Types of Musical Conduct

In a discussion a few days ago the issue of what sort of music people listen to and the different ways in which people listen to music came up. I remembered a useful article I had read years ago by the philosopher Theodor Adorno entitled "Types of Musical Conduct" which was ultimately published in his book "Introduction to Music Sociology." Now I am not saying that I agree with everything he would say in other venues, Adorno having been a part of the Neo-Marxist Frankfurt School, but I really think he is onto something here.

Adorno identifies seven different types of listener (which is what he means by "musical conduct"). They are:

1) the EXPERT listener - this is someone who is capable of what is called "structural hearing," which is hearing the various musical themes, their permutations, the connective tissue (i.e. episodes, transitions), as well as other elements and devices the composer uses, and gets these "past, present, and future moments to crystallize into a meaningful context." He can put it all together as a Gestalt, rather than as a disconnected series of temporal events. Generally, the expert listener would know the technical names for these things. He knows and appreciates what the composer has done. This is the highest level of listening to music as an art form.

2) the GOOD listener - this is someone who can intuitively appreciate the structural elements in music similar to the way the expert listener does, but isn't fully conscious of these things and usually doesn't know the technical names. He "get's it" as to why a piece of music is great, but when placed on the witness stand wouldn't be able to give anything more than a mediocre explanation of why this is so.

3) the CULTURE CONSUMER listener - this is a person who is sometimes mistaken for one of the first two types. He is a busy beaver collecting objects of musical culture, from recordings to biographical information about composers and his attitude can run the gamut from "an earnest sense of obligation to vulgar snobbery." He is not a good listener. Sometimes he is even a poseur who is class conscious and who holds himself apart from the "great unwashed." However he often would rather talk about the circumstances of the first performance of a piece by Beethoven than actually listen to the piece itself. When he does listen to music "he lies in wait for specific elements, for supposedly beautiful melodies, for grandiose moments."

4) the EMOTIONAL listener - this is the type of person who listens to music for the emotional "zing" it can give him. Such a person would prefer Tchaikowsky (or Rutter) to Bach, and, even more so, popular music to classical music. This is not to deny that music engages the emotions, but this listener focuses on this obvious aspect of music (and often in such an extreme, exaggerated form) that he is like the man who "falls in love with falling in love." The "emotional listener considers music a means to ends pertaining to the economy of his own drives" which are, well, highly emotional. That a piece of music might be an object worthy of serious study in itself and that it would give delight to the mind (even the mind delighting in the subtleties of emotional expression) would be foreign and, perhaps, even offensive to him. He is a naif and a sentimentalist - a rank amateur.

5) the RESENTMENT listener - this listener is probably unknown to most people and that is because he tends to exist within professional musical circles or among other people with a high level of training in music. Basically it involves listening to a piece of music from the standpoint of a very partisan view of how it should be interpreted, and then reacting in an uncharitable fashion when it doesn't follow "the party line." There was once a French visitor at the college Mass who happened to be a chant expert. He engaged me in conversation after Mass with this opening gambit, "Zo, ah hyear you ztill use ze IC-tus." He spat the word "ictus" out with contempt as his lip curled up into a smirk. The point was, I was a benighted ignoramus who wasn't up on the latest methods of chant research and interpretation.

To be fair, I fell into that trap in grad school when we "young Turks" would sometimes scrutinize each other's compositions to see if there was an acceptable level of dissonance - and comment dismissively when there wasn't enough.

6) the ENTERTAINMENT listener - according to Adorno this is "music to talk to" or to do just about anything else to but listen. It can be "Muzak," but not necessarily so. Music is not so much listened to, but is a kind of "sonic wallpaper" which either breaks the monotony of life and/or provides some sort of a badge of tribal loyalty. Adorno describes such a listener thus: "if the culture consumer will turn up his nose at popular music, the entertainment listener's fear is to be ranked too high. He is a self-conscious lowbrow who makes a virtue of his own mediocrity."

7) the UNMUSICAL listener - here Adorno uses the unique German word "amusisch." It is the opposite of "musisch" which literally translates "musical," but has a broader meaning of "cultured." (from "the Muses"). Frankly, I think that Western culture has had a major infection of the "amusisch" virus for centuries, but there are particular people for whom music seems to mean little to nothing. Sometimes it seems to be the result of a neurological problem - as in the condition "amusia" - when a person cannot seem to process musical sounds into a meaningful whole in the brain (in a way that even an emotional or entertainment listener can). At other times these are people who have a high competancy for math and science and other related technical disciplines, but for whom music (and often other arts) mean little to nothing.

In summary, musical conducts 1, 2, 3, and 5 (expert, good, culture consumer, and resentment) would all want to fit into the simpler classification of "cultured listener," even if some would dispute the other's right to belong. Musical conducts 4 and 6 (emotional and entertainment) would fit into the simpler classification "uncultured listener," the entertainment listener (#6) perhaps being proud to be so classified, the emotional listener (#4) blissfully unaware that there are other ways of listening to music ("but isn't music just about feelings . . . my feelings?") Number 7's "musical conduct" is that he is incapable of listening to music in any meaningful way- incapable of making sense of it even in the simple way the emotional (#4) and the entertainment listener (#6) can. So, while he may "hear" music, he is not really a "listener" at all.

I want to stress that these vignettes are deliberate broad-brush characterizations. Not everyone would fit neatly into one of these, people can move from one classification to another, and some people might belong to several of these. Nonetheless, I think that these are useful categories for discussion and reflection.

(Incidentally, the picture is "Listening to Schumann" by Fernand Khnopff, 1883)