In general it is easy for the trained ear to distinguish radio music from live music even in such cases where the tool is not visible. One might point out that in America the distinction is none too difficult to make anyhow as there are few opportunities to listen to live music outside of the concert hall, the night club, and other places expressly devoted to musical performance. There is no live music as background in the sense of the continental café concert. Nevertheless, one must face the issue of making that distinction everywhere. One only has to think of Muzak, the radio’s competitor, whose well-groomed voice tends to enchant the superior restaurant into a private salon. No musician is likely to ponder for more than a second which is which: wireless or telephone – telephone being, as Stokowski points out, the more closely akin to live music.
Much has been thought about that difference. Reflections on the subject have taken mainly the line of weighing the respective merits of live music and radio music, mostly advancing to a negative judgment about radio, then analyzing the causes of the difference, and finally attempting to draft devices for abolishing the difference, that is to say, to develop methods in order to achieve that radio music sounds exactly like live music. Stokowski’s approach may be taken as representative. Discussing the element of amplification in radio transmission, he says: »The result becomes a caricature, and discriminating music lovers will prefer not to hear in a degraded form music they know and love; and those who hear the music for the first time can have no conception of its true beauty, or of the inspired message it conveys.«a From such a criticism he proceeds to the postulate of faithfulness. »The important question is the degree of faithfulness with which symphonic and operatic music can be delivered in our homes, and the message conveyed in its full value.«b In order to realize his ideal of faithfulness, he starts with an analysis of the technical elements of radio transmission which he divides into three kinds: frequency range, intensity range, and auditory perspective. After criticizing the specific shortcomings of radio with reference to these categories and offering certain remedies, such as a revision of the allotment of frequency »channels«, or wired transmission as a guarantee for three dimensional or perspective listening, he finally reaches the »vistas opened up by wired transmission«. He comes to conclusions as, say: »Through constant experience of listening by radio, and laboratory experimentation with electrically produced and reproduced sound and wired transmission of music, our horizons have become so vastly extended that formerly accepted standards and definitions of ›good‹ and ›bad‹ and ›natural‹ and ›artificial‹ tone have become less dogmatic and more fluid. Or it might be better to say that they are no longer adequate but give a limited and incomplete view of a field which is every year becoming more extended in our consciousness.«c Or, he asks more radically even: »What then is the ›natural‹ sound of an orchestra?«d Obviously, this trend of thought is such as to turn against one of its own presuppositions. What good is it to set the goal of faithfulness for radio transmission if the very concept of »natural« sound is questionable? There is no criterion for the»natural« sound of mechanically reproduced music but the faithfulness to the live sound. If the »natural« sound becomes problematic, the ideal of faithfulness becomes problematic too. For the contradiction, however, not the logic of Stokowski is to be blamed. It is rather a contradiction within the object itself, which may be spotted most simply by asking: of what import is it that music is distributed on a scale of mass reproduction while the idea of the »original« is still maintained?
Now the meaning of the terms original and mass reproduction, evidently, is not exhausted by their physical reference by comparative measurement of wave lengths, sound colors, and auditory perspectives. They are properly musical only insofar as they are related to men: they are social categories whatever their physical conditionedness may be. Being pertinent to the musical object, which is either an original or a mass reproduction, they reveal themselves as social the very moment the musical object makes its appearance. It is the appearance of music listened to directly or by radio on which depend both its own social meaning and any possible effect upon the listener. The listener hears music, not decibels. Hence, there is a need for a closer examination of radio phenomena not in terms of the physical and technological processes underlying them but by describing them as they present themselves immediately in experience.
It would be futile to attempt any such description as an isolated one. There is hardly anyone who has listened to music by radio only. Even the staunchest adherent of the self-styled radio generation speaks in comparative terms when giving his opinion about the new medium. No characteristic of the musical phenomenon pouring out of the wireless set seems possible without reference to similarities and/or dissimilarities to the live sound. Since that phenomenon transcends its particular and immediate musical situation and bears on the whole variety and manifoldness of musical experience as well, its description can only be given somewhat rhapsodically.
As against live music, radio music in one respect appears more alive than live music itself. Speaking not about music, but about the voices of people on the radio, Robert J. Havighurst passes a remark pointing in the same direction: »In the case of people the listener feels close enough to form direct impressions of a speaker’s personality; around the voice he hears the listener builds a person as real in many ways as if he had been actually met. This illusion of closeness makes the listener feel that he is actually present at the place where the broadcast originates – or purports to originate.«e The radio listener’s feeling at ease with the music offered them, the intimacy they profess to enjoy there, the personal touch which they cherish in it, are likely to reflect that »illusion of closeness«. To be sure that is partly due to extra-musical factors such as the attitude they can afford to assume at home in face of their wireless set as against the position they must take at more or less official occasions, where they are forced to keep silent on account of the person in the next seat, and take on a serious air for the sake of social prestige. Whatever the extra-musical factors account for: the illusion of closeness, which may well include them, the over-amplified noises by which the radio set appears to approach its owner-victim, undoubtedly play a major part in immediate radio phenomena. Illusion, according to current American musicology, is the life element of music: »Without the blessing of normal illusions, musical art would be hopelessly stunted. Our profoundest appreciations of nature and art are detachments from the physically exact and constitute a synthesis through the medium of normal illusions.«f
The illusion of closeness, however, does not go unchallenged. If the radio sound appears to approach one bodily, as it were, at the same time it seems also as if what approaches one were not quite this sound itself but something like its own shadow, or its mirrored reflection. One might dissect this impression into its different constituents. There is, first of all, the question of loudness or softness. Besides the fact known to every techniciang that radio’s »intensity range« is less than half as large as the scale between loudness and softness which music can cover in a concert hall, there come into play conditions of reception – quite apart from the physical necessity of »compressing« the intensity range of the broadcast itself. Even the intensity range left over after the process of compression is hardly ever fully used by the listener. What is actually listened to does not depend only on the picking up and transmission of the broadcast but also on the room where it is listened to. It is, normally, only a fraction of the size of a concert hall or radio studio. The full strength of an orchestra, even if already regulated by the sound control engineer, would blow it up. Hence, the listener is forced to »compress« the sound again. This second compression, though considered in the calculations of the sound control engineer, is not entirely in his hand. The fact that it is left for the listener to perform that compression has a greater bearing on the musical phenomenon than can be determined by mere technical-physical calculations. As the second process of compression necessarily affects the forte more than the piano, the acoustic proportions are not only reduced but also distorted.
This bears upon the illusion of closeness. One might assume that it is partly due to the over-strength of a radio playing with full power in a small room. Muting it down, the listener already counteracts it. It is paralyzed by the very softness that makes acoustic events sound more »remote« even in the apartment where they appear. It is paralyzed, too, by the disturbance of the acoustic proportions. The listener feels as if presented with something totally familiar, and familiar it may be indeed, yet in such a manner that it assumes an air of strangeness. The phenomenon is not autonomous; it is still to such a degree an image of the original that it can be apperceived only in relation to that original. However, neither is it a pure copy of the original, for it becomes oblique by the very act of reproduction. Thus, inasmuch as it concerns the object, there arises a peculiar uncertainty and uneasiness on the part of the listener. The strangeness of the phenomenon expresses itself in the somewhat vague and half-conscious awareness of being at home with it and yet quite far away. It both is and is not the same as the live sound. One actually has it not »here« though one seems to be face to face with it. This experience contradicts the illusion of closeness that is still maintained by the loudspeaker. This is not the only contradiction originating within the realm of radio phenomena. In speaking of the irrational effects of radio, it must not be overlooked that [they] cannot be traced back to the »psychology« of the listener, whose irrational behaviors largely reflect objective social processes. Nor does the authority of the monopolistically owned and administrated means of communication, which underlies those processes, directly produce these irrational effects. They are mediated by the technical structure of what the listener comes in contact with when listening to his set. This social function of radio is determined neither by the surface appearance of the particular contents which it transmits, nor by the conditioned reactions of the listeners, but by the actual technical structure of the radio phenomena which confront the listener. It is this structure, its social implications and relatedness to present social conditions, upon which a theoretical radio analysis ought to be based. This structure displays irrational trends and it is apt to bewitch mischievously the laws of logic. While radio music seems to approach one bodily to such a degree that one can hardly escape it, at the same time does it sound like an echo.
Echo possesses not only the characteristic of remoteness but also of derivation. Hence, radio music, however it may diminish or even abolish the distance between the listener and the musical work, which is delivered to his home and to which he can listen in his shirt sleeves, assumes a certain character of artificiality that contradicts its wornness no less than does its remoteness contradict its physical closeness. One has spoken of phonograph records as »canned« music. Indeed, while the preservation of music in records reminds one of canned food, the sound of radio suggests the actual taste of it: somehow it has lost its acoustic vitamins. Or perhaps one may compare the container of the sound with a box rather than a can. It is the voice of the man in the box that suddenly seizes upon the listener. The sound comes out as if it had been imprisoned. »Even with most perfect apparatuses there takes place a certain blunting and dulling of the live sound, as can be observed in every electrical reproduction of music.«h It consists not only in the modification of the sound colors caused by the loss of more distant overtones, nor in the much discussed shrinking of the auditory perspective of music which, although conceived in terms of binaural listening, is picked up and distributed monaurally only. The sound modifications can be grasped within a precise musical terminology. The neutralization of the sound colors attributable to both those technical factors makes them sound much more alike than in live music, whereas some of them, like the flute and the percussion, do not undergo any neutralization and therefore detach themselves much more from the total sound of the orchestra than in actual orchestra performance. The sound, at the same time, becomes more uniform, less plastic and articulate, and on the other hand, more torn into extremes – a new antagonism within the basic musical phenomenon. The interplay of these interrelationships one could subsume under the head, »neutrality-modification«, a term borrowed from epistemology that accounts for »a certain having ›postponed‹ something, or, better still, a ›having let it stand‹, where we have not in mind anything that has been ›really‹ let stand. The positing characteristic has become powerless.«i On radio, music loses something of its ›reality‹ however hard it may be to determine the concept of reality as it applies to music. Music as an art has no empirical reality as its immediate object which is ›meant‹ by it: the reality characteristic of music refers purely to its self-existence. That self-existence is harmed by radio. At any rate, radio music is not fully ›present‹. It is rather an image of music than music itself. Here the connection between the change within the musical phenomenon and its social aspect becomes manifest. By losing its reality, it loses something of its spell, of the power ascribed to it since time immemorial as an indigenous element of actual existence. That may imply that radio aids in viewing music with fewer illusions, although it evokes, to be sure, new illusions of its own. Yet, however that may be, the new tool somehow deprives music of its obliging character. It is not quite serious. Sociological reflections on radio music which naively identify a broadcast of Beethoven with a live Beethoven performance, inferring that today »the farmer’s wives in the prairie States listen to great music performed by great artists as they go about their morning housework«,4 miss their point from the very beginning, and substitute for an adequate analysis the erudite yet hollow conventions of accepted »great music«.
This can be made clearer by a more concrete treatment of the interrelationship of what is commonly called the original – namely, the live performance of a work – and its reproduction. One might well start with the assumption that radio brings »great« symphonic music to people who never heard it before. The current view may even concede that symphonies brought to the knowledge of the fabulous farmer in the Middle West are somewhat affected and deteriorated by the transmission. But on the whole, they would argue, those differences matter only to those few who know a lot about music in general and about symphonic music in particular. The finer shades and differences are of no import to the layman who has to gain a first acquaintance with the material. Better a symphony that is not quite so good as if heard in Carnegie Hall than no symphony at all. Whoever dares to oppose such a view is likely to be regarded as an aesthete who lacks any true sympathy with the needs and desires of the unhappy many. Yet, the social analyst must risk to be unsociable if the uncovering of social tendencies, as distinct from their mere appearance, is to be his objective.
Such an analysis, in the case of a radio symphony, must rid itself not only from the unexamined supposition that the apparently slight alterations brought about by radio have no bearing on the social sig nificance of the symphony. It must neither be content with the conventional definition of symphony itself which asserts that it is but a sonata for orchestra. For, the insight into the changes a Beethoven work undergoes by radio depends on the specific understanding of the symphonic form, such as that form has crystallized and maintained itself in the comparatively short period of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Now, this specific understanding is not furthered by analyzing the symphony in terms such as exposition, development, repetition, or more subtle ones such as the antagonism of the two main subjects of the exposition, their »bridge«, their conclusion, the way they are worked out and make their modified recurrence. However easy it may be to identify all those typical constituents of form in every Beethoven symphony, they are essential only within the interplay of the unexchangeable content of each work, and not abstractly. It is too easy to identify them: any approach starting from the mere recognition of those invariants, tends to degrade listening to a mechanical process where each symphony could be replaced by any other which has the same scheme. If reference to those terms does not aid much in the actual following of the work, they help even less to come to an understanding of the meaning and function of the symphonic form itself. The late German musicologist, Paul Bekker, in a paper on the symphony from Beethoven to Mahler, has stated the problem very clearly. »A sonata for orchestra, that does not say anything«, for it does not explain »why Beethoven wrote that sonata especially for orchestra«.j The notion of sonata does not convey what is essential for symphony: that the idea of the sound volume determined the choice of the orchestra as a medium. The reason that Bekker advances for this, is that Beethoven, while executing a symphonic device, »was at the same time composing an ideal picture of space and audience«.k From here he proceeds to what he regards as the essence of symphony: its power to »create a community«.l
No doubt, Bekker’s theory is open to a great deal of criticism. He still remains within the sphere of German nineteenth century aesthetics, particularly of Wagnerian wish-fantasies, when attributing to symphony the power of creating a community within a world where the individuals are so radically alienated from one another that the attempt to bridge the gulf between them cannot possibly be restricted to the realm of art, but must touch upon the very structure of society itself. If, on the other hand, he conceives of the power of the symphony merely in terms of the ephemeral feeling of elation and togetherness of the audience during the performance, he is thinking of that power in terms of a means to produce psychological drunkenness. This drunkenness, however, – the notion was first critically developed by Nietzsche against Wagner – tends less to unite men than to make them forget that they are disunited. Such ambiguities are caused by too great an aloofness from the technical musical processes within the symphony. His vagueness in matters of composition forces him to have recourse to such problematic psychological notions as Beethoven’s »picture of an audience«. Yet, apart from its obvious shortcomings, Bekker’s theory expresses something deeper than the usual formalistic reference to the symphonic schedule. One must only transfer it from the sphere of sociological generalities to the inherent technicalities of the symphony, in order to arrive at a more precise social identification of the symphony. What characterizes a symphony when experienced in immediate listening as something different not only from chamber music but also from other orchestral forms, such as the suite, or the »tone-poem«, could be best grasped as a peculiar intensity that captivates the listener. As against Bekker, the medium in which the individuality of the listener is sublated and integrated is no community, either real or fictitious, but the organizing principle of the work of art itself, which is pointing, in a mediated manner only, to the possibility of a real community. In other words, the process of integrating and sublating the individual into a whole, is represented by a proper musical process. While the purely musical moments correspond to the »individuals«, the totality of the work of art corresponds to the production and reproduction of social life. The »intensity« of a symphony in which that interconnection between the whole and the details consists, can be understood musically as the incomparably greater density and conciseness of thematical relationships within the symphonic field as against other forms. It is the most completely organized piece of music that can be achieved. Every detail, however emphasized as spontaneous, is absorbed in the whole by its very intensity and gets its true bearing only by its relation to the whole. Bekker rightly points at the relative unimportance of thematic inventiveness in Beethoven, and the »triviality« for which Mahler is blamed so often can certainly be accounted for by similar reasons. On the other hand, romanticism failed to produce symphonic works of the same obliging character as those of Mozart and Beethoven because the increase in importance of the expressive detail as against the whole made impossible the determination of every moment by the totality.
While listening to a typically romantic post-Beethovenian symphony, one remains fully conscious, sometimes too conscious, of the time it takes, however beautiful all the moments by which this time – one’s own time – is filled. With Beethoven it is different. The density of thematical interwovenness, of »antiphonic« works, tends to what one could, exaggeratedly, call a suspension of time-consciousness. If a movement like the first of Beethoven’s Fifth or Seventh Symphony, or even a very long one such as the first of the »Eroica« is rightly performed – which, by the way, happens less frequently than one should expect in a time which overflows with crack conductors – one has the feeling that these movements do 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 performance, the contingencies of private existence and transfigures the individuals into what could be called, not an actual community as Bekker calls it, but the awareness of the »idea« of such a community where at the same time the drives and desires of the individuals are fulfilled and brought into a perfect equilibrium with the needs and necessities of society. The promise of the happiness of such an equilibrium, the musical formulation of which at the same time exhibits and sublates the antagonisms between the individual and society, makes the greatness of Beethoven. One has a live experience instead of a museum experience of his music, one »lives« it, as it were, only insofar as this »idea« is realized by the performance, that is to say, inasmuch as the performance accomplishes such a dense relation between the tension of the moments and the fulfillment by the whole, that time which drags away from such fulfillment is actually superseded.
If the view of the community-forming power of symphony were tenable in its abstract generality, radio would seemingly bear it out best. The number of people brought at the same time in contact with symphonic music is so tremendous that one could actually think of them in terms of a »society«, a mass of individuals held together and articulated by the power of music. From the analysis of the characteristics of the symphony, however, there follows that the specific conditions of radio tend to effect in the opposite direction. Even the literal and undifferentiated acceptance of the community theory of symphony leads into difficulties. For, the evoking of a feeling of community which supposedly is best aided by the volume of the symphony, evidently requires the presence of a large number of people in the face of the work. It is no accident that totalitarian countries, when staging their »community experiences«, do all they can to herd together as vast masses of people as possible, while those who cannot participate in the event are taken out of their physical isolation and made to face the broadcast under the title of »community reception«. Normal listening to a symphony on the air takes place under totally different conditions: people listen to their Toscanini performance in their private apartments on Saturday evening at 10 o’clock, and, whatever the collective »message« conveyed to them, they cannot experience it with that immediate feeling of togetherness as the expression of which Bekker interprets the »Seid umschlungen Millionen«. They are aware only indirectly, if at all, of the hundreds and thousands of fellow-listening neither affected by them, nor does it bring them into contact with them from whom they are literally isolated. It may be argued that the collective meaning of a symphony must not be understood so literally but rather as something internalized which must also be apperceived in an internalized way. But then it would be hard to understand why symphony should have to make use of such drastic and external means as that of »loudness«, while other musical forms, such as most of church music which to be sure makes also for an internalized community, can dispense with those means. Be that as it may, even if it is admitted that the collective message of the symphony is something not at all literal but internalized that can be conveyed to the physically isolated radio listener, there still remains the question as to how the structure of the symphony, that alone can be the »bearer« of the ideal collective message, appears in the radio phenomenon. This brings to the fore again the more concrete determination of the symphonic form. The issue is, to what extent are the inherent constituents of this form realized by radio.
One may start from the most primitive fact about symphonic music – indeed, the only one on which Bekker’s theory is founded, while it is probably also the one that accounts for the preference of the majority of listeners for symphonic as against chamber music. It may be stated in terms of »absolute dimensions«, the meaning of which is well known from the arts, particularly from architecture. A cathedral has not only its actual function but also its esthetic meaning only in proportion to the human body. A model of a cathedral in table size is something totally different 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 cathedral. The building itself, being of utterly problematic value as architecture, becomes plainly ridiculous as a miniature: the impression one gains is much like the one which one receives when seeing the sugar-coated architecture on wedding cakes. The question of absolute dimension takes a similar shape in music. The power of symphony to absorb the individual into the organized whole, in part depends on 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 to submerge into the totality. This being larger could first be expressed in comparative terms of the intensity range. That implies that the intensity range of the sound is larger than any musical range the listener could conceive of in terms of being produced by himself either by singing or playing. It implies further the existence of an experience which is difficult to render in exact terms but is nonetheless fundamental for the apperception of symphony and is the true musical objective of the 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«. And it is this surrounding quality that, in the sphere of aesthetic appearance, comes closest to the idea of symphonic absorption. Both these qualities are radically affected by radio. The sound is no longer »larger« than the individual. In the private room that largeness would cause those very disproportions which the listener has to mute down. The »surrounding« function of music, notwithstanding the value which can be attributed to it, vanishes into nothing as well, partly because of the diminution of absolute dimensions, partly because of the monaural conditions of radio listening. What is left of the symphony, even in the ideal case of an adequate reproduction of sound colors, is a mere »chamber symphony«. It may be taken as a first index for the thesis that radio is an executor of musical and social tendencies outside of its proper technical realm, that in musical production itself, quite independent from radio, the form of chamber symphony and similar chamber orchestral forms have gained an ever increasing importance since Schönberg’s Kammersymphonie, of 1906. However this may be and whatever the merits of this development, it certainly hits at the very point which is conventionally regarded as the main asset of radio transmission, namely, its seeming collective message. If symphony music today reaches masses that have never before been in touch with it, it does so in a way in which just the collective a priori, the inherent social qualities of symphony are practically eliminated from the musical picture.
One must be careful not to derive therefrom a premature judgment on radio, or try to »save« music from it, in the role of a panegyrist of the past. The »surrounding« quality of music challenged by radio, is certainly part of that musical dope the criticism of which is justified and considerably furthered by radio. The dope tendency is very clear in Wagner where the mere largeness of the sound into the waves of which the listener can dive, is one of the means to snatch the listener, quite apart from any specific content. In Beethoven, it has not this irrational function. But the more intrinsically it is connected with the structural devices of the work, it is therefore also the more deeply affected by broadcasting. Paradoxically as it may appear, a Beethoven symphony becomes more problematic as a broadcast than 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 impressed upon the listener by an unabating intensity of presentation. Throughout the movement it remains clearly recognizable as the same motif: its rhythm is vigorously maintained. Yet here is no repetition but development: the melodic content of the basic rhythm, that is to say, the intervals which constitute it, change perpetually: it becomes perspectival 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 by 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 meets with an utmost richness of texture: the richness prevents the simple from becoming the primitive, while simplicity prevents richness from dissipation into mere details. It is the unity within the manifold as well as the manifoldness within that unity which constitutes the antiphonic work and promulgates the seizing power of that music finally terminating in the suspension of time-consciousness. This interrelationship of unity and manifoldness itself, and not the mere loudness of the sound is 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 utterly significant for Beethoven as well as for the German philosophy of his time – 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 underscores it as the virtual material of everything that is to come. The first bars of the Fifth Symphony, if rightly performed, must possess the characteristic of a »statement«, or, as those German idealist philosophers would have put it, of a »positing«, a Setzung. 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 touches upon the very structure of symphony, and therewith also upon the internalized community that could be regarded as the »idea« of Beethoven’s symphonic form. 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 stated. 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, further, 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 proved 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 receives its proper bearing in Beethoven only between the extremes of Nothing and 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 turn the symphony into a work of chamber music which, although different from symphony, has merits of its own. A symphony, however, conceived in symphonic terms, would necessarily become a bad work of chamber music. Its symphonic simplicity would make itself felt as poverty in chamber musical texture, as lack of polyphonous interwovenness of its parts as well as a 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. No doubt, radio symphony bears a stronger resemblance to the chamber music transcription with its pseudo-colorfulness than to the simple yet faithful translation into the mere piano sound. For the sound colors are affected on the air too 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 a unifold melody, while their coloristic differentiation realizes at the same time the construction and all its interrelationships underneath that surface. The finer the shades within the construction, the finer also necessarily the shades of changing sound colors. These subtleties more than anything else tend to be effaced by radio. While exaggerating conspicuous contrasts, its neutralization of sound colors practically blots out the minute differences upon which just 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, in a way, the second violins – never quite so brilliant and intense as the first violins – are different instruments, as it were, from the firsts.m Such differences play a decisive part in the Beethoven 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 similarity between them, that of strings playing in the same tonal region. Obviously, radio accomplishes only that unity, whereas differences such as those between first and second violins are necessarily eliminated. Moreover, certain sound colors, like that of the oboe or the mute trumpet – the latter, of course, being post-Beethovenian – are changed to such an extent that the instrumental equilibrium is disturbed. As 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 must again and finally touch upon the structure of the symphony. The less articulate the symphony becomes, the more it loses its character of unity and becomes a conventional and unobliging sequence and recurrence of more or less nice tunes, the interrelation of which is of no import whatever. Here it becomes apparent why it is Beethoven that becomes the victim rather than Wagner and later romanticism. For it is in Beethoven where the idea of articulate unity constitutes the essence of the symphonic scheme. That unity is achieved by a severe economy of means forbidding their reduction, which in turn is inevitable by radio.
In order to arrive at any inferences regarding its working upon the listener, it is necessary to relate the results of all those changes as they take shape in the radio symphony, for the radio symphony performs its function only in the way it appears and not as music that is »in itself«. The traditional argument that the novelty of symphonic experience in America compensates for the allegedly slight alterations loses its ground and turns into its opposite: the less the listeners know the works in their original form, the more their total impression is based on the specific phenomena delivered to them. These phenomena, in the case of the radio symphony, are far from being unambiguous. One is tempted again to call them contradictory in themselves. A process of polarization is taking place within the symphony: it becomes trivialized and romanticized at the same time.
The trivialization of symphony, first of all, is caused by its relapse into time. The smaller the symphonic time suspension, the farther away one is from that sphere of the symphony that bears all the implications for a virtual community: the individual, no longer absorbed by it, contents himself with absorbing it into his everyday existence to which he expects it to add some glamour. No longer can he experience symphonic time contraction because the technical requisites to that end have been blunted. The time the radio symphony takes is the empirical time. It is entirely in agreement with the structure of the material offered that, by switching it off, the listener can dispense with 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 speeds up its liquidation. Every sound tends to undermine the idea of spell, of great music, and of the uniqueness of moment, which are emphasized so much by the radio business. And not only the spell and the idealistic notion of symphonic totality fall victim to mechanization. The decline of the unity that is truly the symphony, means also a decay of the manifold held together by it. The symphonic particulars become atoms. The tendency toward atomistic listening is perhaps the most universal of present day’s musical consciousness. It is furthered by such divergent features as musical recognition contests that place all emphasis on the isolated detail, the »theme«; as books that tell the listener how to memorize the main tunes of famous symphonies by underlaying them with certain words, without regard to their development; and, as the standardization of light popular music where the whole is so stereotyped that only the detail can catch the listener’s attention. This tendency finds its exact technical expression in radio. The meaning of the music is made to shift from the totality to the individual moments because their interrelation and articulation by dynamics and colors is no longer fully valid. Those moments become semi-independent episodes, organized mainly by their simple succession in time. One has often compared symphony with drama. If that comparison tends to emphasize the dualistic character, the dialogue aspect of symphony, it must still be admitted that it is justified insofar as symphony aims at an »intensive« totality, an instantaneous focusing of an »idea« rather than an extensive totality of »life« unfolding itself within empirical time.n It is in this sense, that radio symphony ceases to be a drama and becomes an epical form, or, to render it in less solemn terms, a narrative. And narrative it becomes in a more literal sense, too. The particular, when broken out of the unity of symphony, still retains a trace of the unity in which it functioned. A genuine symphonic theme, even if all light is centered upon it and it thus ceases to be understood in its dynamic relation to the whole, is nonetheless of such a kind as to impress upon one that it is actually nothing in itself but basically something »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, the theme, or the individual moment of symphony is presented like something out of a context which itself does not appear in the performance. In other words, through radio the individual elements of symphony acquire the character of quotation. Radio symphony approaches the potpourri insofar as the musical atoms it proffers 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 the suggestion of Beethoven’s Fifth. The commentator, in grafting upon the listener’s own spontaneity of judgment while chatting about the marvels of the world’s immortal music, is not but following the trend of the music which, in that it seemingly reassembles fragments from a context not realized itself, seems to tell all the time: »This is Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.« The image character of radio need not be explained by abstract reference to physical conditions. It follows from the structural changes, the changes of the »sense« of symphony by broadcasting. And it is only in relation to that »sense« that the mechanical alteration of the musical object has a bearing on the listener’s virtual understanding.
The issue of »quotation« again is inseparably bound up with the structure and significance of symphonic themes themselves. From the dramatic literature of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries the moment of sententious precision serving to reveal in words the sense of an entire dramatic development or situation is well known. The sententious passages in reflecting upon the action detach themselves from the immediacy of the action itself. Through this detachment they become reified, emphasized and easily quotable. The abstract generality into which they translate the concrete idea of the drama from which they draw conclusions much in the form of maxims for practical life, brings them close to the banal. At times the sententious moments gain power over the whole of the drama. There are many jokes in England and Germany about elderly ladies expressing the delight they take in plays such as »Hamlet« or »Wilhelm Tell« with the single reservation that they consist of quotations only. If in the realm of music radio has realized a similar tendency and has transformed Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony into a set of quotations from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the symphonic theme as such may structurally very well be compared with the sententious element of the drama.
The symphonic theme of the Beethoven period consists in most cases of the triad upon which it is based harmonically and which it circumscribes melodically, the characteristic intervals coinciding with those of the triad. As the triad is the general principle of the whole tonality, triadic themes have a touch of »generality« themselves, they are to a great extent interchangeable. One has remarked often enough on the striking similarity between the material of pieces of such totally different character as the finale of Mozart’s G minor Symphony and the Scherzo of Beethoven’s Fifth. This generality, or even abstractness, of symphonic theme is balanced by its precision, mainly 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 in German musicology one frequently speaks of »head motives« (Kopfmotive) as opening a symphonic movement. All this points at the sententious character of symphonic themes, and it is this character that offers itself to the process of trivialization executed by radio. The triviality characteristic of 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 their own development. Radio interferes with both these purposes. Being atomized, the symphonic theme fails to show its »generality«. It catches attention just as it is. From the viewpoint of symphonic construction one could well picture a substitute for the famous second theme of the first movement of Schubert’s B minor Symphony. The radio listener who does not care much for the movement and only waits for the theme would get the shock of his life if it were replaced by another. And again it is evident that the theme does not serve as a mere material of what follows if everything that follows is visualized only from the viewpoint of the theme which stands out because it has lost its dynamic function. 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 serves as a stock of musical trademark articles labeled »culture«.
For, by sounding like a quotation the trivialized theme assumes a peculiar air of authority. Only what is established and accepted as a standard social value, is art, 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 of proving themselves as small cultural owners within the big ownership culture. This tendency again is closely related to the material, apart from radio’s general leanings toward authoritarian standardization. It has already been mentioned too that radio tends to present the symphony as a sequel of results rather than a process. The more the result is set off against the process in which it is created, the more it ceases to be questionable. Within the symphonic process the theme has its fate, it is »disputed«; by radio the theme becomes definite. In the process it is not conceived as something rigid but as fluent, even in its most emphatic first presentation. By radio even its 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 in this manner is unlike the emphasis which the symphonic theme possessed in its »positing«. As positing it owes its emphasis to the potentiality of process which it virtually contains in itself. Through radio it becomes emphasized because that process exists no longer and the theme absolutizes itself in its more present existence, in its being as it is. It is this literal-minded and pharisean self-righteousness of the theme which brings it so close to quotation. Quotation is reproduction in its decline. While genuine reproduction stands in a tensionlike relation to its object and realizes it by again »producing« it, the quotation-reproduction has dropped all spontaneity, dissolved all tension toward the object and seized upon all particulars of the object as fixed and reified individuals. It must be emphasized that the substitution of quotation for reproduction does not mean a greater faithfulness to the original but just the opposite. It has been shown that the meaning of the original is distorted by its atomization. Moreover, it is essential to the object, that is, the symphonic original that it be reproduced in the sense of being produced again instead of being photographed with degenerated colors and modified proportions. The essential of the Beethoven symphony is its being a process; if that process is replaced by a presentation of ready-made items, the performance is faithless even if achieved in the name of the utmost fidelity to the letter. One might say that it is a law of form of the great bourgeois art that its works must not be quoted and that it must be regarded as a symptom of decay of that art as well as of its reception if quotation begins to supersede it. It is the Boeotian’s relation to literature that consists in quoting, and to music in whistling his favorite tunes. But his attitude does not simply indicate a lack of erudition. It betrays also the man that bows to the established and is gratified in showing that he knows everything that everybody knows. Radio symphony, among other institutions, comes to aid in this attitude.
Yet it comes to aid in the romantization of music no less than in its trivialization. The authoritarian theme, the »result« replacing the process and thus destroying symphonic spell, acquires a spell of its own. The history of musical production after Beethoven itself reveals a shift from the totality aspect to the detail which bears a strong resemblance to the process which musical reproduction undergoes by radio. That shift took place in the name of subjective expression. The less the individual was absorbed by the symphonic totality, the more it became a mere sequel of details, the lyrical expression of which tends to emphasize the atom and separate it from any comprehensive »objective« order. Radio disintegrates classical music much in the same way as romanticism has turned against it before. If radio atomizes and trivializes Beethoven, it makes at the same time 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 had in its context. And it is this air of importance that makes it seem to »signify« or express something all the time, while originally the expression was only mediated by the whole. It is characteristic that radio publicity takes such a delight in speaking about the »inspiration« of symphonic themes, although in Beethoven the movement is inspired and not the theme. It is the romantic notion of melodic inventiveness which radio projects upon classical music in the proper sense. Details are deified as well as reified.
This sometimes leads to paradoxical consequences. One should expect that radio, since it affects the sound colors, causes them to play a less conspicuous part than in line music. Precisely the opposite is true. Together with the structural totality there vanishes the process of musical spontaneity, of musical »thinking« of the whole in the listener. The notion of musical thinking applies 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«. It is hardly accidental that young people when listening to a symphony on radio, so often discuss the respective merits of the various instruments or the sounds of the different orchestras. The structural element of music – the element that is defamed by the same listeners as »intellectual« though it constitutes the concreteness of the musical phenomenon just as much as the sound – is abstracted and they content themselves with the stimuli left, however shopworn those stimuli might be. Yet, those stimuli once were the bearers of musical »expression« in its specific, romantic sense. Deteriorated as they are now, they still maintain something of their romantic glamour: they sometimes assume such a glamour even if they never had it before. That is why the atoms, sentimental in their 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 the value of which is adored by its prospective customers rather than the spell of the ideal »surrounding« community in Beethoven. One may say that even in the symphonic field those works lend themselves to radio the most willingly which are agglomerates of momentous tunes of both sensual richness and structural poverty, dispensing with the process of thinking that is restrained anyhow by the way the phenomenon comes out of the set. The preference for Tchaikovsky among radio listeners is as significant for the inherent nature of the radio phenomenon as for the broader social issues of today’s reception of music.o And it is very likely, though hard to test, that Beethoven is listened to in terms of Tchaikowsky as well. The thesis that music by radio is no longer quite »serious« implies after closer technical considerations that it can no longer be related to essential spontaneous and conscious experiences of the listeners: the way it comes out of the radio no longer presents the listener with an adequate material for such activities. They are forced to a more or less passive sensual and emotional acceptance of predigested yet disconnected qualities, while those qualities at the same time and through the present use of the tool become in an odd way mummified and magicized.
It is this preliminary result which subsequently shows the necessity of starting from the sphere of reproduction of musical works by radio instead of from an analysis of listener’s reactions. For, any such a beginning would imply a kind of naive realism with respect to such notions as symphony or »great music« on radio in analyzing the »effect« of such music upon the listeners who are expected to enjoy or not to enjoy it. If that music, however, is not only something that is superficially modified but fundamentally different from what it is supposed to be, listener’s statements about their reactions to it must also be evaluated accordingly. There is no justification for unqualifiedly accepting the word of the mythological farmer about his sudden delight in a Beethoven symphony, if that symphony is changed the very moment it is received into something very close to the kind of entertainment against which educational broadcasters put emphasis on serious music in general, and symphonic music in particular. Further, the analysis tends to invalidate 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. But, the way symphony appears by radio is not »neutral« in regard to the original. It does not convey a dim effigy in a one-colored shape which could be »filled« and made more concrete by later live listening. It must be realized as the actual result of the analysis of radio symphony that the latter’s relation to the live symphony is not that of the pale to the robust thus as if the pale could be transformed into the robust by the infiltration of more red blood corpuscles. The insight into the fact that the changes brought about by radio are more than coloristic, that they are changes of the symphony’s own essential structure does not only mean that this structure does not come out fully enough. What does come out opposes that structure and constitutes a serious obstacle against its realization. Through the way of presentation by radio the listener’s attention is diverted in such a manner that the criteria with which he approaches symphonic music like Beethoven’s do not match that music which cannot fulfill the postulates to which it is subjected by its radio transformation. Reference may again be made to the coloristic element. Due to the change of attitude to which the radio phenomenon induces the listener, color comes to prevail and the listener’s claims come to refer to sounds. Music, however, that is actually conceived in structural terms rather than coloristic ones does not satisfy these claims. The colors of a Beethoven symphony in live performance as well as by radio are incomparably poorer not only than those of Wagner, Richard Strauss, or Debussy, but poorer even than the stocks of cheap 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 movement 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 »poor«, 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 ingenuous statements as that Beethoven was not able to score well enough. If radio, however, brings to the limelight just such particles as the oboe cadenza: does it not actually suggest such statements and provoke a resistance within the listener – 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 of Whiteman’s rendition of the Rhapsody in Blue and the frugal meal of the symphony, consumed, as it were, as a meal merely. The transformation of the symphonic process into a set of results means that the listener receives the symphony as a ready-made 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 or concrete musical thinking, this thinking is antagonized by radio presentation. It is significant that the same listeners who are allegedly caught by symphonic music are also so ready to dwell upon what they call their emotions as against what they call »intellectual« in music. For it is as likely 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 certain 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 the 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, or whether by the way he picks out that tune he translates it into the language of »A-tisket-a-tasket«. It may well be that this translation falls into a historical process the perspectives of which go far beyond the limits of traditional aesthetics, a process that contains tremendous productive powers. If this be true, however, it should not be appreciated in terms of the same aesthetic norms which it challenges, one should not speak about spreading classical 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 could be built immediately upon radio symphony without taking into consideration that the listener’s reactions must be different from what is generally expected because to something different from what is expected. No such educational attempt, furthermore, is worthwhile to be undertaken that does not give the fullest account of the antagonistic tendencies promulgated by serious music in radio: the sort of resistance which the phenomenon seems to provoke almost inevitably because of its inherent contradictions.
It may well be argued that it is superfluous if not futile to trace all those changes to subtle features as those of radio symphony which necessarily remain unconscious to most listeners. It recommends itself as better common sense and less bothersome as well, to derive them from general conditions of the life of society in the present and of music life in particular. Is it not possible to explain the quotation character of symphonic music much more simply and convincingly by reference to the fact that a small number of standard works are played again and again, thus calling for a »that’s it« experience for a replacement of spontaneous apperception by mere recognition in each case? Is not the adherence to commercialized glamour so universal that the adherence to obtrusive sound colors and coloristic effects is nothing but its particular realization? Is not the passivity of the listeners determined less by the structure of the radio phenomenon than by their psychological predisposition? Do they not live in a society that allows them ever fewer choices and increasingly tends to transform them into mere employees or functionaries who no longer believe in their own initiative but surrender to prescribed pleasures as well as duties?
The insight into such broader issues, however, cannot be gained by making abstract statements about »our time« or »general conditions«. If men attain such features as glamour mindedness or readiness to accept standardized culture under present day conditions, radio itself is one of those institutions which change their consciousness in that direction. It would be nonsensical to presuppose glamour-mindedness or intellectual passivity, so to speak, as psychological invariants of the man of today and to exempt radio from the mechanism which produces such a mentality because the objective characteristics by which it helps to build up that mentality are too subtle. The being unconscious of those characteristics are no argument against their effectiveness. It rather adds to it. If people were conscious of those trends, they might easily revolt against them just as they often revolt against such clumsy attempts to subject them to the mechanism as those of the commentator who is the pseudo-objective panegyrist of the stuff he has to advertise. However, the subtler those objective characteristics and the deeper they are engraved in the phenomenon facing the listener, the better is their chance of reaching him at the very layers of his own unconscious life which correspond to the unconscious elements of the object, without being »censored« by his critical Ego. – The assertion that men are as they are because of the general conditions of production makes sense only if it is shown that they are virtually made what they are at every moment of their existence. Their following given patterns which is expressed in the argument against the »objective« analysis, demands itself the analysis of the objective patterns which are allegedly followed. To be sure, the fitting of specific conditions of radio with general predispositions of the listeners is an index of the fact that radio is not an isolated specification of a merely technological type but that it is a working social power »expressing« underlying social laws. But this expression can be spotted only within the specific structure of the radio phenomenon. Only if one succeeds in demonstrating that the radio phenomenon as it is produces certain tendencies toward reification and atomization, is it possible to place it in the total social process of atomization and reification and to interpret it as a concrete mediation between the thus-being of the individuals and the working of social forces, instead of a social contingency adapted to the psychological mechanisms of the listeners.
One may further raise the more specific objection that it is fallacious to single out such phenomena as the radio symphony from amidst the working social forces: that one is falsely attributing to it a power which it does not possess for itself but only within the totality of all the forces to which the individual is subjected today. Such criticism would concede that one could speak about the existence of listener’s passivity only if that passivity is revealed in such experiences as radio symphony. It would deny, however, that this passivity can be traced as stemming from the radio symphony itself. According to this view, the passivity of the listener existing in face of the radio symphony would have been there even if the structure of the radio symphony were identical with that of the live symphony. Obviously, it would be hard to prove such an hypothetical assertion, again to say nothing about the grave methodological reservations against an exempting of radio from the rest of today’s means of social communication. In spite of all that, however, it must be admitted bluntly and unconditionally that it is impossible to actually and literally derive the listener’s behavior from one isolated mechanism within the interplay of those means of public communication. If listeners »react« to a radio symphony atomistically, their way of reaction contains virtually the whole life indeed of the listeners: it contains the dulling process of labor in which they have to participate, the renunciations which they are forced to make, their adaption to given behavior patterns, but also their transfer of quite specific experiences from other spheres of mass communication to that of radio, such as the picking out of close-ups in motion pictures or the indifference to the context as created in musical shows. It appears even possible to identify the process of such a transfer, to a certain extent, by detailed case analyses of radio listeners. Nevertheless, the general knowledge that each moment represents such totalities does not supersede the postulate that there is justification in speaking about those tendencies only insofar as they can be spotted within the specific phenomena. Neither the totality of conditions nor the mediation between this totality and the single reactions of listeners are completely given to the observer at any one moment. The totality of conditions functions in knowledge only insofar as one could demonstrate on the phenomenon, like on a microcosmos, all those features which are considered as inhering in that totality though the intermediary links are missing. In other words: analysis of the phenomenon of radio symphony is a model. It is to be taken literally and in all technical severity insofar as from a musical viewpoint the music itself as it is pouring out of the radio set is concerned. It is not to be taken literally in the sense of a causal explanation of listener reactions. True, the analysis describes certain limitations of those reactions: it follows from the structure of the phenomenon that listeners, when perceiving it adequately, cannot react to a radio symphony as to a live symphony, although the interplay of different means of communication may go so far today that, in turn, they may listen to a live symphony as to a radio symphony. But this limitation does not imply that the atomistic listening to radio symphony is caused solely and concretely by this radio symphony. It is possible that the listener listens atomistically to a Beethoven symphony on the air »because« he is used to listen to jazz only or because he is trained by the music appreciation system to concentrate merely on recognizable themes. Yet, the »model« analysis of radio symphony is to be carried out. In the phenomenon itself the sufficient conditions lie manifestly at hand for all that is to be explained in terms of causal connections, irrespective of their kind and however indirect and hidden they may be. One may put it this way: the radio phenomenon itself expresses or »utters« what should be categorized by causal analysis. One may even go a step further. Can one still adequately say that people are »influenced«? Does not the term influence presuppose a sort of stability of the individual that might be altered from outside while it is highly questionable if this stability still exists and while much points in the direction that vast numbers of people are changed into mere passive centers of reaction? It is possible that the very »thusbeing« of men upon which the influences are exercised does not actually belong to them, but that, paradoxically speaking, they are already that into which they are changed. The new means of communication may »reproduce« them such as they are already in themselves because, in a way, they are already produced by the mechanism. If this be true, they would actually not be changed at all and nothing would happen. Radio, like other means of communication, would be less an instrument of influence than of social revelation: it would demonstrate to the individual the identity of the inner and the outer and thereby continue to reconcile him with the reality which otherwise he would find hard to bear. However this may be hypothetical considerations of this type would match with the analysis of the radio phenomenon. This analysis renounces to start with any causal reduction. It confines itself to a simple description but attempts to spot, within such a description, features which are interpreted otherwise in causal terms only. The actual justification for treating radio as a model and as a microcosmos lies in the fact that radio in its very individuation and concretion concentrates and executes the same universal tendencies which the objection against its isolated treatment ascribes to influences outside of what is listened to.
How is it possible that radio »utters« for itself what it is so hard to deduce causally? What actually »speaks« through radio is man: by his voice or by musical instruments. Thus the term »speaking« appears to be a purely metaphorical one. One attributes to the instrument what is due to man merely because of his invisibility and remoteness. Still, when the phenomenon is analyzed, man’s remoteness from the loudspeaker and his invisibility are part of the phenomenon. Whenever one switches on his radio, the sounds pouring out bear an expression all their own, an expression which is related to the men behind it only by reflection and not by the primordial awareness of the phenomenon. Radio speaks to the listener even if he is not listening to a speaker. It might when he fools around with the dial. It might shock him when he returns home, tired, at night, quite unattentively turns it on and is suddenly attacked by a shouting stranger praising the merits of a Deity. It might even raise its eyes at the very moment when he suddenly realizes that the inarticulate sounds are taking the shape of a piece of music which is no advertisement to him. For clarifying what is meant by radio’s expression, one must preliminarily distinguish it from that of the material offered by radio. What is aimed at is not the expression of the singer’s voice or the commentator’s words but the way any voice or any instrumental sound appears on the air. Of course, such a distinction does not hold good ultimately: the analysis of radio symphony has shown how intimately the »how« of music’s appearance by radio and the »what« of the particular material are bound up with each other. Yet, starting, not from the material, but from the listener’s experience the weight of the material itself cannot be measured immediately. The listener receives a sum total of the material and its modifications by the tool. It is only an analysis of this sum total which makes for a clear understanding of the interrelationship between the »how« and the »what«: the »how« totally wraps up the »what«. Radio has its own voice inasmuch as it functions as a filter for every sound. Due to the comprehensiveness of its operation as a filter, it gains a certain autonomy in the ears of the listener: even the adult experiences the radio voice rudimentarily, like the child who personifies radio as an aunt or uncle of his. It is the physiognomics of this radio voice which provides the key for an understanding of how the expression of radio tends to become a model for its social significance; physiognomics in a sense somewhat analogous to that in which one makes statements like, »This woman has a nice voice«, or »This man has an arrogant voice«.p Little as such a »physiognomic« analysis of the radio voice is to be taken literally and much as the ascetic description of the phenomenon calls for an interpretation in more dynamic terms, it is not without justification as regards the technical structure of radio itself. One may entirely disregard the fact that radio transmits human voices or sounds in such a way that they seem to be produced by the tool, as if sounding like the tool’s own voice. One may still maintain, however, that the »abstract« characteristics of the radio sound are somewhat similar to the live voice. From certain aspects the radio pick-up of live music can be regarded as a substitute for the human ear. In a way the microphone does the work of listening. Radio technicians hold that the structures of the microphone and of the ear are similar. The diaphragm of the microphone corresponds to the diaphragm of the human ear. To this diaphragm the voice coil is connected which conveys the electric »intelligence« further on its way. To the diaphragm of the ear the series of small bones is connected which convey the auditory stimulus through the nervous system. Hence, the view of the radio mechanism as patterned after human sense organs. Therefrom the concept of a radio voice is derived. Perhaps the latter’s specific characteristics are due partly to such an imitation, partly to the shortcomings of any attempt made so far to replace organic human function by mechanical ones. One may even ask – and this bears immediately on the problem of the »effect« of broadcasting on the listeners – to what extent radio’s ear and radio’s voice replace the listener’s own ear and voice. Technologically, one is justified in speaking of radio’s ear and voice because the process by which the electric current is retransformed into acoustic waves is the reverse of the process achieved by the microphone-ear, namely the transformation of acoustic waves into electric waves. The standardization of listener tastes, habits, and reactions may start at an earlier stage of the broadcasting process than it is generally assumed. It is not entirely out of the question that in a sense his own ears are already displaced by the microphone which »hears«. This would be in accordance with the theory of a German student of motion pictures, Alfred Sohn-Rethel,5 saying that the camera, itself »seeing« in place of a virtual spectator, represents a kind of socialization of the eye.
The radio voice, like the human voice or face, is »present«. At the same time, it suggests something »behind« it. In listening, one lacks a precise and clear consciousness of what this something is. At any rate, it appears merely by means of the experience of it. Here the comparison to facial physiognomics may be helpful. Whenever one looks at a face or listens to a voice, one is dealing, too, with something more or less vaguely »behind« it, not distinctly separated from, but apparently intimately connected though not identical with it. To render it in psychological terms: in the experience of live voices and faces the phenomenon is not merely a superficial sign of whatever is behind it, replaceable by any other sign. It constitutes a unity with the content in that it is its expression. The specific characteristics of the radio voice, such as the »illusion of closeness«, tend in the same way to such an expression which is more than a contingent set of signs. The study of the elements of expression of the radio voice is the actual task demonstrated by the »model« of radio symphony. To be sure, the illusionary among those elements must finally be traced back to the conditions which necessitate the illusion. But studies aiming at a social theory cannot be content with a mere sundering of appearance or illusion from the essential and real. In a society which, like the present one, has such a gross veneer for »appearance« it is just as important to study the mechanism which produces the illusion as it is to discount it. The »illusionary« character of the radio voice is itself an element of its »reality«. Incidents like, say, the Orson Welles broadcast provide a sufficient justification for such an assumption.
Terms like »phenomenon«, »expression«, »illusion« invite one obvious objection. The radio phenomenon, apart from the objective conditions, technical and others, behind it, exempted from the world of things, is »subjective«: it is nothing but the particular experience of individual listeners in listening to radio broadcasts. Every statement about the expression of this phenomenon appears to be bound up with the listener’s subjectivity and to vary within individual differences; and the »illusions« promoted are certainly subjective illusions which it would be hard to attribute to any thing-in-itself. How, then, can one start from the phenomenon, its expression and its illusionary characteristics as if it were something objective by which subjective reactions are conditioned, whereas the »phenomenon« qua phenomenon as well as its specific qualities already belong to the sphere of subjective appearance? How is the analyst to avoid the pitfall of private arbitrariness and bad generalization? If one attributes, say, an aggressive character to the radio voice when in its full strength, how is one to know that this aggressiveness is really due to the »expression« of that voice and not to the listener’s individual nervousness merely? It is the more appropriate to answer these questions plainly because there can be no doubt that the current »phenomenological« method has been abused frequently to build up ephemeral opinions as essential insights by hypostasizing the phenomenon instead of interpreting it as an index. Without entering into the epistemological discussion of relativism, however, it may be stated that in the concrete context of the social sciences the assertion that »subjective« reactions are arbitrary and accidental and that each individual may react differently, is much too radical to be true. The thesis about the unbridgeable differences between the individuals aims more at discrediting theoretical assertions based upon an »understanding« of subjective behavior patterns, than it is based on experience. Against the assertion that the shock caused by the overstrength of the radio voice is a particular effect which is not to be »generalized«, one simply has to point to the fact that under present day conditions no individual is justified to regard his own reactions as incompatible with those of other individuals. The full weight of present day experience leads to the assumption that features which appear to be totally monadological and even so »private« as nervousness are caused by general trends and can be found in vast numbers of people. The epistemological assumption of an extreme individualism of reactions sounds slightly ironical in a period where individuals, thoroughly subjected to all kinds of standardization, virtually become more and more alike. The necessity of an empirical checking of statements of a quantitative nature so as to establish the generality of the shock caused by an overstrong radio voice, cannot deter the theory from formulating such an assumption within the theoretical context. – Further, the term »subjective phenomenon« is much too abstract and undifferentiated for actually invalidating the previous propositions concerning the radio voice. Even if one grants, in a broader sense, the »subjectivity« of the phenomenon, the individual who »has« the phenomenon is very well able to distinguish within »his« phenomenon between subjective and objective, between »we« qualities and »it« qualities. The leader of a string quartet may rehearse a work, busy with controlling and possibly with altering some specific sound phenomenon – not any »thing« behind it. He is fully aware of the difference between the quasi-objective qualities of this phenomenon, however »subjective« it may be compared with an »objective« thing such as the fiddle, and elements purely subjective in the slightly different sense of their being conditioned by his own individuality and the contingencies of his own individual listening. The leader of the string quartet may be sitting next to the cellist. At one given moment he may make two observations: that one of the parts sounds somewhat out of tune even if at first he does not know exactly what and where it is and that the cello sounds too loud and out of proportion to the whole. Eventually he will correct the instrumentalist playing out of tune because he realizes that »this«, »his« sound phenomenon of being out of tune has an objective character. However, he will refrain from asking the cellist to play more softly because he knows that the cello sound’s loudness is due to his own closeness to it, whereas in the concert hall the music is likely to appear in its proper proportions. Analogously, the man facing the overstrong radio voice will regard »his« subjective phenomenon as an objective one and will behave accordingly: he will mute down his radio. And there is no reason to limit the differentiation of the phenomenon as to »subjective« and »objective« to such primitive sensual data as »too strong« or »out of tune«. Any higher intellectual differentiation of music, concerning its phrasing, its articulation, its »making musical sense«, and its expression, bears the same character of objectivity within the phenomenon and it is only this objectivity which allows to teach music, to improve the level of a performance, or to correct structural inconsistencies in a composition. The more concretely such questions are put and the more precisely they are translated into technical language, the more the wraith of relativity is prone to disappear. The musician who answers the proof, that the bass of some harmonical sequel is worked out illogically, with the assertion that this proof is merely subjective and that he just »likes« this kind of treatment of the bass, is clearly a dilettante. However, the analyses of the radio symphony which led to the notion of radio voice, are in principle not so different from the string quartet leader’s statement about the playing out of tune or the teacher’s criticism of a bad bass part. Such statements are based not so much on individual taste or private susceptibility to subtle stimuli but on expertship, that is, nothing but the developed knowledge of the structural interrelationships within a field of phenomena such as the symphony. This kind of expertship allows for inferences concerning the radio voice as being more than »merely subjective«. Radio physiognomics aims precisely at determining the objective, structural elements within the subjective radio phenomenon. If it is to be more than a loose sequel of impressions, it has to aim at the constitutive categories of the radio phenomenon.
It may be appropriate, first, to illustrate what the expression of the radio voice, the categories of which are to be sketched, actually is, and in what sense it may serve as a model. The harshness of the unadapted strength of the voice heard through a loudspeaker suggests, quite irrationally, a sort of authority behind the phenomenon. One imagines a person who holds a great contempt for the individual while at the same time pretending to be concerned about him: the contempt makes itself felt in the lack of consideration for the individual’s own wishes.
The individual has no chance to raise his voice against the super-voice addressing him, – while the interest expresses itself in the directness, closeness and intensity of the commanding voice, apparently aiming at holding the individual in its spell. The disproportion between the huge radio voice and the listener’s tiny voice demonstrates the unimportance of the latter as compared with the power confronting him: the fact that this power does not allow him to take any refuge in his own unimportance is revealed in the fact that the public voice catches him in his own sphere, however »unimportant« that sphere may be. All these experiences, in a way, may be illusionary. The actual owner of the terrific voice may be quite a humble person. In the studio he may speak quite normally, while the overemphasis of his voice is brought about by amplification only. But is the expression of harshness attributed to the phenomenon therefore just spurious and unconnected with radio as a whole? It gains a definite meaning when related to the typical listening situation, which accounts for the quasi-objectivity of the expression of the radio voice: a situation characterized by the clash of publicity and privacy taking place as soon as radio speaks at full strength in a small room. The »authority« of radio increases the more it reaches the listener in his privacy. An organized mass of listeners might feel its own strength and rise to a kind of opposition against the »strong man« if he is experienced as a living being: the strong men know only too well why they use loudspeakers when performing as orators in mass meetings where their natural voices are quite audible without them. The isolated listener on the other hand, feels overwhelmed by the might of the personal voice of an anonymous organization – and be it only the voice of an employee. The more strongly this voice is coming from the personal sphere of the listener and the more it appears to stream from the cells of his intimate life, the more he has the impression as if his own cupboard, his own phonograph, his own bedroom were speaking to him as a personal friend or enemy: the more perfectly he is ready to accept in toto whatever he hears. His own sphere of existence becomes the messenger of the outside world. His privacy at the same time sustains the authority of the radio voice, – because it is »his« apartment, the language of which he cannot escape –, and helps to hide it by making it no longer appear as if it were coming from outside. It is the opposition between privacy and publicity that makes the radio voice so conspicuous in this situation that it assumes an expression all its own. The shouting of the commentator, however »unreal« in itself, brings to the fore an actual discrepancy, namely, that the illusion of privacy and individual independence is upheld in a situation where such privacy and independence do not really exist. The listener who believes that the commentator shouting through his loudspeaker is a dictator, is wrong. But the fact that he »sounds« like a dictator expresses an imposition of publicity upon privacy which gives every reason to fear dictators. It makes the radio voice the bearer of the potentialities, acoustic as well as social, of dictatorship. Thus in a way the naive listener who becomes afraid of the voice of the commentator is right: the social mechanism behind the technical one leading to those disproportions is necessarily one which he has all reason to fear, and it may easily be one that breeds dictators who in their outdoor shows really shout the way the humble commentator’s voice sounds within the listener’s four walls. It is hypothetical considerations of this type which show in what sense the expression of the radio voice may be regarded as an index.
The basic characteristic of the relation between radio and time is the simultaneity of the phenomenon listened to and the broadcast performance. It is this simultaneity, first of all, which promotes a feeling of immediacy: the listener has the impression that in a way he is »present« at the broadcast event. There is no gap between the time in which something is happening and the time in which one is listening to it, and therefore no mediation seems to intrude between the two spheres, such as the printed word in serving the publication and distribution of news. This immediacy and presence has a touch of para-doxy from the very beginning: though temporally »present« at some occasion, say, the ceremonious announcement of the election of a new Pope, the listener realizes at the same time that he is not at all present, that he is not at all in Vatican City but in Newark, New Jersey. Occasionally, this latent paradoxy becomes strikingly manifest. So it happened that a nightingale sang in the garden of a country home. Her voice could be clearly heard in the house. A radio company that discovered the nightingale decided to place a microphone next to the tree where the bird had its nest. The tenants of the house, listening to the broadcast and the live voice of the nightingale at the same time, observed the broadcast nightingale was heard earlier than the live one, – the difference being due to the different velocities of electrical and acoustic waves. The real nightingale sounded like her own echo. Such an extreme case reveals a bit of what may well be at the bottom of ordinary radio experience owing to the fact that the experienced immediacy is no genuine immediacy: at the same time one knows that this immediacy is a consequence of mechanization and reification and that it may tilt over into something disavowing the kind of presence that it promulgates. The presence is the presence of phantasmagoria.
This immediacy which is one of the main temptations for radio to imitate live events is no less illusionary than the closeness of the commentator’s voice streaming out of the cupboard. Radio thingifies events in a way that at the same time hides their thingification. Of a similar quality is another characteristic of radio in its relation to time: its seeming mobility.
A comparison between radio and phonography may illustrate this relation. Radio seems to be free from objectivated or »canned« material in the crude sense, that is, the phonograph record. It is this freedom which lends to the tool the appearance of much greater mobility than to the phonograph, a mobility that further aids in the illusion of immediacy and presence. There are no such narrow time limits as there are in phonograph records. Without interruption one can listen to a whole Bruckner symphony if one likes. In listening to a recorded symphony the interruptions, still reminding the listener of the distinction between the record and the live performance, destroy the musical continuum. To be sure, this continuum does not exist in the case of the radio symphony either, but, though abolished by the very structure of the radio symphony itself, the illusion of continuum is maintained on the surface of an uninterrupted stream of music. Again, the mobility of radio permits to broadcast accidental elements, such as the noises of tuning, the conversation of the audience, the solemn silence upon the entry of the conductor and the timed applause following it. The elimination of these, as it were, accidental features tends to make a phonograph record objective and disconnected from time. The more faithfully, however, those features are reproduced and the more emphasis they are given in handling the radio programs, the more does the listener feel as if he were participating in life, uncontrolled and spontaneous, wherein the essential and the accidental are unseparated and one. The careful planning and controlling of the accidental particularly aims at producing this effect. Still it must be admitted that radio’s mobility is no fiction merely but inherent in the technical structure of the tool. One day it may serve better purposes. Its potentialities are already evident in certain cases, such as the broadcasting over an American network of a discussion between commentators in various European capitals following immediately upon an important political speech. With utmost rapidity the broadcast transmission changes from one capital to the other. Much as the mere pleasure in the working of the tool may express itself in this activity, it nevertheless indicates the degree of mastery over nature already achieved by means of the temporal omnipresence of radio.
Yet, the virtual antagonism between radio’s reification and its immediacy also affects the mobility of the radio voice. A phonograph record, though recorded at a special time and place, is no longer bound to its special time and place in virtue of its very cannedness. True, radio can chase live events with incomparably greater mobility than the phonograph. But its mobility is limited by precisely its »presence«, by the uniqueness of the live event. The mobility of the phonograph’s product – that is, the record – is greater than that of the product of radio broadcasting, that is, the phenomenon coming out of the loudspeaker. Radio’s limitation to the unique event reminds one of the telephone whose mobility is even more limited. On the other hand, the limitations of telephone’s mobility are of such a kind as to soften the listener’s boundness to the phenomenon rather than to strengthen it. There he is connected with a particular person and their conversation may bear upon an actual, and not merely fictitious, relation between them. The narrowness of the telephone phenomenon, having no omnipresence at all, tends to humanize that phenomenon precisely for the reason that the technical possibilities offer, its potential mechanization, are of a much lesser degree than in radio, – aside from the fact that the listener is not passively subject to the phenomenon but can speak himself. In radio these potentialities are unlimited inasmuch as one can listen to it virtually everywhere in space. But one cannot do so everywhere in time. It is this configuration which leads to so severe restrictions as do not apply either in phonograph or telephone. One is rigidly bound to the particular moment of the event or performance by means of the closeness of the radio voice to the »Now« of the broadcast performance, whilst – in contrast to telephone – that performance is neither related to the individual of whom it knows nothing, nor does it allow, roughly speaking, the individual to interfere with its contents. The listener remains the slave of radio’s immediacy, of the simultaneity of the performance.
The implications for the listener are obvious. He is bound to a specific time. He can listen to things he is interested in only when they are offered and not when he would choose to listen to them. If one has only one’s free time to listen to music, one cannot listen to whatever one likes, which one could do if one plays himself or chooses something out of the vast repertoire of records. One has to adapt oneself to the comparatively small range of the dial of his set, at a specific hour. Hence, the listener is subject to the will and power behind the instrument much more than when listening to the phonograph. It may be expressed more generally this way: if radio is more mobile than the phonograph in its connection with immediate life, is close to real events, musical or non-musical, man becomes less mobile in that he must keep pace with the tool itself. The new tool, in virtue of its alleged and often affected closeness to life, may be, as the phrase goes, more »dynamic« than the older forms of technical reproduction. The radio listener becomes less mobile though, because he has to fit himself more strictly into what is given to him.
In its relation to time, radio seems to have much of the same structure as live music. It even appears to come closer to ordinary time experience than recorded music inasmuch as it temporally coincides with the live event. Its relation to space, however, is fundamentally different from that of live music as well as of that of the phonograph. Live music takes place at one particular time, at one specific locus. Phonograph records can appear at different loci, at different times. The radio phenomenon, in principle, appears at one time but at different loci. The simultaneity with the live musical performance makes it still appear as the one and original performance. But it is scattered in space. Something that appears to be, not a »reproduction« like a phonograph record, but an original at which one is present at the moment of its performance, nevertheless has the character of reproduction, as the same uniqueness of the event to which the listener is bound through its presence, is abolished in another respect: there appear »images« of the unique event at innumerable places, all of which pretend to be the thing itself.
The ubiquity of the radio phenomenon and its structural implications were first discussed in an article by Günther Stern, entitled Spuk und Radio.q Starting with the assumption that music is, in principle, neutral in regard to space, he says that »music is nowhere and everywhere it is heard;« it transcends its Here in spite of its »hereness«, and never does its unity confine itself to a limitation in space. »As soon as music assumes a definite relation to space, its fundamental character as music is said to be somewhat altered.« The thesis is illustrated by the simple example of a street piano. Here, »in spite of the space-neutrality of music, ›music is taken for a walk‹, played now here in one locus, then there, in another. In thus leaving behind what was played like a trail of smoke, as it were, until meeting what still remains to be played, the unity of the piece which is neutral to space, is actually dragged over the whole length of the road.« Therefrom Stern draws the conclusion that, »if the locus of music is fixed, the space of music is contingent and ungiven. This space becomes articulate as soon as music moves and changes its locus.«
In radio the space-neutrality of music is destroyed completely. »One leaves his house and the music of the loudspeaker still resounds in one’s car. One is still in the music – while it is nowhere. One takes ten steps and the same music sounds from the neighbor’s house.« To account for the »shock« that this phenomenon is said to cause in the listener, Stern refers to several factors, such as the ubiquity of music, the possibility of a plurality and even numerability of »musics«, and the »double« or second-self phenomenon. This »shock«, Stern finally concludes, is closely related to the kind of fear which always seizes man whenever technical tools become stronger than he and threaten to overpower him.
Methodologically, Stern’s reflections represent an attempt to explain a phenomenon like radio, with all its social and historical implications, in terms of the reactions of »man as such«, man as an invariant. He seeks to account for the phenomenon in terms of an anthropology of radio by attempting to deduce radio characteristics from the »essence of man«. A critical account of the phenomenon, however, cannot possibly be content with indicating radio’s »human aspect«. It must also consider in how far it is alienated from man. While conscious of the latter element in radio, Stern nevertheless yields to the temptations of the Heidegger kind of existential philosophy in hypostasizing some of the historical characteristics of the radio voice as a priori features. In fact the »shock« of radio ubiquity is apt to vanish or recede into the background as soon as the listener gets accustomed to the tool. Similarly, the shock of the double or second self vanishes. The double, once a startling experience for Edgar Allan Poe and Heinrich Heine, has long since become a trite, technical term in film business. Still, something of the »haunting« character of radio’s ubiquity, though no longer in the foreground of radio experience, may have migrated into deeper layers of the phenomenon and still add to the »unreality« of radio that makes everything appear as an image. But the spook of radio must not be interpreted as an ontological quality. Only if the listener assumes an attitude toward radio that is not fully rational and, further, if he does not keep in evidence all the technical implications of radio, may the shock still occur. Such attitudes of listeners, however, are not existential ways of behavior. They can be accounted for, in each case, socially and psychologically.
The premature metaphysical interpretation of the radio shock is bound up with Stern’s general assumption of the spacelessness of music. He is right about the neutrality of music to space as regards the unity of music and its proper musical constitution. It may indeed be said that in a way music has its own space, that there exists something like musical »dimensions« and even musical »perspective«, clearly noticeable by any keen listener. This space, though more than a pure metaphor, is by no means identical with empirical space and certainly different from the relation of music to the place where it is executed and heard.r Yet, this space cannot be entirely disconnected from the experience of external space.
What is meant may thus be clarified: in the orchestral scores of Wagner’s late works, particularly of the Meistersinger, the horn plays an outstanding role. One of the reasons is the sound quality of the horn in the piano. This sound quality enables the composer to give tones and even leading melodies to that instrument which do not sound quite »here«. They are not, so to speak, on the surface of the musical space but somewhere deeper in that space. It allows the possibility of a part which, though it is the main part, seems to be not quite in the fore. Now, it would certainly be fallacious to assume that there exists an immediate relation between this effect and empirical space. The instrument playing is no farther away from the listener than, say, the violins which seem to be more »here«. But such an effect of musical perspective would never occur unless the specific expression of the horn sound provokes the consciousness of a space that is penetrated by the horn call. And this space which the horn sound summons is precisely the empirical space. When this calling expression sounds piano, it sounds as if it were a strong sound coming from a distance. Thus, indirectly, by means of the specific expression of the instrument, empirical space is related to musical space where it is preserved in a sublimated form. An extensive analysis of the phenomena of musical space would demonstrate that all such phenomena are related to outside space by means of their musical »expression«. This outside space is, so to speak, left as a sediment within the internalized musical space, just as the most internalized psychology is necessarily related to external reality and can be expressed only in terms of that reality.
Even in a more primitive sense musical space is not so independent of the normal and empirical space, as Stern and also Kurth appear to assume; even if the proper musical dimensions of a work are not related to empirical space qua musical dimensions, they must still fall within that space qua acoustical dimensions. Every musical phenomenon takes place within certain spatial limits where it can be heard.
Music, however much it seems opposed to empirical life and its space, is no island. A moving street piano or a piece of music moving from one loudspeaker in one house to another loudspeaker in another house does not by any means obtain a space coefficient which were lacking in »normal« music. The collision between music’s own space and the empirical space and even the »shock« created by such a collision is frequent enough. One need only refer to an odd expression of an opera heard by a latecomer in the lobby or to the feeling retained by the listener coming from the auditorium of the opera to the lobby that he is still in the music space. Hence, the shock described by Stern, so far as it still survives, is not so much due to a conflict between different spaces well-known from pre-radio days, as to other characteristics of radio.
The so-called spacelessness of music is affected by the inherent modifications music undergoes through the radio voice. The echo character mentioned in the case of the radio symphony is of a more general nature. It makes itself felt even if the transmission is satisfactory: the music sounds as if coming from a distant place. The spatial distance between the room where a person is listening and the room where the broadcast is taking place has not altogether been bridged. This echo character may be due not to the spatial distance from the live performance but to the specific sound conditions of coming from somewhere else.s Stern has noted this quite correctly. He is wrong only inasmuch as he attributes this new space relation to the sequel of music over two or more different loci, whereas it actually affects the radio phenomenon in its most elementary manifestation – namely, within the private room.
Much as Stern’s general approach to the radio phenomenon remains open to criticism, his notion of radio ubiquity nevertheless points to something essential. This is true particularly of his observations on the »plurality or numerability of musics« as bound up with the structure of music’s mechanical reproduction – which, in his opinion, does not fit for music at all – and that this plurality comes into conflict with the claim of each reproduction to be the thing itself. For further clarifying the problem, reference may be made to a theory developed by Walter Benjamin in his essay, L’œuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproduction mécanisée.t He treats the difference between the uniqueness and reproducibility of the work of art from the viewpoint of a fundamental historical change. Up to the era of mechanical reproduction, which he studies particularly in the field of motion pictures, one of the essentials of the work of art is said to have consisted in its »hic et nunc« – its Here and Now –, its existence unique to the locus at which it is found. The »authenticity« of the work of art is based on this Here-and-Now-character and the elements which make for its authenticity strictly decline any kind of reproduction, not only the mechanical. »Only the original sustains its authority and the ›aura‹ of the work of art is only the way this authenticity is expressed in the phenomenon of the work of art.« Benjamin traces the uniqueness of the work of art back to its ritual function in former ages. That is, he accounts for it in terms of the veneration of a particular work of art in a special locus, supposed to represent superhuman powers only in its original form, as a symbol not interchangeable with other figures at different places without affecting the metaphysical substance attributed to it by its worshippers. The destruction of that ritual nature of the work of art, the vanishing of its »aura« and its becoming reproducible are, for Benjamin, equivalent terms. In motion pictures he finds elements of a radically new, non-auratic art which is determined even within the process of its very production by the basic idea of reproducibility. – Obviously, this theory cannot be directly applied to music for the simple reason that there is no music conceivable, except perhaps for petty relics of improvisation, that were not based on the idea of reproducibility. Reproducibility as such cannot be considered to be an element of basic change accounting for the ubiquity of the radio voice. Surely, one cannot say that in music the »original« is more authentic than its reproductions for possible reproduction and nothing »in itself«. Incidentally, here lies the epistemological justification for speaking about changes »within« the work of art, say, the decomposition of »the symphony« or »the opera«. If these prescriptions for possible reproduction fundamentally relate the work to its reproduction, basic changes within the reading of these prescriptions also affect the work itself, for the work is not independent of them and their relation to a possible interpretation. Still, observations very closely akin to Benjamin’s can also be made in music. The authenticity that he attributes to the original in the visual arts is characteristic of the live performance in music. The live reproduction has its Here – either in the concert hall or the opera –, and its Now – the very time in which it is executed. And what Benjamin calls the »aura« of the original certainly constitutes an essential part of the live reproduction, no matter what forces are actually reflected by that aura.u It is this authenticity or aura of music that is challenged by its mechanical reproduction. The phonograph record destroys the Now of the live performance and in a way its Here as well. Although the ubiquity of radio tends to preserve the Now, it is definitely hostile to the Here. Authenticity and aura are disintegrated by radio’s image character. All the older magical effects of music that people believed in and that make themselves felt up to the present, were bound up with a notion of music as a real power and not as a picture: music did not »represent« anything outside of itself; it was on the order of prayer and play, not painting and writing. The decay of this reality of music by its becoming an image of itself tends to break the spell. The break of the spell is to be interpreted in more comprehensive terms of philosophy of history. As the illusionary qualities, with all their apparent irrationality, increase, the archaic irrational power, formerly considered the essence of music, threatens to vanish. Terms like »emotional«, »irrational«, and »magic« can be understood only in a historical perspective. They may have entirely different meanings in different periods. It is only when it is fully realized that the image character of the quasi-magic radio voice ruthlessly destroys the remnants of that older magic, that the failures of radio in all attempts to maintain magic features can be appreciated. The tool disavows as cheat anything that radio presents in magic terms of authenticity, for radio liquidates the character of music as an act of unbroken, objective reality which is the presupposition of all those magic effects.
In the light of such considerations Stern’s thesis of the plurality and numerability of musics and the contradiction in the claim of the duplication of the piece to be the piece itself, may obtain its proper weight. The analysis of the radio symphony has shown that radio has so far failed to provide the illusion of a live event that one is actually witnessing. The problem may now be set more sharply. It is commonplace to say that radio is a phenomenon of mass reproduction in regard to both its social and esthetic meaning. But one does not seem to be aware of the fact that the character of mass reproduction necessarily affects the idea of the original. In radio the authentic original has ceased to exist: the present standard of technical development has surpassed it. Yet the illusion of the original is still maintained. The shock, of which Stern speaks, is nothing but the collision between the innate tendency of mechanical reproduction to abolish the »thing itself« in its originality and authenticity, and the claim still surviving and artificially fostered that one is facing the original. The claim to be the »thing itself« is not the inherent claim of radio. It is a claim which comes from the listener and which, to be sure, is nourished also by the way radio functions under present conditions. The shock, that is, the basic conflict will disappear as soon as radio has learnt to emancipate itself from the idea of originality that it is denouncing at every step. The distinction between original and reproduction in radio may be unavoidable for the time being. Avoidable, however, is the pretense of identity between reproduction and original. Stern points out that the »plurality and even numerability of musics is not really a property of music«. That this is not a property of music applies only to the idea of the original in the sense of the live performance. Only in relation to that notion, the plurality is contradictory and shocking. The disquieting factor lies in the plurality of uniquenesses. Such a plurality of uniquenesses is the basic principle of any double. Without uniqueness the plurality will no longer be felt because the divergent claims of different Heres have ceased to exist. The »haunting« character of radio will persist as long as the vain impression of uniqueness is still maintained. It is neither due to the newness of the mechanical tool nor to the overpowering of man by the machine but to the remnants of the pre-technical notion of authenticity applied to an art technique basically opposed to it. When these remnants disappear, the »spook« in radio will disappear also.
It may be argued that such a hope is futile because the purely technical conditions of radio are fundamentally different from, say, those of architecture where the abolition of the fetish of uniqueness by unveiled mass production does not encounter any difficulties from the material. The conflict between the unique and the ubiquitous in radio appears to go on as long as radio technique itself must reckon with the reproduction of something that actually takes place somewhere else, namely the live performance in the studio, which in this regard is an original that may or even must rightly be imitated. But this argument is not really striking. In motion pictures, Benjamin’s model of a »nonauratic« art, there certainly exist conditions similar to those in radio. There are actual events, theatrical scenes that are photographed and reproduced. Correctly, Benjamin refers to the whole technique, however, as not starting with the idea of imitating the event but with the idea of its reproduction and of the effect it has when brought to the screen. It does not matter how Charles Laughton actually talks. What matters is how he talks on the screen and his actual talking in the studio has to follow the line of how it comes out by the mass reproduction. Of course, the idea of »naturalness« still plays a major part in motion pictures, – this being one of the spots that lag behind their present potentialities. Although they are not particularly concerned with Laughton’s voice the way it sounds in the studio, they are still eager to get a voice on the screen that sounds like a »natural voice«, whatever that may mean. In radio, however, aims and conditions are still below the level of such issues. The idea of allowing huge masses to »participate« in original events from which they are actually excluded prevails throughout. Not only does the actual mechanical transmission aim at an illusionary faithful reproduction of the live performance but the whole staging of the event pursues the same line, terminating in such absurdities as the broadcast of applause while it were actually for the radio listener to make up his mind to applaud or not to applaud. Certainly, the pseudopresence at a unique event artificially promoted by the system of its reproduction is not inherent in the structure of the tool. The very fact of mass reproduction, by emancipating a musical event from the place where it occurs, is antagonistic to the idea of the original. Every attempt to conceal this discrepancy is, for all its insincerity, doomed to failure. This failure is due not to the insufficiency of the tool but to its use for a wrong purpose. It expresses the fundamental inadequacy between mechanical mass reproduction and the maintenance of the original, the unique event with all its nimbus and its magic qualities preserved throughout radio in spite of the rationality of the tool itself. It ought to be seen in terms of reproduction, not of the original.
The fact that the magical idea of the unique and original is maintained by radio, though its very structure opposes it everywhere, can be understood no longer in technical but only in social terms. In offering canned food radio cultivates the idea of the live stuff or the original as a kind of symbol of individual freedom and economic security that exist no longer. Kindred tendencies have been observed by Thorstein Veblen in his Theory of the Leisure Class.v The more the process of monopolization goes on and the more individual spontaneity is dispossessed by ownership culture, the more does the process of monopolization tend to hide behind a veneer of spontaneous and individual events and to suggest to the dispossessed majority that it enjoys minority privileges. The less the customer is asked what he wants and needs, the more is it emphasized that the wants and needs of his privacy are considered vital. Radio upholds the illusion of privacy and individual independence in a situation where such privacy and independence are no longer alive. Otherwise, the subjects might not bear this situation quite so patiently. If the pressure of public mechanisms became too obvious, their effect might tilt over into the opposite and the individuals would no longer adapt themselves to those mechanisms. Their adaptation is easier as long as they believe that the mechanisms are »individual«. The pretense of the original is part of this fictitious individualism. Yet, even fictitious individualism does not go unchallenged. The more the canned food of radio attempts to imitate the live, the more does its cannedness stand out. The illusionary original may ultimately prove just as provocative as a monopolized production frankly denouncing the claims of the individual. Not only does the idea of the original become falsified by radio. The adequacy of mass reproduction is impaired by the cult of the original and the touch of authenticity in which nobody actually believes any longer. The aura of the radio original reminds one only too easily of the sociable laughter of the announcer, who, in laughing, makes fun of the listener and of his own laughter as well. The antagonism between mass reproduction and individual in radio cannot be escaped, for it merely reflects a social antagonism over which radio has no power.
Radio’s ubiquity stands for standardization. The same material is offered to a vast number of people. They are forced to listen to it within the comparatively small choice offered them by their dial. This standardization takes place independent of any specific content of broadcasting, which in turn tends actually to reinforce it. It does not matter for the structural standardization of radio that the programs, particularly those of light popular music, are in themselves standardized to such a degree that in many cases it makes less difference to what station one is listening than one is made to believe. Nor does this fundamental standardization presuppose that the better technical equipment, the better wave lengths, the more expensive programs available to the big networks tend to bring vast masses of listeners to listen to the same product. The basic standardization with all the authoritarian potentialities inherent in it would hold good if there were no standardization of programs at all and even if the whole question of monopoly in radio would not exist. In a way, standardization is the essence of radio itself. The technical law of radio according to which an identical content appears at innumerable places at the same time practically coincides with standardization in its concrete social sense, namely, that the material is imposed upon large numbers of people. Whatever alterations may be recommended for radio organization and program policy, this type of standardization cannot be changed under present technical conditions. Today it would be absurd to attempt a system of broadcasting which would produce different material at the same time at different places. Radio standardization is no less a function of the technical state of the productive powers than of the social state of the interrelationships of production. It would therefore be bad simplification to consider radio just a product of monopoly capitalism: its basic standardization is certain to prevail in some way or other under non-capitalist forms of production. Technical standardization leads to centralized administration. It must be said, however, that both technical standardization and centralized administration fit completely into the more general conditions of monopolistic economy and are therefore particularly called upon to execute its orders. But radio was not invented »for the sake« of monopolistic society though it owes its existence to the very same processes of development of industrial productive powers which also further economic monopolization. The tendencies linking it to present social conditions do not coincide with the conscious intentions of the originators of radio. Those tendencies realize themselves over their heads.
The interrelationship between radio technique and monopolistic society is of a highly mediated order. Two illustrations may be given for the complexity of this interrelationship. Stokowski, in suggesting to include in radio broadcasting the missing frequency range between 5000 and 13000, proposes »to widen the channels that were apportioned some years ago by the Radio Commission in Washington« which at present »are so narrow that the full frequency range necessary for the complete and undistorted broadcasting of good music is practically impossible … There has been a great demand for these channels, and in order to supply this demand the channels have been made narrow. These narrow channels do not permit the necessary frequency range of about 30 to 13000 cycles per second, but up to only about 5000. The first and the fundamental need is for Washington to revise its allotment of channels so that they can be broader«.w Obviously, the technical shortcomings hit by Stokowski’s criticism are due not to the technique itself but to the allotment. The latter is determined socially if by no other influence, so by the provision that all applicants »shall set forth such facts as the licensing authority by regulation may prescribe as to citizenship, character, and financial, technical, and other qualifications of the applicant to operate the station«.x No less obviously, any serious alteration of that provision would meet with the most serious resistance on the part of vested economic interests. It is by links of this kind and not by the, as it were, abstract standardization that the shortcomings of the radio symphony or more generally of the expression that the radio voice is bound up with existing social conditions. – The second illustration refers not to the present technical state but to the history of radio. It is hardly too bold to allege that the monopolistic structure of radio imposing the same material upon innumerable customers could not succeed but in the era of monopoly capitalism. Not only do the deciding improvements allowing for the transmission of acoustic phenomena, which transmission was originally limited to the Morse signals of wireless telegraphy, date back as far as 1906 while the history of radio proper does not begin before 1920. But even as early as 1885 Thomas A. Edison, in attempting to devise a means of telegraphing to moving trains, came very close to the invention of wireless telegraphy. Gleason Archer, in accounting for the reasons why »the Edison attempt nearly missed the goal«, points out: »One fact that militated against it as an answer to the problem of how to maintain telegraphic communication with a moving train was that the device was too democratic in its operation«.y Individualistic considerations of this kind do not count any longer in an era when more and more nations abolish the inviolability of letters, – though, to be sure, that abolition cannot possibly be understood to be democratic either. The supremacy of authoritarian central institutions over the privacy of the citizens is not only promoted by radio: it is in part the historical presupposition of the existence of radio as well. The radio voice is the executor, the agency of those authorities. Just as these authorities alienate themselves from men, regarding men as a mere material for the realization of their will, so does the radio voice. It is its alienation, its reification in virtue of which it appears to speak itself. The expression of the radio voice bears witness of the reification of society.