When Hugo Riemann wrote his 1873 doctoral dissertation, ‘On Musical Listening’, he felt himself part of the innocent atmosphere of a self-contained musical tradition. Back then, a topic that was so general could lead without further ado into fundamental questions of Classical and Romantic harmony. Today we can no longer view issues such as the opposition of major and minor or relationships of consonance and dissonance as genuine matters of principle, and physiology and mathematical acoustics seem to us to be even less suitable bases for explaining musical phenomena. If we take up Riemann's theme again today, this must necessarily mean taking other approaches, both to our subject matter and to methodology. The musical situation has changed too much in the meantime. A tradition that is in any way self-contained no longer exists. In musical creativity, as in theoretical contemplation, things once taken for granted have now been put in question to a degree hardly ever recorded in music history. The naïve feeling of living in the heyday of a unified tradition is past, Viennese Classicism has been stripped of its absolute dominance, and the figure of Richard Wagner is on the point of slipping from immediate potency into historical distance. In their place – alongside the new rhythms and colours of the nigger jazz band [sic]Footnote ¹ – early music is penetrating our present horizon on a really large scale. Handel and Baroque opera, the pre-Bach era art of the organ, German sixteenth-century song in the youth movement (Jugendbewegung), medieval music, Gregorian chant: we cannot imagine the overall picture of musical life today without them. In recent years the ‘renunciation of Romanticism’ has repeatedly been proclaimed. Clearly the current interest in past or foreign musical cultures differs from the Romantic revivals of Palestrina and Bach insofar as we lack the naïve confidence to adapt the past to our present-day customs with a clear conscience. What we are seeking is its very peculiarity, strange and yet related to us, imbued with the highest degree of unity and intensity, expressed through those forms. It is only an age whose traditionally rooted musical sensitivity has already been deeply corroded that can embrace history with such enthusiasm – and history, in its turn, cannot help accelerating the process of corrosion still further. The notion of a timeless ideal of musical beauty should by now have been reduced ad absurdum, and not only for the historian.Footnote ² To proclaim immutable laws of music at our present juncture only amounts to trying to combat a new intellectual situation by closing one's eyes to it.Footnote ³

The current process of transformation and relativization reaches far beyond the musical domain in its narrower sense – in other words form, technique, sound, content, etc. Down to its last branches, the whole of our musical life shows itself to be thoroughly permeated by the characteristics of a traditional position, revealing itself in every aspect as the expression of a certain basic musical attitude. If in this context we single out the central problem of [musical] listening, we are not to aim at investigating psychologically certain artificially isolated processes. The question is rather the manner in which music in general becomes or may become accessible (zugänglich) to us.Footnote ⁴ It is in the nature of things that any such possibility of access (Zugangsmöglichkeit) will also express itself in certain social formations, and it is precisely there that changes will reveal themselves in the most unambiguous manner.

An example is the concert, for generations the defining form of music-making, which has had a hard time in the current crisis. The fact that, seen from outside, business seems to be carrying on as usual must not be allowed to deceive us: the business is running on empty, having long lost its former gravitas and depth of experience; it is problematic for anyone who does not want simply to conserve the past out of a spirit of false piety, and has already been deliberately renounced by the musical youth movement, for instance. The essential characteristics of the concert and of its corresponding attitude have already been outlined in a number of places.Footnote ⁵ The dichotomy between performers and listeners is a familiar one in other forms of music-making too. But the audience as an unlimited and undifferentiated mass is unique to the concert. According to its original Beethovenian idea the audience represented humanity; but for the generations from roughly Brahms to Richard Strauss it has been restricted to the educated bourgeoisie, though this has not consolidated its internal organization. On the contrary: from the very beginning the already seriously diluted idea of community (Gemeinschaft) has been thinned down ever further, until in the end only a completely atomized and incoherent mass, at best a subscription society, remained. This audience allows the music to reach it in complete passivity. It expects – depending on the circumstances – to be stimulated, entertained, or deeply moved [by it], indicating the degree of the effect attained by applause. The determining factor in this is the ideal of perfection of the performance, whether this consists in objective reproduction or in so-called ‘individual interpretation’ – in either case an achievement of which the listener in general is incapable, and which is overseen by public criticism. This form of the concert has, in the last few decades, also influenced domains that were originally sustained by other impulses. It has ratcheted up the technical demands of the leading chamber works to a level attainable only by specialists, it has encroached on church choirs, distorted social forms of music-making such as male-voice choirs, as near as eliminated dance and functional music from our aesthetic consciousness, and made folk song a matter for historians and ethnologists.

An early symptom of a rejection [of all this] was Schoenberg's 1910 ‘Society for Private Musical Performances’ which, however, was not an opening for the construction of new community but for mere exclusivity. Today's international music festivals, at which the composer addresses a group of ‘interested’ persons, essentially colleagues, journalists, and publishers, point in the same direction. Simultaneously, the steady progress of technology is the most prominent factor that threatens the concert with destruction. If, and to what extent, the gramophone and the radio take over our heritage is by now simply a matter of what lies within our technical capacity. We should finally rid ourselves of the deep-rooted prejudice that we are dealing with a mere intrusion of mechanical forces into the realm of the spirit – as if technology were not following precisely the tracks our intellectual infrastructure had long laid out in advance for it. To a person from antiquity the thought of detaching the spoken or sung word from its originator would have seemed incomprehensible and absurd. For Western music it is the final, logical consequence to be drawn now that the concert has already limited physical and spatial connectedness to a minimum. With radio the audience has really expanded to an unlimited, completely atomized mass. The gramophone even annuls the common temporal link.

Whilst the concert model is here pushed in certain directions nearly beyond its limits, elsewhere quite new approaches can easily be distinguished. In part as a consequence of the redistribution of wealth, there now coexists with the educated bourgeoisie, which had until this point been the sole guiding force in musical life, a new social class: the ‘intellectual labourer’, a species shaped by a cosmopolitan lifestyle. He finds his musical requirements to be satisfied much more appropriately by jazz bands and the latest popular songs than by the concert, against whose overweening cultural pretension his robust and sober temperament rebels. At the same time the youth movement, having broken away from the previous social order, has deliberately and radically abandoned the concert and reorganized itself, taking its cue from the old German song repertoire. The form of the Collegium Musicum should also be mentioned here, first re-established in the universities and then imitated in many places. In an even more determined manner than the youth groups, it embraces the music of the past, and it might, therefore, appear useful to investigate non-concert types of listening initially in relation to historical models. Methodologically, however, this approach would be wrong. We can interpret history only insofar as we still live with its after-effects, or in similar situations. And so, if we look closely enough, the present offers everything we need for our particular inquiry.

In the first instance we would expect to find in music fundamentally different modes of access that lack the above-mentioned, essentially concert-type characteristics. Perfection of execution should accordingly be considered unimportant; the music is not to be yielded to passively by an undefined mass of listeners, but rather, the listeners should, as a true community of like-minded individuals, approach the music with an active, expectant attitude. An art of this kind will therefore always correspond to a definite need – it will not seek its public; rather, it will grow out of it. This music is Gebrauchsmusik. Pushed aside by the concert, until recently it led a somewhat neglected existence in a variety of circles, even though its aesthetic investigation – as yet scarcely embarked upon – leads us towards much more far-reaching and varied relationships than those to be found in concert music. The obvious starting point is dance. Dance music has always existed. Its value and position relative to the overall state of musical production, however, is subject to considerable change. For the first time in many generations we now encounter an original literature whose technique does not exhaust itself in the imitation of already-existing art music, but which is able, in its own right, to transmit entirely new sonic and rhythmic inspirations. It is not a matter of making value judgements about jazz: this is a fact to be acknowledged sine ira et studio [without anger or partiality]. At the same time this [original literature] guarantees that we are here encountering the characteristics of a typical Gebrauchsmusik in an unadulterated form.Footnote ⁶

What immediately strikes one about the posture of a dancer or even of a closely involved spectator is that for him the music is not the main focus.Footnote ⁷ The dancer is only half listening to it. His actions consist in allowing his body to swing with the rhythm, internally following the usually familiar melody. He does not listen, but responds in an outpouring of activity, without perceiving the music as an objective presence. For him, the music is not objectively there at all. And nearly in the same way as here the distance we expect between music and listener appears to be absent, so the otherwise distinct and discrete individuals blend into a kind of rhythmically vital collective being, whose lifeblood is the music. It is quite obvious that a mere observer does not have the appropriate access (Zugang) to this music, inasmuch as he does not ‘join in’ (nicht ‘mitmacht’). There is no question of ‘listening’ in the way one would at a concert. This ‘letting oneself be guided’ in one's own active response to the music through dance could be designated, at most, as a kind of overhearing (Mithören) [of the music].

The basic element of every kind of dance music is rhythm. It represents the track along which the bodily movements of all participants follow steadily – a resonance that allows the music to take on an elemental force such as it can never attain in the concert hall. For dance music has its real existence in the whole circle of participants, which at the same time indicates its limits; those outside are not touched by it in its true sense. Since it thus does not exist as an ‘object’ at all, value judgements in this respect will also take on another meaning. Just as perfection and beauty of sound in performance matter less than a certain verve, vibrant and thrilling, so the worth of dance music per se is determined solely by how well it fulfils the demands of the relevant community (Gesellschaft). ‘Aesthetic’ values independent of this may also come into play, but these will then exist on a quite separate level. As dance music, a Johann Strauss waltz is not in the least superior to a contemporary popular song; there simply is no meaningful possibility of comparing them. Gebrauchsmusik knows no eternal values: it is created from the very beginning without any intention to last. It is at its most vital when it emerges out of the moment for the sake of the moment. Here improvisation or the breaking-up and variation of tracks too well worn are appropriate procedures which have been renewed in jazz too. The composer takes a back seat; name and identity are of no consequence. He treats his job as craftsmanship or as a business, without assigning any value to originality. The role of the musician in relation to the community of which he forms part is telling. He does not belong; rather, he is merely tolerated, something that can be expressed in a great variety of ways. In any case, the role and value assigned to music is expressed here clearly enough: dance exists within a system of conventions – we are discussing only social dance – and itself represents such a convention. This means, however, that, as with all established forms of human contact, the point is not what is done but how it is done. Thus music, as a means of social exchange among persons, is here subsumed into the service of an extramusical context.

Without doubt, in our day dance presents us with the most lively form of Gebrauchsmusik – we are disregarding sidelines such as ballet, solo and ‘expressive’ dance, rhythmic gymnastics, etc. Since we are dealing here with a free, unrestrained vitality, it makes sense to pass on now to genres in which the energies of life are placed more and more into utilitarian contexts. Marches, soldiers’ and rambling songs (Wanderlieder) do not add anything fundamentally new to our topic. However, work songs as a genre deserve more detailed consideration, if only because they are, ethnographically speaking, unusually widespread, though represented in today's industrialized Europe only by insignificant remnants. Popular tunes sung or whistled at work do not, of course, count as work songs, in particular since these kinds of pieces, in contrast to the popular tunes of an earlier age, are invariably remnants from the dance hall or the operetta. Neither can we include more recent types of folk song, mostly of a sentimental nature, such as one frequently hears in the countryside during communal work. The true work song grows out of the rhythm of the work itself. It can arise only where a purposeful activity is still felt to be meaningful and satisfying, and thus worthy of adornment. Work and leisure have not yet been separated and opposed to one another, but are evenly distributed around life's centre, fed by the same current of energy. How incredibly widespread and truly ‘primitive’ – that is, sprung from an original form of existence with its sense of strength unimpaired – this form of music-making is can be understood from a glance into K[arl] Bücher's well-known study of work and rhythm.Footnote ⁸ Here we have the musical counterpart to decorative art, whose earliest stages also begin with daily work, with tools and weapons. This kind of music-making and singing is now completely lost to us. The economic structures of capitalism have brought about a different relationship between work and leisure, and thereby blocked up a spring of vitality which today survives only in a sort of guilty conscience: we sense that things could and should be different. Such lacunae are, it would seem, a typical way in which the after-effects of extinct primitive structures can still be felt in contemporary existence. Because of its significant role, particularly in primitive life, the work song calls for our special attention, since the mode of access (Zugangsweise) to music found here must unquestionably count as one of the most primordial (ursprünglich).Footnote ⁹ The oppositions familiar to us, of performers and listeners, individual and group, do not yet appear here; they are not even present in embryonic form. Just as purposeful activity itself, not only the relaxation that contrasts with it, is capable of supporting musical enhancement, so in each case the particular form of singing is determined solely by the moment and the specific kind of work being undertaken. ‘Overhearing’ (das Mithören) does not feature here, not even in the sense of ‘letting oneself be guided’ by one's own musical-kinetic sense, as with dances or marching, but at the most as a mutual adjustment to common activity. The authentic mode of access to these (when viewed objectively, very monotonous) tunes is a physically active joining in ([Mit-] Vollziehen). An outsider hearing such music will react only with the observation, ‘There go the woodcutters’, or some similar remark – assuming he at least belongs to the relevant environment and is not imposing a quite alien scholarly or atmospheric-literary attitude on the situation. But that means: he interprets the music as a mere indicator, as a reference to a familiar occurrence that in itself has nothing to do with music. Here, then, simply listening turns out to be inappropriate, to just the degree that the work song lacks its own, object-like significance.

The types of Gebrauchsmusik we have considered thus far have always been linked to physical, visible movement, and have thus been predominantly governed by regular rhythms. But, somewhat late in the day, musicology has realized the evident fact that rhythmic accentuation in metrical ‘bars’ does not constitute the fundamental principle of all music. Even within the realm of Gebrauchsmusik we find large areas independent of a physical-rhythmic basis. If, instead, music is linked to language as the expression of certain kinds of inner movement, then we must right away reject the misunderstanding that we are now dealing with some kind of ‘communication’ or ‘expression’ in the narrower sense. All functional practices (alles Gebrauchshafte), as we define the phrase here, move on a level to which the individual, isolated personality as such does not belong. It is only insofar as we still live in some unmediated intercourse and state of connectedness with the world, without pondering or announcing to the world matters that are specific to us alone, that we can take part in such music. At present the most prominent example of music of this kind is the communal song (Gesellschaftslied).Footnote ¹⁰ The mere name indicates that the individual is essentially supported by a community, the cohesion of which is based not on music but on certain purposes, conventions, predilections, or destinies. A typical example is the student song (Kommerslied). It was not integrated into the body of student customs (Komment) as a work of art but as cantus (melody), aiding the concentration and discharge of certain communal emotions. Anyone who does not sing along (nicht mitsingt) more or less excludes himself from the community, and it is at least more likely that he will be suspected of intellectual arrogance than that his listening role will be interpreted as ‘aesthetic enjoyment’. For with every communal song the quality of the performance is basically irrelevant. If one pays special attention to it, this merely signifies an application of extraneous criteria. The music in its turn possesses no aesthetic substantiality but gains its meaning from the expression of an emotional bond. The mode of access is that of someone joining in (das Mitmachen), the attitude determined entirely by the ethos of the community in question. This opportunity offered by music was most clearly recognized and made use of in the music of the youth movement, whose leading figures years ago gave priority to, and exploited pedagogically, the communal value of music-making.

As demonstrated by the polyphonic songs of the youth movement, circumstances may arise that allow even artfully elaborated music to be absorbed within the ambit of the socially functional. The structure of the male-voice choral societies of recent generations is, because of their social and nationalistic undertones and in spite of the fact that music provides their communitarian principle, so closely related to the extramusically formed communities mentioned above that when these groups stray into concert-type performances this comes close to a renunciation of their actual aims. The light music of the cabaret also belongs to this category, as far as it relies on the expectations of a firmly delineated social class. The popular song (Schlagerlied) presupposes its own unique mode of access, not to be confused with concert-type attitudes. Since one can hardly speak here of an aesthetic value in terms of technique or content, it can hold its ground only by means of a wittily pointed delivery and the sympathetic resonance of its audience, which sees its communal requirements met in the narrowly circumscribed range of themes – eroticism and intellectual cynicism – and thus readily joins in at climaxes and refrains.

The forms of communal music-making mentioned so far resemble art music quite closely, in that they necessitate a constant and more or less vigorous productivity and are correspondingly subject to changes in taste. Compared with this, work songs, for example, show a much greater stability. How many generations they may go back in each case generally eludes ethnographic research. It is, however, fair to assume that they change only very slowly. The more primitive a form of expression is, the more it floats out of the reach of history and its transformations. For this reason songs of allegiance (Bekenntnislieder), such as national anthems and other declarations of political or religious community, would seem to deserve special consideration. In these songs the formal aspect recedes to such a degree that a very small number of works can survive over many generations without any need for renewal or greater variety being perceived. Here the pulse of life can be sensed on a level other than the formal. In recent years it was quite a frequent occurrence for a concert or theatrical performance to be interrupted by the announcement of a political event, upon which the national anthem would be sung by all present. Anyone who has ever experienced something similar knows that it is nearly impossible, after such an outburst, to recover one's aesthetic concentration in a way befitting a concert. One's entire being has suddenly been plunged into turmoil – stirred up at a deep level of the psyche that remains inaccessible to any kind of concert music. Anything aesthetic, seen from this viewpoint, seems to be somehow noncommittal. Whatever likes and dislikes someone possesses are – for him, as one person among others – a matter of relative indifference. But it can become a literally vital issue if in the context of a political demonstration one decides for the German national anthem or the workers’ Marseillaise …Footnote ¹¹ A song of allegiance is always in the first instance an expression of one's convictions; the music is a mere means to this end, its quality a question of secondary importance.

What emerges particularly clearly here is that the personal engagement of one's whole being, strengthened further by the willingness of one who thus pledges his allegiance to take all the consequences, belongs in varying degrees to the characteristics of all Gebrauchsmusik. There is no need for further explanation that all religious music also comes under this heading, if it serves not only the congregation's professions of faith but also contemplation and prayer within the service, in other words all liturgical music as it continues to this day in Gregorian chant and portions of the Protestant hymnody. Here too the musical dimension is only an ornament to and an intensification of an extramusical fundamental attitude – that of prayer – and the appropriate way of approaching music consists of joining in with this fundamental attitude, by joining in the prayers (Mitbeten). The intentional object is not the music but the faith behind it.Footnote ¹² St Augustine (Confessions 10:33) connected this separation of the cantus (song) and the res quae canitur (the ‘thing to be sung’ [i.e. the meaning of the song]) with a reference to the religious person's temptation to forget, while joining in [the music], the involvement of his own person, and to fall into a noncommittal attitude of mere listening. With this the basic difficulty of every type of church music, including its current set of problems, is encompassed. It can grow only out of a primordial religious situation (aus einer religiösen Ursprünglichkeit); thus, in the end, it is not a musical but a religious matter. All attempts to introduce into the church another pre-existing type of art music to coexist with the traditional stock of hymns lack aesthetic commitment, and have nothing in common with the Augustinian problem of church music.Footnote ¹³

As scarcely needs to be stressed, the functional character (Gebrauchscharakter) of music is not necessarily linked with primitiveness in an evolutionary sense. It was already noted in the context of work songs that such a typically primitive genre exists for us only as isolated remnants and certain gaps in our musical consciousness. However, it is precisely the modes of access to music of this kind that claim to be particularly primordial, and for this reason, in the analysis of later phenomena as well as in relation to the understanding of the essence of music itself, they will reveal themselves as significant. Can we thus also trace remnants of primitive structures in relationship to texted music in contemporary musical life? And what modes of access are we dealing with there? First of all we must briefly clarify the meaning we have in mind when using the word ‘primitive’. C[arl] Stumpf points out that work songs play hardly any role in the lives of ‘really primitive’ peoples.Footnote ¹⁴ This ethnological sense of primitiveness should remain outside the context of our discussion. Our starting point is the present as it surrounds us hic et nunc, and we will seek out such phenomena as seem in themselves more ‘primitive’ than would, in general, correspond to our contemporary situation, whose attitude of mind points to a stage of existence more enclosed, less differentiated, less pervious to reason, more primordial (ursprünglich) [than ours]. From this perspective the field of comparative musicology can be ordered into a number of series, whose earlier stages we can still spontaneously understand and re-enact in our minds. Among these we find above all those genres such as work songs, which are more ‘primitive’ in the sense discussed. From there on, however, the degree of comprehensibility diminishes increasingly, to the point where one would like to interpret certain things as developmental sidelines and regressions that no longer have any meaningful connection whatsoever with our present situation and that we can therefore no longer reconstruct.

One area in which primitive structures can still easily be observed today is the life of the child. Educational theory has long stopped seeing the child as only an unfinished stage of the adult. It recognizes in the child levels of being that are ruled by quite different fundamental forces than those we otherwise encounter. For our discussion it is important [to note] that the child lacks a firmly bounded self, and thus also a firmly bounded sense of the world, permeated and dominated by reason. The unexpected can happen anywhere; the creative imagination stands ready to let its images enter reality at any point. The line between the real and the imaginative world is blurred. The fairy tale is not literature, it is reality. Where such a mode of being gives rise to literary form, which is not created and received with a consciousness of its character as illusion but as an immediate reality of the same rank as genuine reality, then we speak of the mythical. That something of this mythical quality always adheres to the words of the poet, that these words possess a degree of reality different from the everyday language of disenchanted, technologically dominated reality, belongs at the present time to the teachings of the circle around Stefan George. There poems are recited in a diction strongly intensified in the direction of music, without, however, crystallizing into a melody that could be separated from the words. At its most primordial we can experience the mythical in the fairy tale, when the prose narration is intensified into a series of matching sentence constructions, which in terms of content usually present only a string of similar events but which, by means of their repetitions of rhythm and intonation (rhythmische und sprachmelodische Wiederholungen), feel like a series of lines from epic poetry. Good narrators will apply to such passages a half droning, half musical reciting delivery that is likely to remain unforgettable for anyone who has heard it as a child. From here it is possible to gain immediate access to the melody in the lines of early medieval sagas, similar to that still found today in the Finnish epic the Kalevala.Footnote ¹⁵ Our mode of access matches the child's reaction to the fairy tale: it does not actually listen; rather, it enters into the world of the tale and lives in it just as it does in the real world. It is the similarity of the recurring (melodic) lines that makes possible this most intensive kind of active involvement.

Just as here the musical dimension scarcely attains the shape of a palpable melody, but through a suggestive use of rhythm and intonation forms the supporting basis for the mythical text, so one can also observe a similarly intimate unity of words and music in another primitive domain, which childhood again makes tangible for us. Lullabies, the chanted formulas of folk medicine (Heilsegen), musical spells (Zaubergesänge) represent for us the last remnants of the magical, which ethnology will testify to be one of the most important roots of primitive musical practice. Here too the speaker and the group with whom his words resonate are in immediate, world-encompassing communication with the powers [of the cosmos]. Once again music is only the medium through which the magical incantation, alternating between spoken and chanted passages, becomes effective. Echoes of these phenomena are certainly to be heard in the so-called accentus of Gregorian chant. If here the magical is reinterpreted to provide a liturgical sequence, this does not signify any fundamental contradiction to the musical mode of access.

The areas discussed so far may suffice to illustrate the variety and characteristics of Gebrauchsmusik. It is not our intention to provide a complete and systematic categorization, especially as here only those phenomena that are still directly accessible to us are to be investigated. We must now ask ourselves how we can sum up the essential aspects of this music-making and its corresponding modes of access, how they should be demarcated from so-called art music and concert-type conventions, what relationship the two spheres have to one another, and whether history confirms this relationship to be necessary and unchangeable. We begin again with the question that also implicitly underpinned our individual examples: what is the position of music-making in the context of any given human existence (Dasein) and its everyday manifestations (Alltäglichkeit)?Footnote ¹⁶ Here we must keep our feet firmly on the ground and stick to the broadest, most familiar, most commonplace manifestations of our own lives: work that has to be done every day, the pressure of certain duties, hoped-for or unwelcome news, misunderstandings in our dealings with others, distraction or calm contemplation after the business of the day, anxiety, financial concerns, recreation, sport, shared moments of joy, etc. With this everyday atmosphere (Alltäglichkeit) as our starting point, how do we find our access (Zugang) to music? Until recently, and to a large extent even today, it was an idea so generally accepted as to be almost a canonical truth that the highest aim of art consisted in its delivering us from the everyday, in transporting us for a brief period into a purer, better world, allowing us to glimpse the realm of spirit and freedom. Certainly the large majority of our concert music, as far as it claims to be high art, tries to live up to this idea, and is sought after with such expectations – at least in theory. The fact that in practice cultural affectation and social convention play a large role is proven by the unavoidable penetration of ‘pragmatic’ (gebrauchshafte)Footnote ¹⁷ attitudes into this domain too, a fact rightly decried by aesthetic criticism. Since Gebrauchsmusik is for the most part not only judged but also created and sought after in the same attitude, it must necessarily appear as fundamentally inferior – as a fragmentary and imperfect realization of what only high art is capable of revealing fully. This prejudice must be done away with as a matter of principle, and in the first instance we need to establish the intrinsic value of the practical element (des Gebrauchshaften), which remains unattainable to all concert music.

The everyday ordinariness (Alltäglichkeit) out of which high art wishes to lead us is the life-blood of Gebrauchsmusik. If today we are conscious of almost nothing but social dance, cabaret songs, and – at most – expressions of political fervour, this does not represent an objection to [such] music but to the destructive artificiality of metropolitan capitalist existence. After all, to us it is at least still within the realm of the comprehensible that religion once formed the centre of life, that something resembling the work song should exist, that a social art that makes no ambitious claims might not have to be restricted to the double entendres of the cabaret song or the atmosphere of the male voice choir. The essential thing is always that music does not enter into the context of everyday life as something extraneous, but that it is supported by its rhythm, continuing in an alternation of tension and release, work and relaxation, and that the individual takes up music-making with personal commitment, that is, within a life fully bound up with the everyday. Thus Gebrauchsmusik for the individual occupies an equal place alongside other activities, something that he handles (womit er umgeht) as one handles articles of daily use without first overcoming a certain distance, in other words, having to establish a special aesthetic attitude. In consideration of this, let us designate the basic character of Gebrauchsmusik as functional (umgangsmäßig).Footnote ¹⁸ All other art, whose approaches and basic attitudes, when looked at in detail, prove to be as varied as those of functional (umgangsmäßig) music, is encountered in our lives as in some way independently constituted, as autonomous (eigenständig).

From the nature of our categorization it is easy to see in what sense everyday (umgangsmäßig) forms of listening demand priority over autonomous ones, and why we must begin with them if we want to grasp the essence of our music-making conceptually. Here we are not dealing with a historical sequence, an actual ‘earlier’ or ‘later’, but with matters of ranking that can be made comprehensible only from the viewpoint of our contemporary situation. The issue of the actual origins of music is a theoretical matter, arising from pure scholarly curiosity, which can only ever lead us to hypotheses that may be more or less well founded. The origin of the meaning (sinnmäßiger Ursprung) of our music-making is a quite different question. It is born out of the contemporary set of problems, out of our doubts about the sole validity of the most recent tradition, our perplexity as to what will happen next, and our general insecurity as to what we should expect. It directs our gaze towards the condition of music prior to that rupture between art and life, and thus towards a more primordial life, whose concentrated strength is capable of supporting music within the everyday. The mode of access to any kind of everyday (umgangsmäßig) music was distinguished by the fact that in it listening played either no role at all or only a subordinate, accompanying role. It was only a matter of singing and praying together, of generally joining in and contributing (Mitsingen, Mitbeten … Mitmachen oder Mitvollziehen).Footnote ¹⁹ In this context the communal link expressed by the prefix ‘Mit-’ did not even prove to be absolutely necessary; yet the transition from individuated to communal performance could always proceed immediately and without a sense of ‘switching’. The emphasis thus lies absolutely on the active performance (Vollziehen) of the music: it is sustained in the first instance by the whole physical and spiritual person.Footnote ²⁰ As soon as one joins in only ‘in one's mind’ this already signifies a fading and receding of energies that originally pressed towards visible and audible discharge. Furthermore, musical enactment (Vollziehen) is essentially linked to a functional (umgangsmäßig) attitude to life – to prayer, confession, work, relaxation in dance and community, entrance into a mythical or magical view of the world: it invariably makes its appearance as an adornment or intensification, as a specifically musical shaping of that attitude.

At this point the opportunity presents itself to dissociate the essence of music from two non-musical domains with which it is often bracketed – visual representation and language. In its primordial sense music knows no representational (gegenständlich) relationships. On its everyday (umgangsmäßig) level, it is neither an object nor does it strive to represent objects, i.e. to imitate phenomena of the world around us. Naturally, the status of music as expression lies on a quite different level, which will concern us later. Representation in the sense of painting is alien to the nature of music, because in the first instance the only mode of access to it we can consider is that of joining in actively (Mitvollziehen), and it is impossible at the same time to grasp it as an object. Where something of this kind is added at subsequent stages, the object can – apart from the formal aspect – be given only as sound. Musical sound, however, has no clearly illustrative relationship to an object, since (as stylized sound [stilisierter Klang]) it is not to be found in our extramusical environment. Thunder and wind machines are not musical instruments. Pure programme music, which can exist only on the basis of more or less vague associations, distances itself from the primordially musical to the same degree as it lacks an independent formal-musical process. Similarly sharp is the boundary with the nature of language. Although right from the beginning there have existed the most intimate and manifold relationships between words and tones, nevertheless the designation of music as a language is, strictly speaking, absolutely false, and even more untenable than the derivation of singing from speaking. Every word, insofar as it is a word, points beyond itself to what it ‘means’. Every dialogue addresses a partner from whom one expects a reply. All poetry will also formulate an unambiguously definable content. Music has nothing to do with any of this. To call it a language is either a mere paraphrase – one might say, an expression – or it is meaningless. The intention of communicating something and being understood is completely lacking to music, particularly at its everyday (umgangsmäßig) level. For this reason it is also impermissible to connect the beginnings of music-making with acoustic signalling. Even if it was in this context that distinct scale-steps first evolved,Footnote ²¹ acoustic signals have as little to do with what we consider essential in music-making as does Morse code. Questions of sound alone are no basis from which to penetrate the essence of music – least of all as long as everyday (umgangsmäßig) music-making is under discussion.

If we attempt to summarize our investigations, we can broadly state that the essence of music in its primordial sense becomes accessible to us as a way of being human, more precisely as an everyday (umgangsmäßig) mode of existence, radiating activity. This definition still lacks a closer determination of the specifically musical aspect within human life, in the same way as until now we have avoided including matters of rhythm, melody, and sound within our investigation. The problem thus raised, however, demands much more far-ranging and difficult work, since it presents itself right from the start as a historical problem. The inner organization of our contemporary music can by no means be reduced to simple definitions of essence. Every epoch engages to varying degrees of intensity with the tradition out of which it grows, in order to subject it to sublation (Aufhebung), in the double sense used by Hegel.Footnote ²² Thus in the present, if we remove the layers one by one, we will be able to trace in some form or other the after-effects of all the decisive situations and innovations of Western music history. What we designate with the formulaic and equivocal terms ‘rhythm’, ‘sound’, ‘melody’, indeed even with the overarching term ‘music’, has been experienced and elaborated by each age in its own particular and unique way. Therefore any investigation that wants to grasp the meaning and content of such phenomena will necessarily encounter the richness of historical reality and then have to proceed anew from there.

We do not intend to tackle all the ramifications of such a problem here. Let us merely examine briefly what access to history is opened up for us by the concepts we have gained. In the contemporary situation the sphere of autonomous music-making more or less coincides with what is understood to be art music, whereas ‘folk music’ constitutes only one part of the everyday (umgangsmäßig). Music history, however, demonstrates the remarkable fact that even the leading art music is very often determined purely by functional (umgangsmäßig) considerations and that, all in all, functional (umgangsmäßig) music-making dominates far wider areas and stretches of time than does fully autonomous music, which makes only an occasional appearance. For nearly all the above-mentioned genres of everyday (umgangsmäßig) music, and some others besides, one can point to examples in history which, as the predominant form of music-making at the relevant time, united the creative powers in their service and thus gave a much sharper outline to typically functional (umgangsmäßig) characteristics than is the case with the more rudimentary forms [of functional music] today. To give only a few examples, polyphonic dance music as a genuine form of functional art (Gebrauchskunst) makes a brilliant appearance in the dance song and the German suite at the time of Joh[ann] H. Schein. German songs of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as well as the oldest French motets of the first half of the thirteenth century, represent highly typical cases of music as social play, taken seriously insofar as one joins in without reservation and with full individual commitment, but without wishing to lay stress on either the challenging seriousness of aesthetic significance or on moral or psychological content. Perhaps the most splendid manifestation of an enclosed, conventional, class-bound social art, with totally functional (umgangsmäßig) traits, is supplied by the music of the Minnesänger, though here, on the surface, performers and listeners are kept strictly separate.Footnote ²³ Liturgical music lived through its period of greatness in Gregorian chant, then in organum, and later once again in the church cantata. The communal song of allegiance found its highpoint in the Protestant chorale of the sixteenth century. Since, therefore, art music per se certainly does not yet presuppose any departure from the interactions of everyday life (Umgang des Daseins), the question arises as to the circumstances under which such a switch to autonomy occurs, and what new phenomena are important in this context.

This question can best be investigated with the aid of historical material, and the obvious candidates are, in the first instance, those genres that can be followed through continuously in their development beyond the initial, consistently functional (umgangsmäßig) stage, such as the German suite in the seventeenth century or sonata form in the eighteenth. Medieval music exhibits a particular advantage in this respect. French polyphony of the twelfth to the fourteenth century, above all the liturgically derived motet and the ballade, shows a continuous, logical development that never has to confront foreign traditions, but that displays directly, without any interruption or interference, and in unique clarity the intellectual positions that support it. All later music, even where it enters the scene with new energies, evolves out of a stable tradition with a thoroughly organized set of techniques, given forms, sonic ideals, social formations, etc., against which it must first assert its own identity. This is usually supplemented by impulses from neighbouring musical cultures, so that it really takes an acute ear to penetrate through outer layers of epigonism or other sorts of borrowings to find the genuine driving motives.

Since the history of the motet in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries has been presented in detail in another context, a few pointers will suffice here.Footnote ²⁴ The oldest French form of the motet exhibits a number of striking characteristics that can be understood only through its functional (umgangsmäßig) character. To begin with, it is nearly devoid of any sonorous definition. If one listens as a bystander, it is impossible to find any resting point within the sound. The rhythm runs on uniformly and without contrasts. One can scarcely hear a formal structure within the uninterrupted succession of fairly short, overlapping phrases. However, one gets a very different impression of the work if one approaches it in a functional (umgangsmäßig) way – that is, if one contributes to its performance by taking one of the parts oneself. Now the overlapping phrases no longer cause irritation, the organization of sound takes on a new meaning in terms of the regulation of distance between the parts, and the rhythmic uniformity makes it possible to pick up and join in the movement straight away. It is in this undifferentiated course of events, uninterrupted by any surprises, that the essence of the typically functional (umgangsmäßig) modal rhythm lies. It is, for instance, closely related to the uniform flow of J. S. Bach's rhythms, itself equally reducible to just a few basic forms of movement.

If one looks at the motet a generation later, after the middle of the [thirteenth] century, one finds that its shaping forces have been restructured to such an extent that here one must acknowledge a quite different stage of being, sharply divided from the functional (Umgangsmäßig e). The modal rhythms are burst open, whole sections that are irregular and rhythmically arbitrary follow each other, the soloistic weight of the top part as well as the regular fifth and octave sonorities point unambiguously to an outside listener, who is now confronted with the consolidated unity of the three parts. What lies at the heart of this new phenomenon of listening? In the first place there is certainly no yielding to the sensuous effects of sound. Full triads – that is, thirds and sixths filling out the sonority – will still play only a very modest role for the next two generations and more. What we do hear now is a movement differentiated according to the vocal parts, clearly subdivided into different sections that are often formally interrelated. This means, however, that one comprehends the music as something like an object. The previously direct connection between it and the listener has been dropped, and a distance has been instituted, which prevents it [the music] from being simply flooded by our own inner activity. One has to ‘keep still’ in order to perceive the music's new and irregular structure. The listener encounters it as a self-willed entity with which he can no longer immediately join in (mitvollziehen) but can understand only upon reflection (nachvollziehen). Up to this point the work had been supported directly by the vitality of the musician and the circle of listeners with which he resonated. Now it is no longer embedded in the context of [daily] life; it is elevated to an autonomous existence. Notation becomes ever more important, since it is, after all, sufficient by itself to communicate what now constitutes the music's focus: its formal design. At the very moment where, at this point, the expectations of the listener and the work of the musician meet, musical autonomy has been detached from previous functional (umgangsmäßig) behaviour and formed into its own sphere of being. From now on we are occupied with the aesthetic charms of playing with freely invented forms, technical problems, further refinement of sonority, etc. We have left behind the context of the everyday. From now on the artistic realm begins to build itself up, layer by layer, above everyday existence, as a world of its own with its own laws. Autonomous listening, directed as already mentioned towards the music qua aesthetic object, no longer stands in a purposeful context (Zweckzusammenhang), as did everyday listening, nor is it supported any longer by concrete needs as is functional (umgangsmäßig) music-making. Its only basis is the general expectation of ‘aesthetic pleasure’. It immediately becomes evident that, on this autonomous level, music no longer appeals to, or is sought out by, everybody. Its social basis narrows in characteristic fashion. It now comprises only, as Johannes de Groche[i]o expressed it in a concise and striking manner, the literati,… qui subtilitates artium sunt quaerentes, the ‘connoisseurs who understand quality and technique’,Footnote ²⁵ or, as the eighteenth century had it, those with knowledge and love [of music] (Kenner und Liebhaber). One should note in the meantime that the community's principle of selection is, in contrast to the functional (umgangsmäßig) stage, a purely musical one, and that this connoisseurship lays the foundations of an equality of status between artist and listener. The musician here is still well grounded in ‘guild’ standards, or, to put it in a more modern fashion, he exists within a closed community that can understand and judge his work.

If the various levels of listening that can be demonstrated in the present or in historical epochs have several times in the course of history supplanted each other, this does not imply that each one has to invalidate completely the ones that preceded it. The issue is merely that of the coming to prominence of one type of approach, which then tends also to determine the organization and theoretical self-understanding of music. The preceding traditional types can more or less survive alongside it, albeit forced into the background. Thus even today we can still find, existing here and there, autonomous listening in the narrower sense, alongside the corresponding type of ‘connoisseur’, without this exerting any noteworthy influence on the structure of our musical life. Here we are dealing with a ‘pre-Classical’ model – if, following our tradition, we designate Beethoven as the Classical composer par excellence – which in its last great manifestation spans roughly the period of C. P. E. Bach.

The Classical approach to music bears quite different traits. The usual traditional conception is of the ‘Classical’ [period] as the summit of art, because within it, as one is wont to say, form and content coincide, or are in equilibrium. Let us here disregard the origin and meaning of this phrase, which has gradually sunk to the level of banality. It is cited only in order to prove that in the popular image of the Classical, ‘content’ plays a role. In the earlier approaches discussed thus far no such phenomenon existed. Autonomous listening of the expert type is focused upon music as an object, but not upon a content that it conveys. In contrast to this, the distinguishing mark of the Classical approach could be described as one that understands music from the very outset as having content, and correspondingly comprehends it not as an object but as expression. The ambiguity of notions such as form, content, expression, etc. as applied to music could be clarified only by means of thorough phenomenological analyses. However, as these would, in the present context, lead too far, the reader must permit the following discussion to be limited to a few sentences. All music is expression – in the same sense as every human utterance is an ‘expression’ of life. Historical research is oriented towards this expressivity as a matter of principle. Without it there would be no history of the humanities. However, it is a totally different question how this music exists for the listener, in view of the special approach required to match each type of music-making. In the case of the [expert] autonomous type, musicians and connoisseurs were situated on the same level, with the work, as it were, in the middle between them as an object of similar aesthetic interest. For a Classical artist the work becomes, over and above its aesthetic objectivity, the formulation of a certain content. He exploits it as a means of objectifying the problems of his (aesthetically refined rather than everyday) existence, and of communicating these to the world. It goes without saying that this ‘expression’ is not a question of presenting banal, everyday facts such as emotions, or a matter of programmatic representation – during the peak of the Classical period, such matters remain of totally secondary importance and dispensable. To the same degree that all artistic activity is concentrated in the creator, the listener sinks to the position of a mere receiver of expression. The Classical approach to music is that of receptive surrender to the work. It is experienced not as expression in the sense of beginning with a particular creator and a particular occasion, but as a vital effect, as music that ‘touches the soul’ and immediately affects the listener's very being.

This effect is possible only because here too the essential musical accomplishment of the listener, despite his attitude of surrender while listening, still consists of an inner re-enactment (Nachvollziehen). This re-enactment differs from autonomous listening, however, in that it lacks the latter's directedness towards an object. It is a constantly guided re-enactment, guided by the sovereign freedom with which the Classical creator shapes rhythms and forms: the shifts and surprises annihilate the listener's own activity and make him into the compliant tool of the creator, whose inner emotions (Bewegtheit) are thus conveyed to the listener through the medium of music. For this, a technical comprehension of the work such as a connoisseur would have is unnecessary; indeed, it even contradicts the demand for total surrender. One cannot experience the vital effect if one is paying attention objectively to the formal means on which that effect relies. This Classical approach makes it possible to communicate musical content, just as at the same time the essence of such content is suggested. [There is] nothing objective or representational, no individual emotional processes such as could be captured in words; rather, only the basic rhythm or particularly clearly shaped emotions of existence are capable of entering into the Classical musician's expression. Only through quite abstract descriptions can one begin to hint at how art is, even here, existentially rooted again. Perhaps the concept of ethics may better outline an area from which music of the Classical type draws nourishment.

It would appear that on this level music has regained its relationship [through ‘content’] to that human life whose fullness and richness supported it in its more popular, functional (umgangsmäßig) genres. The mode of access, however, visibly manifested in an audience ready to surrender itself in passivity, already indicates that here we are dealing with only a paradoxical incorporation of human life into the free-floatingFootnote ²⁶ realm of the aesthetic. In the final analysis all this remains noncommittal, for there follows upon the most exalted expectations one can bring to art – redemption from the everyday, moral purification – no positive endeavour, but only surrender. Nor can we, for this reason, speak of symphonic works’ ‘community-forming power’.Footnote ²⁷ Such power may be present to a high degree in functional (umgangsmäßig) forms of music, but the attempt to create a genuine community using an art that has become autonomous is doomed to failure under any circumstances.

The relative unity of the Classical type of listening perhaps derives only from an artificial bracketing together of various Romantic ways of approaching music, which make up the bulk of our traditional attitudes. No attempt will be made here to trace or analyze them in detail – that would amount to tackling the cultural history of music of the nineteenth century! The two most important approaches, which might be labelled atmospheric and associative listening, represent the furthest remove from functional (umgangsmäßig) music-making that we encounter within the realm of Western music. Allowing ourselves to sink into moods that cling to [musical] sounds and, on the other hand, the literary-illustrative reinterpretation of musical movement could almost cause us to forget what music in its primordial sense means – were there not at the same time, in a thousand details, signs of renewal to be detected. We do not know where this will lead. But even if it were to disappear again into history, it would have achieved one thing: to have shaken us up and set new goals for our quest.