Dissonant Works and the Listening Public

What Odysseus hears is without consequence for him; he is able only to nod his head as a sign to be set free from his bonds; but it is too late. Adorno and Horkheimer Dialectic of Enlightenment THE ANXIETY OF LISTENING This chapter is about what happens, according to Adorno, to the production of music under the modern condition of oppressed or improper listening and why he locates resistance to this condition in an aesthetic or dialectic of loneliness [ Dialektik der Einsamkeit ]. I present two models of musical listening: Arnold Schoenberg's, then Adorno's. Each is motivated, not by acoustic or physiological studies of the ear, but as a response to the charge that music of a dissonant character, particularly Schoenberg's, is unlistenable. So motivated, these models of listening are better conceived as models of reception, and of the reception particularly of what Adorno calls New Music. The chapter has two parts: first, a presentation of the two models; second, a detailed expansion and commentary on Adorno’s model. I set Adorno’s model in detail and dialectically (as Adorno did himself) against a sketch of Schoenberg’s.My interest is in Adorno and why he focused on Schoenberg. To explain this, we must immerse ourselves in Adorno’s general philosophical engagement with music. My first objective is to show that there is nothing isolated or merely preferential about Adorno’s focus. He uses Schoenberg to articulate his own profound pessimism regarding the condition of his times and the response his own philosophy can have to it. He sees New Music’s radical task to be at one with his philosophical task, namely, to challenge what we take in experience to be most self-evident. He uses Schoenberg to show how we rationalize and traditionalize our listening habits and deal with the music that challenges them.