To make a study of what radio transmission does musically to a musical structure or to different kinds of music would be a vast undertaking. It involves problems of a great many types and levels, concerning the material and the technicalities of transmission,b which can be solved only by the close collaboration of analytically minded musicians, social scientists, and experts on radio engineering. Here would appear the problem of the role played in traditional serious music by the »original« – that is, the live performance one actually experiences, as compared with mass reproduction on the radio. Or one would have to investigate to what extent the technical conditions of jazz in themselves establish a configuration of quasi-mechanized technique with quasi-subjective expression weirdly analogous to that of the actual mechanization of radio transmission with the quasi-expressive ballads with which our radio programs are jammed. Attention must be accorded to chamber music, which structurally is best suited to radio transmission but which, for socio-psychological reasons, is very rarely heard over the air.c
It is not our intention to do more than suggest the significance of such problems here. Instead of elaborating them systematically to their fullest extent, we restrict ourselves to one example analyzed in detail in order to demonstrate concretely the implications as well as the complexity of the field. We are primarily concerned with pointing out the fact that serious music as communicated over the ether may indeed offer optimum conditions for retrogressive tendencies in listening, for the avalanche of fetishism which is overtaking music and burying it under the moraine of entertainment. The statement of the problem and the model analysis which we offer here are in the nature of a challenge to musical and social research. We are undertaking an experiment in theory.
The subject matter of this experiment in theory is the fate of the symphony and, more specifically, of the Beethoven symphony, when it is transmitted by radio. The reasons for this approach are sociological and musical. A typical statement exhibiting official optimism presents claims that today »the farmers wives in the prairie states listen to great music performed by great artists as they go about their morning housework«.d The Beethoven symphony is popularly identified with such great music. The truth or falsity of such complacent statements concerning the spreading of great music, however, can be gleaned only by an investigation into their presuppositions, namely, the naive identification of a broadcast with the presentation of a live symphony.
The musical reasons for the choice of the symphony as instance become clear in the course of the analysis. Beethoven is selected not only because he is the standard classic of cultural sales talk in music, but also because his music exhibits most clearly some of the features we regard as particularly affected by radio transmission. Earlier symphonic music is less exposed to changes by radio because the problem of sound volume and the issue of dynamic development play a lesser role than in Beethoven; the later romantic symphony is less characteristic because it does not offer the central problem of the radio symphony: the problem of the fate of the »integral form«.
Even those who optimistically assume that radio brings great symphonic music to people who never heard it before, concede that symphonies brought to the overburdened hypothetical farmer in the Middle West are somewhat affected and deteriorated by radio transmission. But in principle they maintain that these differences matter only to the musical snobse who know so much about music in general and about symphonic music in particular. The finer shades and differences – so they say – are of no importance to the layman who must first become acquainted with the material. Better a symphony that is not quite as good as it is supposed to be in Carnegie Hall, than no symphony at all. Whoever dares to oppose such a view is likely to be regarded as an esthete who has no true sympathy for the needs and desires of the people. Yet the social analyst must risk being castigated as a misanthrope if he is to pursue social essence, as distinct from the façade.
Analysis of a radio symphony must rid itself of the common sense view that the alterations brought about by radio have no significant bearing on the symphonic purpose. To begin with, it must cast-off the conventional definition of symphony which asserts that it is merely a sonata for orchestra.f For insight into the changes a Beethoven symphony suffers in radio transmission depends upon the specific understanding of symphonic form as it crystallized and maintained itself in the comparatively short period of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. This specific understanding is not furthered by analyzing the symphony in stereotyped terms such as exposition, development, repetition, or even more subtle ones such as the antagonism of the two main subjects of the exposition,g their »bridge«, their conclusion, the way they develop and undergo their modified recurrence. However easy it may be to identify all those typical constituents of form in every Beethoven symphony, they are essential not abstractly, but only within the interplay of the inexchangeable content of each work. Such schematic identification actually is too easy: any approach starting from the mere recognition of those invariants, tends to deliver listening up to a mechanical process in which any symphony can be replaced by any other which has the same framework.
If reference to those terms does not add much in the actual following of a specific work, it is even less helpful in achieving an understanding of the meaning and function of symphonic form per se.h*
What characterizes a symphony when experienced in immediate listening, as distinct not only from chamber music, but also from orchestral forms such as the suite or the »tone poem«, is a particular intensity and concentration.i* This intensity rests musically upon the incomparably greater density and concision of thematic relationships of the symphonic as against other forms. This density and concision are strictly technical and not merely a by-product of expression. They imply first a complete economy of craft; that is to say, a truly symphonic movement contains nothing fortuitous, every bit is ultimately traceable to very small basic elements, and is deduced from them and not introduced, as it were, from outside, as in romantic music.j
Secondly, this economy itself does not reside in a static identity, as in preclassical music. It is not content with mere repetition, but is intrinsically bound up with variation. If everything in a Beethoven symphony is identical in its ultimate motifical content, nothing is literally identical in the sense of plain repetition, but everything is »different« according to the function it exercises within the development of the whole. A Beethoven symphonic movement is essentially the unity of a manifold as well as the manifoldness of a unity, namely, of the identical thematic material. This interrelationship of perpetual variation is unfolded as a process – never through mere »statement of detail«. It is the most completely organized piece of music that can be achieved. Every detail, however spontaneous in emphasis, is absorbed in the whole by its very spontaneity and gets its true weight only by its relation to the whole, as revealed finally by the symphonic process. Structurally, one hears the first bar of a Beethoven symphonic movement only at the very moment when one hears the last bar. Romanticism failed to produce symphonic works of this exacting character because the increase in importance of the expressive detail as against the whole, rendered impossible the determination of every moment by the totality. While listening to a typical romantic symphony one remains fully conscious, sometimes all too conscious,k of the time it consumes, despite the immensely progressive novelty of the details. With Beethoven it is different. The density of thematic interwovenness, of »antiphonic« work, tends to produce what one might call a suspension of time consciousness.
When a movement like the first of Beethoven’s Fifth or Seventh Symphonies, or even a very long one such as the first of the »Eroica« is performed adequately, one has the feeling that the movement does not take seven or fifteen minutes or more, but virtually one moment. It is this very power of symphonic contraction of time which annihilates, for the duration of the adequate performance, the contingencies of the listener’s private existence – thus constituting the actual basis of those experiences which, in commentator phraseology, are called the elatedness of an audience as a result of the sublimity of the symphony.
To what extent are the inherent constituents of the Beethoven symphonic form realized by radio?
To start from the most primitive fact about symphonic music: it may be stated in terms of »absolute dynamics«, the meaning of which is well-known from the visual sphere, particularly from architecture. A cathedral acquires an essential condition of its actual function, as well as its aesthetic meaning, only in proportion to the human body. A model of a cathedral in table size is something totally different from the actual cathedral, not only quantitatively but also qualitatively. On the Campo Santo in Genoa, there is a tomb in the form of a diminutive imitation of the Milan dome. The building itself, which is of highly questionable architectural value, becomes plainly ridiculous in miniature: the impression one has is much like the one received upon seeing the sugar-coated architecture of wedding cakes. The question of absolute dimensions in architecture has its counterpart in music in the question of absolute dynamics.
The power of a symphony to »absorb« its parts into the organized whole depends, in part, upon the sound volume. Only if the sound is »larger«, as it were, than the individual so as to enable him to »enter« the door of the sound as he would enter through the door of a cathedral, may he really become aware of the possibility of merging with the totality which structurally does not leave any loophole. The element of being larger may be construed comparatively in terms of the intensity range; that is to say, the intensity range of symphonic sound must be larger, because of the exigencies of symphonic form, than any musical range the individual listener can conceive of producing himself either by singing or playing.l Absolute symphonic dimensions, furthermore, carry with them the existence of an experience which it is difficult to render even in rough terms, but which is, nonetheless, fundamental in the apperception of symphony and is the true musical objective of technical discussion of auditory perspective: the experience of symphonic space. To »enter« a symphony means to listen to it not only as to something before one, but as something around one as well, as a medium in which one »lives«. It is this surrounding quality that comes closest to the idea of symphonic absorption.
All these qualities are radically affected by radio. The sound is no longer »larger« than the individual. In the private room, that magnitude of sound causes disproportions which the listener mutes down. The »surrounding« function of music also disappears, partly because of the diminutions of absolute dimensions, partly because of the monaural conditions of radio broadcasting. What is left of the symphony even in the ideal case of an adequate reproduction of sound colors, is a mere chamber symphony.m If the symphony today reaches masses who have never before been in touch with it, it does so in a way in which their collective aspect and what might be called the collective aspect of the symphony itself, are practically eliminated from the musical pattern – which becomes, as it were, a piece of furniture of the private room.
One must be careful not to derive therefrom a premature judgment on radio, or try to »save« music from it. The abolition of the »surrounding« quality of music on the radio has its progressive aspects. This »surrounding« quality of music is certainly part of music’s function as a drug, the criticism of which, inaugurated by Nietzsche and revived by such contemporary writers as Jean Cocteau, is justified and has been considerably furthered by radio. The drug tendency is very clear in Wagner where the mere magnitude of the sound, into whose waves the listener can dive, is one of the means of catching the listeners, quite apart from any specific musical content. In Beethoven, where the musical content is highly articulate, the largeness of the sound does not have this irrational function, but is the more intrinsically connected with the structural devices of the work, and is therefore also the more deeply affected by broadcasting. Paradoxical as it may appear, a Beethoven symphony becomes more problematical as a broadcast than the music of a Wagner opera.
This may be made clear by such a well-known piece of music as the first movement of the Fifth Symphony. It is characterized by its simplicity. A very short and precise motif, the one with which it opens, is conveyed by an unabating intensity of presentation. Throughout the movement it remains clearly recognizable as the same motif: its rhythm is vigorously maintained. Yet there is no mere repetition, but development: the melodic content of the basic rhythm, that is to say, the intervals which constitute it, change perpetually; it gains structural perspective by wandering from one instrument or instrumental group to another and appearing sometimes in the foreground as a main event, at other times as a mere background and accompaniment. Above all, it is presented in gradations, dynamic developments, the continuity of which is achieved through the identity of the basic material. At the same time, this identity is modified by the different dynamic grades in which the basic motif occurs. Thus the simplicity of the movement is inextricably bound up with an elaborate richness of texture: the richness prevents the simple from becoming primitive, while simplicity prevents richness from dissipation into mere details. It is this unity within the manifold as well as this manifoldness within that unity which constitute the antiphonic work finally terminating in the suspension of time-consciousness. This interrelationship of unity and manifoldness, and not only the loudness of the sound, is itself affected by the dynamic reductions of radio.
First of all, the whole building up of the movement upon the one simple motif – the creation ex nihilo, as it were, which is so highly significant in Beethovenn* – can be made understandable only if the motif, which is actually nothing in itself, is presented in such a way that from the very beginning it is underscored as the substance of everything that is to come. The first bars of the Fifth Symphony, if rightly performed, must possess the characteristic of a »statement«, of a »positing«.o* This positing characteristic, however, can be achieved only by the utmost dynamic intensity. Hence, the question of loudness ceases to be a purely external one and affects the very structure of symphony. Presented without the dynamic emphasis which makes out of the Nothing of the first bars virtually the Everything of the total movement, the idea of the work is missed before it has been actually started. The suspension of time-consciousness is endangered from the very beginning: the simple, no longer emphasized in its paradoxical nature as Nothing and Everything, threatens to degenerate into the trite if the »nothingness« of the beginning fails to be absorbed into the whole by the impetus of the statement. The tension is broken and the whole movement is on the verge of relapsing into time.
It is threatened, even more, by the compression of the dynamic range. Only if the motif can develop from the restrained pianissimo to the striking yet affirming fortissimo, is it actually revealed as the »cell« which represents the whole even when exposed as a mere monad. Only within the tension of such a gradation does its repetition become more than repetition. The more the gradation is compressed – which is necessarily the case in radio – the less this tension is felt. Dynamic repetition is replaced by a mere ornamental, tectonic one. The movement loses its character of process and the static repetition becomes purposeless: the material repeated is so simple that it requires no repetition to be understood. Though something of the tension is still preserved by radio, it does not suffice. The Beethoven tension obtains its true significance in the range from Nothing to All. As soon as it is reduced to the medium-range between piano and forte, the Beethoven symphony is deprived of the secret of origin as well as the might of unveiling.
It could be argued that all these changes by radio turned the symphony into a work of chamber music which, although different from symphony, has merits of its own. A symphony, conceived in symphonic terms, however, would necessarily become a bad work of chamber music. Its symphonic simplicity would make itself felt as poverty in chamber music texture, as lack of polyphonous interwovenness of parts as well as want of extensive melodic lines developed simultaneously. Simplicity would cease to function in the symphonic way. Clearly, a Beethoven symphony played on the piano by four hands, although it is only a one-color reproduction, is to be preferred to a chamber music arrangement, because it still preserves something of the specifically symphonic attack by fingers striking the keys, whereas that value is destroyed by the softened chamber music arrangement, which, by virtue of its mere arrangedness, easily approaches the sound of the so-called salon orchestra. Radio symphony bears a stronger resemblance to the chamber music transcription than to the simple yet faithful translation into the mere piano sound. Its colorfulness is as questionable as it would be in a salon arrangement. For the sound colors, too, are affected on the air, and it is through their deterioration that the work becomes bad chamber music. Symphonic richness is distorted no less than symphonic simplicity. While trying to keep the symphonic texture as plain and transparent as possible, Beethoven articulates it by attaching the smallest units of motifical construction to as many different instruments and instrumental groups as possible. These smallest units together form the surface of an outspoken melody, while their coloristic differentiation realizes at the same time the construction and all its interrelationships underneath the surface. The finer the shades of motifical interrelationships within the construction, the finer necessarily the shades of changing sound colors. These essential subtleties more than anything else tend to be effaced by radio. While exaggerating conspicuous contrast, radio’s neutralization of sound colors practically blots out precisely those minute differences upon which the classical orchestra is built as against the Wagnerian, which has much larger coloristic means at its disposal.
Richard Strauss, in his edition of Berlioz’ Treatise on Instrumentation, observes that the second violins – never quite so brilliant and intense as the first violins – are different instruments, so to speak, from the first.p Such differences play a decisive part in the Beethovian articulation of symphonic texture: a single melody, subdivided between first violins, second violins and violas, becomes plastic according to the instrumental disposition – that is to say, the elements of the melody which are meant to be decisive are played by the first violins while those intended rather as incidental are played by the second violins or violas. At the same time, their unity is maintained by the fact that they are all strings playing in the same tonal region. Radio achieves only unity, whereas differences such as those between first and second violins are automatically eliminated. Moreover, certain sound colors, like that of the oboe, are changed to such an extent that the instrumental equilibrium is thrown out of joint. All these colors are more than mere means of instrumental make-up, that is, are integral parts of the composition which they as well as the dynamics articulate; their alteration consummates the damage wreaked by radio upon symphonic structure. The less articulate symphony becomes, the more does it lose its character of unity and deteriorates into a conventional and simultaneously slack sequence, consisting of the recurrence of neat tunes whose interrelation is of no import whatever. Thus it becomes ever more apparent why it is Beethoven who falls victim to radio rather than Wagner and late romanticism. For it is in Beethoven that the idea of articulate unity constitutes the essence of the symphonic scheme. This unity is achieved by a severe economy of means forbidding their reduction, which is inevitable by radio.
In the light of the preceding analysis, the hackneyed argument that radio, by bringing symphony to those formerly unfamiliar with it, compensates for its slight alterations tilts over into its opposite: the less the listeners know the works in their original form, the more is their total impression necessarily erroneously based on the specific radio phenomena delivered to them. And these phenomena are, in addition, far from being structurally consistent. One is tempted to call them contradictory in themselves. A process of polarization sets in through radio transmission of the symphony: it becomes trivialized and romanticized at the same time.
The trivialization of symphony, first of all, is bound up with its relapse into time. The compression of symphonic time is relaxed because the technical prerequisites have been made blunt. The time the radio symphony consumes is empirical time. It is in ironic keeping with the technical limitations imposed by radio on the live symphony that they are accompanied by the listener’s capacity to turn off the music whenever he pleases. He can arbitrarily supersede it in contrast to the concert hall performance where he is forced, as it were, to obey its laws. It may be questioned whether symphonic elation is really possible or desirable. At any rate, radio expedites its liquidation. Its very sound tends to undermine the idea of spell, of uniqueness and of »great music«, which are ballyhooed by radio sales talk.
But not only the spell and the high-flown notion of symphonic totality falls victim to mechanization. The decline of the unity, which is the essence of symphony, is concomitant with a decay of the manifold comprehended by it. The symphonic particulars become atoms. The tendency toward atomistic listening obtains its exact and objective technical foundation through radio transmission.q The meaning of the music automatically shifts from the totality to the individual moments because their interrelation and articulation by dynamics and colors is no longer fully affected. These moments become semi-independent episodes, organized mainly by their chronological succession.
The symphony has often been compared with the drama. Though this comparison tends to overemphasize the dualistic character, the dialogue aspect of symphony, it must still be admitted that it is justified insofar as the symphony aims at an »intensive« totality, an instantaneous focusing of an »idea« rather than an extensive totality of »life« unfolding itself within empirical time.r It is in this sense that the radio symphony ceases to be a drama and becomes an epical form, or, to make the comparison in less archaic terms, a narrative. And narrative it becomes in an even more literal sense too. The particular, when chipped off from the unity of the symphony, still retains a trace of the unity in which it functioned. A genuine symphonic theme, even if it takes the whole musical stage, and seems to be temporarily hypostatized and to desert the rest of the music, is nonetheless of such a kind as to impress upon one that it is actually nothing in itself but basically something made »out of« something else. Even in its isolation it bears the mark of the whole. As this whole, however, is not adequately realized in the phenomenon that appears over the air, the theme, or an individual symphonic moment, is presented like something from a context itself blurred or even absent. In other words, through radio, the individual elements of symphony acquire the character of quotation. Radio symphony appears as a medley or potpourri insofar as the musical atoms it offers up acquire the touch of having been picked up somewhere else and put together in a kind of montage. What is heard is not Beethoven’s Fifth but merely musical information from and about Beethoven’s Fifth. The commentator, in expropriating the listener’s own spontaneity of judgment by prating about the marvels of the world’s immortal music, is merely the human executor of the trend inherent in music on the air, which, by reassembling fragments from a context not itself in evidence, seems to be continually offering the reassurance: »This is Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.« The image-character of radio cannot be altogether explained by abstract reference to physical conditions alone, but these conditions must be shown at work on the symphonic structure, wrecking havoc on musical sense.
The issue of »quotation« is inseparably bound up with the structure and significance of symphonic themes themselves. Sententious precision which summarizes the meaning of preceding dramatic development or situation, is an age-old ingredient of dramatic structure. The sententious passages, by reflecting upon the action, detach themselves from the immediacy of the action itself. Through this detachment they become reified, emphasized, and facilely quotable. The abstract generality of maxims for practical life into which they translate the concrete idea of the drama, brings them close to the banal. At times the sententious moments supersede concrete dramatic sense altogether. There is the revealing joke about elderly ladies who express delight in Hamlet with the single reservation that it consists of quotations. In the realm of music, radio has realized a similar tendency and has transformed Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony into a set of quotations from theme songs.
The symphonic theme of the Beethoven period may structurally very well be compared with the sententious element of the drama. It consists in most cases of the triad. It is based on the triad harmonically and it circumscribes the triad melodically. As the triad is the general principle of major-minor tonality, the triadic theme has a touch of »generality« itself; it is, to a great extent, interchangeable with other triadic themes. The striking similarity between the material of movements as totally different as the Finale of Mozart’s G minor Symphony from the Scherzo of Beethoven’s Fifth, bears witness to this generality. This generality of symphonic theme is balanced by its precision, which is in the main achieved by one short and distinct rhythmical formula apt to be remembered as well as to be repeated. Musical commentators have often compared symphonic themes with mottoes in literature, and German musicology frequently alludes to »head motives« (Kopfmotive) as opening a symphonic movement.
All this points up the sententious character of the symphonic theme. It is this character that offers the theme up to the process of trivialization by radio. The triviality characteristic of live symphonic themes serves a double purpose: that of »generality« transcending the specific case in which they appear, and their existence as a mere material for self-development. Radio interferes with both these purposes. Being atomized, the symphonic theme fails to show its »generality«. It calls for significance just as it is. From the viewpoint of consistent symphonic construction it would be possible to imagine a substitute for the famous second theme of the first movement of Schubert’s B minor Symphony – the so-called »Unfinished«. The radio listener who does not care much for the movement and waits for the theme would get the shock of his life if it were replaced by another. Moreover, the theme that sticks out because it has lost its dynamic function, can no longer fulfill its truly musical role – which is to serve as a mere material of what follows – as soon as everything that follows is visualized only from the viewpoint of the undeveloped material of the theme. Hence, in the isolation of the symphonic theme, only the trivial remains. And in turn it is the triviality of the symphonic detail which makes it so easy to remember and own it as a commodity under the more general trademark of »culture«.
For by sounding like a quotation – the quintessence of the whole – the trivialized theme assumes a peculiar air of authority, which gives it cultural tone. Only what is established and accepted as a standard social value is quoted, and the anxiety of the listeners to recognize the so-called Great Symphonies by their quotable themes is mainly due to their desire to identify themselves with the standards of the accepted and to prove themselves to be small cultural owners within big ownership culture. This tendency again springs from the »electrocution« of symphony by radio, without taking into account radio’s social authoritarianism. It has already been mentioned that radio tends to present symphony as a series of results rather than a process. The more a particular result is set off against the process in which it gains creation, the more it ceases to be »the problem« of its own treatment. Within the symphonic process the theme has its fate. It is »disputed«; by radio the theme becomes definite. In the process of symphonic development it is not conceived as something rigid but fluent, even in its seemingly dogmatic first presentation. By radio even its musically remote transformations sound like themes of their own. If one could say, exaggeratedly, that in symphonic music nothing is theme and everything is development – which holds good literally for some modern symphonic music, particularly for Mahler – one could say as well that by radio everything becomes »theme«. The emphasis which every symphonic moment acquires through the radio voice is unlike the emphasis which the symphonic theme possesses in its live »positing«. As positing, it owes its emphasis to the potentiality for process which it contains within itself. By radio it becomes emphasized because that process has been broken through and the theme absolutizes itself in its mere present subsistence, in its being as it is. It is this literal-minded and pharisaical self-righteousness of the theme which transforms it into quotation.
It must be emphasized that the substitution of quotation for reproduction does not mean a greater faithfulness to the original but just the opposite. Quotation is reproduction in its decline. While genuine reproduction would stand in a tension-like relation to its object and realizes it by again »producing« it, quotation-reproduction sheds all spontaneity, dissolves all tension toward the object and seizes upon all particulars of the object as fixed and reified items. It is essential to the object, that is, the symphonic original, that it be reproduced in the sense of being produced again rather than of being photographed in degenerated colors and modified proportions. A Beethoven symphony is essentially a process; if that process is replaced by a presentation of frozen items, the performance is faithless even if executed under the battle cry of the utmost fidelity to the letter.
Radio symphony promotes the romantization of music no less than its trivialization. The authoritarian theme, the »result« replacing the process and thus destroying symphonic spell, acquires a spell of its own. The history of symphonic musical production after Beethoven itself reveals a shift from the totality aspect to the detail which bears a strong resemblance to the shift which the Beethoven symphony suffers through radio. The shift after Beethoven took place in the name of subjective expression. Lyrical expression tends to emphasize the atom and separate it from any comprehensive »objective« order. Radio disintegrates classical music in much the same way as romanticism reacted to it. If radio atomizes and trivializes Beethoven, it simultaneously renders the atoms more »expressive«, as it were, than they had been before. The weight which falls upon the isolated detail conveys to it an importance that it never has in its context. And it is this air of importance that makes it seem to »signify« or express something all the time, whereas in the original the expression is mediated by the whole. Consonantly, radio publicity proclaims the »inspiration« of symphonic themes, although precisely in Beethoven the movement, if anything, is inspired and not the theme. It is the romantic notion of melodic inventiveness which radio projects upon classical music strictly so-called. Details are deified as well as reified.
This has paradoxical consequences. One might expect that radio, since it affects the freshness of sound colors, makes them less conspicuous than in live music. Precisely the opposite is true. Together with the structural totality there vanishes in radio the process of musical spontaneity, of musical »thinking« of the whole by the listener. (The notion of musical thinking refers to everything in musical apperception that goes beyond the mere presence of the sensual stimulus.) The less the radio phenomenon evokes such thinking, the greater is the emphasis on the sensual side as compared with live music, where the sensual qualities are in themselves »better«. The structural element of music – the element that is defamed by many listeners as »intellectual« though it constitutes the concreteness of the musical phenomenon even more than the sound – is skipped over, and they content themselves with the stimuli remaining, however shopworn these stimuli may be. In romantic music and even in the romantic interpretation of Beethoven, those stimuli actually were the bearers of musical »expression«. Deteriorated as they are now, they still maintain something of their romantic glamour. Certain of them today, through the radio, assume such a glamour even though they never had it before, because their institutionalization casts about them a social validity which listeners credit to the music. That is why the atoms, sentimentalized by radio through the combination of triviality and expressiveness, reflect something of the spell which the totality has lost. To be sure, it is not the same spell. It is rather the spell of the commodity whose values are adored by its customers.
In the symphonic field those works surrender themselves to radio most readily which are conglomerates of tunes of both sensual richness and structural poverty – tunes making unnecessary the process of thinking which is anyhow restrained by the way the phenomenon comes out of the radio set. The preference for Tchaikovsky among radio listeners is as significant a commentary on the inherent nature of the radio voice as on the broader social issues of contemporary listening habits. Moreover, it is very likely that Beethoven is listened to in terms of Tchaikovsky. The thesis that music by radio is no longer quite »serious« implies that radio music already prejudices the capacity to listen in a spontaneous and conscious way. The radio voice does not present the listeners with material adequate to such desiderata. They are forced to passive sensual and emotional acceptance of predigested yet disconnected qualities, whereas those qualities at the same time become mummified and magicized.
This shows the necessity for starting from the sphere of the reproduction of musical works by radio instead of from an analysis of listener’s reactions. The latter presupposes a kind of naive realism with respect to such notions as symphony or »great music« on the air. If that music is fundamentally different from what it is supposed to be, listener’s statements about their reactions to it must be evaluated accordingly. There is no justification for unqualifiedly accepting the listener’s word about his sudden delight in a Beethoven symphony, if that symphony is changed the very moment it is broadcast into something closely akin to entertainment. Further, the analysis invalidates the optimistic idea that the knowledge of the deteriorated or even »dissolved« radio symphony may be a first step toward a true, conscious and adequate musical experience. For the way a symphony appears by radio is not »neutral« with regard to the original. It does not convey a hollow one-colored effigy which can be »filled« and made more concrete by later live listening. The radio symphony’s relation to the live symphony is not that of the shadow to the robust. Even if it were, the shadow cannot be given flesh by the transfusion of red blood corpuscles. The changes brought about by radio are more than coloristic; that they are changes of the symphony’s own essential structure means not only that this structure is not adequately conveyed but that what does come out opposes that structure and constitutes a serious obstacle against its realization. Beethoven’s musical sense does not match with the postulates it evokes itself when transmitted on the air. Reference may again be made to the coloristic element. The radio phenomenon produces an attitude in the listener which leads him to seek color and stimulating sounds. Music, however, composed in structural rather than coloristic terms does not satisfy these mechanized claims. The color of a Beethoven symphony in live performance as well as by radio is incomparably less radiant, more subdued not only than those of Wagner, Richard Strauss, or Debussy, but poorer even than the supply of current entertainment. Moreover, the coloristic effects which Beethoven achieves are valid only against the ascetic background of the whole. The cadenza of the oboe in the beginning of the repetition of the first moment of the Fifth Symphony is striking only as a contrast to the bulk of the strings; as a coloristic effect in itself it would be »poorer«, and it is the misinterpretation of such relations which leads some of today’s happy-go-lucky routine musicians who are nothing but competent, to such ingenious statements as that Beethoven was not able to score well. If radio, however, brings into the limelight just such particles as the oboe cadenza, may it not actually provoke those opinion statements and even a resistance within the listeners – a resistance which is only superficially compensated by the official respect for established values – because the symphony fails to satisfy the very same demands which it seems to raise? But the resistance goes beyond unfavorable comparisons between the full seven course dinner in color of Whiteman’s rendition of the »Rhapsody in Blue« and the frugal meal of the symphony in black and white consumed, as it were, as a meal merely. The transformation of the symphonic process into a series of results means that the listeners receive the symphony as a ready-made piecemeal product which can be enjoyed with a minimum of effort on his part. Like other ready-made articles radio symphony tends to make him passive: he wants to get something out of it, perhaps to give himself up to it, but, if possible, to have nothing to do with it, and least of all to »think« it. If it is true that the experience of the actual meaning of symphonic structure implies something like an activity of concrete musical thinking, this thinking is antagonized by radio presentation. It is significant that the same listeners who are allegedly overwhelmed by symphonic music are also ever ready to dwell upon what they call their emotions as against what they call »intellectual« in music. For it is as certain that actual musical understanding, by transcending the isolated, sensual moments of music and categorizing them by the interconnection of the past and the coming within the work, is bound to definite intellectual functions, as it is certain that the stubborn and spiteful adherence to one’s private emotional sphere tends to build a wall against these experiences – the very experiences by which alone a Beethoven symphony can be properly understood. Great music is not music that sounds the best, and the belief in that sound is apt to tilt over into frank hostility against what, though mediated by the sound, is more than sound. It is highly doubtful if the boy in the subway whistling the main theme of the Finale of Brahms’ First Symphony actually has been gripped by that music. By the way he picks out that tune he translates it into the language of »Only Forever«.2 It may well be that this translation falls into an historical process, the perspectives of which go far beyond the limits of traditional aesthetics.
If this be true, one should not speak about spreading music while that spreading implies the abnegation of the same concepts of musical classicism, in the name of which serious music is handled by radio. At least no responsible educational attempt can be built directly upon the radio symphony without taking into consideration that the radio symphony is not the live symphony and cannot therefore have the same cultural effect as the live symphony. No such educational attempt is worth undertaking that does not give the fullest account of the antagonistic tendencies promulgated by serious music in radio.