Listening back in time: Today’s listeners recognize selected historical expressive connotations in 19th-century music

Works of Western art music have been addressed in writing for centuries by different listeners, including critics and music theorists. The question arises, whether today’s listeners still ascribe expressive connotations made in the past to music excerpts with similar features, which might indicate a stability of these connotations over time. To test this idea, we used historic descriptions of the “Glorifying Hymnic” as identified in a previous study on expressive connotations of 19th-century music in a new music-listening experiment. A total of 120 participants completed an online listening study in which they were asked to first read one of a set of historical descriptions and then listen to an excerpt that could either be a passage from (a) a piece of music with similar characteristics as the originally described excerpt or (b) a piece of music with different characteristics. Participants were asked to rate the match between the description and the passage. Participants were also asked about their familiarity with music that they heard, their interest in Western classical music and their musical sophistication. Participants’ performance indicates that present-day listeners do indeed recognize the expressive connotations of the Glorifying Hymnic that were described by 19th-century listeners. Moreover, performance in the listening task was significantly different between participants with different levels of interest in Western classical music, that is, listeners with interest in this kind of music made a correct assignment more often; however, the performance in the listening task did not correlate significantly with measures of musical sophistication. The results show that the connotations of music can still be recognized after a long period of time, at least 150 years, especially among listeners who have an interest in the music in question.