Approved musical charms make listeners reject unfamiliar sonorities as dissonant

Evidence

Once the perceived charms remain unopposed in a rigid format, whoever yields to them will eventually rebel against it. But then they are themselves of the most limited kind. They all centre on an impressionistically softened tonality. It cannot be said that interest in the isolated colour or the isolated sonority awakens a taste for new colours and new sonorities. Rather, the atomistic listeners are the first to denounce such sonorities as ‘intellectual’ or absolutely dissonant. The charms which they enjoy must be of an approved type. To be sure, dissonances occur in jazz practice, and even techniques of intentional misplaying have developed. But an appearance of harmlessness accompanies all these customs; every extravagant sonority must be so produced that the listener can recognize it as a substitute for a ‘normal’ one. While he rejoices in the mistreatment the dissonance gives to the consonance whose place it takes, the virtual consonance simultaneously guarantees that one remains within the circle. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 97

Categorization

• XREF: The mechanism here—pseudo-difference contained within standard forms—is the core of Adorno’s pseudo-individuation thesis, which the reader wants to run on post-Adorno culture. — connects to: Contradictory critical dismissal signals genuinely novel music — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1328
• DEFINE: Illustrates how ‘the circle’ of standardized tonality encloses even apparent deviations, a key move in the standardization analysis.