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'"Labyrinthine Pathways and Bright Rings of Light": Hoffman's Aesthetics of Music in Performance'

Performance studies have had little to say about the theory and aesthetics of listening, as distinct from spectating, and following his chapter on ‘Illusion and Aura’ Johnson has turned to the aesthetics and practice of musical listening. This paper, which the author was invited to contribute to a volume of _Nineteenth-Century Music Review_ dedicated to performance, deals with one of the most striking accounts of musical listening in the literature, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s description of his experience of hearing a performance of Beethoven’s Piano Trios, Op. 70. Hoffmann’s extravagant, metaphor-laden style in this passage is contrasted with the workmanlike, analytical style of his preceding examination of the scores, the resort to metaphor signaling an experience of wonder afforded by the outstanding performance and his attentive listening. Hoffmann’s metaphors speak of a music of illusion in Adorno’s sense, and in his _Aesthetic Theory_ Adorno provides the theoretical ground for their interpretation as expressions of wonder. Adorno’s aesthetics challenge the tendency in current musicology to pursue questions of meaning and, in a more recent article (forthcoming), Johnson further develops the theory of musical listening as peak experience. Both papers develop the conclusion in Johnson_01, that concentrated listening to classical music affords a critique of contemporary life by affording a different yet rewarding kind of experience which need not, and perhaps should not, be reduced to knowledge-acquisition.

Both Johnson_01 and Johnson_02 are relevant to the central concerns of performers, and hence to the central work of Birmingham Conservatoire, in terms both of how musicians approach the task of interpreting the work and how they set out to engage a live audience or listeners to their audio recordings.