Written by Stephen Gliatto
Theodore Adorno (1903-1969) was a Marxist-influenced cultural critic who saw the need of music as demanding radical change in a misguided and oppressed world. Any music that did not meet that function, no matter who wrote it, was not good nor worthy of its place in the arts. His list of unacceptable music is long, and it covers many styles and genres, although he saves most of his scorn for contemporary pop music as a tool of thought manipulation by market capitalists.
Good music alone, he expands, is not enough to effect the radical overhaul that society needs; it also needs to be listened to correctly. One does not need to be a trained musician nor a professor of composition to listen to music well, but Adorno describes multiple ways of listening that fall short of his mark.
Adorno’s first level of listening is “cultural consumerism” – having music in your life as a piece of your social standing. In his generation, he saw it in people who boasted of how many records they owned; in previous centuries it might have been expressed by trying to see as many star virtuosos in concert as possible or never missing an Opening Night. In today’s world, a cultural consumer can brag about how many artists are on their playlists, or how their vinyl recordings have superior sound quality to MP3s. Adorno saw this as “market fetishism,” which is comparable to the craze for the latest gadget or fad toy one can buy at a store. Having a record for the sole sake of its cultural value (“everyone should know Mozart”), for its rarity, or to show off to others, is as useless as owning crystal plates you never use.
The next level is “emotional listening” (where I believe myself to be, notwithstanding my music degree). Emotional listeners use music to vent their pent-up emotions, which they cannot express fully in public or perhaps even to other people in private. To Adorno, even if the music is fulfilling its intended purpose, it is still the second consideration after the emotions. If an emotional listener needs a cathartic sob, what does it matter if the music is well written, as long as it provides them the opportunity to sob? This discourages good music from being written if schmaltz will suffice.
Then there are the resentment listeners, who pride themselves on not being emotional listeners. They reject any response that comes from the music. Instead, they get lost in the weeds of the written score. A resentment listener is obsessed with form and structure, and look for hidden meanings, and brag about solving works of music like crossword puzzles. While they are a step up from emotional listeners, as they put the music first, their reaction to the music is too inward to enact societal change. In fact, their attitude makes society more unequal, as they trend towards viewing themselves as a select initiate distinguished from the uneducated philistines.
Finally, there are entertainment listeners. Similar to emotional listeners, entertainment listeners will focus on their surroundings rather than the details of the music, and will listen to anything or everything so long as it provides a soundtrack to their daily grind, or a nice beat to dance to. Adorno views this as awful for two reasons – it makes it easier for the music industry to profit from selling inferior products to indiscriminating listeners, and it removes individuality in the arts by making us all equal rhythmic souls.
If this is the case, then what constitutes good listening? Adorno only says, cryptically, that a good listener should “neither understand everything nor nothing” (p. 320). A good listener should discriminate good music from bad, but not exult when doing so. Rather, they should be highly conscious to experience music for that which keeps them aware and informed to the ways society is kept docile, not for reasons that distract them from the crises they’ve been ignoring.
Reference
Bowman, W. D. (1998). Philosophical perspectives of music. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Philosophy of Music 