Music’s forms and listener attention reflect the social status of their performers and public

Evidence

And if musical forms evolve in response to their public (church and salon music being little by little supplanted by middle-class spectator forms), so also they are influenced by the changing social functions of their performers as well. Wagner, himself a great conductor, for the first time undertakes to compose music in which the role of the virtuoso conductor is foreseen and built into the structure of the score. As in parliamentary demagoguery, the listening masses submit to the conductor with a kind of hypnotized fascination. The quality of their listening deteriorates; they lose that autonomy of judgment and intensity of concentration which the earlier generations of the triumphant middle class brought to their practice of the art. Thus they are increasingly unable to follow anything as thoroughly organized as a Beethoven sonata, and instead of the theme and variations with its development and resolution in time, Wagner offers them something cruder and easier to grasp: the repetition of easily recognizable themes not unlike advertising slogans, “fatefully” underlined for the listener’s benefit by the dictatorial gesture of the conductor. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 54

Categorization

• XREF: This is Adorno’s critique of Wagner — the hypnotized mass/listening regression — showing Jameson mediating Adorno’s sociology of music into the dialectical frame. Connects to Horkheimer/Adorno’s culture industry. — connects to: Radio’s technical properties determine music’s social meaning for listeners. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 991; Music functions as a fundamental class marker indexing Bourdieu’s social distinction — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 654; Group listener sessions bias subjective loudspeaker ratings through social signaling — Toole, Floyd E, Sound reproduction- the acoustics and…, 1112 (+1 more)
• SEED: Angle: the ‘conductor as demagogue’ parallel — how the rise of the virtuoso director/performer in any domain (conductor, CEO, surgeon) restructures audience attention toward hypnotic submission.

Broader Connections

• Music functions as a fundamental class marker indexing Bourdieu’s social distinction #corroborates (0.78) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 654
• Radio’s technical properties determine music’s social meaning for listeners. #qualifies (0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 991
• Group listener sessions bias subjective loudspeaker ratings through social signaling #exemplifies (0.72) — Toole, Floyd E, Sound reproduction- the acoustics and…, 1112
• Mass music’s regressive listening confirms rather than merely diverts its audience #contradicts (0.72) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 96