ABSTRACT
Today's musicology fastens on issues of listeners and listening, turning a once neglected field into one of its central preoccupations. Recent decades have witnessed the growth of such areas as reception studies, the psychology of listening and the history of listening practices, while analysts and critics have confronted the issue of their own hearing more explicitly than ever before. In the case of western 'high' concert culture of the last hundred years and more, the dominant listening practices have often been defined in terms of silent, motionless attentiveness. This ideal is more than a matter of social etiquette. It is embedded in post-Romantic traditions of musical aesthetics and composition, especially those of central Europe, and it surfaces in numerous guises and in many types of source. The fundamental aesthetic principles guiding the eighteenth-century musicians' references to attention are distinct from those that informed later writers who started from a post-Romantic or post-Kantian aesthetic position.
