The active listener: Greek attitudes towards music listening in the age of enlightenment

Abstract

In the early nineteenth century Ottoman Empire, music listening was still controlled by Quranic law, and thus limited. At the same time, one of the ethnic peoples of the Empire, the Greeks, had developed a liberal attitude towards music listening, mainly due to their Hellenic heritage as well as their exposure to the ideas of the Enlightenment. This paper focuses on the first Greek writing on the topic of “the listener”, from the 1810s, showing how the Greeks sought to combine perceptions ranging from classical writings to contemporary western European theories of aesthetics, and develop them into a harmonious whole.¹