ABSTRACT
The older middle-brow creature's masculinity is sickly and deviant, touched by an unhealthy and deadly fixation on the mouldering ears of dead Beethoven. Adolf Loos's new masculinity is vibrant, virile, and strong. So the gender matrix remains intact: one oppressive masculinity is replaced by another. The discipline of musicology, perhaps one of the most sustained works of mourning in the Western academy, is enthralled to a deep epistemological nostalgia. Born at that moment when Loos despairs at decadent listening practices of the public, in retrospective idealization of the ascendant moment of late Viennese classicism, musicology has consistently marginalized and censured most of what sociologists of listening would term normative. In Loos's bitter complaint there is implicit reproach: listening, of all activities, should have remained aloof from such processes, since to listen at the beginning of the long nineteenth century within the Austro-German romantic economy was to embrace exemplary interiority, to deepen one's humanity, to experience fulsome abundance in the self.
