Hearing Things Music and Sounds the Traveller Heard and Didn ’ t Hear on the Grand Tour

For Charles Burney, as for other Enlightenment scholars engaged in historicising music, the problem was not only how to reconstruct a history of something as ephemeral as music, but the more intractable one of cultural boundaries. Non-European music could be excluded from a general history on the grounds that it was so much noise and no music. The music of Egypt and classical antiquity, on the other hand, were likely ancestors of European music and clearly had to be accorded a place within the general history. But before that place could be determined, Burney and his contemporaries were faced with a stunning silence. What was Egyptian music? What were its instruments? What its sound? The paper examines the work of scholars like Burney and James Bruce and their efforts to reconstruct past music by traveling to exotic places. Travel and a form of historical reenactment emerge as central not only to eighteenth-century historical method, but central, too, to the reconstruction of past sonic worlds. This essay argues that this method remains available to contemporary scholars as well.

was both aleatoric and cacophonic.Via Goethe's Italian Journey (published in 1816), we establish the centrality of sound to the grand tour-little remarked on in the scholarly literature-as well as sound's imbrication in other modes of cultural appreciation and in alternative forms of knowledge making. 2 Since sound and music were central to the eighteenth--century traveller's experience, it will be argued that there is something to be learned by examining the types of auditory experience sought out by the traveller, as well as from the auditory experiences elaborated, imagined or elided in travellers' accounts of their journeys.Finally, this article raises questions about what it meant to listen in the eighteenth century and, by implication, asks what it means for us, in the present, to listen to the past and so participate in a broad and thickly described cultural history of sound and music.
As generations of rich young men had done before him, Goethe set off for Italy in 1786 in the expectation that the journey would open new vistas.Exposed, at last, to the heritage of classical antiquity, he would finally enjoy that which lent menand increasingly women-a degree of urbanity and self--assuredness.The grand tour was a journey that consolidated familial and social ties, opened commercial possibilities, launched artistic careers and marked the start of adult life. 3Of course, Goethe was no longer a boy.At thirty--seven, he was known throughout Europe for his Sturm und Drang novella, Die Leiden des jungen Werther (1774); he had been appointed Privy Councillor by Duke Carl August, and recently ennobled.With considerable professional responsibilities, he somehow found time for a lively creative and social life.Still, Weimar was not Paris or Rome and he longed for something more.As the carriage took him away from the pinching court, secure in his assumed identity he felt the clouds lift, the vegetation luxuriate and the landscape grow picturesque.
The journey would be Goethe's making as a man of science.The intensity of the Mediterranean light prompted an investigation of colour and its perception, resulting in a vast treatise on colour theory that Goethe later deemed his best work.
He stopped often to geologise and to botanise and, with Linnaeus in his pocket, was constantly on the look out for new plants.As he wrote to his friend Johann Gottfried Herder, he sought the very essence of 'plantness', the archetypal Urpflanze that would enable all plants to be recognised as plants. 4On a more prosaic note, Goethe looked forward to eating grapes and tasting his first fig. 5In Palermo he toured the public gardens, so perfect in their layout and botanical variety that they invoked the garden of Alcinous, the superabundant garden in Homer's Odyssey. 6id the sensory proliferation that was Goethe's tour, there was also music.
Close to home, he attended an opera and remarked on the skill of the Jesuit organ builders in Regensburg. 7A girl walking with her father by the side of the road joined Goethe in his carriage and he was charmed by her musicality and naïve curiosity.
The strings of the girl's harp served as a kind of weather barometer, going flat whenever it rained.On this leg of the journey, the instrument sounded sharp-a happy omen for Goethe and his companion. 8Further south, Goethe remarked on music making at a local market.The square was piled high with fruit and vegetables; the people were constantly shouting, throwing things, laughing and singing.It was the mild climate and cheap food, he said, that made life voluble as one ventured closer to the Tropic of Cancer.By night the peasants' music making grew louder still.
They sang satirical ballads about the Seven Years War, played the violin and dulcimer in the street, and whistled and imitated birdcalls. 9In Venice, Goethe was charmed by gondolieri singing verses by Tasso and Ariosto to their own melodies.
Such commentary suggests that whatever might be asserted about Goethe's limited musicality, the self--described 'fugitive from the north' was indeed alive to sound as he journeyed through Italy. 10In this, Goethe was like any number of other travellers who left northern cities on an established trek south.Following an itinerary that took them from London to Paris, then to Italy-Genoa, Venice, Florence and on to Rome and Naples-these grand tourists finally circled home through the German states.The more intrepid took in countries farther to the north and east-Scandinavia, the Ottoman Empire, Egypt and the Holy Lands.By the early nineteenth century, Greece-the acknowledged cradle of Western civilisation and a part of the Ottoman Empire until 1821-had been added to the itinerary.
Accompanied by a guide or cicerone, travellers were informed about where to stay and what to see.Their experiences were regulated by guidebooks, which instructed them on proper travel etiquette, and by sets of instructions known as apodemics, which helped the traveller make sense of the unfamiliar and gave them a basis upon which to make national comparisons-the socially adroit French, the serious, reflective Germans. 11 For all grand tourists, experience was thus central.Committed to a Lockean belief in the epistemological value of sensory experience, travellers felt themselves superior to stay--at--homes, whose learning was confined to hearsay and to the book.
Charles Burney (1726-1814) reminded the reader of this fact when he appropriated the opening gambit of all eighteenth--century travelogues to insist on the superiority of witnessing: to make reliable knowledge about music, he insisted, meant leaving the comfort and security of one's own hearth and travelling to the source.This had been the custom in antiquity, with the great historian--travellers like Herodotus and Asclepiades, who was said to have toured the world on a cow's back, living on its milk; and it was a practice-travelling-that Burney meant to emulate. 12For Burney, as for so many of his historian contemporaries, knowledge about music was contingent on seeing and hearing things for oneself, on the credibility of the witness, on collecting authentic artefacts, and on visiting what came to be referred to as the 'showplaces of history'. 13By applying a standard rhetorical device to musical travel, Burney pioneered a new concept: the eyewitness was transformed into an earwitness, one who testified to the subjective aural experience of travel.
Music was not formally incorporated into these eighteenth--century apodemics and yet many travellers-musicians as well as non--musicians-travelled in the expectation that musical experiences would be integral to their mobile education.Because of the greater availability of digitised eighteenth--century source material, but also because of developments within musicology that signal a growing enthusiasm for cultural historical and sociological approaches to the study of music, there is new scholarly interest in what might be thought of as the historical soundscape.Increasingly, scholars are interested in travel's contribution to the cultural history of music and, conversely, the role of music and sound in the history of travel, cross--cultural encounters, colonial practice, anthropological and racial thought, and emerging national and transnational identities. 14And yet, in writing about the sonic dimensions of travel, we are confronted with problems of terminology.Shall we refer to it as musical travel?Music of or on the grand tour?
The soundscape encountered by travellers on the grand tour?To refer to music and sound on the grand tour implies that aural phenomena were ancillary to the main business of travel.Yet we know that music and sound were commented on frequently by eighteenth--century travellers.Indeed, for some travellers the lure of Continental music was so strong as to be a motivating force behind the journey itself.By the same token, we cannot speak of music on the grand tour in unitary terms: music did not constitute a single national tradition nor a series of national traditions; moreover, the traveller's appreciation of music was not confined to serious music, nor even to modern music.At best, we can say that with some few exceptions-including Burney and Johann Friedrich Reichardt-most eighteenth-century travel commentary on music and sound was haphazard and digressive; it was interspersed with personal reflections and it contributed to a broader picture of social and cultural life.
Here, we mark sound's difference from other cultural objects.On the grand tour, classical sculpture, painting and architecture constituted a recognised and recognisable cultural corpus in which the well--healed traveller was meant to gain fluency.In Rome, the traveller expected to spend some time appreciating the Coliseum and the Pantheon; in Herculaneum, he would be led into the dark, half-excavated depths of the ancient ruins to inspect titillating wall paintings; in recently discovered Pompeii, he could marvel at time frozen beneath a layer of ash and rubble; in Naples, he might play the lotto and sample the macaroni. 15Music, in contrast, was always a more contested discursive site.To be sure, there were important destinations like the Parisian and Neapolitan operas and, for the better-connected, meetings with famous composers and performers.But by the end of the eighteenth century there was still no real consensus about the relative merits of French and Italian music, nor about the superiority of vocal over instrumental music. 16Perhaps most importantly, music lacked the classical imprimatur enjoyed by painting, sculpture and architecture.As Burney would complain while preparing his General History of Music, too little was known about the music of antiquity and what was known suggested too few similarities with music in the present. 17swering the question, 'What did the grand tourist hear?' is more difficult than might be assumed.Travellers listened to whatever was available: they heard organised music making in churches, concert rooms, pleasure gardens and opera houses, but they also listened to impromptu musicking in marketplaces, on the streets and in the fields.Thus, while Burney might have been adopting a common titular convention when he referred to his musical travelogues in terms of the Present State of Music, the books are in fact perfectly described.What constituted the 'present state of music' was an eclectic mix of old and new, of high and low, of sounds and of noise.Since scholars like Wolfgang Gratzer have drawn our attention to the need for a more expansive account of the history of listening, we might consider the question of how the eighteenth--century traveller made sense of such unfamiliar soundscapes. 18By extension, we can draw some conclusions about the ways in which travel accounts may be used to help construct a cultural history of listening that includes not only the music of Scarlatti, Jommelli and Sammartini, but also the music and the sounds that constituted a sonic backdrop for the grand tourist.
In some sense, the grand tour set up the traveller for disappointment.This was certainly the case for the English aristocrat William Beckford, who remarked on Antwerp's deadly silence and contrasted it with the 'important bustle' that had once made the city so famous. 19For our own travelling companion, Goethe, comparing his observations with the reports of earlier travellers and the present with its classical antecedents also implied a falling off from the original.His initial enthusiasm about the botanical gardens in Palermo, for instance, gave way to disappointment and frustration when he found himself unable to reconcile the Sicilian flora either with the idealised Homeric description or with the Linnaean classificatory system.'Gone were my fine poetic resolutions-the garden of Alcinous had vanished and a garden of the natural world had appeared in its stead.' 20 And, much as Goethe criticised Newton for his explanation of the frangibility of light, he took Linné to task for his reductionist approach to nature.'Why', Goethe asked in Faustian fashion, 'are we moderns so distracted, why do we let ourselves be challenged by problems which we can neither face nor solve!' 21 We find a similar, if less explicitly reflected, gesture in Goethe's assessment of music. 22Joseph Addison, writing in the first years of the century, had established a form of auditory horizon for later travellers, describing: a custom at Venice, which they tell me is particular to the common people of this country, of singing stanzas out of Tasso.They are set to a pretty solemn tune, and when one begins in any part of the Poet, it is odd but he will be answered by some body else that overhears him: So that sometimes you have ten or a dozen in the neighbourhood of one another, taking verse after verse, and running on with the poem as far as their memories will carry them. 23aders of travel writing thus knew what to expect of Venetian music.In The Confessions it was the gondoliers' singing that, Rousseau claimed, converted him to Italian music.'I had brought with me from Paris', he wrote, 'the prejudice of that city against Italian music but I had also received from nature a sensibility and niceness of distinction that prejudice cannot withstand … In listening to barcarolles, I found I had not yet known what singing was.' 24 Rousseau defined barcarolles in his Dictionary of Music (1767) as: A type of song in the Venetian dialect that the gondoliers in Venice sing.
Although the airs are made for the people, and are often composed by the gondoliers themselves, they are so melodious and charming that there is not a musician in the whole of Italy who doesn't pique himself on knowing and singing them.
The gondolieri apparently knew Tasso's epic poem 'Jerusalem Delivered' by heart and, according to Rousseau, sang alternate stanzas from boat to boat. 25 To hear the gondolieri sing was, in other words, to hear what previous travellers had heard or claimed to have heard.It was also to confirm the existence of an ancient, unbroken tradition of indigenous music making in which simple boatmen intoned classical texts; it was to uphold the ideal of Venetian musicality and, in a Rousseauvian sense, it was to revisit prelapsarian music making at its very source. 26But, as Goethe noted, gondolieri performances were now largely a thing of the past and there were no guarantees that travellers could still hear the lovely sounds that earlier travellers seem to have enjoyed. 27Motivated by the desire for a complete sensory experience of Venice, Goethe commissioned a gondolieri performance and, sitting in a boat, he became audience to the experience made famous by Joseph Addison, Rousseau and others before them.'If the listener chooses the right spot, which is half way between the [gondolieri] … the more enchanting the singing is', Goethe wrote.'The sound of their voices far away was extraordinary', he went on, 'a lament without sadness, and I was moved to tears.' 28 Here, Goethe reported that women on the Lido sang while they awaited the fishermen's return.
While there is no indication that Goethe actually heard the women singing on the Lido, he observed that the sound of their voices across the water, answered by the returning men, was like the 'singing of a lonely human being sent out into the wide world till it reached the ears of another lonely human being who [was] moved to answer it'. 29Other travellers experienced similar anxiety over what they might fail to hear.Hester Piozzi, for example, wondered aloud whether the gondolieri would ever sing and was gratified when, finally, she did hear the boatmen calling across the Grand Canal.It was, she said, a pretty, pleasing song about the flight of Erminia from Tasso's 'Jerusalem'. 30For Burney, the songs of the gondolieri were invoked in The General History of Music as a foil for the composer Jommeli, whom he met in 1770, and whose 'learned and ingenious music' Burney deemed insufficiently appreciated by the 'frivolous and depraved taste' of the Italians who preferred simple airs and barcaroles. 31ere were yet other musical experiences that Goethe and fellow grand tourists deliberately sought out. 32In Naples, Goethe's travel journal has him listening, for example, to the tarantella, a dance performed by two women to the accompaniment of castanets and the tambourine. 33This energetic dance in compound time, sometimes played for as long as several hours, had long been suggested as a cure for tarantism, a disorder said to be caused by the bite of the tarantula spider.With symptoms that reportedly included mania, convulsions and even death, tarantism had been commented on for centuries.By the end of the eighteenth century foreign travellers were curious to ascertain for themselves whether tarantism actually existed and, if so, whether music could affect a cure.
In 1753, The Gentlemen's Magazine published a letter that seemed to offer proof of music's efficacy in treating the disorder.The letter included a transcription and, apparently, a firsthand account by the father of the English composer Stephen Storace. 34 Storace reported that he had been visiting his hometown near Naples when he saw a man slump to the ground after being bitten by a tarantula.The man seemed close to death and, with neither doctor nor priest available, Storace was asked to play: he tried various pieces without success, then an old woman was fetched to teach him the antidotal tune.Within a few minutes Storace said he had learned enough to begin playing.The result, he said, was instantaneous: the tarantus leap to his feet and began moving every joint of his body.When Storace stopped playing, the victim collapsed, screamed, contorted his limbs and face, and scraped the ground with his hands.When he recommenced, the victim resumed his frenetic dance.According to Storace, the dance resembled a very wild jumping without 'rules or manners', and was not unlike the 'Chinese dances sometimes seen on the stage'.
Hour upon hour, faster and faster the music went on until Storace, too, was on the verge of collapse.Finally, the victim was given a sword with which to bleed his hands and feet.Victim and violinist collapsed, exhausted.According to the account, the man was bled some more, given a strong cordial and left to sleep for several hours, whereupon he woke, perfectly recovered.Many foreigner travellers found such reports apocryphal.Some, like A.F.
Büsching, went so far as to lampoon Storace's claims to have treated tarantism.'Had [Storace]  not had a violin on him but rather a good Spanish cane and let the back of this beggar soundly feel its power, he would have cured him a lot faster than in two hours', wrote Büsching in a 1755 article published in Hamburgisches Magazin. 35rney's Italian informants told him much the same when he inquired about the practice during his 1770 visit to Naples.'The whole thing is an imposition', a Doctor Sarao informed Burney, 'practiced by the people of Apulia, to gain money: not only the cure but the malady itself is a fraud.' 36 Burney investigated tarantism further when he visited Potsdam two years later.Although a great music enthusiast and a believer in music's curative powers, Burney's informant was doubtful: music might be able to cure ailments like insomnia and melancholy, but he suspected that the tarantella was a Neapolitan fabrication.
Notwithstanding this kind of scepticism, travellers to southern Italy expected, or were expected to report on, the tarantella. 37This reflects the widespread English enthusiasm for Italian folk customs, as reflected in a painting of Lady Hamilton, second wife of the British Envoy to Naples, famous for her tableaux vivant and for dancing the tarantella (see Figure 1).Though Goethe claimed in his travel journal to have heard the tarantella himself, he made no mention of it in the later publication, the Italian Journey.In all likelihood the journal-distributed among Goethe's friends and acquaintancessubstituted another traveller's account for his own earwitness testimony. 38rtainly, his guide, Johann Volkmann (1732-1803), author of one of the most popular guidebooks of the day, Historisch-kritische Nachrichten von Italien, doubted the authenticity of tarantism and its musical cure. 39 recognise in Goethe a tendency to gratify the expectations of the reader by claiming to have heard what was unheard is to acknowledge the difference between the author and the traveller.It is also to recognise a central convention within the travel genre-a tension between credibility and incredulity that extended not only to things seen and felt, but also to things heard. 40nce aural phenomena are often regarded as transparent forms of historical evidence, Goethe's elaborated and elided remarks on the tarantella and the barcarolle throw up historiographical problems.By exposing the anomalies and disjunctions in his and others' accounts, we recognise the need for an analytic apparatus that acknowledges the ways in which eighteenth--century reporting about music and sound was subject to rhetorical conventions.Investigating what was heard, apparently heard and wilfully or unconsciously unheard is, in other words, a means of simultaneously investigating what was at social and political stake for the traveller and the traveller's audience.
For contemporary scholars then, accounts like Goethe's provide an opportunity to do sound and music history in new ways.Rather than superimposing on the grand tour a typical set of stylistic and aesthetic categories, period groupings and national designations, we can think about eighteenth--century auditory commentary in the same messy terms as its firsthand reporters.If they made things up and heard things that were not there in order to conform to readers' expectations; if their appraisals of French music were tempered more by Rousseau than by their own ears, then they were acting no differently than other, unmusical travellers who matched their accounts of Herculaneum and Pompeii to those in the guidebooks.
And, as Charles Dickens' later Pictures from Italy makes clear, by commenting on a broader soundscape grand tourists have bequeathed us the very sound of travel itself: You have been traveling along, stupidly enough… and it has become a very jog--trot, monotonous, tiresome sort of business … [Finally] the first indication of a town appears … and the carriage begins to rattle and roll over a horribly uneven pavement … Whip, wheels, driver, stones, beggars, children, crack, crack, crack; helo! hola! charité pour l'amour de Dieu! crick--crack--crick--crack; crick, crick, crick; bump, jolt, crack, bump, crick-crack; round the corner, up the narrow street, down the paved hill on the other side; in the gutter; bump, bump ... 41 The grand tour provided an ever--changing sonic backdrop that ran parallel to the more regulated, professionalised appraisal of serious music.And it is here, I think, that we can recuperate something of the lost auditory world of the eighteenth century-one that recovers both its music and its sounds; here that we find an echo of the musical past awaiting its reconstruction. 42  Hogarth's Enraged Musician, in effect, returns us to London at the end of our Italian grand tour.The cacophony we meant to escape by touring the Continent awaits us at the point of origin.Gritty and unprettified, Hogarth presents us with the complex soundscape of modern life. 43e engraving offers more than a straightforward commentary on the material conditions of musical life in the eighteenth century.It may also be seen as a metaphor for aesthetic discourses, and hence as a window into eighteenth--century ideas about the nature and purpose of music and sound.Hogarth's scene demonstrates a kind of democratisation of sound production, for everyone, even the baby, is able to participate in this sonic marketplace.In contrast to an earlier age when musicians and musical genres were the preserve of specific times, places and occasions, we now find a breakdown in the hierarchical ordering of music that constitutes a collapse in the sonic ancient regime.In this new economy, it is the serious musician who struggles to find a place where his music will be valued and the distinctions between performer and listener nicely preserved.The musician must compete with tooting and screeching for his livelihood and secure a privileged space in which to practice his art.While he objects to the encroachments on his domain, he has no avenue of aesthetic recourse.Indeed, there is no audience for his tirade because in this musical free--for--all, the nature of music itself is open to question.
Music has become subject to the market's 'invisible hand', as well as its 'invisible ear'.In this riot of sound, music is cleaved from its purpose.The baby is not lulled by its mother's song; the ballad conveys no moral; goods can neither be sold nor animals herded by the street vendors' calls.Instead we are presented with a musical dystopia, where each sound--maker remains isolated within his or her own aural realm.Only the milkmaid crying her wares seems to be exempt from this.Her song, like her gaze, is directed out of the frame of the picture, extending an invitation to participate in the communicative potential of sound and music.We must become the scene's invisible listeners and must listen in new ways as we attempt to reconstruct the soundscape of an earlier age. - And it is thanks to such travel reports that we have inherited a vivid record of eighteenth--century music making, written with the fresh eye and ear of the outsider-Joseph Addison's Remarks on Several Parts of Italy (1705); Burney's Musical Tours through France and Italy (1770), and the Lowlands and the German states (1772); Susan Burney's lively record; and that, too, of Hester Lynch Piozzi (Observations and Reflections, 1789).

Figure 2 :
Figure 2: William Hogarth, The Enraged Musician, ca.1741, etching and engraving on paper (Courtesy: Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Great Britain.Photo credit: V&A Images, London / Art Resource, New York)