Popular Classics: Western Art Music and the Everyday Listener

流行经典：西方艺术音乐与日常听众

• 批准号: AH/X012859/1
• 负责人: Kate Mabel Guthrie
• 金额: $ 26.53万
• 依托单位: University of Bristol
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Fellowship
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2023 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FX012859%2F1
• 关键词: Popular; Classics; Western; Art; Music

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.

这个项目试图从一个新颖的角度重新书写二十世纪艺术音乐的历史：日常听众的角度。尽管在过去的30年里，接受和聆听研究取得了重大进展，但西方艺术音乐史仍然重视评论家和学者的声音。这导致了由革命的现代主义者和他们的精英评论家主导的音乐史的狭隘视野——这段历史模糊了更古老的艺术音乐风格，如古典音乐和浪漫音乐，它们是如何被公众广泛倾听的，是如何深入融入现代生活的。我的项目追求更广泛的解释：它考察了非专业听众对艺术音乐的情感投资；并恢复了倾听仪式，特别是那些与在家倾听有关的仪式，这些仪式反映并塑造了这些文化价值观。这样一来，它不仅解释了如此广泛的艺术音乐听众是如何维持的，更重要的是，为什么听众认为艺术音乐很重要。为了重振历史上听众的观点，我的研究集中在二十世纪最有影响力的音乐教育家伦纳德·伯恩斯坦的听众身上。尽管伯恩斯坦最广为人知的身份是作曲家和指挥家，但他作为一名教育家留下的遗产，不亚于“将整整一代漫不经心的美国音乐听众转变为狂热的音乐爱好者”。为了还原伯恩斯坦职业生涯的另一个方面，我利用了两组数据。首先，我使用了伦纳德·伯恩斯坦档案中大量未记录的粉丝邮件，这些邮件是伯恩斯坦在20世纪50年代、60年代和70年代收到的——他在哥伦比亚广播公司的大部分广播都是从那个年代开始的。这些通信揭示了过去几代听众在古典音乐中发现的价值，以及他们如何表达自己的情感投资。它也使我能够重建教师和学生之间存在的动态关系，即使这些“相遇”是通过电视。其次，我将对前电视观众进行至少30次新的口述历史采访。这些口述历史将补充我的档案研究，恢复伴随观看伯恩斯坦广播的聆听仪式，并探索听众认为这些古典音乐遭遇对他们长期艺术兴趣的重要性。本研究将以专著和期刊专版的形式发表。除了提供20世纪音乐文化的新描述之外，我的项目还利用这一历史研究来发起一场关于今天艺术推广的对话。近年来，英语国家就艺术和人文学科在教育中的地位展开了一场激烈的国际辩论，这场辩论的利害关系因疫情而更加突出。试图证明正在进行的投资的合理性，主要集中在经济和社会效益上，而忽视了艺术的情感诉求问题。在重新激活历史观众所做的情感投资的过程中，我的项目开辟了一条道路，即如何参与这个被忽视的方面，可以提供一种新的、强大的方式来阐明为什么艺术在当今很重要。这个问题是通过两个相互关联的参与活动来探讨的。首先，利用社交媒体的互动性，我试图吸引一个对音乐教育感兴趣的社区，并通过每月在buzzsprout上托管的播客和视频博客来启发伯恩斯坦的作品，并在所有主要的播客存储库中列出。其次，我将与项目执行者和项目合作伙伴Positive Note（一家古典音乐电影制作公司）合作，制作4部youtube电影和8部TikTok短片，针对KS4学生和他们的老师，将伯恩斯坦观众的经验教训应用于今天的年轻观众。