Abstract

If the history of music has been writen and writen over, it has always been around the works and the composers. There is a place for a history of music written from the listener?s point of view. The ability to listen is not so much a personal quality or the mechanical counterpart of the history of musical works and languages as the end result of having made the necessary time and space for this activity, after a long historical and collective apprenticeship which itself produced a world of coordinated objects. The paper gives elements of analysis and materials from a survey on music lovers, whose taste is seen as an active and reflexive practice, involving a collective, objects, and procedures, and not as a label put on social games of identity and difference.