Listener Types

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Discussion Starter · 6 d ago

In his book Introduction to the Sociology of Music, writer and composer Theodor Adorno presents a list of different listener types. What do you think? Do any of these apply to yourself or other listeners? Or is it all nonsense and/or out of date? Or perhaps you can idenitify types that he has overlooked.

1. The Expert:

...the fully conscious listener who tends to miss nothing and at the same time, at each moment, accounts to himself for what he has heard... Spontaneously following the course of music, even complicated music, he hears the sequence, hears past, present, and future moments together so that they crystallize into a meaningful context. Simultaneous complexities—in other words, a complicated harmony and polyphony—are separately and distinctly grasped by the expert.

2. The Good Listener:

The good listener too hears beyond musical details, makes connections spontaneously, and judges for good reasons, not just by categories of prestige and by an arbitrary taste; but he is not, or not fully, aware of the technical and structural implications. Having unconsciously mastered its immanent logic, he understands music about the way we understand our own language even though virtually or wholly ignorant of its grammar and syntax.

3. The Cultural Consumer:

He is a copious, sometimes a voracious listener, well—informed, a collector of records. He respects music as a cultural asset, often as something a man must know for the sake of his own social standing; this attitude runs the gamut from an earnest sense of obligation to vulgar snobbery. For the spontaneous and direct relation to music, the faculty of simultaneously experiencing and comprehending its structure, it substitutes hoarding as much musical information as possible, notably about biographical data and about the merits of interpreters, a subject for hours of inane discussion.

Such people are appraisers. The one thing they primarily respond to is an exorbitant and, so to speak, measurable performance—breakneck virtuosity, for instance, wholly in the sense of the "show" ideal. Technique, the means, impresses them as an end in itself; in this respect they are quite close to the presently widespread mass audience.

4. 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... this type may indeed respond with particular strength to music of an obvious emotional hue, like Tchaikovsky's. He is easily moved to tears... The emotional type fiercely resists all attempts to make him listen structurally—more fiercely, perhaps, than the culture consumer who for culture's sake might put up even with that.

5. The Anti-Emotional Listener

Loyalty to the work, which they set against the bourgeois ideal of musical showmanship, becomes an end in itself, not so much a matter of adequately presenting and experiencing the meaning of works as of guarding zealously against any minute deviation from what—impeachably enough—they take for the performing practice of past ages. If the emotional type tends to corn, [the anti-emotional] tend to a spurious rigor, to mechanical suppression of his own stirrings... Subjectivity, expression—to the resentment listener all this is profoundly linked with promiscuity, and that he cannot bear to think of... Strikingly undeveloped in this type is the sense for qualitative differences within the preferred literature. The ideology of unity shriveled the sense for nuances. As a general rule, whatever is differentiated comes under puritanical suspicion

6. The Entertainment Listener:

The ground for the type has been prepared in another type: in the culture consumer, who does not relate to specific music either; to both types it is not a meaningful context but a source of stimuli. Elements of emotional listening play a part there, so do elements of listening as a sport. But all of this is flattened as by a steamroller, leveled by the need for music as a comfortable distraction.

It is quite possible that extremes of this type may not even be gratified any longer by the atomistic stimuli, that music will hardly be enjoyed any longer, in any conceivable sense. The structure of this sort of listening is like that of smoking. We define it more by our displeasure in turning the radio off than by the pleasure we feel, however modestly, while it is playing.

We might conceive a series leading from the man who cannot work without the blare of a radio to one who kills time and paralyzes loneliness by filling his ears with the illusion of "being with" no matter what; from him to the lovers of medleys and musical comedy tunes; on to those who value music as a means of relaxation.

If the culture consumer will turn up his nose at popular music, the entertainment listener's only fear is to be ranked too high. He is a self—conscious lowbrow who makes a virtue of his own mediocrity.

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