Adorno

Adorno’s Path to Social Research 249

are socially mediated and what role is played in this by the omnipresent
medium of mass communications. In chapter 2 Adorno concentrated on
the more narrowly musical aspect of radio programmes. He was inter-
ested in two problems. On the one hand, he asked how the musical
material was affected by its distribution through the medium of radio.
On the other, he inquired about the reception given to the different
music genres. He focused particularly on the ‘Concept of Fetish-Making
in Radio Music’:

By musical fetish-making, we mean that, instead of any direct

relationship between the listener and the music itself, there exists

only a relationship between the listener and some sort of social or

economic value which has been attributed either to the music or

to its performers.^34

Following this thesis of the regressive consumption of music by the con-

sumer, Adorno proposed in chapter 3 to turn his attention to the primary

emotional effects of radio. His working hypothesis was that listening to

the radio was part of a general tendency towards pseudo-activity:

We believe that most attempts made by radio to ‘activate’ the list-

ener belong to the sphere of pseudo-activity. Here is one example:

the amateur orchestra broadcasts the music and the amateur

listeners at home can fit in the noises they make themselves.

This is plainly a pseudo-activity insofar as the activized listener

actually has no control over the real orchestra because he cannot

be heard by it.^35

Adorno wanted to make use of empirical methods to discover the social

situations in which broadcast music is actually listened to:

The meaning of a Beethoven symphony heard while the listener

is walking around or lying in bed is very likely to differ from its

effect in a concert-hall where people sit as if they were in church.

Do they listen to radio music while sitting, standing, walking

around, or lying in bed? Do they listen before meals, during meals,

or after meals?... If music is becoming a sort of daily function

then it certainly will be very closely associated with meals. And if

people try to break down the distance between themselves and

the music by incorporating it, so to speak, within themselves,

and if they treat it as a sort of ‘culinary’ product, all these things

could be proved to have a definite relationship with eating.^36

This extensive memorandum gathered together a number of

ideas that Adorno had already worked out, such as his various

studies on jazz, his fundamental critique of amateur music-making