ABSTRACT
In the introduction to this volume, Ioannis Tsioulakis and Elina HytönenNg note the place of the discussion of music not only in providing another vehicle for communicating that which music communicates, but in producing music and the participant musicians and audiences. With recourse to the philosophy of Michel Foucault, they note that ‘subjects (by which here we mean both individual persons and concepts) are produced in discourse and cannot be conceived outside it’. Though more common for music after 1950 – see for example Mark Duffett’s and Elina Hytönen-Ng’s essays in this volume – the discourse of performers and audiences in nineteenth-century popular music has thus far remained in their contemporary historical texts, and been little discussed in popular music studies. Scholars such as Daniel Cavicchi (2012) have written about the popular response to Jenny Lind, and historians working with material relating to music hall and vaudeville (Kift, 1996) or theatre more broadly (Bennett, 1997; Davis, 1991) have attempted to reconstruct the audience of performances. However, bridging the gap between what the historical actors had to say about their subjectivity and the kind of academic analysis which would add to our knowledge of how the relationships between star performers and their audience have developed, has been fragmentary. This is partly due to the difficulties in accessing the views of individual audience members from such a distant time. With the collection of fan letters to one music hall celebrity, Vesta Tilley, it is now possible to recover some of the discursive production of the star and the audience. Encouraged by Vesta, who made a point of constructing a particular writing audience in interviews that she gave to the press by repeatedly reporting about her fan correspondence, this audience then responded in kind. The letters, written predominantly by women many of whom came from the working classes, allow a view into the discursivelyconstructed subjectivities of popular music of the Edwardian period. Using nearly 140 letters written in 1919-20, this chapter shows this construction qualitatively through the subject matters that they included in their letters,
and quantitatively through corpus-based linguistics in the volume of positive evaluative adjectives in their correspondence. What emerges is a strong sense that both performer and audience sought a reciprocal relationship and that fans reached for a surprising parity with someone they saw as one of their own.
