ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how musical performances became public events, beginning in the late seventeenth century. People learned how to sit still instead of stomping around and how to be silent and focused rather than talkative and distracted. Civil audiences took up listening habits that had developed in religious contexts. In 1761, the first German concert hall was inaugurated in Hamburg, which in turn started a boom—all the major cities in Europe wanted a concert hall, and all built one. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the necessary infrastructure was in place, and the concert audience became the most conspicuous part of a resonating body. Its presence creates a charisma of its own, resulting in the collective construction of aura. The culture of listening attentively to music was a cultural achievement by the public of the past that has been preserved to this day.
