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This essay is about the long-standing and tenacious audile technique of listening past--that is, the discrimination of music, musical performances, and even sound amid the ostensibly broader range of vibrations conveyed by any media form. For some time, an assortment of musicians, sound artists, and theoreticians have lined up to maintain that this cognitive-discursive technique, which suppresses or diminishes the processes of mediation, is in some sense ideological: illusory, contingent, and even exclusionary. Cagean theories of sound, feminist valorizations of embodiment and presence, ecological ethics of the soundscape, tech-focused philosophies of mediation, ethnographic conceptions of aurality, and Deleuzian vibrational ontologies--all are united in their foundational skepticism. Centered on digital transfer of an early electric recording of a performance of Beethoven's Sixth from 1927 conducted by Felix Weingartner, this essay seeks to reevaluate the political implications of listening past by drawing out its submerged relationships to the traditional historicist project of recovering what I call past listenings--lost modes of listening that are supposedly indivisible from particular spaces, historical moments, and radically situated subjectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the idea of interest and the interesting in the late eighteenth century through Haydn's London experiences of the 1790s. It argues that several of Haydn's London compositions, together with the surviving records of his English trips, bear the traces of a metropolitan mediascape and urban commercial environment in which attention and desire were newly conceivable in terms of the psychic "investments" of interest--a concept that notably oscillates between what we would nowadays consider separate economic and aesthetic meanings. Looking again at Haydn's late encounter with England's burgeoning commercial society might prompt musicologists to rethink the nature of their own scholarly interests, as well as the deeper histories of currently popular methodological paradigms that aim to resolve musicology's objects of study into networks of people and things gathered together by entangled interests and "concerns". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]