Document Type
Article
Abstract
[First paragraph]
In 1941, the famously despondent Theodor Adorno worried about the detrimental effects of radio broadcast upon the symphony. He theorized that much of value was lost when listeners experienced an orchestral performance of a composition in symphonic form through its electronic transmission to their kitchens rather than in a concert hall. Based upon empirical research done in collaboration with Paul Lazarsfeld and the Princeton Radio Research Project, he argued that the "presence" of music was lost to the radio listener, and with it a part of music's "auratic" spell, its uniqueness in time and place, its ritual, cultish radiance [1]. Heard through the technological mediation of radio broadcast, the symphony's physicality, its immersive sonic quality, and the attending ability to replace a quotidian, "serial" perception of time with the "suspension of time-consciousness" were all damaged. Separated from its origins in the concert hall, the experience of the symphony was deprived of its unity as an aesthetic totality. The work was likely to be perceived as a series of reified quotations, snatches of melody taken out of context, while the listener was doomed to a regressive subject position, depoliticized and passive, masochistic and self-abnegating [2].
Repository Citation
Malsky, Matthew. "Fantasy and the Concert Hall: Musical Performance in the Electroacoustic Age." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 4, no. 1, 2004, pp. 1–37. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol4/iss1/6
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Acoustics, Dynamics, and Controls Commons, Audio Arts and Acoustics Commons, Music Theory Commons