Message #24877

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The call for socially useful music did not go unchallenged, formulated as it often was in explicitly political terms and as an implicit critique of the Expressionist isolation commonly associated at the time with the Second Viennese School. Schoenberg himself was especially defensive, often construing the reforms proposed by the younger generation of composers as personal attacks (1976).

One demands New Music for all! Gebrauchsmusik! But it transpires that no use can be found for it. … And what use? For want of a use, many of the business-like Gebrauchsmusiker have become ideal artists. More ideal than those outmoded ones, who may at least hope for success after they die, whereas the involuntary idealists have composed for particular use and have no hope or desire for the future.

No less vitriolic and certainly more extensive were the involved polemics directed against the supporters of Gebrauchsmusik by Schoenberg’s apologist Theodor W. Adorno. With his characteristic ear for the news of the day, Adorno eagerly took up the term, albeit in a derogatory sense, as early as 1924, and he continued to write critically about Gebrauchsmusik for the rest of his life. He began by dismissing the latest music of Hindemith and Stravinsky as ‘fiktive Gebrauchsmusik’ (1924), music with only apparent utility and little expressive value of the kind he associated with ‘absolute music’. By 1932, in his sociological tract ‘Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik’, Adorno was using Gebrauchsmusik to describe one of four types of contemporary music, the others being ‘modern music’ (Schoenberg), ‘objectivism’ (Stravinsky) and ‘surrealism’ (Weill). He associated Gebrauchsmusik above all with Hindemith, whose music he criticized for identifying itself with a fictitious collective. The only use-value of music in capitalist society, he argued, was that of a commodity (in the Marxist sense). Any attempt to restore pre-capitalist immediacy he dismissed as ideology in the sense of ‘false consciousness’. As he concluded in Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie of 1962, ‘Gebrauchsmusik, is tailor-made for the administered world’.

The idea of Gebrauchsmusik, as the work of musicologists such as Besseler illustrates, derives first and foremost from methodological reflection; it does not so much capture the essence of music as reflect a perspective of the scholar or listener. As such, it identifies a philosophical viewpoint, in this case one indebted to phenomenology. The same piece of music can be viewed both in terms of its use-value and in terms of its autonomous features. These two perspectives are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Understood in this way, autonomy must be seen less as an idealistic construct that precludes consideration of social utility than as itself a complex of artistic practices embracing the social, the aesthetic and the theoretical. These three areas overlap. Social autonomy encompasses various aspects of music sociology: the composer’s employment status or sources of patronage, the context of musical presentation and the nature of music’s social function. Aesthetic autonomy also touches on questions of presentation, on how musical objects are approached, as well as on the status of music as a discrete work, on the kind of criticism and interpretation it attracts, and on matters of musical form. The dimension of theory encompasses questions of formal taxonomy and other structural factors. Historically, it is possible to observe a process of increasing ‘autonomization’: composers become their own bosses, freed from direct service to institutions and patrons; their musical works are conceived less for specific social occasions, more as discrete works, independent of immediate social function; and the identity of their works, in formal and structural terms, increasingly resists their being subsumed under generic norms. Autonomy and the postulate of originality are closely linked.

One need not subscribe to Adorno’s negative dialectics, which posits social relevance in artistic isolation, in order to appreciate one principal point of his critique: namely, that proponents of Gebrauchsmusik could not – or rather would not – relinquish certain facets of their autonomy as composers. They remained modern professional composers, with all the aims and aspirations implied by the ultimately irreversible division of labour. The choice, then, was not a simple one between ‘autonomy’ and ‘utility’, concepts which insofar as they denote types of music exist merely as abstract constructs. Even ‘autonomous’ music has its uses. Rather, the call for Gebrauchsmusik functioned historically as a corrective to extreme manifestations of autonomy. Composers in the 1920s were rejecting not the hard-won autonomies of Beethoven so much as the extreme isolation of the Schoenberg school.

In different circumstances, on the East Coast of the USA in the early 1950s rather than in 1920s Berlin, Hindemith spoke of his earlier music as though the attendant politics and struggles had never existed. In the preface to his Norton lectures, delivered at Harvard University in 1950, he appeared to take credit for coining the term Gebrauchsmusik; at the same time he tried to distance himself from it (1952, p.viii). History has proved him more successful in the former venture than the latter.

A quarter of a century ago, in a discussion with German choral conductors, I pointed out the danger of an esoteric isolationism in music by using the term Gebrauchsmusik. Apart from the ugliness of the word – in German as hideous as its English equivalents workaday music, music for use, utility music, and similar verbal beauties – nobody found anything remarkable in it, since quite obviously music for which no use can be found, that is to say, useless music, is not entitled to public consideration anyway and consequently the Gebrauch is taken for granted. … [When] I first came to this country, I felt like the sorcerer’s apprentice who had become the victim of his own conjurations: the slogan Gebrauchsmusik hit me wherever I went, it had grown to be as abundant, useless, and disturbing as thousands of dandelions in a lawn. Apparently it met perfectly the common desire for a verbal label which classifies objects, persons, and problems, thus exempting anyone from opinions based on knowledge. Up to this day it has been impossible to kill the silly term and the unscrupulous classification that goes with it.

In the period following World War II, not only was the term regarded as ‘silly’, if not ‘useless’, but in an age that sought autonomy at all costs, even at the expense of ‘public consideration’, Gebrauchsmusik acquired a pejorative connotation. Thus Stockhausen dismissed his modernist colleague Zimmerman as a ‘Gebrauchsmusiker’ because he used pre-existing materials rather than generating totally new and original ones. Lack of absolute autonomy became synonymous with a lack of artistic value. The earlier generation in the inter-war years had thought otherwise; it was for them that the term had had its positive, historically significant meaning.

L. Kestenberg: Musikerziehung und Musikpflege (Leipzig, 1921)
P. Nettl: ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte der Tanzmusik im 17. Jahrhundert’, ZMw, iv (1921–2), 257–65
T.W. Adorno: ‘Gebrauchsmusik’ (1924), Gesammelte Schriften, ed. R. Tiedemann, xix (Frankfurt, 1984), 445–7
H. Besseler: ‘Grundfragen des musikalischen Hörens’, JbMP 1925, 35–52; repr. in Aufsätze zur Musikästhetik und Musikgeschichte, ed. P. Gülke (Leipzig, 1978), 29–53
K. Weill: ‘Verschiebungen in der musikalischen Produktion’, Berliner Tageblatt (1 Oct 1927); repr. in Kurt Weill: Musik und Theater: Gesammelte Schriften, ed. S. Hinton and J. Scheber (Berlin, 1990), 45–8
K. Weill: ‘Die Oper – wohin?’ (31 Oct 1929); repr. in Kurt Weill: Musik und Theater: Gesammelte Schriften, ed. S. Hinton and J. Scheber (Berlin, 1990), 68–71
H. Besseler: Die Musik des Mittelalters und der Renaissance (Potsdam, 1931)
T.W. Adorno: ‘Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik’, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, i (1932), 103–24, 356–78
P. Hindemith: ‘Betrachtungen zur heutigen Musik’ (1940), Aufsätze, Vorträge, Reden, ed. G. Schubert (Zürich, 1994), 131–76
A. Schoenberg: ‘New Music, Outmoded Music’, Style and Idea, ed. D. Newlin (New York, 1950, enlarged 2/1975 by L. Stein), 113–24
P. Hindemith: A Composer’s World (Cambridge, MA, 1952)
H. Besseler: Das mujsikalische Hören der Neuzeit (Berlin, 1959); repr. in Aufsätze zur Musikästhetik und Musikgeschichte, ed. P. Gülke (Leipzig, 1978), 104–73
T.W. Adorno: ‘Ad vocem Hindemith’, Impromptus (Frankfurt, 1968, 3/1970), 51–87
S. Hinton: ‘Gebrauchsmusik’ (1988), HMT; repr. in Terminologie der Musik im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. H.H. Eggebrecht, i (Wiesbaden, 1995), 164–74
S. Hinton: The Idea of Gebrauchsmusik (New York, 1989)

But we still don't know where Brahms comes in do we?