6. Adorno on Types of Listeners,
Popular Music as mood altering drug
We just saw in the last chapter that Adorno made reference to the
“emotional listener”, the kind of person who listens to music as if it were a
mood altering or mood stabilizing drug.
The emotional listener could be seen as a kind of contrast to the structural listener, someone who could
discern musical qualities and also hear the structural processes in large-scale
musical works. The emotional listener
was not at the lowest level in Adorno’s taxonomy of listening types but he had
few kind words for the type:
INTRODUCTION TO THE
SOCIOLOGY OF MUSIC
Theodore W. Adorno
The Seabury Press, Inc.
originally published 1962
English translation 1976
ISBN 0-8164-92662-2
pages 8-9
Next in line would be
another type, one defined not by the relation to the specific quality of what
is heard, but by its own mentality, grown independent of the object. This is
the emotional listener. His relation
to music is less rigid and indirect than the culture consumer's, but in another
respect it is even farther removed from perception: to him, the relation
becomes crucial for triggering instinctual stirrings otherwise tamed or
repressed by norms of civilization. Often music becomes a source of
irrationality, whereby a man inexorably harnessed to the bustle of
rationalistic self-preservation will be enabled to keep having feelings at all.
Often he has virtually nothing to do any more with the form of what he has
heard: its preponderant function is that of such a trigger. The listening
process follows the theorem of specific sense energies: a sensation of light
results from a punch in the eye. Yet this type may indeed respond with
particular strength to music of an obvious emotional hue, like Tchaikovsky's.
He is easily moved to tears, and his links with the culture consumer are
continuous; the latter's arsenal too is rarely without an appeal to the
emotional values of genuine music.
In Germany-perhaps under the
spell of the cultural respect for music-the emotional listener seems less
characteristic than in Anglo-Saxon countries, where the stricter pressures of
civilization necessitate evasions into uncontrollably introverted realms of
feeling; in technologically backward countries, notably in the Slavonic ones,
it is also likely to retain a role. The contemporary output tolerated and
mass-produced in the Soviet Union is tailor-made for this type; in any event
its musical ego ideal is patterned after the cliché of the violently oscillating,
now ebullient, now melancholy Slav. As in music, the type is probably naive, or
ostensibly naive, at least in his overall habitus. The immediacy of his
reactions tallies with an occasional stubborn blindness to the thing he is
reacting to. He does not want to know anything and is, therefore easily
influenced from the outset. The musical culture industry can plan for him-in
Germany and Austria with the synthetic folk song species, for example, from
about the early nineteen-thirties on.
In case anyone was wondering whether Adorno thought there was any
possibly good pop music in his time, this is another passage from Introduction to the Sociology of Music:
page 225
...
The lower sphere obeys the
predominant circumstances of production. A critical sociology of music will
have to find out in detail why today-unlike a hundred years ago-popular music
is bad, bound to be bad, without exception. To be discussed in this context is
the question raised by Erwin Ratz: how music can be mean. Meanness too is a fait social, incompatible with the
immanent claim of any musically animated sound. Entertainment music no longer
does anything but confirm, repeat, and reinforce the psychological debasement
ultimately wrought in people by the way society is set up. The masses are
swamped with that music, and in it they unwittingly enjoy the depth of their
debasement. The proximity in which popular music besets them violates human
dignity along with esthetic distance. It would be up to empirical research to
develop methods subtle enough to track down such enjoyments and to describe
their course.
To invoke Adorno in any discussion of popular music in positive terms
might be akin to invoke Karl Marx on the virtues of capitalism. That Adorno treated what he called the
culture industry as monolithic has been dealt with by other writers, so I don’t
need to spend much time on that issue.
There have been attempts to explain Adorno’s taxonomy of listeners in
terms of modes of musical cognition.
There is something interesting to that as the sociology of music goes
but my larger case is that Adorno merits a thorough rebuttal at the level of
music, and at the level at which he made his arguments against popular music,
and that ragtime, ultimately, is the most useful style through which to make
such a rebuttal.
One of the ironies of the early twenty-first
century may be that Adorno’s arguments against the possibility of popular song
rising to the levels of European concert musical art have been best preserved
by an anti-Marxist philosopher who was concerned with conservative politics and
the aesthetics of music, the late Roger Scruton
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