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Composer, performer, listener. They're what Benjamin Britten once called the "Holy Trinity", the three cornerstones of the musical experience. But we only ever hear about the first two.

Look at the music section of any bookstore, and what you see are rows of books on the people who compose music, and on the people who play it. They are the stars of the show, whose names go ringing down the centuries. Hardly anyone writes about listeners, and yet their story should be told as well, because it's the listeners who complete the musical experience. Their thoughts and feelings are like the blossom at the apex of the rose, or the pleasure the diner gets from all that effort and careful artistry in the kitchen. However, there's a problem with telling the listeners' story.

What composers and performers do is reassuringly solid. They produce musical works, written down on paper, and performers use crafted objects - such as pianos and violins and synthesizers - to bring them to life.

Supporting their efforts is a huge infrastructure of concert halls and publishers and radio stations. Much of this still exists, and those parts which have vanished have left traces behind. So its story can be told. What the listener contributes (apart from buying a ticket) are vast swarms of fleeting thoughts and feelings. Just imagine the thousands or even millions of mental responses generated by one concert. Here the traces are harder to find. They lurk in letters and diaries and oral histories and blogs. There's a further complication, which is that the listener came only late on the scene. For most of human history, music existed to crystallise the meaning of an occasion. Imagine a Corpus Christi procession, or a military march, or a rave in an Ibiza club.

Only a few people are actually making the musical sounds, and their meaning doesn't arise only from the sounds themselves. It arises in some mysterious way from the interaction of the sounds and the social occasion that goes with them. For millennia, this was how music functioned in society. There were no passive onlookers; everyone took part, even if it was only to bow before the Duke as he made his grand entrance during the overture. But little by little, music started to prise itself away from the grip of social function, and go its own way. When that happens, music develops a new, unheard-of luxuriance and complication.

Composers no longer have to think about the dance steps, or the needs of the occasion. They can just indulge their fascination with abstract pattern. And when that happens, music can't be "taken as read", as something that just goes along with the occasion. It has to be understood, and something which needs to be understood can also be misunderstood, whereas the idea of someone misunderstanding a funeral march, when everyone is dressed in black and walking solemnly in step, seems inconceivable. Such a massive change couldn't happen overnight.

Music's first steps into freedom were very tentative, and hardly free at all. In the 1620s and 1630s in Germany, a custom arose of having musical entertainments at the end of a church service. Something similar happened at those new churches built in Italy to fight off the Protestant menace, called oratories. In both cases the music had a definite sacred flavour, and it took decades before these fledging concerts took off and lost their aura of a musical sermon.

At the opposite pole were the tavern concerts given in Fleet Street in London in the 1680s. We're told French-style orchestral music was played there, but it would be wishful thinking to imagine these were concerts in our sense. It's more likely the music was perceived as a pleasingly fashionable and elegant accompaniment to pipe-smoking and chatter about the Jacobite threat. It was in the 18th and early 19th centuries that the practice of listening really took off. It was one of the ways the new emerging middle class defined itself, along with coffee houses, monthly journals and learned societies.

The tavern concerts moved into more salubrious surroundings, and musical societies were formed, some with a definite taste for classic "ancient" music, rather than whatever happened to be fashionable at the time. Towards the end of the 18th century the subscription series, purchasable as a package, came into being, an idea still with us today. Later in the 19th century many of these societies shook off their amateur status and became professional orchestras, some of them creating handsome new concert halls in which to perform.

All this we know about, in great detail. What we know very little about is what the listeners at these new public events were actually thinking and feeling. It's a tantalising question, because any new cultural form tends to produce a certain confusion. Think how puzzled people were when cinema came on the scene. They were used to live theatre, and the idea of "cross-fading" one scene with another must have been bewildering. The same must have been true of concerts.

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How did we learn to listen to music?