The Concertgebouw in the Making

Approaching the Concertgebouw through the lens of technology studies means empirically tracing how it is that this building came into being. From the mid-nineteenth century onward, a musical public sphere was growing in Amsterdam. Discussions and debates about orchestral music, both in print and in conversations, were framed around a set of norms concerning audience behaviour, recognition of the Classic-Romantic canon, and the performance of these canonic works. Musical Romanticism was certainly ‘in the air’, but to endure and have efficacy, the ideas that had influenced criticism, conversations, and concert programming had to be translated into something more durable—a new concert hall. To convince Amsterdammers that a new concert hall was needed for their city it was necessary to develop a sociotechnical, or material, perspective towards the city's musical culture. The benefit of this perspective was that it enabled cultural reformers to focus their aspirational efforts towards the media of music's performance and reception, marking a material turn in the history of Amsterdam's musical culture that was the beginning of a serious musical culture that endures to this day.

In this chapter I trace how the desire to establish a classical music tradition in Amsterdam was articulated through a perspective that sought to convince Amsterdammers that musical culture is intertwined with buildings for music. My starting point will be an article that appeared in an Amsterdam newspaper in 1881 that proposed an architectural solution to the city's classical musical shortcomings.