What kind of conscious activity is ‘listening to music’? A contribution from Theodor Adorno by way of psychoanalysis

Abstract

This chapter elaborates Theodor Adorno’s notion of genuine music listening and the role of consciousness within it by analogy with the psychoanalytic conceptualization of listening in the analytic dialogue as described in Freud’s model of the free-association process. Crucial in both models of listening is the simultaneous restraining of conventional expectations and the reception of what is new in what is being heard. For both, listening is collaborative work (between patient and analyst, or between listener and the musical composition), engaging the interaction of consciousness and the unconscious by confronting resistances and bringing new meaning into conscious awareness. Implicit in Adorno’s conception of music listening, as part of his critical theory of society, is a socio-historical dimension: the collaboration between genuinely advanced music like that of the Second Viennese School and the individual engaged in genuine listening works against false consciousness to further an authentic subjecthood..