The Vienna Philharmonic began performing regular subscription concerts in 1860. They played eight times per year, and tickets were scarce. Subscribers didn’t hear all nine Beethoven symphonies until a decade had passed. Other venues helped to make up the lack—the Vienna Conservatory, for example, or recitalists in Bösendorfer or Ehrbar Hall. Nonetheless, there just wasn’t all that much live music, and even the cornerstones of the repertory were in short supply.
The situation had improved by the 1890s. Vienna could offer a total of about 240 concerts a year. That’s a lot better. But who had the time or money to attend all of them? Nor was Vienna representative of the world in general. I don’t have facts and figures handy, but I’m willing to bet that there weren’t 240 some-odd concerts per year in 1890s Louisville, Kentucky. Performances just weren’t all that common anywhere.
Music remained solidly where it always had been: schools, courts, churches, theaters. Most of all, music was at home. It was in printed form. And people were just fine with that. Music was something you read and played. It wasn’t something you bought in pre-digested form in concerts, over the radio, on records, or downloaded via YouTube and iTunes. You made music yourself.
Our musical forbears were musically literate at a level that seems almost superhuman today. Their musical lives were almost entirely self engendered. They played music for themselves, but most importantly, they heard it by reading scores. That’s why they could get to know the Beethoven symphonies intimately and well, even if they hardly ever heard them performed by an orchestra. They didn’t need an orchestra. They had one in their heads.
Brahms turned down an invitation to the opera, saying that he could enjoy a much better performance by staying home with the score. He might have been grandstanding a bit, but nonetheless the point is significant. Nobody would have gasped and said: oh, my God! Can you actually HEAR the music in your mind when you read the score? Of course he could hear the music in his mind. He was a musician.
George Bernard Shaw wrote his first reviews of Wagner’s Parsifal after having spent some evenings at home poring over the score. The author of Saint Joan was a fine music critic in his day. And in his day, music critics could hear the music in their minds. They were musicians.
Musicians got it from their inner ear or they didn’t get it at all. In Bach’s day they were comfortable reading in five or six clefs; they could transpose at sight and improvise from a bass line. Many of them composed regularly. They played numerous instruments. Their listening was far more substantive than today’s typical surface skim; they heard relationships and techniques and organic resonances. And they remembered what they had heard. We could still do that today—except that in most cases we lack the training.
Musical performances, whether live or on record, unfold in real time, marching along inexorably second by second, minute by minute. You are obliged to listen on the fly, grabbing those experiences as they streak by. But when you have the music in your head, you have all the time you need to listen deeply. You can go back and re-examine your hearing; you can revisit and revise, seek better understanding, listen past the momentary surface flow. The inner ear can stop time as it wishes, or refold causality and arc right over phenomena that may be far apart. The inner ear is not limited by clock time; literate hearing sets us free from the brutal constraints of one-way temporal progression.
It’s rather like reading a novel versus seeing a movie adaptation. While reading we’re free to roam about the book at will, even to add our own details as seems appropriate, slow down or speed up or stop or skip or edit or rewrite or reconstruct or resonate. Reading a book involves our imagination, as our minds are obliged to envision the characters and hear them speak and see their surroundings and even smell or taste or feel them. The movie adaptation does most of that for us; it gives the characters faces and voices and clothes and mannerisms, it creates the scenery and settings. But even more to the point, a movie decides what and when and how and even if we will see and hear something. We gain in convenience. But we miss a lot. Too much. We lose the ability to roam and explore. We get what the movie makers have given us, and no more.
That’s what a performance does: it gives what it gives and no more. There is no stepping outside the strict linearity of the time to seek connections, resonances, or hitherto unsuspected layers. We must ride the ride as designed. As with movie adaptations we gain in convenience. But not only do we sacrifice our internal musicianship, if external listening is our only listening we lose the ability to hear in any other way. We become functional musical illiterates—able to see music on the page, but not hear it internally; able to hear music when performed, but not generate it from within. We become the equivalent of first-graders laboriously deciphering See Spot run.
By the 1890s ever-increasing access to performed music was rapidly debasing inner ears. Musical training shied away from eartraining and swerved towards history, repertory, and “performance practice” while musical literacy itself languished. As the twentieth century added radio and recordings to the mix, even trained musicians came to rely on gizmos to do their listening for them.
And nowadays? We live in an era of severely debased musical literacy. Those of us who teach theory or eartraining are painfully aware that many professionally-bound students cannot hear music solely from notation. See Spot run. We conservatory professors do what we can, but without early childhood training, inner ears wither and waste away. The usual two-year eartraining program—a sop—is all too often scorned as a bothersome imposition of no particular value. The flowering of music notation software has produced a generation of composers who depend on digitally sampled playback in order hear their own work. Conception has been replaced by editing. Shostakovich slammed Prokofiev for needing the piano to compose. Imagine what old Dmitri would say if Prokofiev was hitting the "Play" button in Sibelius every time he wrote a few measures.
Coherent musical rhetoric has withered right along with inner ears. Brahms was one of the last of those craftsmen whose music demands the ability to absorb music past the superficial borders of perception. The complex arguments of a Brahms symphony are lost on most listeners; instead, the sound-byte of Wagnerian leitmotivs, the dogged repetition of Bruckner, or the Mahlerian confessional-cum-psychiatrist’s-couch take the place of reasoned discourse in music. Thematische arbeit, the "working out" of compositional materials, is barely audible at the surface level. Only via unconstrained and persistent contemplation can the resonances make themselves heard. Heinrich Schenker knew all about that; he also knew that he was a salmon swimming upstream. So he argued and cajoled and taught and published, never losing sight of those inner structures that reveal themselves only to the gradual unfolding of the musical mind. Many of his colleagues considered him to be a crackpot, as do some musicians today. But he wasn’t. He had Beethoven’s inner ear in a world that was forgetting what it meant to hear, really hear.
Listening isn’t necessarily hearing. Without hearing there is no literacy. If musical literacy vanishes altogether, our future is grim indeed—a parade of puerilities and incoherencies. We will become a culture of repeaters and copiers and reconstructors, capable only of reacting instead of creating, describing instead of understanding. Maybe it has already happened.
After all, the 20th century failed to produce a single Beethoven. You know, the deaf guy.