ABSTRACT
Johann Nikolaus Forkel had a practical interest in problems of attention. A man of uncompromising intellectual standards, he was horrified by the concessions to public taste that he was compelled to make as director of the annual concert series at the University of Gottingen. This chapter situates the problem of attentive listening within Forkel's wider concerns about musical culture. It first analyses the rubrics by means of which Forkel categorized different types of listener and explains the values he attached to them. The chapter then considers his understanding of musical decline, his polemic against inadequate modes of listening and the remedies he proposed in terms of both education and concert programming. His educational efforts must be situated in the context of his view of the overall course of music history as expounded in the 'Introduction' to the first volume of the Allgemeine Geschichte.
