The reopening, in a recent issue of the Journal of the Royal Musical Association,Footnote ¹ of musicology's long-standing debate about musical listening – its typology, historiography, and to a degree also its ethics – has made it a matter of even more urgent priority to fill a significant ‘translation gap’ in the literature on the subject. Heinrich Besseler's 1925 essay ‘Grundfragen des musikalischen Hörens’, which appears for the first time in English translation as an appendix to this article, has in fact a seminal status in several debates at once. The first is the still conspicuously relevant one on the role of the listener in music, in which Besseler's essay has been repeatedly cited and referred to:Footnote ² the availability of a complete translation will, it is hoped, allow a greater number of scholars to assess and build on the value of Besseler's insights. The second is the apparently more historical debate the essay helped to fuel through Besseler's promulgation of the term Gebrauchsmusik, or ‘music for use’ – an alternative to what he saw as the superannuated tradition of concert music.Footnote ³ The central aim of the following essay is to show how this Gebrauchsmusik debate relates to a third issue, one of the largest with which recent musicology has concerned itself: the sociohistorical status of musical autonomy over the past hundred years.

I shall start by sketching Besseler's biography and exploring the background and structure of his article, before moving on to its historical reception and implications. Heinrich Besseler (1900–69) was generally recognized as one of the most brilliant musicologists of his generation, his work covering almost the entire field of early music. He began his academic study of the subject in the winter semester of 1920 with Wilibald Gurlitt, in whose Collegium Musicum he performed as flautist and harpsichordist; despite interruptions to its progress, caused by time spent studying other aspects of the discipline with Guido Adler in Vienna and philosophy and medieval history in Freiburg, his doctoral thesis on the style history of the seventeenth-century German suite had been formally approved by May 1923. It took him only another two and a half years to complete his Habilitation, this time in Göttingen – a ‘breathtaking tempo’ of academic progress, as Thomas Schipperges comments.Footnote ⁴ Besseler's international reputation was secured with his monumental Die Musik des Mittelalters und der Renaissance in 1931.

It was only a few years afterwards that his involvement with the Nazi regime began, and although he used his established academic status to protect a number of his Jewish students, his proven acts of political collaboration led to his dismissal from a lectureship at Heidelberg in 1945. Undeterred, he made a highly successful career in the DDR, building Leipzig into a respected centre of music research and publication. That controversy about his political activities broke out after his death is not surprising, and their relevance for a reading of his work in the 1920s is an issue to which I shall return. Also worthy of note, and surprising in view of the grand projects he undertook, is his student Edward Lowinsky's characterization of Besseler as ‘au fond an essayist […] moved by the vision of an idea that he tried to press into the most succinct form’.Footnote ⁵ Although Besseler bequeathed a number of ideas and terms to musicology, the ‘vision’ of the Gebrauchsmusik idea in ‘Grundfragen’ proved by far the most historic.

In his thesis The Idea of Gebrauchsmusik Stephen Hinton has already dealt in some detail with the two main influences on Besseler, both teachers at Freiburg: Wilibald Gurlitt, the dynamic director of the new institute of musicology at Freiburg, and the philosopher Martin Heidegger, to whom Besseler acknowledges his debt in a footnote (see note 16 in the translation below). Besseler's move away from the late nineteenth-century textual-theoretical tradition of musicology (represented by Hugo Riemann) towards a more contextualized approach is largely a continuation of the ideas of Gurlitt, whose attitude can be judged from the titles of the early lecture courses he gave at Freiburg in 1921–3: ‘Basic Principles of Comparative Musicology as an Introduction to the Music of Non-European Cultures’ and ‘Music and Society (Principal Historical-Sociological Forms of Music-Making)’.Footnote ⁶

‘Grundfragen’ also represents an innovative application of Heidegger's phenomenology – first set out fully in his early philosophical masterpiece Sein und Zeit (Being and Time, 1927) – to music aesthetics. This was an area Heidegger himself never touched upon; and the irony of Besseler's argument is its divergence from the aesthetic position Heidegger himself was to adopt when he finally wrote ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ in 1935 (an essay that dealt only with poetry and painting). Since the novel and exciting portion of Heidegger's 1920s phenomenology lay in his theory of the everyday ‘facticity’ of human life, an attitude in which one ‘deals with’ (geht mit … um) the tasks and everyday ‘equipment’ (Zeug) lying ‘to hand’ (zuhanden), rather than trying to penetrate the metaphysical essence of reality through philosophical contemplation, it was understandable that Besseler should want to apply this to the ‘everydayness’ of musical practices outside the concert hall. Just as Heidegger would present his own project as a Destruktion of the aspiration to transcendence that characterized Western metaphysics, so Besseler could borrow his strategy to attack the transcendence worshipped by musical Romanticism. Little could he have known that Heidegger's 1935 lecture would establish the work of art as a category decisively separate from everyday ‘equipment’ and closer to the ‘object’ (Ding) of traditional philosophical contemplation. In art Heidegger's concern was, after all, with aesthetic autonomy.Footnote ⁷

That Besseler's was not makes his argument all the more novel within the philosophy of music. The kind of paradigm that he wanted to establish, in parallel with Heidegger's analysis of everyday ‘equipment’, is illustrated by his highly original discussion of dance as a mode of musical experience (see below ‘Fundamental Issues’, 52–3). Unlike in Heidegger, though, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that dancing is here being regarded as a normative, as well as ‘phenomenologically original’ or fundamental, category of musical ‘interactivity’. Like musical performance, which, Besseler speculates, forms the aesthetic perspective from which the majority of historical forms of music should be experienced (‘Fundamental Issues’, 62), dancing is participatory, collective, relational, physically engaged – in short, everything that concert listening, which Besseler attacks in no uncertain terms, is not. This is not quite as crass as the utopian vision of rural frolics that Rob Wegman conjures up (Besseler's ‘Kollektivdasein [collective being] seems to stand for a rather idealized, almost fairy-tale state of musicianship in the German countryside, unspoilt by modern society’Footnote ⁸). Besseler has after all just been discussing jazz, about which he professes not to be ‘making value judgements’. Later, during the controversy that arose from ‘Grundfragen’, he would have to insist that his idea of Gebrauchsmusik, though inspired in part by the musical wing of the German youth movement (Jugendmusikbewegung) and its rejection of urban concert culture, was not at all limited to it: ‘I would […] not wish to see Gebrauchskunst as a clear choice among the Jugendmusikbewegung, church music, or dance and cabaret.’Footnote ⁹ He wanted reform, but on as broad a basis as possible.

One might wonder in fact whether the basis, the concept of Gebrauchsmusik as presented in ‘Grundfragen’, was too broad. Besseler seemed to have trouble providing a binding, positive definition to pair with his provisional, negative one – ‘modes of access in music that lack the above-mentioned, essentially concert-type characteristics’ (‘Fundamental Issues’, 52). One important feature, as Rob Wegman points out, is a valuation of the total social event in which music occurs above the ‘music itself’, or any correspondingly attentive (‘autonomous’) attitude that would tend to single music out.Footnote ¹⁰ It is for Besseler evidently a positive, as well as a defining, trait of dance that through it ‘music, as a means of social exchange among persons, is here subsumed into the service of an extramusical context’ (‘Fundamental Issues’, 53).Footnote ¹¹ But this value is not made to hold across the other types of Gebrauchsmusik he examines. The everyday, this-worldly, ‘interactive’ quality he finds typical of Gebrauchsmusik disappears in the last examples described: liturgical music, the ‘musical’ recitation of epics and fairy tales, and spells or lullabies (‘Fundamental Issues’, 57–9). These are valued explicitly for their ability to produce other realities, those of myth or magic, in which everyday social relationships recede or become blurred. Liturgical music is even viewed from a perspective – emphasizing an ‘attitude of prayer’ and the dogmatic content of religious texts – that seems to place the individual's private sense of religious communion or faith above the celebration of religious community. Besseler here suggests another, broader defining feature of Gebrauchsmusik – that it involves the ‘personal engagement of one's whole being’ (‘Fundamental Issues’, 57). Such a claim, while avoiding the social aspect whose importance has clearly been pushed to the background in these examples, does not quite explain the evident differences in the type of ‘personal engagement’ between dancing and listening to a fairy tale.

One also begins to wonder how different the other-worldly, dreamlike atmosphere Besseler evokes in this passage really is from his more antipathetic descriptions of ‘autonomous’ concert listening, since the latter, in a manner symptomatic of Besseler's pre-Adornian perspective, is not at all described in ‘structural’ terms. (The closest parallel in ‘Grundfragen’ to Adorno's ‘structural listening’ is what Besseler calls ‘autonomous listening of the expert type’, appropriate not to Beethoven but to ‘pre-Classical’ works of the mid-eighteenth century and earlier, which were created without reference to the bourgeois categories of ‘content’ and ‘expression’.) Rather, the concert listener's ear is conditioned by the ‘artificial bracketing together of various Romantic ways of approaching music, which make up the bulk of our traditional attitudes’ (‘Fundamental Issues’, 67).Footnote ¹² This is, in other words, the thoroughly ‘literarized’ set of nineteenth-century listening habits critiqued by Leon Botstein, in which the listener allows the ‘atmospheric’ or ‘associative’ qualities of the music to direct his own subjective response.Footnote ¹³ By playing this off against the more ‘objective’ attitude of the earlier ‘expert’, which is said to lead to ‘a technical comprehension of the work such as [only?] a connoisseur would have’ (‘Fundamental Issues’, 66), Besseler already sails dangerously close to the formalist wind. It would be only a step from here to the assertion that typical concert listening was not autonomous enough, a position quite opposed to the Gebrauchsmusik philosophy of ‘interactivity’.

In light of the later development of his thought, it might not be unfair to suggest that Besseler was more concerned to condemn Romantic habits than to specify the exact perspective from which he did so. Whether excessively ‘passive’ or insufficiently ‘expert’, the type of listening encouraged in the modern concert was inadequate to the present, he insisted, and inferior to the common historical (pre-nineteenth-century) types. And this meant that Besseler's distinctive position was always vulnerable to assimilation within the ranks of those scholars who used not Gebrauchsmusik but the weapons of structural analysis to attack late-Romantic musical sybaritism. Wegman rightly accuses Besseler's 1959 ‘Das musikalische Hören der Neuzeit’ (Musical Listening in the Modern Era) of bracketing context and assuming a ‘direct, one-to-one relationship between musical object and listening subject’.Footnote ¹⁴ He could have added that this corresponds precisely with Besseler's post-war restoration of Riemann's ‘synthetic’ category of listening, in which the phrases of ‘Classical’ works up to and including Beethoven are mentally assembled into an architectural structure – one then given further ‘unified organization’ (Einheitsgestaltung) by a network of abstract thematic relationships.Footnote ¹⁵

The radical promise of Besseler's 1925 essay was thus eventually betrayed by its author. But this did not mean that Besseler's arguments had no lasting effect on the musical scene; even their apparent contradictions were reflected in musical practice, as will be seen below. Besseler himself was involved with the Jugendmusikbewegung, both as a student and as a mature scholar, and long remained responsive to its demands for Gebrauchsmusik: during the Nazi period he reformatted the Denkmäler editions of early German music in order to make them more accessible to amateur musicians.Footnote ¹⁶ Although he was not involved with contemporary music on a scholarly level, he did not close himself off from its development,Footnote ¹⁷ and the ideas he explored in 1925 began to exert their own influence. Stephen Hinton's thesis analyses in detail the creatively catalysing effects of Besseler's theories on Hindemith in particular.Footnote ¹⁸ In fact, the categories into which Besseler divides his text, and the facets of the Gebrauchsmusik concept he thereby illuminates, map out much of the territory that would be explored creatively a few years later by composers from Eisler to Krenek.

Jazz was, of course, already being exploited heavily by contemporary German composers, whose brand of Kunstjazz began early on to feed as much on itself as on the ‘original’ American article. Besseler refers in ‘Grundfragen’ to Krenek's defence of the genre in the same year (‘Musik in der Gegenwart’, 1925), on the grounds of its manifest social importance. It was, however, brave of Besseler nonetheless to defend it in a musicological essay, as the outraged 1926 reaction of Hans-Joachim Moser would show: did Besseler really mean to claim that the ‘hallmark of the musical new age’ would be the ‘tea dance with nigger music’?Footnote ¹⁹ The massive success of Krenek's Jonny spielt auf in the very next year would have made a (tongue-in-cheek) affirmative reply quite plausible. The jazz-influenced cabaret and the Schlager, with its ‘wittily pointed delivery’ and combination of ‘eroticism and intellectual cynicism’ (‘Fundamental Issues’, 56), meanwhile formed the basis of Kurt Weill's musical creations for Brecht's Mahagonny and the Dreigroschenoper.

In other areas of musical production, although Besseler conceded that ‘work songs’ as such belonged to a social milieu now more or less obliterated by the ‘economic structures of capitalism’, workers’ ‘songs of allegiance’, as composed by Hanns Eisler, were to be an iconic and lasting legacy of left-wing Weimar culture. When Eisler took a critical stance towards modernism and his former teacher Schoenberg in 1927, his accompanying demands for Gemeinschaftskunst were phrased in a manner directly reminiscent of Besseler's article:

Even without the intellectual commitment of Eisler's radical communism, Hindemith taught at the Volksmusikschule in the Berlin workers’ suburb of Neukölln, composing for it his Hör- und Spielschule. Serving the Volk was an aim that cut across the music-ideological boundaries of the period.

Some of the most interesting creative ‘forecasts’ in ‘Grundfragen’ can be seen in Besseler's least ‘everyday’, faktisch categories of Gebrauchsmusik: the religious, mythical, and magical. The 1920s hardly have pious connotations for us today, but there was enough of an upsurge in interest relative to the fin de siècle for Eisler to notice a ‘new religiosity in music’, citing Stravinsky's Pater noster (Otche nash’, 1926), Honegger's Le roi David (1922), Hindemith's Marienleben (1922–3), and works by lesser-known composers.Footnote ²¹ Lutheran church music experienced what many authorities characterize as a ‘rebirth’, both musically and musicologically (the journal Musik und Kirche having been founded in 1928, the same year that Eisler wrote his article).Footnote ²²

But a religious tone could spring up in Gebrauchsmusik conceived quite independently of the church. Stephen Hinton's article on Brecht and Hindemith's Lehrstück (1929) traces the word Lehrstück's roots in catechistic religious pedagogy and finds them heavily drawn upon in the secular musical genre Brecht founded – ‘both the diction and structure of Lehrstück are redolent of catechistic teachings’.Footnote ²³ Whereas the 1929 Lehrstück contained strong parodic elements, the 1930 Brecht–Weill ‘school opera’ Der Jasager – based on the Japanese tale of a sick youth voluntarily sacrificed by a group of travellers – transmitted its catechism of ‘acquiescence’ (Einverständnis) in grave seriousness. It was even greeted enthusiastically, to Brecht's great displeasure, by some reviewers on the Christian right.Footnote ²⁴ The ideological problems Brecht experienced with music in his collaborations with Weill and Hindemith can be seen as an ironic repetition of the ‘Augustinian problem of church music’ identified in Besseler's ‘Grundfragen’. Where ‘the intentional object is not the music but the faith [or the politics] behind it’, the temptation exists for the participant ‘to forget, while joining in [the music], the involvement of his own person, and to fall into a noncommittal attitude of mere listening’ (‘Fundamental Issues’, 57), which would detract attention from the political message Brecht wanted to convey. Weill's own interpretation of music's dramatic function differed from Brecht's insofar as he aimed less at Verfremdung, the breaking of the theatrical illusion of reality, than at a heightened and stylized sense of reality – an ‘epic theatre’ in a more mythic and original sense, similar to Besseler's descriptions of epic recitation: ‘Now a grand form of theatre has arisen again, one that through elevated language and enhanced reality tries to align the ideas of the time with ideas that are timeless. […] [T]his form of theatre cannot do without the stylizing power of music.’Footnote ²⁵

Until 1933 at the latest, Gebrauchsmusik could thus still inspire the creative and organizational efforts of an influential swathe of German musicians. But thereafter? Stephen Hinton's claim that ‘Gebrauchsmusik as practised by Weimar composers did not bring about changes of either radical or lasting significance’ still poses a challenge to any scholar arguing for the importance of this movement.Footnote ²⁶ On the face of it one simply has to agree. By the 1950s, at Darmstadt especially, it was hard to imagine that avant-garde composers could ever have interrupted the progress of their ‘research and development’ on compositional technique to write music for schoolchildren. (Admittedly some composers, such as Carl Orff, continued to do so after the war; but their endeavours were from now on counted as part of the history of music pedagogy, rather than – as in Hindemith's case – as part of music history.) What had happened in Germany in the intervening period?

The answer – Hitler – opens up the problem of Gebrauchsmusik's ideological affinities. Part of the movement simply evaporated with the mass emigration of intellectuals after 1933: Weill, Krenek, Eisler, and Hindemith all fled to America. But another part was absorbed by Nazi institutional structures – and, some would argue, by a fascist ideology to which it had always been vulnerable. Besseler's talent, ambition, and early rise to the top of his discipline alone constitute him as one of the paradigm cases of Third Reich musicology,Footnote ²⁷ and his philosophical debt to Heidegger, the most famous Nazi supporter among the German intelligentsia, only adds to the burden of suspicion. The reception of Besseler's legacy has understandably been dominated by the issue: a musicologist who had books in the Heidelberg university library stamped with the letters JUDE cannot and should not be spared the thorough exposé of his collusions with Nazism that recent scholars have undertaken.Footnote ²⁸

That said, one should also beware of seeing Besseler's earlier theories with the ambiguous benefits of hindsight. Broader concepts and terms that Nazi ideologists absorbed in the 1930s were not thereby already fascist in the 1920s. As Stephen Hinton puts it, ‘it cannot be a historian's task to describe past events using terms defined according to connotations subsequently acquired’.Footnote ²⁹ For Laurenz Lütteken to suggest, in an otherwise careful critical analysis of Besseler's historiographical approach, that Besseler's 1925 opposition to the ‘exclusivity’ of Schoenberg's Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen could have led him ‘without a break […] in this [same] sense also [to] observe in 1938 that the “National Socialist direction of festivals and celebrations [such as the Nuremberg rallies] […] had created a genuine new Lebensraum for music”’ is a tendentious, if well-intended, juxtaposition.Footnote ³⁰ Many Weimar musical figures who were to be exiled by the Nazis, among them Kurt Weill, objected to Schoenberg's narrowing of the concert audience and were simultaneously interested in creating new mass environments for music. Similarly, Besseler's own 1937 characterization of the ‘unity of life’ (Einheit des Lebens) as the ‘core philosophical problem of National Socialism’ tempts one to a retrospective application, but it is really no more than one of the many ad hoc personal attempts to imagine a ‘philosophical core’ to Nazism that never truly existed.Footnote ³¹ One would be no more justified in ascribing a germinal fascism to twelve-note music of the early 1920s on the basis of Webern's and certain other serial composers’ later sympathies with Nazi values of order and discipline.Footnote ³² To reflect faithfully the ideological chaos of the period, one should point out that ‘Grundfragen’ was thought at the time to reveal Besseler's ‘fundamentally Bolshevist attitude’.Footnote ³³

Writing the history of the Jugendmusikbewegung – which was also, as the phrase goes, ‘brought into line’ (gleichgeschaltet) with Nazi ideology after 1933 – creates similar difficulties.Footnote ³⁴ As Dorothea Kolland's analysis of the movement shows, its ‘ideology of community’ (Gemeinschaftsideologie), although ‘conservative’ in the widest sense of the word, was given different political slants by the movement's constituent factions. The Finkensteiner Bund under Walther Hensel aimed at a German Volksgemeinschaft, and was influenced from the beginning by a right-wing nationalist programme;Footnote ³⁵ on the other hand the Musikantengilde, led by Fritz Jöde, had strong anti-capitalist motives, cooperating extensively with proletarian organizations such as the Sozialistische Arbeiterjugend.Footnote ³⁶ The most fateful tendency in both wings of the movement, which exposed it to the criticism of Eisler and Adorno, was its overall theoretical helplessness, its lack of will to formulate a programme of action based on a thorough analysis of actual social relationships. For a brief moment such a music-sociological approach did lead the movement, through the establishment of the journal Musik und Gesellschaft (1930), edited by Jöde. The democratic and self-critical tone of its contributions (including some from experienced cultural-political figures such as Leo Kestenberg and Eberhard Preussner) pointed the way to a more reflective stance. But this was countered by a persistent strain of mystic irrationalism, expressed in 1932 by Ernst Mehlich:

(It is worth noting that Besseler himself resisted an interpretation of his own work as ‘music sociology’ – partly in the perfectly respectable interest of not being pigeonholed, and working towards a wider transformation of musicology along the lines his teacher Gurlitt had envisaged, but also perhaps for more mystical, Heideggerian reasons.) When such anti-intellectual attitudes are added together with a (re)interpretation of music's communality as a ‘force for the preservation of the State’, then one is left with a type of thinking that, as Kolland remarks, ‘inserts itself without a hitch into the structures of fascist hegemony’.Footnote ³⁸

Yet numerous aspects of the movement disrupted fascist conceptions: the rejection of German Romanticism, which Hitler along with the majority of bourgeois concert-goers still saw as the pride and ultimate proof of German cultural superiority; the contradiction between a Führerkult and the movement's strictly communal conceptions; the Finkensteiner Bund's orientation towards the church; and the movement's democratic and sociological side, which exposed it to Nazi accusations of ‘cultural Marxism’. Kolland's final conclusion is that, in spite of the aspersions cast by Adorno after 1945

If the Jugendmusikbewegung's chief failing was its lack of theoretical power, then one must admit that, for all its originality and philosophical sophistication, there were also important gaps in Besseler's own social analysis in ‘Grundfragen’. Some of them were in the very areas of modern life whose consideration would have complicated the essay's themes of ‘community’ and ‘functionality’. Besseler notably avoided going anywhere near those points at which immediate ‘communal’ functions were supplemented or transformed by the technologies of mass society. In this respect the limitations of his critique converge with both Heidegger's (which, though it did not turn towards the question of technology until after the war, predictably dealt with it as a threat to man's primordial sense of Being) and those of the Jugendmusikbewegung. The radio represented to Besseler nothing more than an intensified degree of that communal disintegration already noticeable in concert life (‘Fundamental Issues’, 51). The question of film is not even addressed in ‘Grundfragen’, a fact which surely owes less to the haphazard nature of film music in the silent era than to Besseler's resolute exclusion of any music-dramatic considerations (the essay barely even mentions opera). Later writers on Gebrauchsmusik – notably Weill and Eisler – would create more fruitful theories of film and radio.

Another sector of Gebrauchsmusik production that seems to have been beneath Besseler's intellectual dignity was kitsch. As the Gebrauchsmusik movement expanded, it became clear how adaptations of salon, operetta, and ‘popular classic’ repertoire were already filling the place that theorists, educators, and composers wanted to keep open for early and contemporary music. Erich Doflein, another student of the Gurlitt school, analysed the problem for the Gebrauchsmusik journal Melos in 1929. Listing all the domains in which the amount of socially available music had increased (amateur choirs and orchestras, brass bands, cinema music, radio, etc.), he confirmed that at first sight ‘everything that the contemporary theses of Gebrauchsmusik call for really seems to be present’:

From a social-pragmatic angle one could make no objection to kitsch. It filled a real need, and could thus represent ‘art in the service of humanity’, as Doflein had himself expressed Gebrauchsmusik's aim.Footnote ⁴¹ Doflein had to invent other criteria, and it is surely significant for the theoretical stability of the Gebrauchsmusik platform that these coincided more with Adorno than with Besseler: kitsch represents not a degenerate communality but a perverted eclecticism, ‘a sin against material and its technique’.Footnote ⁴²

The modernist overtones of such a conclusion were indicative. After the freedom to experiment enjoyed during the early 1920s, Gebrauchsmusik's technical compromises felt like a weight around composers’ necks. Only a few of those with an avant-garde background, notably Weill and Eisler, stuck to a popular or functional idiom through the 1930s (and even they found other outlets for practising their control of ‘material and its technique’). It seems as if the 1929 Baden-Baden festival and its successor in Berlin the following year marked the limit of such compromise and, with it, the peak from which general enthusiasm for Gebrauchsmusik began to decline. By 1930 Hans Mersmann, the editor of Melos, had decided to distance himself from Gebrauchsmusik ideology in its most radical form:

As a statement from the journal that had done the most to disseminate Gebrauchsmusik concepts, this surely marks a decisive turn. The next year the Jugendmusikbewegung's promising publicity venture, the journal Musik und Gesellschaft, folded, and with it any real chance of the movement exerting an influence on mainstream critical opinion. The productive tension of the Gebrauchsmusik initiative was about to be broken in favour of a reinvestment in modernist compositional ‘development’.

Adorno was on hand to seize his chance. The aspirational ideals that Besseler's essay had set for Gebrauchsmusik were always vulnerable to a materialist assault unmasking their ‘ideological’ character, though one should note that Adorno's assessment of Gebrauchsmusik production in 1924, before Besseler wrote, conceded it some legitimacy – as the expression of a certain artistic ‘nihilism’. ‘When Gebrauchsmusik stylizes ragtime’, Adorno wrote with reference to works such as Hindemith's Suite ‘1922’,

Adorno's praise of Weill's Dreigroschenoper was likewise offered on the condition that the work's actual popularity was based on ‘misunderstanding’, and its intended audience was a purely potential and as yet unrealized one.Footnote ⁴⁵ It was after the Gebrauchsmusik movement set itself up in explicit opposition to Adorno's idol Schoenberg – for, as Arne Blum remarks, ‘the Second Viennese School […] were in a certain sense the antipode of the Gebrauchsmusik composers’,Footnote ⁴⁶ with Weill referring to Schoenberg as a ‘fanatic’ and the prototype of ‘musicians […] who carry on their work filled with contempt for the public’Footnote ⁴⁷ – that Adorno presumably felt an increasing provocation to respond in kind.

In 1932 his disapproval found expression in a highly polemical article in the Frankfurter Zeitung (dated 12 March 1932), ‘Kritik des Musikanten’ (Critique of the Amateur Musician), in which Hindemith and Stravinsky are lumped together with a critique of Jugendmusikbewegung ideology.Footnote ⁴⁸ Although Wolfgang Lessing's careful analysis of the text concludes that its ‘unscrupulous’ rhetorical tactics ‘at bottom revolve around an intellectual fetish’,Footnote ⁴⁹ Adorno's critique is nonetheless a turning point in his own theoretical consciousness – marking the first time that he uses a thoroughgoing Marxist theory of economic value and production for the direct interpretation of musical style traits,Footnote ⁵⁰ a theory that was to be developed with greater patience in the long essay ‘Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik’ (On the Social Situation of Music) of the same year. ‘Kritik des Musikanten’ also represents the launching of a sustained offensive against Musikantentum (musical amateurism) that brought him into alliance with Ernst Krenek and the Viennese avant-garde music journal 23.Footnote ⁵¹

Adorno's argument against the Jugendmusikbewegung follows a pattern that will probably strike the reader as rather familiar; and this is because Adorno spent the rest of his career elaborating the economic analysis he developed in the early 1930s. However enchanting the fantasy of musical Gemeinschaft might be, music cannot escape the order of capitalist society; it possesses only value as an object of exchange, not value ‘for use’; it too is subject to rationalization and the division of labour. The musician is for the time being trapped, and should recognize the fact: ‘[Music's] commodity character cannot be corrected in isolation, starting from music; instead to change it presupposes changing the entire socioeconomic process of production’.Footnote ⁵² Where then can music such as Schoenberg's find a place that radically resists the present order of things? Adorno's answer – the concert hall – reveals the extent to which he was after all prepared to accept compromises even for the most uncompromising music:

Adorno even envisaged a sort of radically reduced concert community, a series of ‘cells of radical consciousness’ that would steer the ‘driving forces of the dialectic’ – while listening to serial music.Footnote ⁵⁴ He too wanted to create his own ‘enclaves within rationalized society’, just as he accused the enthusiasts of musical Gemeinschaft of doing.Footnote ⁵⁵ Only they would not give themselves up to any false celebrations of communality: their task would be strictly autonomous, to penetrate the music's secrets, ‘to comprehend the work of art as structure’.Footnote ⁵⁶ They are, in other words, more analysts than listeners. And with this we are already not far from the explicitly élitist and technocratic philosophy later espoused by Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt – himself once a defender of Gebrauchsmusik – in support of the Darmstadt School: ‘We must build ivory towers. We must once again create small fellowships of initiates, for whom the preoccupation with highly subtle intellectual problems provides a raison d'être […]. The ivory towers, as creative sites, are the real germ cells of future musical culture’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Adorno may have taken his distance from some Darmstadt developments, but his mature attitude to music's potential for direct social change was one of unmistakeable and intransigent negation: ‘One must doubt whether the commonly favoured opinion, that music exists for the sake of humanity, is metaphysically tenable […]. We will need to abandon the persistent illusion that through music the relationships between people can be changed in any fundamental sense.’Footnote ⁵⁸

Thus far Hinton's claim stands up, at least for the German context, where Gebrauchsmusik's rejection of the concert in the name of musical community was ultimately trumped by a dialectical rejection of musical community itself. The situation outside Germany had the potential to diverge from this path, however. Musicians in the rest of Europe may not have called it Gebrauchsmusik (though the term did rapidly penetrate debates in America)Footnote ⁵⁹ – but a concern with active ‘music-making’ and non-concert genres was widespread. The 1920s Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians (RAPM) fought even more vociferously than the Jugendmusikbewegung for a radically simplified, participatory musical idiom, and against the bourgeois habit of concert-going. Yet not everywhere was the concern for popular participation opposed to the continuance of concert life. In Britain's less politicized climate Vaughan Williams was pointing out that ‘music for amateurs’ had been unjustly neglected, and demanded cultivation – but this would hardly serve as a replacement for the concert. ‘The virtuoso is essential to our musical life’: the concert tradition was in the end music for ‘the people’ too, if it were only composed in a manner that appealed to them and drew on the background of their own culture.Footnote ⁶⁰ Unlike Besseler, Vaughan Williams had not lost faith that the Volk could still be involved with and engaged by concert music. What was clear was that the national ‘community’ for which he was writing was an ideal or imagined one, rather than one that was actively performed (vollzogen, as Besseler put it, thinking of an interacting group of dancers or chamber musicians). Looking back to the nineteenth century, Krenek conceded the power that Beethoven's music once had to create this kind of imaginary solidarity, even if he adjudged that by the mid-1920s that power had been greatly weakened: for him Beethoven was the original ‘flag-bearer of an imaginary crowd, quite different to the musicians of once upon a time, who were the exponents of a real community […]. That said, the fiction bore him along, and helped his music take on that suggestive rallying power which it has proved able to exert ever since, even if its vitality has now quite evaporated.’Footnote ⁶¹

A potential alternative to Besseler's directly realized forms of musical community thus begins to suggest itself – one that would perhaps draw, as so many symphonies from the late nineteenth into the twentieth century did, on the folk idioms and other symbolic repertoires of that paradigmatic ‘imagined community’, the nation.Footnote ⁶² The alternative does not need to be imagined, however, or reconstructed with the aid of modern theory. It existed before Besseler wrote, and is in fact briefly but crucially engaged at the end of ‘Grundfragen’, by Besseler's disparaging reference – which many modern readers will find cryptic at best – to the ‘community-forming power’ (gemeinschaftsbildende Kraft) of symphonic works (‘Fundamental Issues’, 67).

This phrase can be traced back to the writings of one of the most influential German music critics of the period, Paul Bekker. Bekker is highly significant for the present discussion in having had an entirely different idea of the concert's social meaning from either Besseler or Adorno. In his bestselling 1911 biography Beethoven he argued that Beethoven's greatness lay in the broad popular appeal he gave to instrumental concert music, particularly through the symphony. The Beethoven symphonies were ‘speeches to the nation, to humanity’, new models of ‘the art-form of democracy’. Their ‘wide appeal […] reaches its climax in the choral finale of the Ninth Symphony, which, ideally, demands that the audience should join in the singing, as in the chorales of Bach's cantatas and Passions’.Footnote ⁶³ Such active participation was not a goal in itself so much as the natural overflow of a more sublimated ‘socially formative’ power, which he described in 1918 as follows:

The difficulty of writing symphonies after Beethoven was social, not technical: that of matching the breadth of social integration that his works had been able to create. Only one composer of the modern era seemed to Bekker to have a comparably universal vision: Mahler, who ‘abolishes the stratification that divided various circles of listeners according to their level of education, and makes the symphonic work of art once again […] accessible to everyone who is capable of participating in German cultural life today’.Footnote ⁶⁵ As Margaret Notley has shown, Bekker was here expressing a democratic or sociological aesthetic of the symphony that was widespread among critics in fin-de-siècle Germany and Austria, even if realizing its ideals in practice often proved difficult.Footnote ⁶⁶

With Notley's picture of a popularist concert aesthetic in mind Besseler's principal target in ‘Grundfragen’ looks quite different. It was not primarily Riemann or the ‘aesthetics of autonomy’ that he was aiming at, as many commentators have assumed, but the apparently disintegrating credibility of traditional social arguments made on behalf of the concert. From early on in the essay Besseler presents the concert life he saw around him as an exclusive and decadent form of something that had once, perhaps, had authentic democratic ideals (‘according to its original Beethovenian idea the audience represented humanity’, ‘Fundamental Issues’, 51), but no longer stood any chance of realizing them. And it was precisely this accusation – that the basis of traditional concert life, the symphony, had definitively lost its ‘community-forming power’ – that provoked outrage during the controversy immediately following the publication of ‘Grundfragen’. As Hans-Joachim Moser commented, ‘this, it seems to me, is more or less a death sentence for the symphonic tradition from Beethoven to Strauss’.Footnote ⁶⁷

The sociological defence of the symphony was not entirely destroyed by Besseler's arguments, however – far from it. Bekker himself never abandoned his belief in it: even after a long period of dedication to both contemporary musical trends and the staging of opera during the 1920s, his interest in the social potential of symphonic music did not fade. Writing from exile in New York in 1935, on the occasion of Mahler's seventy-fifth anniversary, he still saw Mahler's Volkstümlichkeit as a challenge, the germ of a new musical community beyond the limits of a self-regarding bourgeois concert culture.Footnote ⁶⁸ For Bekker, these works demanded a new performance space: not the concert auditorium, but the public spaces of New York's summer outdoor stadium concerts.Footnote ⁶⁹

But Bekker had meanwhile taken up the Gebrauchsmusik slogan too – in 1932–4, somewhat late in the day compared to other German critics – and based upon it an analysis of the historical and ideal relationships between art and folk music that was no less radical than Besseler's. The split between the two at the start of the nineteenth century was for Bekker a historical problem whose consequences urgently needed to be addressed. At this point German folk music had ceased to develop further, and popular music culture had during the course of the last century ‘sunk into the vulgar triviality of the operetta’, while art music for its part had been ‘turned into literature’, becoming a ‘high-cultural affair’ in which an ‘imaginary artistic value’ had replaced the ‘values of community’.Footnote ⁷⁰Gebrauchsmusik would be the creative reunion of the two, the ‘epitome of a holistic musical culture’ – neither a folk or early music ‘revival’ nor an insistence on popular accommodation to bourgeois ideas of great composers, monumental works, and their special cultural value.Footnote ⁷¹ Bekker's anthropological definition of Gebrauchsmusik also differed from Besseler's. Whereas Besseler merged ‘primordial’ musical utterance into a variety of other everyday situations, in which music was neither the focus nor even the primary means of expression of the community that created it, for Bekker the primary musical activities of singing and dancing were basic means of human expression in themselves, the signs of a vital mobilization of the self towards community: ‘What is Gebrauchsmusik used for? For singing and dancing […]. Both are activities, means of activation […] shaping expressions of individual vitality and at the same time means of association [with others]’.Footnote ⁷² Although various degrees of abstraction from these fundamental activities were possible and acceptable, Bekker's ideal – and in this he coincides with Besseler – remains that of music as activity, as ‘performance’ (Vollzug), not as passive enjoyment or inert cultural possession.Footnote ⁷³ The latter was, however, what he saw it reduced to in New York's consumption-oriented concert life, which promoted ‘stars’, professional orchestras, and lavish traditional opera productions to the utter detriment of music education and chamber or choral music.Footnote ⁷⁴

There was little chance for a new Gebrauchsmusik here; and yet Bekker found one exception, a solitary sign of hope in the last years of his life. He reviewed one of the first performances of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess with an enthusiasm – and a choice of title – that proclaimed Gershwin's power to draw on those vital forces not employed by bourgeois concert culture. ‘The First American Folk Opera’, ran the headline of his review, published simultaneously in Paris and Zürich in the last week of October 1935.Footnote ⁷⁵ And in this proclamation of the beginning of a new genre he coincided not only, as Andreas Eichhorn points out, with Leonard Bernstein, but with a one-time collaborator, his compatriot Kurt Weill – Gebrauchsmusik pioneer and equally one of the most prominent contributors to the artistic development of the American musical. For Kurt Weill, the experience of Porgy and Bess was both a revelation and a spur to his own creative efforts on behalf of a new music ‘for the masses’.

Those efforts had of course begun in Germany, in 1927, with the start of his collaboration with Bertolt Brecht on Mahagonny and the theoretical manifesto ‘Verschiebungen in der musikalischen Production’ (Shifts in Musical Production).Footnote ⁷⁶ Weill presented his approach to musical theatre as both an exertion of gesellschaftsbildende Kraft and a form of Gebrauchsmusik, directed not at localized ‘communities’ but at the ‘masses’. And, as an entire wave of Weill research has succeeded in demonstrating,Footnote ⁷⁷ his approach remained consistent: there were not ‘two Weills’, with the composer sacrificing the core of a critical or ‘surrealist’ Weimar style for the commercial banality of Broadway. Weill in fact saw the American musical as a genre in which he could realize the democratic ideals he had been working for since the mid-1920s in Germany. That those ideals were not the same as Brecht's was already clear by the end of their collaboration. The loss of that creative tension with one of German literature's most original minds may be a fair reason to assess the overall artistic and humane achievement of Weill's later musicals as somewhat less than Mahagonny and the Dreigroschenoper – though the music itself was no less carefully shaped. But as Gebrauchsmusik – as a university-level Schuloper, in fact – the 1948 ‘folk opera’ Down in the Valley was quite as successful as the 1930 Brecht–Weill Jasager, and the very lack of political controversy kept it in the popular repertoire for longer.

Even with Weill's assistance, and the subsequent contribution of Leonard Bernstein, the ‘socially formative’ musical remained only one part of the American scene. Musealized traditionalism and an avant garde uninterested in social questions both persisted and grew after the end of the war. It was in the East, in Soviet Russia, that the sociological views of music discussed here had their greatest and most lasting impact. The social role of the symphony here was such that in certain cases – most dramatically, the first performances in wartime Russia of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony (1942) – it becomes fairly clear that the line Besseler drew between isolated (concert-type) and communitarian (Gebrauchsmusik-type) listening has been crossed.Footnote ⁷⁸ Whereas Besseler described a clear phenomenological ‘switch’ from relaxing at a concert to standing to attention as the national anthem is played (‘Fundamental Issues’, 56), here the symphony itself becomes a patriotic statement, and listening to it an act of imaginative social affirmation. Neither Besseler nor Bekker could have been expected to foresee what ‘socially formative power’ symphonic music could acquire in such extreme situations – especially not when its range was not merely imaginatively but literally extended by radio and public loudspeakers hurling orchestrated defiance at the German guns. But just as telling was the sneering reaction of critics such as Virgil ThomsonFootnote ⁷⁹ – something that could not yet be ascribed either to Cold War politics or, simplistically, to a more ‘accurate’, formalist appraisal of the symphony's merits as a composition, but which must instead be seen as a product of the broader cultural history of concert music over the past decades. Had Shostakovich composed (and been judged) in an unbroken continuity with Mahler and the ‘socially formative’ aesthetic of thirty years earlier, then his reception outside Russia might have been quite different.

So might the history of musicology, in fact. In disciplinary terms, Besseler's division of the musical field into ‘interactive’ and ‘autonomous’ domains was accepted by Western musicologists with a swiftness that should have aroused suspicion. Stephen Hinton claims that it represents a ‘problem with which musicology has subsequently concerned itself and, in many respects, solved, or at least learned to live with’ (and here Hinton inserts a reference to Dahlhaus's Grundlagen der Musikgeschichte).Footnote ⁸⁰ The ‘solution’, however, involves reinscribing all of those further, sub-disciplinary divisions, superficially convenient but at some deeper level untrue, against which we have been struggling ever since Dahlhaus – between historical musicology and ethnomusicology, classical music and popular music, analysis and cultural studies. As a glimpse into the work of Dahlhaus's redoubtable East German rival Georg Knepler will quickly show, these divisions were much less deeply engraved on the other side of the Iron Curtain.Footnote ⁸¹ And this is because the Soviet bloc remained the place where the nineteenth-century social theory of concert music, whose last great spokesman in the West was Bekker, flourished most prominently. Bekker's writings directly influenced a number of leading Soviet theorists during the 1920s and 30s: in 1926 Boris Asaf'yev translated Bekker's Die Sinfonie von Beethoven bis Mahler into Russian and furnished his own introduction to the text. Natalia Nowack draws attention to the similarities between Asaf'yev's sociological definition of musical form as a ‘directly socially manifested organisation […] of the musical material’ and Bekker's 1916 theory of form as a social product.Footnote ⁸² Bekker's Beethoven biography was translated into Russian in 1913,Footnote ⁸³ a mere two years after its appearance – and soon fed into Anatoly Lunacharsky's ideologically convenient Soviet Beethoven cult;Footnote ⁸⁴ but his work on Mahler was also fundamental to the more complex ‘dialogical’ defence of Mahlerian symphonism in the writings of Shostakovich's friend Ivan Sollertinsky.Footnote ⁸⁵ It was because of this critical environment, not (just) because of the heroic biographical narratives that were woven through it, that – as Richard Taruskin has written in an already notorious sentence – ‘nowhere on earth was symphonic music ever valued more highly by multitudes of listeners than in the Soviet Union’.Footnote ⁸⁶

Yet the Soviet Union, like the nationalist symphony, is no more, and the combination of mass appeal and music-theatrical intelligence that Weill established on Broadway has for the most part been sacrificed to outright commercialism. Though we do not (in spite of my title) have the coroner's report on the classical concert quite yet, its health is a matter for serious concern. It scarcely succeeds better today at combining musical creativity and sociality than it did when Besseler wrote, and the lack of a coherent theoretical apologia for its existence must be one reason why. Meanwhile, that there have since been numerous musicians, critics, and theorists interested in the social dimensions of music is undeniable; but the threads that would link them back to the debates explored in this article have been cut, or lost in the tangle of twentieth-century history. (Christopher Small's critique of classical concert culture, for instance, can be seen as an unknowing recapitulation of Besseler's, inspired by the 1960s’ very own ‘youth movement’ in music and education. To him the rock festival – summed up by a description of the Isle of Wight festival in July 1970 – is a better exemplification than the concert of ‘that kind of communality which we have noted in other musical cultures, and of which ours is in desperate need’.Footnote ⁸⁷) From a political perspective this disconnection is not surprising: those who were aware of the uses to which musical ‘communality’ had been put under both fascist and Communist regimes could be excused for not wanting anything more to do with it.

And yet what Besseler's theorization of musical listening reminds us is that we really have no choice: we have to have something to do with it, for music cannot, any more than language, be stripped of its ‘primordially’ social character. In flat contradiction of August Halm and Ernst Kurth's contemporary analytical notions of ‘absolute music’, Hermann Erpf (another member of the Gurlitt school) wrote appositely in 1922:

The task for anyone pursuing Besseler's line of thought today is to restore as objects of social analysis all those forms and technologies that extend – but do not entirely transcend – the primordial communality of Gebrauchsmusik. These are, in the first instance, the concert itself as theorized by Bekker, but also radio and film as theorized by Weill and Eisler, and today a whole spectrum of technological possibilities from DJ culture to YouTube, MySpace, and other forms of file-sharing combined with popular criticism. Although Adorno's melancholy and alienated gaze continues to hold its appeal for many, we have more reason to be optimistic than he did: neither the ‘culture industry’ nor cultural politics have succeeded in suppressing human beings’ perennial desire to create more ideal social relationships through music.