by Deirdre Loughridge
It is often claimed that our world has become so dominated by visual media that the ability to attend to music alone has been greatly diminished. In 1994, for instance, Leon Botstein observed a consensus within the music industry that “without a visual element or some ‘interactive’ component, classical music will continue to lose ‘market share’”; under these conditions, “pure listening itself - without visual or linguistic elements - is at risk” (Botstein 181). In 2010, Arved Ashby questioned whether one can “speak any longer of listening to music in any practical sense rather than watching-observing-listening to music,” since the Internet and media convergence have produced a world in which one “rarely experiences any kind of sound without a visual key or complement.” According to Ashby, the current “subservience of the musical to the visual” continues a “150-year trajectory of the ‘purely musical’ losing out to extramusical imagery” that began with the rise of program music in the 1830s (Ashby 246-248).
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Projection screens at the New World Symphony in Miami. |
As I show in my book, Haydn’s Sunrise, Beethoven’s Shadow, however, not only the proliferation of lens and image-projection technologies, but also their encounters with music began far earlier than many narratives of audiovisualization and histories of multimedia have allowed. From the material culture and performance practices of the eighteenth century, optical technologies moved into musical discourse and habits of body and thought, helping shape the otherworldly orientation and silent, attentive listening of musical romanticism. By examining innovative mixtures of music and moving images in eighteenth-century popular science, street entertainments, opera and music criticism, Haydn’s Sunrise, Beethoven’s Shadow recovers a vibrant audiovisual culture essential to understanding early romantic discourses about music and modes of listening.
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Early examples of audiovisual culture. |
Music historians find ourselves at a similar juncture, as an emblematic institution of our subject – the concert hall – has become a space of screens as well as musical works, the address to eyes as well as ears made plain. From the perspective of twentieth-century narratives of “the rise of instrumental music” or “the emancipation of music from language,” this development appears to threaten the art, to turn musical works into musical wallpaper and absolute music into obsolete music. But it’s the historiography, not the music, that is past its expiration date. Like projected photography, “pure” music now stands more clearly not as an ultimate form but as one possible, partial enframing among a wider range of mixed musical practices – practices that belong accordingly in our music histories.

- Ashby, Arved. Absolute Music, Mechanical Reproduction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.
- Botstein, Leon. “Music, Technology, and the Public.” The Musical Quarterly 78/2 (1994): 177-188.
- Elsaesser, Thomas. “Early Film History and Multi-Media: An Archaeology of Possible Futures?” In New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, ed. Wendy Hui Kyong Chung and Thomas Keenan, 13-25. New York: Routledge Press, 2006.
- Richardson John, Claudia Gorbman, Carol Vernallis, eds. Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
- Vernallis, Carol. Unruly Media: YouTube, Music Video, and the New Digital Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
- Elsaesser, Thomas. “Early Film History and Multi-Media: An Archaeology of Possible Futures?” In New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, ed. Wendy Hui Kyong Chung and Thomas Keenan, 13-25. New York: Routledge Press, 2006.
- Richardson John, Claudia Gorbman, Carol Vernallis, eds. Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
- Vernallis, Carol. Unruly Media: YouTube, Music Video, and the New Digital Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.