ADEQUATE LISTENING

Stockfelt is said to be challenging Adorno's characterisation of "expert" listening as the most valorised: hmmm not really, Adorno had a complex theory of listening and the category of the expert was only one of many possible modes of listening. Stockfelt (like a large number of critics of Adorno) ends up with a position very close to Adorno himself, the idea of an expanded, contextualised, materially focused listening that is not distinct from "interpretation".

I fully agree with the importance of taking the whole listening situation into account. At my record store I would often be dragged into the pointless debates about "authenticity" in performance with some customers absolutely refusing to listen to recordings of Bach on the piano. Armed with the knowledge that Bach wrote "for" the harpsichord they would declare that only a recording of the Goldberg Variations on double manual harpsichord was "historically accurate". I would sometimes point out that they were listening to a recording and that nothing could be further from Bach than a mechanical reproduction and absolutely repeatability of a performance on disc. This is where Stockfelt is almost literally Adornian in his insistence that the context of listening is just as important as the ostensible object of the listening experience. He's fundamentally correct in my view that musical situations set up ways in which the sounds must be perceived in order to function musically and that "failures" of communication are very instructive in this respect: to an audience that expects music to be heard in one way the presentation of sounds that demand to be listened to differently will usually result in a conflict or displeasure. In a certain sense this is the most interesting thing about the article: it's interesting to think about how the classical concert situation is a completely inadequate one for the adequate presentation of "non-classical" notated music. It is a standard trope by now of criticism of new music to say that it fails with audiences: I would say it is the mode of presentation that is the problem and the audiences and expectations that come along with the apparatus of the orchestra for instance are almost pre-disposed to render the music meaningless. This is why I have a great interest in works that do not simply sit nicely on a mixed program between concerto and symphony. I also have a fascination with programming that takes the dialogue between works into account or which questions the normal modes of presentation from inside the work itself.