Some Ideas on the Sociology of Music

"The sociological interpretation of music is the better grounded, the higher the quality of the music. It becomes dubious in the case of simpler, more regressive, or worthless music. It is harder to see why one hit song should stand higher in public esteem than another than to distinguish between the social significance of public reactions to different works by Beethoven." [13]

"If music on its own initiative makes itself into something desired, something socially useful, something by which human beings may profit, then, by the light of its own truth content, it betrays those human beings. Its relationship to exchange value is, like that of all the arts in our day, dialectical through and through." [10]

"The idea of a dynamic unity, a totality, in traditional great music was nothing but the idea of society itself." [9]

"The gestural language of Chopn's music is aristocratic -- in a sense that would have to be specified concretely. Its popularity, however, stems precisely from this aristocratic manner. We may say that it transforms the ordinary citizen, who aspires to hear himself in its mellifluous melancholy, into a gentleman. Music that is alive today is bourgeois in its entirety; prebourgeois music is played only our of historical interest." [9]

"Neither a composer's origins nor his life history, nor event eh impact of his music on a particular social stratum, yields any compelling sociological insights." [9]

"The composer's subjectivity is not something added on to these objective conditions and desiderata. It proves its worth precisely because it elevates his own impulse, which of course cannot be imagined out of existence, and merges it with that social objectivity. This means not only that he is tied to the objective social preconditions of production, but that his own achievement is itself social, even though it is the most subjective thing about him, a kind of logical synthesis of his own nature. The compositional subject is no individual thing, but a collective one. All music, however individual it may be in stylistic terms, possesses an inalienable collective substance: every sound says 'we.'" [9]

"Empirical studies that take audience responses as their starting point, on the assumption that they constitute the ultimate, secure foundation for scientific data, lose validity because they fail to see these responses for what they have become, that is to say, as functions of production. And incidentally, we must note that what used to be thought of as artistic production has now been replaced by a production process organized and controlled on the pattern of industrial processes, a change that has affected the entire realm of music for the consumer. Furthermore, the difficulties of nailing down the social effects of music are scarcely smaller than those involved in discovering the meaning of their intrinsic social content. In the end, all that can be determined is the opinions of interviewees about music and their relationship to it. These opinions, however, have been preformed by social mechanisms such as propaganda and the selection of material on offer, and hence remain inconclusive in themselves. What respondents think of as their relationship to music, especially in the form in which they verbalize their experience, falls far short of what actually transpires subjectively -- in terms of both individual and social psychology. If, for example, they claim that what attracts them to a piece of music is its melody or rhythm, they will normally have only a very hazy idea of what those words entail. They will use those concepts to designate a vague, conventional meaning: in the case of rhythm, no more than the interaction of the formal beat with syncopated deviations from it; in the case of melody, the easily identified top part in eight-measure periods. The analysis of one's own musical experience is a problematic business for anyone who has not made a special study of music or who lacks exceptional ability and training in introspection. Moreover, reliable experimental methods that are intended to avoid such difficulties by relying on precise counting and measuring lead nowhere. Whether a listener's pulse quickness, and so forth, is an irrelevant abstract in a discussion of his specific reaction to music he has heard." [6-7]

"Sociological research that would prefer to avoid the problems of analyzing production and to confine itself to questions of distribution of consumption remains imprisoned in the mechanisms of the market and hence gives its sanction to the primacy of the commodity character of music, even though to investigate this quality should be one of the foremost tasks of a sociology of music." [6]

"By virtue of tis basic material, music is the art in which the prerational, mimetic impulses ineluctably find their voice, even as they enter into a pact with the processes leading to the progressive domination of matter and nature. This is the material to which music owes its ability to transcend the business of mere self-preservation, an ability that led Schopenhauer to define it as the immediate objectification of the will and to place it at the apex of the hierarchy of the arts. If anywhere, it is in music that art rises above the mere repetition of what just happens anyway. At the same time, however, this material fits it for the constant reproduction of stupidity. The very element that raises music above ideology is also what brings it closest to it. Asa a carefully cultivated preserve of the irrational in the midst of the rationalized universe, music becomes negativity pure and simple, as this is rationally planned, produced, and administered by the Culture Industry. This irrationality has been calculated down the nth degree, and its sole effect is to ensure that people are kept in line. As such, it constitutes a parody of the protest against the dominance of the concept of classification, a protest of which music is uniquely capable when, as with all the great composers since Monteverdi, it subjects itself to the discipline of the rational. Only by virtue of such rationality can it transcend rationality." [6]

"There can be no doubt that the history of music exhibits a progressive process of rationalization. Its different stages are the Guidonian reforms, the introduction of mensural notation, the invention of continuo and of equal temperament, and finally, the trend to integral musical construction, which has advanced irresistibly since the time of Bach and has now reached an extreme. But rationalization -- which is inseparable from the historical process of the bourgeoisifcation of music -- represents only one of the social features of music, just as rationality itself, Engightenment, is no more than one aspect of the history of a society that is still developing in an irrational and 'natural' manner even today. Within the global development in which music shared in the progressive emergence of rationality, music at the same time always remained the voice of all who fell by the wayside or were sacrificed on the altar of the rational." [5]

"Taken globally, the function of music in society is mainly to act as a diversion. Questions such as whether Mr. X plays Beethoven's G Major Piano Concerto better than Mr. Y, or whether the voice of the young tenor has been put under too much of a strain, have scarcely anything to do with the substance and meaning of music. But it all contributes to the creation of the cultural veil, the concern with spirit degraded to the level of 'education,' which prevents countless listeners from obtaining any perception of more essential realities. The neutralization of music through its reduction to matters of cultural activity and cultural chitchat would itself be a rewarding subject of investigation by a sociology of music, as long as it refused to collude in that neutralizing process. But to attempt to combat that neutralization by simply invoking the living power of music to affect people, without realizing the extent to which music depends on society as a whole, is to capitulate to ideology even more abjectly. Music is especially prone to that capitulation because its nonceptual nature encourages its listeners to think of themselves as feeling subjects, to give their thoughts free rein, and to think whatever ideas happen to come into their heads. Music functions as a kind of wish fulfillment and vicarious gratification, but unlike film it does not really get caught in the act. This gratification extends from dozing off -- the promotion of a condition that largely precludes any rational or critical behavior -- to the cult of passion, the philosophical irrationalism that has been so intimately linked with the repressive and violent social tendencies ever since the nineteenth century." [4-5]

"The nonconceptual nature of music deprives us of the kind of evidence for our insights that in the case of traditional literature appears to be legitimated by its contents. Hence assertions about the intrinsic ideological character of music are constantly in danger of being reduced to mere analogies. The only remedy here is a technical and physiognomical analysis that describes formal features as elements of an organized musical meaning (or that points tot eh absence of such meaning) and goes on to infer social significance from those features. The task is to articulate the social meaning of the formal constituents of music -- its logic, in short. How to learn or practice this is something that is scarcely capable of abstract formulation. Attempts to achieve it tend to be arbitrary and to be justified only through internal consistency and the ability to shed light on music's individual features. The crucial task facing a sociology of music -- the task of socially decoding music itself -- resists the kind of positivistic verification of tangible realities of the sort provided by data about musical consumption or the description of musical organizations, but which shies away from analysis of the music itself. The precondition of a productive sociology of music is to understand the language of music. This goes far beyond anything available to the sociologist concerned merely with applying his own categories to music, but also far beyond anything communicated by the official and ossified musical culture of the conservatories or university musicology." [4]

"Some Ideas on the Sociology of Music"
in Sound Figures (1978)
Theodore Adorno