Popular Classics: Western Art Music and the Everyday Listener

This project seeks to re-write the history of twentieth-century art music from a novel perspective: that of the everyday listener. Despite significant advances in reception and listening studies over the past 30 years, histories of Western art music continue to privilege critics' and academics' voices. This has contributed to a narrow vision of music history dominated by revolutionary modernists and their elite critics-a history that obscures how older styles of art music, such as classical and romantic, that were much more widely listened to by the public, became deeply embedded in the day-to-day of modern life. My project pursues a broader account: it examines the kinds of emotional investments that non-expert listeners made in art music; and recovers the listening rituals-particularly those associated with listening at home-that reflected and shaped these cultural values. In so doing, it explains not only how such a broad audience for art music was sustained, but more importantly, why listeners believed that art music mattered.

To reanimate historical audiences' perspectives, my research centres on the audience of the twentieth century's most influential music educator, Leonard Bernstein. Although best remembered as a composer and conductor, Bernstein's legacy as an educator is such that he has been credited with nothing less than "convert[ing] an entire generation of casual American music listeners into avid music lovers." To recover this other aspect of Bernstein's career, I draw on two data sets. First, I use the huge collection of undocumented fan-mail in the Leonard Bernstein Archive, which Bernstein received during the 1950s,1960s and 1970s - the decades from which the majority of his CBS broadcasts date. This correspondence sheds light on the value that past generations of listeners found in classical music and how they articulated their emotional investments. It also enables me to reconstruct the dynamic relationship that existed between pedagogue and student, even where these "encounters" were via television. Second, I will conduct at least 30 new oral history interviews with former television audience members. These oral histories will complement my archival research, recovering the listening rituals that accompanied viewing of Bernstein's broadcasts, and exploring the significance that listeners perceive these classical music encounters to have had on their long-term artistic interests. This research will be published as a monograph and a journal special edition.

Beyond providing a new account of 20th-century musical culture, my project uses this historical research to initiate a conversation about arts outreach today. Recent years have witnessed a heated international debate in the Anglophone sphere about the place of the arts and humanities in education, a debate whose stakes have only been heightened by the pandemic. Attempts to justify on-going investment have focused overwhelmingly on economic and social benefits, while overlooking the question of the arts' emotional appeal. In reanimating the emotional investments made by historical audiences, my project opens the way to ask how engaging with this overlooked aspect could provide a new and powerful means of articulating why the arts matter in the present day. This question is explored through two interconnected strands of engagement activities. First, taking advantage of social media's interactive nature, I seek to engage a community interested in music education and the lessons that Bernstein's work can inspire via a monthly podcast and vlog, hosted on buzzsprout and listed on all major podcast repositories. Second, I will work collaboratively with the Project Executive and project partner Positive Note, a classical music film production company, to produce 4 youtube films and 8 TikTok shorts, aimed at KS4 pupils and their teachers, which put lessons learnt from Bernstein's audiences into practice for young audiences today.