Musical Taste and the Industrial Syndrome. A Socio-Musicological Problem in Historical Analysis

Musical taste and musical publics have received notoriously little scholarly attention. Musical compositions are rarely examined in terms appropriate to the industrial world from which they emerge, owing to the romantic conception of music (Schlegel, Wagner) as a human concern beyond everyday reality. And yet, paradoxically, music attained the socio-economic status of a valuable consumer product precisely during the romantic era. The industrial syndrome at large, that determines every aspect of musical life in a capitalist world, and the question of taste changes are historically followed since 18th-century England (Hawkins, Clementi) throughout 19th- and 20th-century Viennese, French and German phenomena (Mainzer, Riemann, Mahler, Strauss, Schönberg, Stravinsky).