistance (even implausibility) and, as commentators as early as the 1770s had pointed out, ethical dubiety.

Almost as soon as the regime of concentration was established, it became the subject of critique across philosophical, literary, and scientific arenas. As Natalie M. Phillips has shown, burgeoning Gothic literatures emanating first from England, then from continental Europe and America, dramatized the perils of hyperfocus, linking it with atrophied cognition, peripheral attentional blindness, and erosion of moral and ethical awareness. From the 1760s onward—and with particular urgency through the 1780s and 1790s—authors of Gothic novels tied monofocus to monomania, tracing the obsessive tendencies of their antiheroes to forms of pathological attentional narrowing. “In a 180-degree turn,” as Phillips puts it, “the traditional mark of reason and mental discipline became an emblem of cognitive inflexibility.”25 Composers, too, made this connection, most famously Hector Berlioz, whose Gothic antihero in the Symphonie fantastique concentrates so fully on an “ideal” melody that he is driven first to solipsism, then madness.26 Musical focus here leads to what Garrett Stewart calls “attentive surfeit disorder,” a damning excess of concentration.27 Much earlier, another Frenchman—Denis Diderot—had hinted at the same problem in his article on “Distraction” for the Encyclopédie (1754), which derided unwavering attention as a form of stupidity in which the mind “rests on . . . the same idea.”28

The cognitive perils and moral-political pitfalls of selective attention were noted not just by English and French critics but also by Germans themselves. Friedrich Schiller, in his treatise Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 1795), argued for the importance of liberated contemplation, positioning the “free play” of the mind as an antidote to the relentless concentration (or “specialization”) associated with industrial labor. For him, the unconcentrating of the mind was a form of enlarging, a sensuous opening to beauty that “consummate[ed]” one’s “humanity.”29 His ideas were extended by Friedrich Schlegel, whose novel Lucinde (1799) rejected both “concentrated reason” and the culture of utility with which it was associated, hailing cognitive idleness or “intentional . . . passivity” as the true source of knowledge and aesthetic insight.30 These attitudes constituted forms of cognitive disobedience or reversal, moments (to borrow Crary’s formulation) in which “institutionally competent attentiveness veers into something vagrant, unfocused, something folded back against itself.”31 They also had musical ramifications, including in the harmonically wandering, repetitious writing of Schubert, whose work embraced an alternative (Romantic) attention directly at odds with “enlightened” cultures of effortful focus.32

German doubts around the healthfulness and ethics of single-mindedness continued to surface through mid-century, including in the writings of philosopher Hermann Lotze, a figure straddling the transition from German idealism to scientific positivism. In his 1852 Medicinische Psychologie, he noted that “someone tuning the strings of a piano with the most strained attention to his task has a minimum of self-consciousness,” arguing that such absorption should surely be tempered by cognitive “flux” for thoughtful consideration to be possible. Indeed, for Lotze, “prolonged narrowing of the thought process,” no less than “prolonged distraction,” constituted “the first stages of a disturbance of the soul.”33 By this point in the 1850s, even the most earnest concentrators had begun to falter, faced with the drastically elongated works of Schumann, Wagner, and Verdi. To many, the prospect of sustaining rapt absorption during the whole of Tannhäuser or Lohengrin was not just exhausting but suspect, suggesting abdication of wider social and political awareness and, in extreme cases, even a kind of catalepsy. Musical works of this length (along with the thick Victorian novels that served as their literary counterparts) elicited, instead, an intermittent or cyclic attention, which began to be positioned as a more realistic alternative to single-mindedness.34 The notion of “dynamic” focus, which, as Ewan Jones observes, had its roots in eighteenth-century aesthetic theory, emerged as a standard construct in psychological literature of the late nineteenth century. Théodule Ribot, in his Le psychologie de l’attention (1889), asserted that voluntary attention was by nature “precarious and vacillating” (précaire et vacillante), and William James, in his landmark Principles of Psychology (1890), argued that it could be sustained “for no more than a few seconds at a time,” operating as “a repetition of successive efforts.”35

By the early twentieth century, as Benjamin Steege has demonstrated, philosophy of a phenomenological bent had launched an active campaign against absorbed, hermetically sealed concert listening. Heinrich Besseler, in his “Grundfragen des musikalischen Hörens” (“Fundamental Issues of Musical Listening,” 1925), argued that giving over total mental bandwidth to a concert performance meant estranging the ear from wider soundscapes, producing a kind of willful mishearing—a silencing of community and a capitulation to capitalist forces of attentive extraction. Besseler’s contemporary, philosopher Günther Stern, in his “Zur Phänomenologie des Zuhörens” (“On the Phenomenology of Listening,” 1927), went further, arguing that true musical listening was not a matter of either attention or distraction (since one was enfolded within the other) but a radical “gehen-lassen” (“letting go”), an eradication of selection in favor of total inclusion.36 The writings of these young critics hardly marked the end of Hanslickian absorption, but they opened the door to a burgeoning discourse around attention, intention, and (musical) value that would—as Steege’s chapter in the present volume argues—extend across the Atlantic.

Collectivity

In January 1838, in one of the earliest demonstrations of the electric telegraph, Samuel F. B. Morse tapped out the message “Attention, the Universe!,” transmitting it along ten miles of wire emanating from an exhibition space at New York University (see Figure 0.1).37 His experiment anticipated a new kind of networked alertness—a collectivity hardwired into the global psyche by mid-century, when cables linked urban centers across several continents. No longer an individual investment, attention was rerouted by the wired web along collective arrays, producing what philosopher Yves Citton calls “transindividual flows.”38 In telegraphic (and other mass media) systems, he argues, attentiveness and nonattentiveness were produced and defined via reciprocal modulation: “Through ‘me,’ it is always ‘our’ collective thinking and feeling [νους/nous] who is paying attention.” Or, to put it differently, “I” pay attention to what “we” attend to collectively—attention operates as an interaction within a distributed psychic ecology.39

Of course, the “I,” “me,” and “we” in Citton’s claims are loaded, begging questions around the politics of collectivity and the control mechanisms of (unequal) psychic “distribution.” These issues were addressed by pioneering social psychologists of the late nineteenth century, including Gustave Le Bon and Gabriel Tarde, who initiated theories of group mind (“esprit collective”) and crowd behavior as well as notions of a “media” or “opinion” public.40 Such collectives were marked, as Tarde argued, by forms of attentional virality and capture. In the case of crowds, “their attention and also their inattention is always stronger and more persevering than would be that of each of the individuals who make them up, if he were alone.” Members of the opinion public—consumers of print media, telegraph dispatches, and (by the early 1900s), wireless news—were subject to even deeper fascination: “The very fact that their attention is concentrated on a single object, in a kind of collective monoideism, brings them close to the state of dreaming or hypnosis.”41 Power, often disguised, remote, or invisible, was concentrated in the individual(s) riling the crowd or the authors/operators of newly powerful and far-reaching media flows, who manipulated attentional dynamics in the interest of producing compliant, productive, and lucrative networks.42

As in the case of selective attention, the mechanisms of collective alertness were strongly associated with forms of auditory conditioning, including (most obviously) modes of telegraphic and radio listening, which bound military forces, governments, and special interest groups into rapt auditory networks.43 But music and sound cultures—particularly performing bodies—also operated as crucial metaphors and models in the theorization of attentional collectivity. From the intracranial to the geopolitical, networked alertness was framed in terms of listener-performer thrall; indeed, the group consciousness or public “harmonization” theorized by Tarde and Le Bon had its origins in early nineteenth-century phrenological constructions of the “orchestral” mind. As Francesca Brittan has shown, these originated with Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Spurzheim, who first conceived of the brain as a collective organ, an interactive constellation of physical faculties comparable to the instruments (or instrumental sections) of an orchestra. According to phrenological theory, each of the twenty-seven faculties of mind (including those responsible for calculation, vision, language, memory, etc.) was endowed with an individual attentional capacity stimulated via external cues and modulated by the natural propensities/powers of the faculty itself. But these separate attentions were bound into a collective under the watchful eye of a central intelligence, a volitional “I” or mind, conceptualized as a harmonizing power (the “leader” of Tarde and Le Bon’s crowd).44 As phrenological theory spread through the mid-century, this instrumental-harmonic model proliferated, appearing in its most literal form in the work of Spanish phrenologist Mariano Cubí y Soler. In Cubí y Soler, the volition was figured as an orchestral conductor (a “supreme and sovereign attention”) wired via a system of “electric telegraphy” (charged nerve fibers) to all individual brain instruments. Acting as a central surveillance node—a receiver, signaler, and enforcer—the volition ensured that all local attentional faculties played in time and tune. Cubí y Soler’s “I” controlled, while also being constituted by, a collective alertness, its overarching focus indistinguishable from the web of overlapping, continuously modulating individual attentions of the multiplayer mind.45 The result was an enforced cognitive unity troped as collective harmony.

The metaphor of the conducted brain orchestra was constructed by and through the attentive dynamics of actual orchestras, which modeled the centrally monitored collectivity described by phrenologists. Nowhere is this clearer than in the writings of nineteenth-century conductors, who described the act of orchestral leadership as an explicitly attentional power. Hector Berlioz, in his Memoirs, offers a clear example. When the leader of a large orchestra is on the podium, Berlioz writes,

his attention embraces everything; his eye is everywhere; with a glance he signals . . . entries to voice and instrument, up, down, to the right, to the left; with his right arm he flings forth terrible chords that burst in the distance like harmonious projectiles; then, on a pedal point, he arrest all this movement; rivets the attention of all; suspends every arm, every breath, listening for a moment to the silence . . . and then gives freer scope than ever to the whirlwind he has subdued.46

In this account, attentional subjugation is inextricable from violence, rendering individual players mere extensions of conductorly impulse. Reviewers were quick to understand the political implications of such a model, describing Berlioz as a general and his instrumentalists as an obedient army.47 And it was not just mesmeric capture but quasi-telegraphic infrastructure that governed the attentional collective of the orchestra. To hold his thousands-strong group together, Berlioz employed a newfangled “electric baton,” a device linking his own conductorly stick via wires to subsidiary batons arrayed around vast performance spaces. Rhythmic transmissions sent from the central podium along these wires kept far-flung sections of the ensemble (strings, winds, brass, chorus, percussion) in unison, producing a tightly controlled unit, much as Cubí y Soler’s “volition” networked spatially separated brain organs into attentive harmony. These interrelated musico-neural webs were obvious refractions of nineteenth-century telegraphic networks—imperial forms of collectivity rooted in attentional hegemony and extraction.48 We might think of them (paradoxically) as atomizing collectives, holding out the promise of psychic wholeness while privileging consolidated control, thus draining cognitive along with cultural and material resources.

Systems of collectivizing extraction took other guises across the long nineteenth century, including the quasi-inclusive “global listening” regimes excoriated by Nicholas Mathew and the musico-temporal synchronizations described by Jacob Olley. In the former case, fantasies of universal attentiveness derived from the construction of an “omniaudience,” a fantasized auditory network generated by European consumption of “world” music excerpts offered in proto-ethnomusicological collections. The presentation of these snippets in Western staff notation might be compared to conversion into Morse code, which was then sent along the European wire in the form of musical “messages” reinforcing dominant auditory-cognitive modalities. Synchronizations, as described by Olley, operated similarly, generating the illusion of a temporally unified collective in which attention was timed and defined by the ticking of Greenwich Mean Time. Even more obviously, as Erin Johnson-Williams and Roe-Min Kok have pointed out, pedagogical institutions including the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music (ABRSM) created instructional networks across South and East Asia, holding generations of students hostage to carefully curated repertories. The very definition of musical “attention”—as a solo, memorized performance of set pieces and technical exercises—was enforced by examiners fanning out from Britain along routes already well-trodden by military and commercial enterprise.49 What Johnson-Williams describes as the “auditory surveillance” of British examiners was also a form of cognitive molding, an inculcation of global physical and mental “concentration” in line with Euro-German ideals of auditory focus.50

Dehumanizing attentional collectives—often operating as cognitive technocracies—eroded, while often seeming to generate, community. Rather than forms of acknowledgement or inclusion, their wired alertness bound individuals into vampiric systems siphoning off cognitive capital to controlling powers. Characterized by “overhearing,” “listening to” and “listening in,” they relied on “hungry” attention (to adapt Dylan Robinson’s formulation).51 Their extractive regimes have had lasting legacies, including what American sociologist David Riesman described as early as 1950 in The Lonely Crowd as the “other-directed person”—a networked individual who “must be able to receive signals from far and near” even when “the sources are many, the changes rapid.” What this character-type internalizes “is not a code of behavior but the elaborative equipment needed to attend to such messages and occasionally to participate in their circulation”; in other words, a form of cognitive remaking such that individuality is subsumed into voracious attentive collectivity. Among the results, as Riesman argues (and as research on contemporary social media has increasingly confirmed), is “a diffuse anxiety,” a sense of colonized or commodified attentional consciousness always listening outward, never inward, always listening “to,” never “with.”52

In more life-giving guises, collective attention could reverse this psychic evisceration. Telegraphy itself, with its new language of taps and clicks, generated surprising forms of intimacy among operators who learned one another’s auditory signatures. Likewise, radio and telephonic devices could sustain social ties over distances via newly ethereal attentive techniques (see Brian Kane).53 But more obviously, attentional community was related to liveness—to the forms of rhythmic entrainment and emotional induction associated with shared physical experience. Tarde, elaborating on these distinctions, noted that while the media public was the most modern and powerful collective of the age, the older body of the crowd had capacities for connectedness that went beyond mere simultaneity or linkage. The distinction lay in “the mutual contagion of feelings among the assembled individuals” and their broader gestural entrainment (synchronization).54 Crowds witnessing theatrical events, music festivals, or religious celebrations generated a crucial form of “social union” in which “all dissent is momentarily erased in the communion of a single desire, the desire to see one another, to embrace one another, to sympathize.” Rather than a public, physical gatherings generated a community, a multitude of individuals joined sympathetically, whose “love and joy are hidden in the recesses of the heart” such that “long after the party, there remains an extra sympathetic and conciliatory disposition which translates into a thousand unnoticed forms in the gestures, words, and relationships of everyday life.”55

Citton, contemplating constructive forms of collectivity, emphasizes their capacity to effect “a particular quality of attention rooted in care—which is to say consideration of the vulnerability of the other, of our solidarity and our responsibility towards them.” Noncoercive attentional groups involve forms of collective individuation—the sense that the whole animates, enlarges, and resonates rather than subsuming the individual. Examples of this phenomenon across auditory/musical domains of the long nineteenth century are too numerous and complex to unpack in full here but might include the collective forms of kinesthetic, multisensory musical attention of Javanese villagers at an 1815 wedding celebration (see Day and Weiss). In European performance contexts, they can be intimated in what G. Mensch described in 1871 as the autonomous collectivity of the string quartet, whose “four personalities move with and against one another . . . accompanying and complementing each other, but also challenging and fighting, asking and answering, affirming and denying, but always pursuing the same goal and remaining true to the alliance of protection and trust.”56 Herder assigned a similar quality to the “one and not one” of a choral group, whose voices “leave, search, follow, contradict, fight, strengthen, destroy each other, and awaken and animate and console and flatter and embrace each other again until they finally subside into one tone.”57 In these cases, collectivity produces expansiveness rather than anxiety—a listening “with” or “for.” The result—then, as now—is a form of extended cognition generated by shared attention.

Ecstasy

Typical Enlightenment accounts of attention involved a rational response to environmental stimuli, whether voluntary or involuntary. For the French composer and music theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau, for example, careful attention enabled a listener to (voluntarily) discern overtones within a given sonority, while the philosopher and musician Jean-Jacques Rousseau held that our minds involuntarily responded to musical works by rewarding certain features with more or less focus.58 Yet toward the end of the eighteenth century, reports of new, pathologized modes of attending begin to emerge, most distinctly in accounts of ecstatic, trance-like states experienced in the Parisian séances held by German physician Franz Mesmer. Mesmer claimed to have identified a unique energetic force present in all living things, which he termed “animal magnetism” (magnétisme animal). This force, he maintained, could be harnessed to induce action at a distance between people, as well as to generate trance states and even medical cures in certain, sensitive individuals.

A telling encounter between Enlightenment understandings of attentiveness and new medicalized forms of trance can be found in the 1784 investigation of Mesmer by a royal commission headed by Benjamin Franklin. Charged with explaining the phenomena reported by Mesmer’s patients, the committee appealed to the faculty of attention. They remark:

There is not an individual, in a state of the fullest health, who, if he paid a close attention to the point (s’écouter attentivement), would not be sensible to an infinity of interior motions and variations, either of a pain infinitely slight, or of heat in different parts of his body; these variations which exist at all times are independent of the magnetism. To turn and fix in this manner one’s attention upon oneself, is not perhaps itself entirely without its effects. There is so intimate a connection, whatever be the vehicle of that connection, between the volitions of the soul and the motions of the body, that it is not easy to prescribe limits to the influence of attention, which appears to be nothing more than a train of volitions, directed, constantly and without interruption, to the same object. When we recollect that the arm is moved by the will as it pleases, how can we be certain, that the attention being fixed upon some interior part of our frame, may not excite some slight emotion in it, direct the heat towards it, and so modify its actual situation as to produce in it new sensations?59

The turn of phrase “s’écouter attentivement” meaning, literally, “to listen to oneself attentively” renders links among listening, embodiment, and attention explicit. Here, according to Franklin, the individual “listens” to his subjective physical sensations, whether of pain or of warmth, rather than subsuming them into the low sensory hum of embodied existence. An unhealthy attention to repressed sensations—whether real or imaginary—was the explanation converged on in the report, which concluded that

the commissioners, even those who have their nerves most irritable, having expressly turned their attention to other objects, and having armed themselves with that philosophic doubt which ought always to accompany enquiry, have felt none of those sensations, which were experienced by the three patients of the lower class; and they have a right to suspect that these sensations, supposing their reality, were the fruits of anticipated persuasion, and might be operated by the mere force of imagination.60

As this passage indicates, the commissioners fully attributed Mesmer’s alleged powers of animal magnetism to the overactive imagination of subjects under the influence of suggestion. Here the voluntary, rational attention of educated upper-class men is presented as a foil to the involuntary, pathologized attention of lower-class patients.

Despite the commission’s comprehensive refutation of Mesmer’s doctrine of animal magnetism, however, his influence continued to expand throughout the nineteenth century. Indeed, the phenomenon of hypnosis (a term used here to indicate the broad range of long-nineteenth-century practices having to do with animal magnetism, suggestion, and spiritualism, all of which stem from Mesmer’s practice) was foundational to the emergence of Romanticism, offering a robust framework within which nineteenth-century subjects could understand a range of ecstatic, mystical experiences, ranging from trance states of various kinds to purported communication with otherworldly spirits.

A key thread linking hypnotic practices throughout the century is the concept of nervous sensitivity, which was associated with a heightened ability to attend, whether to oneself (as in Franklin’s account of self-audition), to others, or to the environment. Thus the sensitivity of hypnotic subjects compelled them to pay heed to physical cues and vibrations that eluded regular people, including the commands of magnetizers, who “directed” the animal magnetism coursing through living things according to their own will. Given that sensitivity was understood to arise from innate refinement of the nervous system, women—often marked as more physiologically delicate than men—were regarded as particularly vulnerable to mesmeric manipulation. Members of the upper class were also considered to have more rarefied physiologies than members of the working classes, and white Christian Europeans were deemed more sensitive than any other group. Yet this sensitivity was a double-edged sword: Its excess rendered women hysterical and left men feminized, with both populations then potentially more susceptible to the machinations of unscrupulous magnetizers.

As a result, while Mesmer’s ideas attracted many men (notable devotees included Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Friedrich Schlegel, and Charles Dickens), the practice of hypnosis was, from the beginning, marked as other, alternative, and feminine. Upper-class women, confined to vanishingly few possible paths of personal fulfillment, often sought hypnotic treatments as therapy for various ailments, paying both to have their own attention manipulated and to secure the attention of a (male) magnetizer. Poorer, working-class women found in animal magnetism financial gain and some measure of fame as “subjects,” performing trance states for public consumption.61 Moreover, hypnosis was both populist and radical: Magnetizers (and later mediums) often hailed from humble backgrounds, and séances were spaces where inhibitions were loosened, allowing members of different classes and the opposite sex to act and interact in normally unthinkable ways.62

The highly concentrated attention displayed in mesmeric sessions involved a subject’s evident ability to block out all other sensations and fully attend to a single command. As Raz argues, the granting or withholding of attention within some hypnotic contexts can be understood as a form of rebellion against the status quo, a refusal to invest, a demand to be understood on one’s own, marginalized terms.63 The nineteenth-century literature is replete with accounts of women, feminized men, members of the lower social classes, and racialized subjects performing trance behaviors as a form of implicit resistance, even as the reporting witness, often a physician, ascribes these behaviors to intrinsic biological or psychological difference.64 Music, which had been integral to mesmerism from the outset, played a central role both in hypnosis and in its critique. Mesmer himself had famously employed the soft strains of the glass armonica (an instrument ironically invented by Benjamin Franklin) as well as keyboard instruments to enhance his séances; the glass armonica, in particular, would later come to be associated with unsavory mesmeric activities. More broadly, the self-abandon and intense absorption so characteristic of (sonically induced) hypnotic trances would reappear in Romantic accounts of musical listening across the following several decades. One notable example is Heinrich Heine’s report of the effect of Franz Liszt’s concerts on Parisian audiences in 1844:

The electric action of a daemoniac nature on a closely pressed multitude, the contagious power of the extase, and perhaps a magnetism in music itself, which is a spiritual malady which vibrates in most of us,—all these phenomena never struck me so significantly or so painfully as in this concert of Liszt. A physician whose speciality is the disorders of women, and with whom I conversed as to the magic which our Liszt exercises on his public, smiled mysteriously, and told many things of magnetism, galvanism, electricity, of contagion in an over-heated hall, in which are a vast number of wax-candles, and as many perfumed, perspiring mortals, of histrionic epilepsies or stage-fever, of the phenomena of tickling, of musical cantharides [Spanish fly], and other ticklish subjects, which have, I believe, relation to the mysteries of the Bona Dea [the ancient Roman goddess of fertility].65

Heine here invokes the trope of hypnotic trance to understand the ecstatic power Liszt appeared to exert on his audience. His explanation depends primarily on an unnamed medical authority who elides scientific causes such as electricity and heat along with esoteric and vaguely erotic references.66

As the century progressed, hypnosis became racialized and syncretic. Russ Castronovo has shown how mesmeric discourses from the 1830s on drew comparisons between the slave and the somnambulist, the master and the magnetizer, while also synthesizing European notions of animal magnetism with practices drawn from African and Caribbean trancing traditions.67 Spiritualism, an American movement that blended European mesmerism with Swedenborgian mysticism, wishful thinking, and Yankee showmanship, traveled back across the Atlantic to exert a powerful hold on European, and particularly Victorian, culture. French travelers encountering the multisensory rites of mystical Islamic sects, notably the Aissawa Brotherhood in Algeria, also attempted to understand these practices through hypnotic and religious-ecstatic lenses, as Céline Frigau Manning explores.

The power and threat of trance states became a prominent focus of modernist psychology, including in the work of Hippolyte Taine, Jean-Martin Charcot, and Théodule Ribot, all of whom meditated at length on the nature of ecstatic (autohypnotic) processes. For both Taine and Ribot, ecstasy was securely pathological, characterized by a fixation of attention so complete that the normal fluctuations of consciousness were arrested and, along with them, rational thought and volition itself. In his 1883 Maladies de la volonté, Ribot underscores the susceptibility of women to such states and, even more robustly, their association with non-European traditions: “The religious and philosophical literature of the Orient, of India in particular, abounds in documents from which it has been possible to gather a sort of working manual for the attainment of ecstasy.”68 Restricted or repetitive behaviors are key, including the instruction “to remain motionless, to gaze fixedly at the sky, [or] a luminous object,” or “to repeat continually the monosyllable Om (Brahm).”69 Sound—in the form of rhythmical chant, devotional verses, or song—is central, not just in Asian traditions but also in mystical Christian histories.

Ribot dwells on descriptions of religious ecstasy left by the sixteenth-century nun and religious reformer Saint Teresa of Avila. In his La psychologie de l’attention (1888), he notes that St. Teresa describes the stages of ecstasy as stations of prayer in which the focus becomes incrementally ossified and totalized. The early stations involve audible recitation, which progresses to inward, unspoken supplication, then to the “prayer of quietude” (oraison de quiétude) in which the soul no longer recites but instead listens, as if entranced by its own echo. From there, the “prayer of union” (oraison d’union) brings the first sense of divine presence, followed by “rapture” (oraison de ravissement) in which feeling and thought begin to fade, and finally “the flight of the spirit” (vol de l’esprit) involving “the very abolition of consciousness” (l’abolition même de la conscience), a dissolution of selfhood into an “excess of [divine] unity” (excès de unité).70 (See Figure 0.2 for one of several nineteenth-century depictions of the ecstatic moment.)

At this point, attention is no longer an act of will but an eradication of it—a cessation of the fundamental motor activities of the brain such that neither choice nor action is possible. Already in Les maladies de la volonté (1883), Ribot had quoted Saint Teresa’s account of the process by which “all its [the soul’s] powers lose their natural activity; they have no knowledge of their operations. . . . As for the understanding, if it understands, it is by a mode which remains unknown to it, and it can comprehend nothing of what it understands.”71 The volitional power of attention is drained away in a process of mental evacuation eliminating rational forms of knowing and therefore the capacity for intellectual and aesthetic creation. Such a cessation was dangerous, according to Ribot, and he is careful to separate it from the deep forms of concentration associated with male genius—the “intellectual rapture” (ravissement intellectuel) of figures including Archimedes, Newton, and Pascal.72

But not all thinkers were so hostile to ecstatic attentional modes. Henri Bergson, in his 1889 Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (translated in English as Time and Free Will), positioned stilling of the volition as a prerequisite for the apprehension of beauty and grace. Among the primary benefits of art was its capacity to facilitate this form of evacuated openness, to “put to sleep the active or rather resistance powers of our personality, and thus to bring us into a state of perfect responsiveness.”73 Music was especially apt in this regard, since its “rhythm and measure” suspended the normal flow of sensations and ideas, “causing our attention to swing to and fro between fixed points,” thus eliminating the natural attentional flux defining human consciousness.74 The result was “a spiritualized version of the process commonly used to induce the state of hypnosis,” a self-forgetfulness in which thought and will were attenuated.75

Twenty years later, the philosopher Joseph Segond, in his La prière: étude de psychologie religieuse (1911), extended this claim, arguing that the rhythmic regularity of music could absorb the attention utterly, producing a state of passivity conducive to prayer. As Alexandra Kieffer notes, Segond regarded such passivity not as metaphysical (in the manner of Saint Teresa) but purely physiological, reorienting mystical notions of ecstasy toward late-century materialist psychology. Rhythmic music, like the physical rocking it encouraged, brought about “regularized and lulled consciousness.”76 Temporarily quieting Hanslickian forms of focus—mental alertness to music’s structural and aesthetic features—it encouraged instead a form of embodied absorption (entrainment) essential for contemplative practice.

Resistance to the forms of mental diffusion/dissolution embraced by Bergson and Segond was robust, including in critical responses to music thought to induce such a state. Debussy’s compositions, for instance, when associated with Bergson’s hypnotic ideal, were charged with emasculating, irrational, and even “narcotic” effects, the language of critics echoing quite clearly both the pathological terminology of Ribot and the moral charges levied by Europeans against non-Christian forms of ecstatic ritual.77 In the early twentieth century, it was (perhaps unsurprisingly) a woman who offered the most compelling defense of ecstatic attention. Simone Weil (1909–1943), among the few published female philosophers of the period, synthesized mystical and aesthetic strands of ecstatic discourse, arguing in her posthumously published La pesanteur et la grâce (1947) that “extreme attention is what constitutes the creative faculty in man.”78 Such attention declined to explain, analyze, or grasp; in place of the intellectual striving associated with concentration, it aimed for nonvolitional plenitude, consisting of “that attention which is so full that the ‘I’ disappears.”79 For Weil, this self-negation was the purest form of prayer as well as the cornerstone of imaginative work. “The amount of creative genius in any period,” she argued, “is strictly in proportion to the amount of extreme attention and thus of authentic religion at that period.”80 Her conception of creative focus as self-emptying resonated not only with Bergson and Segond, but, as she acknowledged, with aspects of both Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, whose devotional traditions she regarded as compatible with Christianity.81

Weil’s work comes at the very end of our period, marking a point of culmination in the rich strand of scientific and mystical writing on hypnosis and ecstasy. Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries this discourse was markedly French, blending materialist and experimental psychology with philosophy, sociology, and theology. In some respects, it contrasted with the tradition of empirical psychology unfolding in German centers during the same period, and yet points of intersection between the two existed. At the furthest reaches of empirically discernable attention, as David Trippett argues, lay a form of imaginative apprehension that seemed to open, if not onto a metaphysical realm, then onto an otherwise inaccessible domain of the human psyche. Bergson’s conception of the ecstatic state as one in which the faint harmonics of a vibrating string were set in motion in the mind of the praying individual bears some resemblance to the Helmholtzian notion of distant overtones audible only to a mind endowed with extraordinary attentional virtuosity.82 For some French theorists, these were echoes of divine revelation. In Germany, such sounds were more ambiguous, suggesting an unquantifiable mode of perception—hints of what Trippett terms an “auditory unconscious.”83

Looming over German psychophysics in the final decades of the nineteenth century, the idea of unconscious perception interfaced with the emerging and, at times, quasi-mystical practices of psychoanalysis. Famously, Freud described the importance of a loose, undirected attention—a form of all-embracing awareness capable of intuiting the faint vibrations of the deep psyche. His student Theodor Reik (1888–1969) extended this idea, embracing a form of absorption that allowed for apprehension of the “most delicate communications . . . the secret messages that go from one unconscious to another.”84 Listening to such messages was not quite the same as hearing the voices of God, yet both involved a state of “free-floating attention” (in Reik’s words) quite distinct from spotlighted concentration.85 Nongrasping and anti-analytical, this inner focus required a quieting (in some accounts, hypnotizing) of the active intellectual powers. For psychologists, psychoanalysts, and mystics alike this state was regarded as a gateway to revelation—a psychology at once threatening, exotic, expansive, and annihilating.

Measurement

The long nineteenth century’s fascination with attention is intimately linked to the emergence of new technologies of measurement. Instruments including clocks, metronomes, sonometers, resonators, plethysmographs, and kymographs played integral roles in the development of new theories of music and of perception alike. Speculations about the role of attention in human auditory cognition could be occasionally found in music theory treatises in the eighteenth century; by the second half of the nineteenth century, investigations of these topics were pursued at the most prominent psychological laboratories on both sides of the Atlantic. The disciplinary boundary between music, acoustics, and psychology at the time was highly porous; thus, we find key insights into the role of attention in structuring music first articulated by music theorists as introspective observations, and subsequently empirically verified in lab settings. Later in the century, these ideas would migrate from the lab to inform musical practice; as Alexander Bonus has compellingly argued, “the precise mechanical rhythm that most modern musicians practice, modern pedagogues teach, and modern audiences hear today” was forged in scientific laboratories, rather than on the concert stage.86

For one important case study, let us turn to what today is known as “subjective rhythmicization,” that is, our perception of an undifferentiated series of clicks as a series composed of a “tick” followed by a “tock” (or by two or three “tocks,” if we choose to perceive a triple or quadruple meter, respectively). The earliest account of this phenomenon appears in the Essay towards a Rational System of Music (1770) by English music theorist John Holden. Holden reports that

if a drummer were to give a number of quick, but equal timed beats, each with just an equal force, a person attending to them would naturally parcel them by 4 and 4 together, by giving a greater regard to every 4th beat; by which regard these beats would to him acquire a kind of emphasis or accent, as if the drummer did really strike them harder than the others. . . . But the case would be the very same with a hearer, if an inanimate machine were made to beat the drum.87

Holden here ascribes the accents we perceive in a series of undifferentiated beats solely to our “regard,” that is, to the attention we pay to these particular beats. (Attention, it should be noted, looms large in Holden’s work, where it is also used to explain the experience of hearing tonal ambiguity.)88 A similar awareness regarding the role of our minds in perceiving and constructing meter was independently articulated six years later by the German music theorist Johann Philipp Kirnberger in the second volume of Die Kunst des reinen Satzes in der Musik (1776).89 This insight constituted a major break with earlier accounts of meter, which tended to ascribe the differences in the saliency of beats to acoustical differences arising from bodily movement relating to performance practice.

Holden’s offhand mention of a drum-beating “inanimate machine” illustrates the aforementioned link between emerging conceptions of temporal attention and technology. Pocket watches (which Holden praises as useful for internalizing meter), chronometers (invented by Huygens in 1656 and subsequently adapted for musical use, notably by Jean-Étienne Despréaux and Gottfried Weber), and the metronome (patented in 1815 by Maelzel) swiftly revolutionized the way in which musical meter was understood. Prior to the metronome, time signatures had indicated tempo and genre/style of performance to a certain extent; these indications became far less codified by the middle of the nineteenth century, given that the desired tempo could be indicated by measuring clicks in absolute time.

The metronome was widely adopted by European performers and pedagogues in the first half of the nineteenth century, to a mixed reception.90 Endorsed by composers including Cherubini, Pleyel, and Beethoven, some music theorists rejected the device as overly precise and hence a potential obstacle to expressivity.91 However, a view that rhythm should in some way be “metronomic” was by no means widespread; Adolph Bernhard Marx’s view of musical time perception, for example, prioritized the dimensions of duration and accent, regardless of whether the periodical succession of the events they were applied to was equal:

I dwell upon a moment so long as it engages my interest and attention, or until I am drawn away by another of greater force of attraction; I hurry from moment to moment when a lively sensation impels me onward, and I expend a greater amount of force and energy upon those moments which are to me the most important.92

This vivid description of the experience of listening to music in time as dependent on attention, attraction, energy, and force would set the stage for later theories of musical forces, ranging from Ernst Kurth’s approach to form as composed of various types of waves to the experience of time as a wave proposed by Victor Zuckerkandl in the 1960s.93 Marx’s (metaphorical) application of these metaphysically charged terms further reveals that both music theorists and psychologists were thinking about rhythm and meter with reference to concepts of force and motion.

Musicians were, of course, not the only ones interested in metronomes. By the 1850s, the metronome was employed by Dutch physiologist Franciscus Cornelius Donders as a tool of temporal measurement in his physiological experiments.94 At the dawn of modern empirical psychology a decade or so later, the metronome became a staple of the laboratory, facilitating groundbreaking work on the nature of attention and distraction in the hands of the renowned German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt and his students. From the 1860s on, Wundt used the metronome in a series of important experiments intended to ascertain the duration and capacity of human consciousness. Acutely aware of the technology of his day, however, he first noted the absolute importance of finding a metronome adequately suited for scientific research: “If it happens that we can at will hear into the beats of the metronome an ascending or a descending beat, i.e. we can hear one and the same beat now emphasized and now unemphasized, then we may regard the instrument as suitable for all the psychological experiments to be described in the following pages.”95 Wundt here describes the phenomenon of subjective rhythmicization, and suggests his readers perform a version of Holden’s thought experiment with an “inanimate machine” in order to test the accuracy of the scientific equipment required to probe consciousness.

By the 1890s, the phenomenon of subjective rhythmicization had been thoroughly experimentally studied in labs in Europe and in the United States.96 The landmark work in this regard is Thaddeus Bolton’s article on “Rhythm,” published in The American Journal of Psychology in 1894. Bolton, whose advisor, G. Stanley Hall, had studied with Wundt in Leipzig, explains subjective rhythmicization as follows:

This rhythmical grouping [is] a series of efforts to attend to the sound. The grouping results from a sequence of acts of attention. When the attention is directed to the sensation, it lays hold upon the first impression with great force and makes it the sole object of consciousness. If this were the only sound, the attention would turn to something else, but as succeeding impressions follow before the first wave of attention has subsided, they are seized upon with less force than the first impression, and are subordinated to it in different degrees according to the strength of the apperceptive act. Subsequent waves of attention follow the same process as long as the will directs the attention to the phenomenon. The attention accommodates itself to a certain number of impressions, which fall easily within the period of a wave, providing there is no objective difference in the impressions. If there is a regularly recurrent difference, this becomes the signal for a new act of attention, providing only that the span does not exceed or fall much under the normal period of a wave. If this recurrent difference follows at too great intervals, the attention breaks up the span in two portions, the one more emphatic than the other.97

Bolton’s reference here to the attention wave has to do with insights into dynamic attention, which were coming out of European laboratories and reverberating across the Atlantic (Bolton’s experimental setup is shown in Figure 0.3). The notion of the attention wave linked our mental experience to our nervous physiology, explaining various thresholds and transitions in alertness as arising from the behavior of physiological processes. In his contribution to this volume, D. Graham Burnett surveys the rise of the attention wave from Viktor Urbantschitsch’s physiological experiments in 1870s Vienna through research in Wundt’s lab in Leipzig to its ultimate flowering in the kymograph experiments conducted by Edward B. Titchener, Wundt’s student, at Cornell University circa 1905.

Attention also played a crucial role in the investigation of pitch perception, which similarly moved between the worlds of music theory and laboratory psychology. As early as 1726, Rameau described the role of attention in distinguishing partials in his Nouveau système, observing that the overtones

may be distinguished again in cymbals, in the lower sounds of a trumpet, in bells, etc., if one gives all his attention to the undulations that create a sort of murmur in the air just after the predominant sound of the instrument proper to this effect. It is also essential not to be occupied with this dominating sound and not to be distracted by any foreign noise.98

The notion that paying closer attention would enable perception of hitherto unrecognized sounds links Rameau’s report with Helmholtz’s empirical investigations undertaken with the aid of harmoniums and resonators, as Benjamin Steege has shown.99 Helmholtz, for example, observes that in order to recognize overtones, the ear needs the assistance of special performance techniques, including touching a piano key, singing various vowels, or listening with resonators:

On applying to the ear the resonator corresponding to any given upper partial of the compound c, such as gʹ, this gʹ is rendered much more powerful when c is sounded . . . the increase of the loudness of gʹ caused by the resonator may be used to direct the attention of the ear to the tone it is required to distinguish. On gradually removing the resonator from the ear, the force of gʹ will decrease. But the attention once directed to it by this means, remains more readily fixed upon it, and the observer continues to hear this tone in the natural and unchanged compound tone of the given note, even with his unassisted ear. The sole office of the resonators in this case is to direct the attention of the ear to the required tone.100

Here, the resonators assist the ear in singling out part of the compound tone via amplification. With practice, Helmholtz continues, one can eventually largely dispense with the resonators, though not without the “certain amount of undisturbed concentration [that] is always necessary for analysing musical tones by the ear alone.”101

The experience of attentively listening to—and identifying—overtones that illustrated Helmholtz’s resonance theory of cochlear mechanics (as presented in Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik, 1863), reappears in subsequent investigations of the nature of attention by prominent psychologists including Georg Elias Müller, Wundt, William James, and Titchener.102 Wundt, for example, observes that if we attend to a specific overtone within a sound,

we always find that in this case we first recall the memory image of the tone to be heard and only then hear it out of the whole sound. . . . We hear a sound in which we suspect a certain overtone due to certain associations; only then do we recall the image of the tone-to-be-heard in our memory [das Erinnerungsbild des zu hörenden Tones zurückruft] and then immediately notice it from the sound we hear.103

That is to say, listeners can perceive overtones if they know what to listen for; if this stimulus is not provided separately (by means of priming or a resonator), they must mentally prepare to make the identification by means of their prior knowledge, which is to say, they must be prepared to attend to that particular stimulus. Moreover, this process does not occur instantaneously, but rather in time. Thus:

Every idea requires a certain amount of time to rise to the focus of consciousness. During this time we always find within ourselves the peculiar feeling of paying attention. This feeling is all the more vivid the more the focus of consciousness is concentrated, and in this case it tends to continue even after the idea is completely clear to consciousness. In its preparatory stage, it is most clearly perceived in the state of reflection or expectation for an expected impression . . . We experience attention as something that comes from ourselves, even if we clearly imagine the impression that draws our attention to itself as an external one.104

William James invoked both Helmholtz’s overtone experiments and Wundt’s response to emphasize the importance of priming in our process of attention, noting that “where the impression to be caught is very weak, the way not to miss it is to sharpen our attention for it by preliminary contact with it in a stronger form.”105 The larger point, for James, however, is that perception depends on mental receptivity in the form of attention. Thus:

Whilst the object excites [a brain cell] from without, other brain-cells, or perhaps spiritual forces, arouse it from within. The latter influence is the “adaptation of the attention.” The plenary energy of the brain-cell demands the co-operation of both factors: not when merely present, but when both present and attended to, is the object fully perceived. . . . Organic adjustment, then, and ideational preparation or preperception are concerned in all attentive acts.106

Key to James’s (and Wundt’s) notion of attentional priming are the mechanisms of memory and prediction, both of which rely on experience and therefore enculturation. We attend most closely, and with the finest focus, to what we expect and know. Stimuli—from individual sounds to musical systems—outside our epistemic framework easily escape our notice or ­simply register as uncomputable. This is among the points made by Jacob Olley, whose exploration of “calculative listening” in Ottoman contexts underscores the degree to which perception of empirical data (including information revealed by devices like resonators and sonometers) was inflected by local cultural practices and values. In the late nineteenth century, he shows, researchers seeking to develop an empirical theory of Ottoman music used newly developed instruments such as the sonometer in order to quantify the experience of non-European audition and, in so doing, draw it into “modern” and “rational” discourse—render it legible. They thus laid the groundwork for an alternative, scientifically grounded attentive practice for Ottoman musics, including the meaningful “preperception” touted by James.

(Re)orienting and preparing the attention was not just an intellectual activity but a physical practice; indeed, for thinkers including James and, before him, Alexander Bain, Carl Georg Lange, and James Sully, attention was written in and on the body, reflected in material alterations of the nervous and muscular systems. These thinkers, James explains, regarded “muscular adjustment . . . [as] the essence of the attentive process throughout.”107 They devoted considerable time to studying physical attentional cues including inclination of the body, turning of the head, or swiveling of the eyes, often identifying such actions as products of a Darwinian evolution of physical attention.108 It is unsurprising, therefore, to find these ideas informing music pedagogy of the same period. Once attention was conceived as a physical act, the bodily technique of musical performance ceased to be regarded as separate from psychic intention, or simply as its outcome or demonstration; instead, it became synonymous with alertness and even the first site of its generation. That is to say, rather than mental attention preceding or providing a preparation for physical performance, performance itself produced attention—a player could experience musical focus as an embodied phenomenon, now quantifiable in haptic (or more broadly somatosensory) terms.

For the pianist and composer Marie Jaëll, as Michael Weinstein-Reiman observes, “a pianist’s attention to haptic and aural impulses [was part of] an elusive, ‘simultaneous and successive’ process that collates the pianist’s tangible sensation of the keyboard and the ineffable mental impressions conjured by sound.”109 According to the piano pedagogue Tobias Matthey, “the sensation of key-resistance and the sensation of pedal resistance, these are both but part and parcel of that single thought and purpose, summed up as ‘performing-attention’—and that means: attention to Music—THROUGH OUR INSTRUMENT.”110 The influence of motor theories of attention on the development of piano pedagogy is the subject of Youn Kim’s contribution to this volume, which explores how musicians applied scientific ideas about attention in relation to muscular action and motor innervation to improve specific aspects of pianistic technique. Musical performance thus became a site of experimental psychology, and the piano itself an instrument central to the honing and tracking of states of attention.

Legacies

To pay attention / this is our endless and proper work.

—Mary Oliver

The work of auditory attention—its marshaling, molding, measuring, and reimagining—continued unabated through the twentieth century, occupying an ever-wider contingent of researchers and artists around the globe. Many of the characteristic attentional orientations of the “long” nineteenth century persisted (albeit in modulated form), although these were juxtaposed with, and in some cases challenged by, new forms of alertness shaped by shifting media landscapes. The rise of broadcasting, recording, and amplification technologies, for example, generated noisy, multichannel auditory environments in which techniques of spotlighted attention became key.111 The 1950s saw the identification of the “cocktail party effect,” a term coined by British psychologist Colin Cherry, which referred initially to the ability of air traffic controllers to successfully attend to a single strand of the many simultaneous conversations with pilots coming in over their headphones.112 (This problem continues to be investigated today as part of what psychologist Albert Bregman defined in the 1970s as auditory scene analysis.113)

Ubiquitous sound emanating from radios and gramophones in commercial, domestic, and industrial settings necessitated a different kind of selectivity predicated on passivity—a low-level cognitive engagement with music that left attentional resources available for other auditory activities. This mode was prefigured, even inculcated, by musical cultures of the early twentieth century. To take one particularly telling example: In German-speaking centers, the 1920s saw the establishment of the genre of U-Musik, short for Unterhaltungsmusik (entertainment music), originally associated with light concerts put on by orchestras during the summer months at resorts. Unlike serious music (ernste Musik, or E-Musik), which demanded a listener’s full concentration, U-Musik purportedly required only superficial focus, leaving auditors free to engage in conversation, or Unterhaltung (the word means both entertainment and conversation in German).114 The main purpose of the distinction was to parcel out royalties between what was essentially pop music and art music—but it also entailed a psychic renegotiation resulting in dual-channel forms of ambient and spotlighted attentiveness among auditors.115

Passive forms of focus—those associated with boredom, dreaming, and sleep—emerged as central to experimental musical currents across the Atlantic, particularly among mid-century composers working with tape and related recording technologies. Exploration of loose forms of awareness including those associated with dream states was among the explicit goals of Pauline Oliveros’s Sonic Meditations.116 And drastically extended attentive exercises, often incorporating unchanging or slowly transforming musical material, shaped the music of Terry Riley, Julius Eastman, Steve Reich, and John Cage (among others). Sometimes linked to non-Western meditative practices, these experiments constituted new forms of ecstatic focus exploring the boundaries between the soporific and the revelatory. As John Cage put it, drawing on Zen philosophy, “If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.”117

Within the lineage of the European concert tradition, on the other hand, analytical forms of concentration continued to be valorized, separating Kenner from Liebhaber ever more starkly. In his infamous essay “The Composer as Specialist,” also known as “Who Cares If You Listen?,” Milton Babbitt asserted that lay audiences could not help but be “bored and puzzled by what [they are] unable to understand.”118 A related observation was made by Michel Foucault in dialogue with Pierre Boulez a few decades later, namely that contemporary concert music required “a very difficult attention, one which is in contradiction to the familiarities woven by hearing of [older] classical music.”119 As late as the 1990s, composers were still wrestling with the dilemma of complexity versus cognizability, with the composer Fred Lerdahl turning to findings in psychology to argue that Elliot Carter’s superposed musical meters were simply ungraspable, given that these contrasting lines made impossible demands upon the attention.120

The sense of musical listening as a testing ground for attention—a site for the practice, modulation, management, or measurement of alertness—was hardly new. Twentieth-century conversations along these lines were in many regards extensions of nineteenth-century debates around the virtue of concentrated listening, the ecstatic potential of highly focalized audition, and the role of musical focus in the evolution of specialized or extended attentional capacities. If some rhetorics and practices of auditory focus shifted through the mid-late twentieth century, or were newly demoted/valorized, others remained oddly unchanging. Most obvious among these was the practice of concentrated Hanslickian audition, which continued to be tacitly prescribed in recital hall settings by canonic repertoire. Indeed, paraphrasing Lydia Goehr, we might conceive of the experience of twentieth- (and twenty-first-) century concert listening as involving an imaginary museum of musical attentions, no less than one of musical works.121

As this essay has argued, attentive modalities are neither hard wired nor default, but are instead the product of political and social enculturation, technological conditioning, and scientific engineering. Especially central to their development have been techniques of listening, which emerged across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as inextricable from ideologies of focus/unfocus. Audition was predetermined by attention, even while attention was itself fundamentally shaped by audition. This feedback loop made listening the unstable measure of both concentrative acuity and—in some accounts—volitional selfhood. To explore this phenomenon, we need a stronger sense of both attention’s sonic pasts and audition’s attentional investments. Here, and in the chapters to follow, we take a step in this direction.

Notes

1. 1.  Augustine’s De musica, trans. Robert Catesby Taliaferro, in The Fathers of the Church, a New Translation: Writings of Saint Augustine, vol. 2 (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1947), 345–46.
2. 2.  Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Nouveaux Essais Sur L’Entendement Humain § 4. Philalethes (Amsterdam and Leipzig: Jean Schreuder, 1765), 90. The essays were written in 1704 but first published in 1765.
3. 3.  Thomas Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of Man (Edinburgh: John Bell, 1788), 79.
4. 4.  James Sully, Sensation and Intuition: Studies in Psychology and Aesthetics (London: Henry S. King & Co, 1874), 62.
5. 5.  “So sind wir auch fähig, unter einer Menge zugleich wirkender musikalischer Instrumente ein einzelnes und oft das schwächste mit Aufmerksamkeit zu verfolgen, während die Töne der anderen Instrumente des Orchesters nur dunkle Empfindungen in uns erregen.” Johannes Müller, Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen für Vorlesungen, Volume 1, Part 2 (Coblenz: J. Hölscher, 1834), 827.
6. 6.  This etymology is unpacked by Mladen Dolar in A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 75–76. Of particular interest is the Old English “hlysnan” (“hear, attend to, obey”); and Middle English “listenen” (“listen,” “pay attention to”); see the entry for “listen” in the Oxford English Dictionary: https://www.oed.com.
7. 7.  John Mason Good, System of Nosology with a Corrected and Simplified Nomenclature (London: Bensley and Sons, 1817), 937.
8. 8.  The literature on attention is too voluminous to cite in full. Studies that have provided an important backdrop for this essay include Yves Citton, Pour une écologie de l’attention (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2014); Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck, The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2002); Bernard Stiegler, Prendre soin: De la jeunesse et des générations (Paris: Flammarion, 2008); Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads (New York: Vintage, 2017); Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001); Lucy Alford, Forms of Poetic Attention (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020); Nicholas Dames, The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); David Marno, Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Paul North, The Problem of Distraction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012); Natalie M. Phillips, Distraction: Problems of Attention in Eighteenth-Century Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016); Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann, eds. Aufmerksamkeiten. Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation 7 (Munich: Fink, 2001); Lorraine Daston, Eine kurze Geschichte der wissenschaftlichen Aufmerksamkeit (Munich: Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung, 2001); Michael Hagner, “Toward a History of Attention in Culture and Science,” MLN 118, no. 3 (2003): 670–87; Johannes Wankhammer, Creatures of Attention: Aesthetics and the Subject Before Kant (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2024).
9. 9.  A compact overview of these theories is given in Christopher Mole, “Attention,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2024 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2024/entries/attention/.
10. 10.  Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 24, 45.
11. 11.  “Diese Möglichkeit, gewissen Sinnesempfindungenden Eintritt in’s Bewußtseyn zu verwehren, sie gleichsam zu annulliren, ist für das Gehör insofern von besondrer Wichtigkeit als wir nicht im Stande sind, unser Ohr in ähnlicher Art, wie das Auge, beliebig zu schließen und die Einwirkungen der Außenwelt von ihm abzuhalten. Darum vielleicht die fast noch größere Wichtigkeit, welche die Aufmerksamkeit im Gebiete der Schallempfindungen behauptet.” Hermann Ulrici, Gott und der Mensch, vol. I: Leib und Seele: Grundzüge einer Psychologie des Menschen, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: T. D. Weigel, 1874), 289.
12. 12.  “So ist es denn natürlich, dass die Aufmerksamkeit, von welcher alle Geistesthätigkeit zuletzt abhängt, gerade in Gehörurteilen ihr Wesen und Wirken vorzüglich reich entfaltet und dass die Theorie der Aufmerksamkeit sich hier am besten entwickeln lässt.” Carl Stumpf, Tonpsychologie, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1883), 68.
13. 13.  “die wahre [Art des Genußes] . . . besteht in der aufmerksamsten Beobachtung der Töne und ihrer Fortschreitung; in der völligen Hingebung der Seele in diesen fortreißenden Strom von Empfindungen; in der Entfernung und Abgezogenheit von jedem störenden Gedanken und von allen fremdartigen sinnlichen Eindrücken.” Heinrich Wilhelm Wackenroder, “Letter of May 5, 1792,” in Brief an Ludwig Tieck 4, ed. Carl Holtei (Breslau: Eduard Trewendt, 1864), 173; “[eine] ruhige und gesammelte Aufmerksamkeit.” Hermann von Helmholtz, Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik, 4th ed. (Braunschweig: F. Vieweg und Sohn, 1877), 111; Salomon Jadassohn, Manual of Harmony, translated by Paul Tarek and H. B. Pasmore (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1884), 201.
14. 14.  “Die Aufmerksamkeit ist gleichsam die Hand, mit welcher die Seele in ihrem Grunde eine dunkle Vorstellung ergreift, sie in die Höhe hebt und dadurch an das Tageslicht bringt.” Georg Friedrich Meier, Metaphysik (Halle: Johann Justinus Gebauer, 1757), 73.
15. 15.  Quoted in Margaret Koehler, Poetry of Attention in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 1–60, at 6, 32.
16. 16.  James Beattie, Dissertations Moral and Critical (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1783), 12. Dugald Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: A. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1792), 108; see also Lorraine Daston, “Attention and the Values of Nature in the Enlightenment,” in Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal, eds. The Moral Authority of Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 100–26.
17. 17.  Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind, 3rd ed. (London: T. Cadell, 1769), 228; Stewart, Elements, 130.
18. 18.  Matthew Riley, Musical Listening in the German Enlightenment: Attention, Wonder and Astonishment. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017); see also W. Dean Sutcliffe, Instrumental Music in an Age of Sociability: Haydn, Mozart and Friends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 346–70.
19. 19.  Walter Young, “An Essay on Rythmical [sic] Measures,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 2 (1790), 95. On Young and his circle see Carmel Raz, Hearing with the Mind: Proto-Cognitive Music Theory in the Scottish Enlightenment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2025).
20. 20.  Nicholas Mathew, “Interesting Haydn: On Attention’s Materials,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 71, no. 3 (2018): 655–701.
21. 21.  “Die holden Sirenenstimmen deiner in bunter Mannigfaltigkeit prangenden Sätze locken mich immer tiefer und tiefer hinein.” E. T. A. Hoffmann, “Kreisleriana,” in Carl Georg von Maaßen, ed., E. T. A. Hoffmanns Sämtliche Werke; historisch-kritische Ausgabe, vol. 1 (Munich: G. Müller, 1908), 61.
22. 22.  On romantic idealism and musical concentration, see Mark Evan Bonds, Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); On conceptions of organicism and deep knowledge, see Holly Watkins, Metaphors of Depth in German Musical Thought from E.T.A. Hoffmann to Arnold Schoenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); On attention and “sonically moving forms” in Hanslick and A. B. Marx, see Alexandra Hui, The Psychophysical Ear: Music Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840–1910 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 23–54.
23. 23.  Theodor Adorno, “Anweisungen zum Hören neuer Musik,” translated in Caroline Duttlinger, Attention and Distraction in Modern German Literature, Thought, and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 366.
24. 24.  Both in German-speaking lands and across the Atlantic, concentration was figured as an avenue to metaphysical uplift as well as a conquering/controlling power. See, for example, Edward Brooks, Mental Science and Methods of Mental Culture: Designed for the Use of Normal Schools, Academies, and Private Students Preparing to be Teachers (New York: Normal Publishing Company, 1882), 77: “The concentration of the mind in attention is like the massing of troops in a battle. A fortification is stormed and taken by the concentration of a battalion. . . . Attention may be regarded as the commander-in-chief of our mental powers. If we wish to conquer truth, to capture and hold new territory, or to occupy and appropriate that which is already taken, we must concentrate our mental forces, and, like a successful general, determine to fight it out on that line.”
25. 25.  Natalie M. Phillips, “Fixated Attention: The Gothic Pathology of Single-Minded Focus,” in Distraction: Problems of Attention in Eighteenth-Century Literature, Chap. 4, 132–73, at 140.
26. 26.  Francesca Brittan, “Berlioz and the Pathological Fantastic: Melancholy, Monomania, and Romantic Autobiography,” 19th-Century Music 29, no. 3 (2006): 211–39.
27. 27.  Stewart discusses this phenomenon in a literary context. See Garrett Stewart, Novel Violence: A Narratography of Victorian Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 61–89.
28. 28.  “La distraction . . . c’est l’opposé de la stupidité, qui reste sur une même idée.” Denis Diderot, “Distraction (Morale),” in Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, eds. Encyclopédie, ou, Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers 4 (Paris: Briasson, David, Le Breton, & Durand, 1754), 1061.
29. 29.  Schiller’s remarks on cognitive loosening and play weave through his epistolary treatise. See On the Aesthetic Education of Man, in a Series of Letters (1795), ed. and trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). Quotations given here are taken from letter 6 (at pp. 209, 215); letter 27 (at p. 43); letter 43 (at p. 103). Richard Adelman elaborates on Schiller’s conceptions of cognitive passivity and creativity in Idleness, Contemplation and the Aesthetic, 1750–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 52–67.
30. 30.  Friedrich Schlegel, “Idyll of Idleness” (“Idylle über den Müßiggang”), trans. in Peter Firchow, Friedrich Schlegel’s “Lucinde” and the Fragments (Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), 63–68.
31. 31.  Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 77.
32. 32.  Francesca Brittan, “Idle Schubert,” in “Colloquy: Attention, Anxiety, and Audition’s Histories,” convened by Francesca Brittan and Carmel Raz, Journal of the American Musicological Society 72, no. 2 (2019): 557–63. See also Scott Burnham, “Schubert and the Sound of Memory,” Musical Quarterly 84, no. 4 (2000): 655–63.
33. 33.  According to Rudolph Hermann Lotze, “He who tunes the strings of a piano and gives the most intense attention to his subject retains only the minimum of self-consciousness; he who is absorbed in a mathematical problem has scarcely more. But he who attentively considers a decision to be made should at least bring a specific recollection of his personality to this reflection. Both the self-conscious immersion in a single idea and the unconnected flight of many ideas are only compatible with the healthy pursuit of mental life when they occur temporarily; continual distraction as well as a prolonged narrowing of the flow of thoughts, are, as we will later recognise, the first stages of mental disorder.” (“Wer die Saiten eines Clavieres stimmt, hat bei der angestrengtesten Aufmerksamkeit auf seinen Gegenstand ein Minimum des Selbstbewusstseins; wer versunken in seine Gedanken ein mathematisches Problem verfolgt, besitzt dessen kaum mehr; wer mit Aufmerksamkeit dagegen einen zu wählenden Entschluss überlegt, soll wenigstens zugleich eine bestimmte Erinnerung seiner Persönlichkeit zu dieser Reflexion hinzubringen. Sowohl das selbstbewusstlose Versenken in eine einzige Vorstellung, als die unverbundene Flucht vieler sind Zustände, die nur, wo sie momentan sich einstellen, mit der gesunden Bestimmung des geistigen Lebens vereinbar sind; eine dauernde Zerstreuung sowohl, als eine dauernde Verengung des Gedankenlaufs werden wir dagegen später als Anfangspunkte der Seelenstörungen kennen lernen.”) Rudolph Hermann Lotze, Medizinische Psychologie oder Physiologie der Seele (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1852), 506–507.
34. 34.  On cyclic attention in literary culture, see Nicholas Dames, The Physiology of the Novel, esp. chap. 2. Many mid-century novels were published in serial installments, which itself suggested intermittent periods of attentiveness rather than an elongated effort; see Rob Allen, “‘Pause You Who Read This’: Disruption and the Victorian Serial Novel,” in Serialization in Popular Culture, edited by Rob Allen and Thijs van den Berg (New York: Routledge, 2014): 35–49.
35. 35.  Théodule Ribot, Le psychologie de l’attention (Paris: Alcan, 1889), 3; James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (New York: Henry Holt and Company: 1890), 420.
36. 36.  Benjamin Steege, “Joining In or Letting Go?” in “Colloquy: Attention, Anxiety, and Audition’s Histories,” 569–74.
37. 37.  For Morse’s own account of this experiment, see Samuel F. B. Morse: His Letters and Journals, vol. 2, ed. Edward Lind Morse (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1914), 74–76. An early press account was published by Frank Jewett Mather Jr., “Morse and the Telegraph: The Great Portrait Painter and Inventor Who Will Forever Be Memorialized in a Series of Dots and Dashes,” reprinted in The Nation, July 8, 2009. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/morse-and-telegraph/, accessed November 2025.
38. 38.  Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 18.
39. 39.  Ibid., 17–18, 31.
40. 40.  Gustave Le Bon’s Psychologie des Foules (Paris: Alcan, 1895) paved the way for Gabriel Tarde, L’opinion et la foule (Paris: Alcan, 1901), which introduced “psychologie collective ou psychologie sociale” as an emerging area of study (see the unpaginated Avant-Propos).
41. 41.  Tarde, L’opinion et la foule, 40. In reference to “La foule”: “Leur attention—et aussi bien leur inattention—est toujours plus forte et plus persévérante que ne le serait celle de chacun des individus qui les composent, s’il était seul.” Ibid., p. 54: “Le public: car le fait seul de leur attention concentrée sur un seul objet, en une sorte de monoïdéisme collectif, les rapproche de l’état de rêve ou d’hypnose.”
42. 42.  Wider explorations of nineteenth-century communication networks from technological, sociological, and economic perspectives include Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Laura Otis, Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2001); Kenneth Rogers, The Attention Complex: Media, Archeology, Method (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
43. 43.  For more on technologies of auditory networking, see Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Brian Kane, Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Simon J. Potter, Broadcasting Empire: The BBC and the British World, 1922–1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Tom Lewis, Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021).
44. 44.  Francesca Brittan, “The Neural Orchestra: Cognitive Instrumentalities,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 77, no. 1 (2024): 1–63. Musical metaphors appear throughout Tarde’s text, including references to the leader of the crowd as a “conductor” (L’opinion et la foule, 15).
45. 45.  On Cubí y Soler’s orchestral brain, see Brittan, “The Neural Orchestra,” 20–23. Quotations given here are taken from Cubí y Soler, La frenolojía y sus glorias (1852), translated by the author as Leçons de phrénologie scientifique et pratique (Paris: Baillière et fils, 1857); see vol. 2, 369: “la volonté ou harmonisativité . . . c’est un principe d’attention suprême et souveraine” and vol. 2, 464: “une télégraphie électrique nerveuse.”
46. 46.  “L’attention multiple lui revient; il a l’œil partout; il indique d’un regard les entrées vocales et instrumentales, en haut, en bas, à droite, à gauche; il jette avec son bras droit de terribles accords qui semblent éclater au loin comme d’harmonieux projectiles; puis il arrête, dans les points d’orgue, tout ce mouvement qu’il a communiqué; il enchaîne toutes les attentions; il suspend tous les bras, tous les souffles, écoute un instant le silence . . . et redonne plus ardente carrière au tourbillon qu’il a dompté.” Hector Berlioz, Mémoires de Hector Berlioz: comprenant ses voyages en Italie, en Allemagne, en Russie et en Angleterre, 1803–1865 (Paris: Michel Lévy frères, 1870), 254; Hector Berlioz, Memoirs of Hector Berlioz: from 1803 to 1865, comprising his travels in Germany, Italy, Russia, and England, trans. Rachel (Scott Russell) Holmes and Eleanor Holmes, revised by Ernest Newman (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1932), 270.
47. 47.  See, for instance, the Gazette musicale (18 November 1855), which describes “Berlioz, avec ses nombreux ministres ou lieutenants, avec sa cour ou son armée de douze cent cinquante artistes”; and Le Constitutionnel (16 November 1855), where we hear an account of “Des orchestres de sept cents musiciens, des choeurs de six cents voix, d’innombrables phalanges de violons, d’altos, de harpes, de violoncelles, de contre-basses, des ouragans de cuivre à effrayer les archanges du jugement dernier, six généraux de division sous le commandement d’un chef suprême, transmettant ses ordres, ses mouvemens, sa mesure à l’aide d’un métronome électrique.”
48. 48.  See Brittan, “The Electrician, the Magician, and the Nervous Conductor,” Nineteenth-Century Music Review 19, no. 1 (2022): 31–53; Inge van Rij, “‘A Living, Fleshly Bond’: The Electric Telegraph, Musical Thought, and Embodiment,” 19th-Century Music 39, no. 2 (2015): 142–66. A wider view of telegraphic imperialism is offered by Daniel R. Headrick in The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); idem, The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
49. 49.  See, as starting points, Erin Johnson-Williams, “The Examiner and the Evangelist: Authorities of Music and Empire, c. 1894,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 145, no. 2 (2020): 317–50; ibid., “Archiving the Audible Debris of Empire: On a Mission Between Africa and Britain,” Postcolonial Studies 26, no. 3 (2023): 360–385; Roe-Min Kok, “Imperial Music Examinations in South Asia: Colonial Imaginaries, Postcolonial Realities,” Postcolonial Studies 26, no. 3 (2023): 386–405.
50. 50.  Johnson-Williams, “The Examiner,” 326. See also Kok, “Imperial Music Examinations,” 395, where she cites British reports on the alleged lack of “discipline” among North Indian ABRSM examination candidates. The cognitive effects of imperial music pedagogy—and the forms of very real resistance to these infringements—need greater attention. The editors of this volume would like to thank Erin Johnson-Williams for fruitful discussions and email exchanges on this topic over the course of 2023.
51. 51.  See Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press, 2020).
52. 52.  David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, rev. ed. (New York: Doubleday, 1953), 41–42. Emphasis ours. Crary also discusses Riesman in Suspensions of Perception, 53.
53. 53.  Kane’s essay borrows from and critiques Jonathan Sterne’s notion of “audile techniques” as explored in The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
54. 54.  Tarde, L’opinion et la foule, 40: “la mutuelle contagion des sentiments parmi les individus rassemblés.”
55. 55.  Ibid., 45: “toute dissidence s’efface momentanément dans la communion d’un même désir, le désir de se voir, de se coudoyer, de sympathiser”; ibid., 47: “Les bons effets des foules d’amour et de joie se cachent dans les replis du coeur, où, longtemps après la fête, subsiste un surcroît de disposition sympathique et conciliante qui se traduit sous mille formes inaperçues dans les gestes, dans les paroles, dans les rapports de la vie journalière.”
56. 56.  G. Mensch, Ludwig van Beethoven. Ein musikalisches Charakterbild (Leipzig: Leudart, 1871), 161: “Diese vier Persönlichkeiten bewegen sich in dem echten Beethovenschen Quartett mit einander und gegen einander, indem sie sich begleiten und ergänzen, aber auch herausfordern und bekämpfen, indem sie fragen und antworten, bejahen und verneinen, aber immer dasselbe Ziel verfolgen und dem Schutz- und Trutz-Bündniß treu bleiben.”
57. 57.  Johann Gottfried von Herder, Kalligone vol. 2 (Leipzig: Hartnoch, 1800), 159: “. . . sie sind Eins und nicht Eins; sie verlassen, suchen, verfolgen, widersprechen, bekämpfen, verstärken, vernichten einander, und erwecken und beleben und trösten und schmeicheln und umarmen einander wieder, bis sie zuletzt in Einem Ton ersterben.” As Ryan Minor points out, the individuated collectivity of choral singing, as imagined by Herder, was all too easily complicated (and co-opted) by German nationalist currents across the nineteenth century. See Minor, Choral Fantasies: Music, Festivity, and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 8–32.
58. 58.  Jean-Philippe Rameau, Nouveau système de musique théorique (Paris: Ballard, 1726), 17–18; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lettre sur la musique françoise, 2nd ed. (Paris: Pissot, 1753), 35–45.
59. 59.  Benjamin Franklin, Majault, Le Roy, Sallin, Jean-Sylvain Bailly, d’Arcet, De Bory, Joseph-Ignace Guillotin & Antoine Lavoisier, Report of Dr. Benjamin Franklin, and Other Commissioners: Charged by the King of France, with the Examination of the Animal Magnetism, as Now Practised at Paris. Translated from the French. With an Historical Introduction (London: J. Johnson, 1785), 39–40.
60. 60.  Ibid., 53–54.
61. 61.  For discussions of the implications of gender and class in hypnotic subjecthood see Jan Goldstein, Hysteria Complicated by Ecstasy: The Case of Nanette Leroux (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); and Céline Frigau Manning, Ce que la musique fait à l’hypnose: Une relation spectaculaire au XIXe siècle (Dijon: les presses du réel, 2021).
62. 62.  Essential treatments of mesmerism can be found in Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968; Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
63. 63.  Carmel Raz, “Talking to the Hand: The ‘Hysterical Epistemology’ of the Migrating Sensorium,” in “Colloquy: Attention, Anxiety, and Audition’s Histories,” 552–57.
64. 64.  The case of Dr. John Elliotson’s years-long deception by Jane Okey is an illustrative and entertaining example of this; see Winter, Mesmerized, 79–108; see also Kélina Gotman, “Ghost Dancing: Excess, Waste and the American West,” in Choreomania: Dance and Disorder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 224–51.
65. 65.  Heinrich Heine, “Lutetia—Musikalische Saison von 1844—Anhang,” Paris, 25 April 1844, trans. Charles Godfrey Leland, in Heinrich Heine: The Works, vol. 4: The Salon (London: William Heinemann, 1895), 418–19.
66. 66.  Hypnotic trances induced by unusual sounds are reported as late as the 1890s in the experiments of Jean-Martin Charcot at the Sâlpetriere, who experimented on unusually “sensitive” working-class women with exotic instruments such as gongs and tuning forks. See James Kennaway, “Musical Hypnosis: Sound and Selfhood from Mesmerism to Brainwashing,” Social History of Medicine 25, no. 2 (2012): 271–89; Carmel Raz, “Of Sound Minds and Tuning Forks: Neuroscience’s Vibratory Histories,” in The Science-Music Borderlands: Reckoning with the Past and Imagining the Future, ed. Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, Psyche Loui, & Deirdre Loughridge (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023), 115–29.
67. 67.  See Russ Castronovo, “The Antislavery Unconscious: Mesmerism, Vodun, and ‘Equality,’” The Mississippi Quarterly 53, no. 1 (1999): 41–56.
68. 68.  “La littérature religieuse et philosophique de l’Orient, de l’Inde en particulier, abonde en documents dont on a pu extraire une sorte de manuel opératoire pour parvenir à l’extase.” Théodule Ribot, Les maladies de la volonté (Paris: Librairie Germer Baillière, 1883), 124; Théodule Ribot, The Diseases of the Will, 4th enlarged English edition, trans. Merwin-Marie Snell (Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1915), 94.
69. 69.  “Se tenir immobile, regarder fixement le ciel, ou un objet lumineux . . . répéter continuellement le monosyllabe Oum (Brahm),” ibid., 124, trans. The Diseases of the Will, 95.
70. 70.  Théodule Ribot, Psychologie de l’attention (Paris: Alcan, 1889), 144–49; translation by J. Fitzgerald in The Psychology of Attention, trans. J. Fitzgerald (Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1890), 97–100.
71. 71.  “Toutes ses puissances perdent leur activité naturelle; elles n’ont aucune connaissance de leurs opérations. . . . Quant à l’entendement, s’il entend, c’est par un mode qui lui reste inconnu, et il ne peut comprendre rien de ce qu’il entend.” Ribot, Les maladies de la volonté, 130; trans. The Diseases of the Will, 99.
72. 72.  Ibid., 140, trans. The Diseases of the Will, 89.
73. 73.  “l’objet de l’art est d’endormir les puissances actives ou plutôt résistantes de notre personnalité.” Henri Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (Paris: Alcan, 1889), 11; translated by F. L. Pogson as Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (London: George Allen & Company, 1913), 14.
74. 74.  “le rythme et la mesure suspendent la circulation normale de nos sensations et de nos idées en faisant osciller notre attention entre des points fixes.” Bergson, Essai, 11, trans. Pogson, Time and Free Will, 14–15.
75. 75.  “une forme atténuée, raffinés et en quelque sorte spiritualisés, les procédés par lesquels on obtient ordinairement l’état d’hypnose.” Bergson, Essai, 11, trans. Pogson, Time and Free Will, 14.
76. 76.  Joseph Segond, La prière: étude de psychologie religieuse (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1911), 69. Quoted and translated in Kieffer, “Mystics and Skeptics: Joseph Segond’s Psychology of Prayer,” this volume, 215.
77. 77.  As in Raphäel Cor, Le cas Debussy (Paris: Bibliothèque de temps présent, 1910). For wider context see Alexandra Kieffer, “Bergson, Debussy, and Early Twentieth-Century Psychologie,” Colloquy, “Attention, Anxiety, and Audition’s Histories,” 563–69; and idem, Debussy’s Critics: Sound, Affect, and the Experience of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
78. 78.  “. . . attention extrême est ce qui constitue dans l’homme la faculté créatrice.” Simone Weil, La Pesanteur et la Grâce (Paris: Plon, 1947), 119, translated as Gravity and Grace by Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 117.
79. 79.  “L’attention seule, cette attention si pleine que le “je” disparaît, est requise de moi.” Weil, La Pesanteur, 120, trans. in Gravity and Grace, 118.
80. 80.  “La quantité de génie créateur d’une époque est rigoureusement proportionnelle à la quantité d’attention extrême, donc de religion authentique à cette époque.” Weil, La Pesanteur, 119, trans. Gravity and Grace, 117. Weil’s interest in attention spans much of her work including her slightly earlier Attente de Dieu [Waiting for God], written 1942, published 1951.
81. 81.  On Weil’s relationship with these traditions, see A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone and Lucian Stone, Simone Weil and Theology (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2013). For a recent philosophical exploration of attention as selflessness see Jonardon Ganeri, Attention Not Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
82. 82.  As Bergson wrote to Joseph Segond (18 January 1911): “You have submitted to penetrating analysis the fundamental state of a praying individual and the states that are like harmonics, those that, reinforcing it, give it its psychological timbre. You have studied the mystics as they should be studied, with sympathy, but also submitting them to penetrating critique.” In Henri Bergson, “Henri Bergson (1859–1941) Lettres à Joseph Segond (1872–1954),” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 205, no. 4 (October–December 2015): 543–560, at 543.
83. 83.  Trippett, “Franz, Stumpf, Riemann, Kafka: Towards an Auditory Unconscious ca.1883,” this volume.
84. 84.  Theodor Reik, Listening with the Third Ear: The Inner Experience of a Psychoanalyst (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, orig. pub. 1948, repr. 1998). See chap. XV, “The Third Ear,” 144–56 (here at 145). The connection between these “unconscious messages” and theories of an elusive inner language is explored in Viktoria Tkaczyk, Thinking with Sound: A New Program in the Sciences and Humanities Around 1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023), 15–54.
85. 85.  Reik, Listening with the Third Ear, chap. XVI, “Free-Floating Attention,” 157–72.
86. 86.  Alexander Evan Bonus, “The Metronomic Performance Practice: A History of Rhythm, Metronomes, and the Mechanization of Musicality” (PhD diss., Case Western Reserve University, 2010), 225.
87. 87.  John Holden, Essay towards a Rational System of Music (Glasgow: Urie, 1770), 113.
88. 88.  For more on Holden’s ideas about attention see Carmel Raz, Hearing with the Mind.
89. 89.  Johann Philipp Kirnberger, Die Kunst des reinen Satzes in der Musik II (Berlin and Königsberg: Decker und Hartung, 1776), 114–15.
90. 90.  See Roger Mathew Grant, Beating Time and Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 200–07.
91. 91.  Prominent voices include Peter Lichtenthal, François Joseph Fétis, and Gottfried Weber, though the latter, as Grant notes, had other reasons for disparaging the metronome, which competed with his own chronometer. Ibid., 201–203.
92. 92.  Adolf B. Marx, The Music of the Nineteenth Century and its Culture: Method of Musical Instruction, trans. August Heinrich Wehrhan (London: Robert Cocks and Co., 1855), 32.
93. 93.  See, e.g., Ernst Kurth, Bruckner (Berlin, Max Hesses Verlag, 1925); Victor Zuckerkandl, The Sense of Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956).
94. 94.  See Henning Schmidgen, “The Donders Machine: Matter, Signs, and Time in a Physiological Experiment, ca. 1865,” Configurations 13, vol. 2 (2005): 211–56.
95. 95.  Wilhelm M. Wundt, An Introduction to Psychology, trans. Rudolf Painter (New York: Macmillan, 1912), 4.
96. 96.  See William James, “The Perception of Time,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 20, no. 4 (1886): 374–407, at 380.
97. 97.  Thaddeus L. Bolton, “Rhythm,” American Journal of Psychology 6.2 (1894), 211–12.
98. 98.  Jean-Philippe Rameau, Nouveau système de musique théorique (Paris: Ballard, 1726), iii, translated in B. Glenn Chandler, “Rameau’s ‘Nouveau systeme de musique theorique’: An Annotated Translation With Commentary” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1975), 159; Jean-Philippe Rameau, Nouveau système de musique théorique (Paris: Ballard, 1726), iii: “. . . se distinguent encore dans les Tymbales, dans le Son le plus grave d’une Trompette, dans les Cloches, et cetera pourvû qu’on donne pour lors toute son attention aux ondulations qui forment une espece de murmure dans l’Air, immediatement après le Son dominant de l’Instrument propre à cet effet, sans s’occuper pour lors de ce Son dominant, ny sans y être distrait par aucun bruit étranger.” A similar observation can be found in Holden, Essay, 47.
99. 99.  See Benjamin Steege, Helmholtz and the Modern Listener (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012),80–122.
100. 100.  Hermann von Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music, trans. Alexander J. Ellis (London: Longman, 1875), 82; Helmholtz, Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen, 88: “Wenn man die Resonanzkugel an das Ohr setzt, welche irgend einem bestimmten Obertone, z. B. g’ des Klanges c, entspricht, und dann den Klang c angiebt, so hört man das g’ durch die Kugel um Vieles verstärkt. . . . wohl kann man diese Verstärkung durch die Kugel benutzen, um das Ohr auf den Ton, den es hören soll, aufmerksam zu machen. Wenn man nachher die Kugel allmälig wieder vom Ohre entfernt, so wird das g’ schwächer; indessen die Aufmerksamkeit, welche einmal darauf gerichtet worden ist, bleibt nun leichter an diesen Ton gefesselt, und der Beobachter hört diesen Ton nun auch in dem natürlichen unveränderten Klange der angegebenen Note mit nicht unterstütztem Ohre. Es soll also die Resonanzkugel hierbei nur dazu dienen, das Ohr aufmerksam zu machen auf den Ton, den es hören soll.”
101. 101.  “eine gewisse ungestörte Concentration der Aufmerksamkeit [ist] nöthig, um die Analyse der Klänge durch das Ohr allein auszuführen.” Helmholtz, Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen, 89; Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone, 82.
102. 102.  On Müller’s critique of Helmholtz’s overtone experiments see Steege, Helmholtz and the Modern Listener, 108–10.
103. 103.  “So hören wir aus einem Zusammenklang einen vorher für sich angegebenen Ton besonders deutlich. . . . Dies führt uns unmittelbar auf die inneren Bedingungen der Aufmerksamkeit. Gehen wir von der zuletzt besprochenen Beobachtung aus, so kann das geübte Ohr einen schwachen Theilton eines Klanges bekanntlich auch dann wahrnehmen, wenn derselbe ihm nicht zuvor als gesonderter Eindruck gegeben wurde. Bei näherer Beobachtung findet man aber stets, dass man sich in diesem Fall zunächst das Erinnerungsbild des zu hörenden Tones zurückruft und ihn dann erst aus dem ganzen Klang heraushört.” Wilhelm M. Wundt, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1874), 720–21.
104. 104.  “Jede Vorstellung bedarf einer gewissen Zeit, um zum Blickpunkt des Bewusstseins hindurchzudringen. Während dessen finden wir stets in uns das eigenthümliche Gefühl des Aufmerkens. Dasselbe ist um so lebhafter, je mehr der Blickpunkt des Bewusstseins sich concentrirt, und es pflegt in diesem Falle noch fortzudauern, auch nachdem die Vorstellung vollkommen klar vor dem Bewusstsein steht. In seinem vorbereitenden Stadium wird es am deutlichsten im Zustande des Besinnens oder der Spannung auf einen erwarteten Eindruck erfasst. . . . Wir empfinden das Aufmerken als etwas das von uns selbst ausgeht, wenn wir auch deutlich den Eindruck, der unsere Aufmersamkeit auf sich lenkt, als einen äusseren vorstellen. Hierdurch tritt dieser Zustand in die nächste Verbindung mit jenem, welcher der willkürlichen Bewegung vorausgeht.” Ibid., 721.
105. 105.  William James, The Principles of Psychology 1 (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1893), 439.
106. 106.  Ibid., 441, 444.
107. 107.  Ibid., 444.
108. 108.  See, for instance, James Sully, Sensation and Intuition: Studies in Psychology and Aesthetics (London: Henry S. King & Co, 1874); Sully, Outlines of Psychology, with Special Reference to the Theory of Education (Longsman, Green and Company, 1885).
109. 109.  Michael Weinstein-Reiman, “Printing Piano Pedagogy: Experimental Psychology and Marie Jaëll’s Theory of Touch,” Nineteenth-Century Music Review 18, no. 3 (2021), 427. Jaëll’s haptic approach to pianistic attention is framed in her treatise La musique et la psychologie (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1896).
110. 110.  Tobias Matthay, Musical Interpretation: Its Laws and Principles, and Their Application in Teaching and Performing (Boston: Boston Music Company, 1913), 147. Original italics and small caps.
111. 111.  Media transformations during the early-mid twentieth century, and resultant shifts in auditory culture, are dealt with in foundational sound studies literature including Jonathan Sterne, The Sound Studies Reader (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012); Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Michael Bull, Les Back, and David Howes, eds., The Auditory Culture Reader (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).
112. 112.  E. Colin Cherry, “Some Experiments on the Recognition of Speech, with One and with Two Ears,” The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 25, no. 5 (1953): 975–79.
113. 113.  Albert S. Bregman, Auditory Scene Analysis: The Perceptual Organization of Sound (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). For a comprehensive account of the history of binaural listening, starting in the 1820s, see Gascia Ouzonian, Stereophonica: Sound and Space in Science, Technology, and the Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021); see also Viktoria Tkaczyk, Thinking with Sound.
114. 114.  On the problematic distinction between E-Musik and U-Musik see Frieder W. Bergner, “Das E und das U in der Musik,” Glarean Magazin (10 August 2007), http://glareanverlag.wordpress.com/category/u-und-e-musik/, accessed November 2025.
115. 115.  This capacity for music to siphon off some (but not all) cognitive energy became key to the development of “productivity” soundscapes including Muzak, which functioned as a mild distraction from repetitive or dehumanizing labor; see Allen Anderson, “Neo-Muzak and the Business of Mood,” Critical Inquiry 41, no. 4 (2015): 811–40. On attentional dynamics of passive or “ubiquitous” listening, see Anahid Kassabian, Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity (University of California Press, 2013).
116. 116.  Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice (Lincoln, NE: Deep Listening Publications, 2005).
117. 117.  John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 93.
118. 118.  Milton Babbitt, “The Composer as Specialist,” in The Collected Essays of Milton Babbitt, ed. Stephen Peles et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 51. The essay was first published under the title “Who Cares If You Listen,” in High Fidelity 8, no. 2 (February 1958): 38–40, 126–27; this title was the editors’, not Babbitt’s.
119. 119.  Michel Foucault, Pierre Boulez, and John Rahn, “Contemporary Music and the Public,” Perspectives of New Music 24, no. 1 (1985), 11.
120. 120.  As Lerdahl explains, “Musical cognition has a bias for hierarchical organization. Simultaneous tempos instead produce independent organizations competing for attention. The difficulties in attending to more than one such organization are well known (Cherry 1953) and are ameliorated only if the vertical correspondences are coherent (Sloboda 1985), a condition that only partly obtains in this case.” Fred Lerdahl, “Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems,” Contemporary Music Review 6, no. 2 (1992), 106.
121. 121.  Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).