”Viskall gå på restaurang och höra på musik”

Om reception av restaurangmusik och annan ”mellanmusik”.

Abstract

The article discusses music played in restaurants and cafés in the early twentieth century. A sample of 100 printed programmes listing such music (Royal Library, Stockholm) documents an extremely wide range of genres performed (cf. Tables 1 and 2 plus music examples), far wider than one is likely to find in today's genre-specialised music market. Ever since the late eighteenth century, song remained an important social activity, since its importance was founded in the need to aestheticise the everyday experiences of bourgeois life (Stojlar 1985). Listening to a high degree stood in close relation to the feelings and lyrics of the songs. Songs allow for fragmentary listening and require no particular attention from the audience vis-à-vis the flow of music (Dahlhaus 1988), in comparison to the concentrated listening attitudes favoured by the aesthetics of ”absolute” music. How popular was such Autonomie-Ästhetik? Using Ross' (1983) model of the person—situation—product process, the following distinctions can be made. Those fostering the new instrumental music legitimised their music as superior to that written for entertainment purposes and used ”absolutely musical” arguments to prove their point. This upper middle-class audience considered listening as a kind of work that demanded concentration on the music alone and postponement of aesthetic rewards. However, the bourgeois parlour tradition also favoured a fragmentarised reception of music, as Ballstaedt & Widmaier (1988) exemplify in their discussion of Badarczewska's A Virgin's Prayer. Whereas these authors, Ross (1983) and Sponheuer (1987) offer models presenting a nuanced
view of nineteenth-century music listening, there are probems with Dahlhaus' view (Mittelmusik, etc. 1988), postulating an ”objective” split between Kunst und Nicht-Kunst and ignoring factors of person and situation. In fact, the default listening mode was emotional-aesthetic with analytical/structural listening as an option, while purely structural listeners constituted no more
than a small minority. Figures p. 110-111 illustrate how the individual's listening modes can fluctuate within the time limits of a single concert. One peculiarity is that even if males were the spokesmen for analytical/aesthetic listening, women were better qualified to listen in that way, due to the role of music in the education of every upper class or upper middle-class girl. The music most Swedes heard in restaurants, cafés, open-air theatres, at home etc. (later in cinemas and on radio) was Mittelmusik. The same applies largely to popular classical concerts, except that these often included a Mozart or Beethoven symphony. The frequency of
ananalytical/structural/automomous listening decreases in inverse proportion to the size and modernity of towns. Of course, ”high-brow” and ”low-brow”, terms acquired through education, were applied to music but the distinction between ”ours” and ”theirs” was probably of greater importance. Restaurant music was in any case ”music of the many” and the question of ”value”
and ”quality” is another matter altogether …