Despite significant advances in reception and listening studies over the past three decades, attempts to account for listener experience have continued to foreground critics, composers and practitioners, whose perspectives are readily discoverable through the public press. In contrast, this paper seeks to recover the voices of “ordinary” classical music listeners in mid-twentieth-century America, asking what the act of listening to Western art music meant to them and what (dis)pleasures they derived from it.

It takes as its starting point the vast and largely undocumented collection of fan mail sent during the 1960s and early 1970s to American conductor, composer and music educator Leonard Bernstein. Using this, the paper explores the ways in which classical music culture was embedded in an array of everyday practices – from letter-writing to autograph collecting, from school projects to television viewing. In so doing, it offers a new perspective on the emotions – one that deviates from traditional scholarly understandings of them as “excessive” and disruptive to social norms, revealing instead how emotional “excess”– such as experiences of art music as “transcendent”– could reinforce social and cultural structures. Finally, in taking historical listeners’ experiences seriously, the paper reflects on how contemporary public musicology might move beyond its routine dismissals of public opinion towards a more reparative approach.

Bio

Kate Guthrie is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Music at the University of Bristol. Her research interests lie in the cultural, political and social history of Western art music in the twentieth century. Her first book, The Art of Appreciation: Music and Middlebrow Culture in Modern Britain came out with the University of California Press in 2021. In addition, she has published numerous articles and is a recipient of the Jerome Roche and Westrup Prizes. She has recently started a new project investigating Bernstein’s audiences.

Lily Holland is a third-year PhD student at the University of Bristol studying the performance of queer gender through alter-ego characters in popular music.