Music exists in every human society. In its primary forms of dance, march, and collective song, it is a participatory activity whose purpose is often religious or bellicose. The throbbing drum of the war dance is the spirit of the tribe, in which the warrior loses his identity so as to become one with the collective will. The hymn is the collective voice of the congregation as it communes with its god.

In Western civilization, music of a quite different kind has gradually pushed the old participatory forms to one side. Our musical culture depends on a radical divide between performer and listener. For us the act of listening takes place in silence, often in the hushed and reverential atmosphere of a concert hall. To sing, hum, gesticulate, or tap your feet in time is not just bad manners. It is a violation of the sacred ritual, which merits nothing less than expulsion from the divine presence into the cacophonous street outside.

If we wish to gauge the health of Western civilization, then we should study its musical culture.

Cultural historians have begun to ask themselves when this momentous transition from a participatory to a listening culture occurred. As James Johnson shows in Listening in Paris(1995), his brilliant examination of the growth of opera as a spectacle in eighteenth-century France, it was only by degrees that audiences learned to fall silent. The rise of the instrumental “concert” in the late Renaissance, and the very names