Daniel Cavicchi's Listening and Longing offers an attractive new perspective on American music and musical life during the late nineteenth century, the so-called “Age of Barnum.” Whereas musicological approaches tend to favor composers and performers, this study highlights listeners; and whereas most inquiries into listening practices focus on non-musical soundscapes, Cavicchi explores what it means to be an audience member. Conventional wisdom, he claims, posits that the nineteenth century witnessed the unfortunate rise of passive audience behaviors – listening in awe and reverence to a transcendent musical work, as opposed to earlier practices of amateur music making that valued active participation (186–89). Yet this book, which blends historical musicology, ethnomusicology, identity studies, and sound studies, argues convincingly that the choice to join an audience and to experience music as part of such a community was no less participatory and indeed continues to have significant cultural consequences.

The book's guiding theoretical concept is what Cavicchi labels “audiencing,” a useful but perhaps clumsy neologism that seeks to encapsulate audience behaviors and listening practices before, during, and after a musical event. The first two chapters argue for the purpose and value of understanding audiences as historical agents and describe how they acquired this agency at a particular historical moment in US history. Cavicchi first situates the rise of public musical performances within larger processes of musical commodification. Early Americans had tended to understand music solely as an aesthetic experience or an otherwise fleeting phenomenon, not necessarily as an object to be marketed and traded. Cavicchi explains, however, that the increasingly diversified music business, which sold instruments, sheet music, and even music education, gave way to the commercialization of the musical experience itself through the marketing of public concerts. The most successful entrepreneurs integrated these concerts seamlessly into other areas of profitseeking – by selling sheet music publications whose covers feature images of star performers, for example. Cavicchi then demonstrates how the development of this new commercial musical enterprise fed into practices of listening that consumers had honed in churches, theater productions, and public lectures; audiences felt right at home – or at church, you might say – in the concert hall.

The final three chapters draw the reader more fully into the practice and historical development of “audiencing.” Each chapter presents studies that demonstrate how listening behaviors contributed to and were integrated with broader cultural developments. The book's third chapter is by far the most provocative: listening to music, Cavicchi argues, played a vital role in mid-century processes of self-formation, even among less privileged social groups such as middle-class white women and African American men. Building on concepts developed by Daniel Walker Howe and Thomas Augst, he contends that the active management of leisure time, including the choice to attend concerts and the act of listening itself, became a powerful tool for constructing one's own identity in the urban world. As masters of their performative craft, concert artists in turn served as models of selfhood with whom listeners could enter into a spiritual dialogue. Over the next several decades, listeners who were drawn into such a communion with these artists formed communities of “music lovers,” a designation that carried culturally elitist connotations on the one hand and, on the other, as Cavicchi amply demonstrates, pathological ones.

The book will be of great interest and value to a wide readership since it presents a new foundation for understanding nineteenth-century American musical culture as well as the development of American popular culture more generally. The study does have significant weaknesses, however. Cavicchi draws heavily from private diaries, a fruitful and intriguing undertaking whose pitfalls he describes amply, yet he apparently bypassed several articles on listening and types of listener printed in prominent music periodicals from the era, especially from the critical decade of the 1850s. Cavicchi also notes that he eliminated genre as a variable in his study, at least at the outset (10–11), but by doing so he negates the fact that an orchestra of sixty or eighty players simply sounds different, sonically and musically, from a virtuoso pianist or vocalist. Even the least sophisticated or experienced listeners would have understood the differences, and it stands to reason that “audiencing” practices would vary from one context to the next. These nuances are not explored. Finally, readers may be left wondering if the cultural phenomena Cavicchi describes were unique to the United States: many were not. Despite these weaknesses, Listening and Longing will remain a valuable and thought-provoking contribution to several disciplines because it challenges accepted definitions of what it means to be musical.