The High of Cultural Experience

Bodily Self-absorption and Self-entrainment

Let us begin with microdetails of the peak experience of the most committed opera fanatic (Benzecry 2011). The opera fanatic closes his or her eyes during the aria. The crowded space at the top of the opera house does not allow good views of the stage in any case, but it is an intense auditory experience that the opera fanatic seeks. The listener tunes out the surrounding people to concentrate on how the soaring soprano voice feels inside his or her own body. It is an intensely inward experience, although not quite in isolation: There is a connection “from diaphragm to diaphragm,” as one interviewee puts it, from the vocal apparatus of the singer to the body of the hearer. It is hearing not just with one’s ears, brain, and nervous system; it is all of these, the bodily arousal of emotions as well, but above all a response to the singer’s voice that sets the hearer not exactly singing himself or herself but resonating with the singer’s voice. At the peak moment, the sound goes right through you, it makes you weak in the knees, it makes you feel you are melting, and other metaphors commonly used to describe the thing that opera fans most love.

What sets off this experience is a peak dramatic moment that is also a peak musical moment. Individual fans resonate most with their own favorite type of singer, a spinto who produces high volume in the lower soprano range, or a soprano dramatico, or other types. But the particular emotions expressed are a vehicle, not the intoxicating pleasure itself; yearning, tragic sorrow, tenderness, exuberant joy, vengeful anger, all will do it; the singer loads her or his voice with emotion, energy, and musical qualities to send out a sound that the hearer receives as pervading his or her own body. The peak moment can be described musically: It is a high sustained note, held much longer and louder than notes in the melody lines of most kinds of popular song. This is, superficially, what makes the opera singer a unique type: tremendous lung power, often based on great girth. But a single note without variation would be boring; what makes it absorbing for the listener is the micro-rhythm within the note, the vibrato, the humming-resounding self-echoing quality of the great operatic voices. It is this micro-rhythm that the hearer is caught up in, making the hearer’s own body feel like it is reverberating, taken over with the singer’s voice.

There is also a long-term rhythm of the musical composition itself; the peak moment comes at the turning point of a set of harmonic chord changes, just where the chord sequence is about to resolve to the tone center. There are also intermediate points during a song where the chord tension is held, before resolving into a temporary tonal center as a melodic phrase; a great aria will have a number of these, but the last point of high tension before the melody resolves into its ending is typically the climax of the listening experience. After such a moment, the true opera fanatic will not burst into applause; he or she lets the resonance die away inside his or her body at its own pace, a rhythmic aftermath; and he or she is annoyed at an unsophisticated audience that breaks into cheers and clapping before he or she can expel a deep breath, so to speak. Thus the peak notes are the focus of multiple rhythms: the vibrato of the sustained long note and the rhythm of the song as it moves through the chord changes that constitute the underlying harmony, setting up tensions anticipating the next chord and eventually resolving them.

All music, of course, operates by tonal resonances and the forward-moving tensions of melody line, harmonic accompaniment, and rhythmic beat; opera is the type of musical composition that maximizes prolonged peak moments of pleasurable tension. This is why opera fanatics are the ideal type of the cultural consumer absorbed in the experience as an end in itself.

The operatic peak experience fits the theoretical model of an interaction ritual (Collins 2004). An interaction ritual (IR), at its most successful level, is an intense social experience. It begins with the ingredients of bodily copresence, mutually aware focus of attention, shared emotional quality, and exclusion of outside distractions; if successful, it intensifies the mutual focus and emotional experience so that participants become absorbed into their common object of attention and feel a very strong emotion about it. This mutual experience, simultaneously internal and external, generates a second emotion, what Durkheim called collective effervescence; this is the social emotion par excellence, the excitement of feeling in close resonance with other participants. The particular emotions expressed in an opera aria—sorrow, longing, and so on—become transmuted into a different emotional experience; the intensely focused listener does not feel sad but a different, very satisfying emotion. In the close empirical details of microsociology, the collective process consists in rhythmic entrainment; participants are caught up not only in each other’s rhythm but in their own. One can anticipate other persons’ signals so well because they follow a rhythm, and one is attuned to that same rhythm; the satisfying feeling is knowing in advance how other persons will move, gesture, and make sounds, and repeatedly finding one’s anticipations are true. On the outcome side, IRs that arrive at this degree of mutual entrainment result in feelings of solidarity, respect for collective symbols, and the emotional energy of confidence, enthusiasm, and proactive motivation.

Second-order or inner IRs extend this social experience by repeating and amplifying it inside one’s mind and body. The ritual of social conversation with other people gives rise to the internalized ritual of talking to oneself, that is, thinking; the ritual of collective religious worship is internalized as solitary prayer; the social experience of listening to music, or playing in a musical group, can morph into the internal experience of remembering music in one’s head or in solitary composition. Similarly, the self-absorbing experience of the opera fanatic is an internalized IR with a very strong emphasis on self-entrainment.

An internal IR, like the external IRs on which it is modeled, can be more intense or less intense, more successful or less successful in attaining a high degree of self-entrainment. Compare unsuccessful internal IRs: a writer suffering from writer’s block, who cannot get the flow of internal conversation, who is interrupted by outside distractions or by fits and starts of wandering mental attention—these are the ingredients of an IR in their negative range. Conversely, the internal IR that is working well is generating its own collective effervescence, its own internal solidarity. Wiley (1994) theorizes internal solidarity as a harmonious rhythm among the different parts of the self: the symbolic interactionist components of I, me, and generalized other. Thus a successful internal IR generates self-motivation and internal sources of pleasure.

The opera fanatic tunes out the surrounding audience but focuses intensely on the voice of the singer from the stage below; on the continuum of external versus internal, the ultra-attuned opera hearer is not quite at the extreme of solitary world rejection but near it. Opera fanatics have collections of recordings, but the high experience is not in listening to a recording in the solitude of one’s home. Opera fanatics prefer to attend operas in person, even though they tune out their fellows when the music starts; one interviewee describes it as “falling in love alone, although surrounded by others.” It is not the physical surroundings of the opera house that they seek; opera fanatics close their eyes to become absorbed into their own bodies—to be taken over by a live voice, emanating from an unseen body. The visual channel is not what makes it real but the bodily reverberation that fills oneself up on the inside. The opera fanatic has perfected an inner IR that maximizes one’s bodily and sensory entrainment, not just with the singer’s presence but with the listener’s internal resonance—literally making himself or herself into a musical instrument.

In his classic article “Making Music Together,” Schutz (1951) presented the “mutual tuning-in relationship” that happens in playing music together, when musicians align their internal times with each other, and use the composer as a template for living together simultaneously in specific dimensions of time. Heider and Warner (2010) analyze the absorbing experience of a traditional type of religious singing as the result of the IR mechanism. The experience of the opera fanatic is a peculiar mode of secondary internalized IR, in which the mediation of co-performance happens as training, not just to adapt reflexively to the taste of those around but to make it intensely and uniquely meaningful in itself. Schutz (1951:88) quotes Brahms saying, “If I want to listen to a fine performance of ‘Don Giovanni,’ I light a good cigar and stretch out on my sofa.” Like a great composer, listening to the music in one’s own head is an inner IR of someone who knows what to listen for.

Such an occasion reproduces not only the Schutzian co-presence between composer and listener, mediated by the performer, but the many iterations of the piece in which the listener has participated. For an opera fanatic hearing a live performance, the experience is a combination of listening to the actual voice of the singer while also listening to it inside one’s own head, surrounded by internalized memories and standards creating by previous hearings. Some performances thus become meaningful by comparison to the benchmark or yardstick against what one is listening, mobilizing the listener’s accumulated stock of knowledge. Other performances produce a more refined attunement with what caused the musical high in the listener. Still others recall the distinctive experience of a particular performance, such as the first time they listened to a particular fragment or last time they heard their favorite performer interpreting a particular role. Opera fanatics listen to recordings to search for particular bodily effects and moods, using records as an index of sensory memories against which live embodied experiences can be measured.

The opera fanatic feels the singer’s voice inside one’s own body; it becomes a resonance chamber, a counterpart instrument attuned as tightly as possible to the singer producing the music. The listener, like the performer, is a veteran of hundreds or thousands of hours of practice, knowing the micro-rhythms of vocal vibrato of many singers of the past and of their greater and lesser performances, anticipating the tensions building and the long-awaited deliverance of harmonic resolutions that make the flow of a well-remembered melody. Where less dedicated listeners become bored with too many repetitions of famous songs, the fanatic listener focuses on nuances, hearing still finer resonances and microvariants. The exquisite pleasures of the opera fanatic come from tiny elements of what is not fully anticipated, a moving edge between the internal flow of one’s own bodily anticipations and the flourishes and tweaks the singer can give to his or her voice. The excellence of the opera fanatic in using his or her entire mind and body as an instrument for hearing is similar to what Chambliss (1989) finds among championship athletes: They differ from lesser competitors in enjoying their practice hours, including solitary practice—like that of a swimmer who constantly feels the precise angle of one’s fingers in the water, the rhythm of the wall turn, and other microdetails of bodily concentration—that give them an edge in competition. What less-skilled persons find boring, they find enjoyable. The same happens with opera fanatics; in fact, they do not perceive the repetitive character of repetition. To them, every time is a new event, a new opportunity for enjoyment and comparison.

This self-trained expertise is both an intersubjective occurrence and a process of self-production. As new fans listen to opera live, they also take into account how others describe different shows and competing performances. They improve as fans as they attend more performances and as others react to their comments and gestures about what is being watched and listened to. Becoming a fanatic means getting to know opera and understanding what it means to be an opera lover. It entails making comparisons, associating and distinguishing one’s private responses from that of others. Loving opera, or any cultural object, is a socially produced experience in which one learns, with and against others, how to be a unique individual. Through this process, individuals develop a passionate commitment to the object of their love and to a way of being in the world.

Once the meaning is fixed, the object-symbol becomes a moral repository of the past lived experience, working as a Proustian madeleine, that focuses and overflows the individuals with emotional force as if they were sharing those emotions in public again and focusing in tune with others. Their aim, as Adorno ([1963] 1992:20) put it, is rekindling “the childhood experience of Madama Butterfly on the gramophone.” One of Benzecry’s (2011) types of engagement, what he labels the Nostalgic, follows precisely this template: linking what happened on stage to particular performances from the past, isolating the potentially disrupting components of the current production; and providing a model of reference for appropriate behaviors and local knowledge to aspire to, anchored and modeled after audiences from the past, for which nostalgic opera fans are both bridges and translators.

Even for the practiced listener, the high experience does not happen automatically every time. Every time a performance is attended, there is a chance for the link of the meaning with the experience to be at risk. A bad musical performance, a soprano who does not channel the role or does not fulfill the previous expectations the listener had of her in comparison to singers from the past, a contemporary staging that deviates toward intellectualization or “disfigures” the remembrance of the staged work, the neighboring audience that strongly disagrees and outnumbers the fanatics: all these can unhinge a production from the meaning attached to it. After the initial experience, the work of re-enchanting the event is a constant levee against the forces of ritualization or disenchantment. That is why opera fanatics are so forceful in their constant work of isolating themselves from competing orientations in the opera house and in isolating the “meaningful” parts of what has been lived and observed, constantly conversing about it during intermissions so as to control the definition of the situation.

Opera fanatics describe their moments of listening experience as the high points of their life, the greatest of all pleasures. To a considerable degree, it is under their control. They need access to opera performances, but the greater part of their pleasurable experience is what they contribute themselves, shaping their bodies into the finely tuned instrument for listening, not passively but actively; incorporating heard sounds into internal rhythms built up not only from memory but from practice.

The most autonomous cultural experience is of this kind: an internal IR generating a high degree of self-entrainment by focus on a cultural object. The obsessive enthusiasm of the opera fanatic, and similarly intense experiencers of cultural objects, is the emotional energy of these internal IRs.

Collective Effervescence

Collective effervescence is a central feature of Durkheimian ritual, where a group is assembled, builds up a focus of attention, transforms a shared emotion into the additional emotion of group solidarity, and thereby pumps up a shared symbol with membership significance. According to Durkheim, the group is worshiping itself, reveling in its solidarity. These ingredients are all found in the opera house audience, and their collective effervescence is their collective applause.

But opera fanatics perceive themselves as focused on something different from the audience in general, and hence they do not feel solidarity with them or enter into rituals of applause in the same way.

Opera fanatics have a distinct realm of group ritual and generate their own collective attunement. In Benzecry’s (2011) study, the opera fanatics of Buenos Aires gather in long queues to buy tickets; they rush excitedly up the price-segregated entrance stairs to get good positions in the upper balconies of the theater; they strike up conversations from long familiarity with each other’s faces, discussing past performances and anticipations of this one. They share a common emotion about the opera they are focusing attention upon, and they join in applause—or sometimes booing—that further generates and regenerates group solidarity.

But for opera fanatics, the highest experience is not in the group interaction. They distance themselves from collective ritual as a group of fans. The top floors of the opera house, where the fanatics who attend multiple performances sit in the cheap seats or stand wedged against walls and against each other, are only part of a larger audience below them in the medium-price stalls, the grand tier, the showy boxes, and the expensive seats on the orchestra floor. The entire house joins together to applaud a performance, in the self-sustaining rhythm of clapping, punctuated by a chorus of Bravas! and Bravos! and rises en mass for standing ovations. But opera fanatics do not feel a kinship with these lesser devotees. They are not only scornful but viscerally offended by unsophisticated audiences who applaud at the wrong time (including applauding anything other than the peak arias—such as applauding an orchestral passage or a chorus). They dislike audiences that come in too quickly with applause after a breathtaking aria, intruding on the moment of bodily transition from the inner echoing of the vocal rhythm into the profane, or merely semi-sacred, realm of the audience’s ritual of appreciation.

Opera fans reject rituals of membership with persons they perceive as having reasons for opera attendance outside of transcendent enjoyment of the music. They scorn some audience members for being interested in opera too casually, as part of a larger menu of cultural products (what Bryson [1996] refers to as “omnivores”). They chastise others for being there because of formal obligations and social ties or non-operatic exchanges. Unlike “casual” and “formal” audience members, opera fanatics suspend who they are outside of the opera house, their hierarchies and roles. Opera fanatics bound themselves while setting a boundary against these others as they focus exclusively on what happens on stage and by being viscerally overflown by it.

The self-conscious elite of opera enthusiasts does not orient itself to the collective ritual of appreciation, because it very pointedly does not identify with the opera house audience in general. It is true that the rhythmic noise of collective applause filling the house adds something to the Durkheimian experience of constituting the opera as a cultural sacred object. But comparison between the inner ritual of bodily self-absorption and the external ritual of crowd effervescence shows how different levels of cultural commitment can be created. Opera enthusiasts are anti-Durkheimian in the sense that for them, the music is not a symbol or vehicle for group solidarity. God is not society, although society (or some refined part of it) is the beginning of the path to God. It is the pure experience of the inner ritual that counts.

Goffmanian Public Self-presentation

Goffman (1959) shows that everyday life resembles a theatrical performance in being divided between front stage and back stage. Back stage is the realm of privacy, where one cleans and grooms oneself, selects and dons clothing, makeup, jewelry; perhaps also one rehearses proper manners, topics of conversation, memorizes names and speeches. Grazian (2008) shows that even persons who are very informal in their styles, such as contemporary young men, have a period of planning and strategizing how to present themselves for a visit to night spots. Back stage is where preparation is done for a front stage, a social occasion where formality or mutual surveillance is exercised to uphold the collective definition of the event. The strictness of front-stage demands lies on a continuum and is correlated with the amount of preparatory work done on the back stage. At a high level of front-stage demands are official and religious ceremonies, also some traditional forms of cultural consumption, such as attending theatrical and musical performances.

Among the strongest demands for a distinctive front-stage appearance have been traditionally those of attending the opera. However, the opera fanatic is scornful of this aspect of the event. The historical tradition of opera going has been that of the elite community gathering. The music was the occasion for the gathering but not the chief concern of the audience. Historically, the opera began in early modern Europe, in aristocratic courts where courtiers vied for position through patronage (W. Weber 1975). Subsequently, opera spread to wealthy cities, where it became the chief occasion, outside of religious ceremonies, where prominent citizens met outside their own homes—that is to say, as a public arena. ³ The sociological novels of Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola, describing France between 1820 and 1890, repeatedly depict social climbers and connection seekers rising and falling by whose box they sit in at the opera or theater and whom they meet and discuss in the corridors. The favored seats are in the tiers of private boxes or stalls arranged in a horseshoe, where opera goers can see each other, observe how they are dressed and coiffed, and who is sitting with whom. The traditional opera house was a place to publically display one’s networks as well as what splendor of personal appearance one could muster. Slowly the distribution of seats in the opera house transitioned from this model to the “Italian” one, in which the center of the attention is the stage. By the late 1870s, the structure of musical concerts in Europe (mainly Vienna, London, and Paris) looked similar to what they look today (W. Weber 2004). The transition in architectural design was parallel to the relationship between stratification and audience at large. In most European countries, opera followed a trajectory, from the genre being “owned” by a few patrons but consumed in the same way by everybody, to a distinction game that involved the cultivation of a specific taste (the development of “high culture”) that corresponded one-on-one to positions on the social structure.

In the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the density of connection within opera house networks has decreased; with larger populations, more competing places of entertainment, more attendance by tourists, the percentage of opera attendees who recognize each other has almost certainly declined. Manners have shifted; more deference is given to the performers, among whom some are treated as celebrities, a pattern that also appeared in the theater and orchestral concerts from the early nineteenth century onward (DeNora 1995). Nevertheless, some of the tradition of social display remains; some of the audience are only mildly interested in the music, taking the event as an occasion to dress up, take part in a prestigious scene, and to be recognized, if not as individuals within a network of status-laden gossip, at least as anonymous members of the social category of the respectable and sophisticated.

Opera fanatics are acutely aware of this public self-presentation in the opera house, perhaps even exaggerate it when attributing motives to those who sit in the expensive seats and boxes. The opera fanatics are in the top tiers, where they cannot be seen by others and are of no interest to those below. They are cramped in a crowd, standing or sitting sometimes on the floor in the rearmost spaces of the theater. They do not dress up for performances and scorn those who do. They have a self-identification and recognize it among others who attend so many performances in the cheap seats, but their identity is in opposition to those in the expensive seats below. They are here to be seen; we are here for the music. Although there is an element of self-presentation among the opera fanatics, it occupies little of their attention; and when the music starts, their focus upon the inward, solitary experience of listening with their whole bodies shuts out the surrounding opera fanatics as well. For the opera fanatics, public self-presentation is exactly what they are against.

Discourse of Connoisseurship or Extraneous Topics

What do people talk about when they are at the opera and during surrounding moments? Opera fanatics talk about past performances; they comment on quality of singing particular passages and many other details, such as how the singer did at the dress rehearsal versus the first night, how another singer sang this role. Their talk displays the amount of knowledge they have and the high standards they hold; this is what makes them connoisseurs of a high degree.

At the other end of the continuum, nonconnoisseurs say little or nothing about the music and the singers. They have a limited vocabulary for this purpose, confined to a few standard expressions of praise or enthusiasm or even honest indifference or dislike. They also spend much less of their talk on the music and talk instead about extraneous topics: who is attending the theater, gossip about their doings, or topics even more remote from the scene.

Opera fanatics, since they spend much time waiting in queues, and because they arrive early to seek good places in the house, tend to converse with each other a lot. Benzecry (2011) documents several themes: In addition to talking about the music, they also give narrations that show their commitment, heroic tales of how long they stood in line for notable performances, the sacrifices they have made to attend. Novices have an interest in knowing more about the listening experience, while older members have an audience to tell their war stories to. These topics are extraneous to pure immersion in the music itself, but they show off the moral career of the opera enthusiast, exhibiting the industrious self-discipline and sacrifice that it takes to acquire the refined abilities of the trained listener. Such stories are lacking among nonfanatical opera goers. The latter may talk in a similar fashion about their travels (inferring here from typical topics of conversation among upper-middle-class persons at dinner parties, where they frequently talk about vacation trips they have taken); entertaining stories that such persons tell consist of adventures they have had in airports, trains, and foreign places generally, especially slip-ups and times of discomfort, retrospectively viewed as humorous. This discourse serves an analogous purpose of showing one’s dedication to a taste (in this case, the modern middle-class ideal of traveling to exotic places). But note several differences from opera fanatics’ discourse: Fanatics are single-minded in their concern for opera; their discomforts are displayed not as adventures with entertaining value in themselves but as a display of commitment.

Opera fanatics are not cultural omnivores, in the sense of higher-class persons who like a wide range of music and other entertainments (Bryson 1996; López-Sintas and Katz-Gerro 2005; Peterson 2005; Peterson and Kern 1996; Van Eijck 2001) and who derive prestige from their open-minded, nondiscriminatory enjoyment of cultural diversity. Opera fanatics look down upon ordinary opera goers, who have more money and wider cultural consumption, precisely because they spread their attention so widely. Opera fanatics experience their own commitment to highly refined opera listening as so all-consuming that they judge others who do not behave similarly as lacking in the true inner experience of opera. Not only do they focus just on opera but they do so in a distinctive fashion, isolating minute details, guaranteeing that their experience is bounded from other groups that could give competing interpretations.

Another important difference is when opera fanatics talk about opera: when they are in the theater awaiting the performance, of course; this is also when ordinary opera goers talk about the music, and in the intervals, since it is an obvious subject of conversation, although mixed with other topics. But fanatics confine their talk about the music quite rigidly to particular sequences. They do not talk about the performance after it ends; although they are surrounded by other connoisseurs who have many knowledgeable things to say, they go home alone and in silence because they are prolonging the inner resonance of the music as long as possible. Opera fanatics are not a fan club; they do not meet outside the theater to discuss and socialize. They prefer to attend an opera alone, rather than bringing a friend or family members. Here, again, they are concerned to maximize the conditions for an intense listening experience; to have to talk to others who lack the same degree of fanaticism would be to interrupt their concentration and bring the experience down. Thus even outside the setting of the opera house, the fanatic tends to live an inward, even secret, life.

Opera fanatics do not brag or show off to people who are not opera fans in the course of everyday life about the performances they have attended. Opera going is not, in their experience, a cultural capital that brings them high status. Contrary to sociological stereotype, for them, opera going is neither social climbing nor high-status display. To admit to others the degree of their immersion—or obsession—with opera is felt as being looked down upon as odd or inferior. The opera fanatic is too finely attuned to an intensely pleasurable experience that others do not reach; it cuts off ordinary social contact rather than facilitates it. In this respect, the opera fanatic is analogous to the drug addict (cf. Bourgois and Schonberg 2009). Organizing their life around opera means that they feel unable to share this experience with most people. While attending opera once a month (or even once a week) might be taken for a sign of refinement, confessing to going four or five nights a week rubs the patina off of those doing it. Many opera fanatics choose to hide this part of their lives from others, who, far from admiring their cultural eliteness, disparage their fanaticism. Instead, opera fanatics develop long-term, yet thin, bonds with other people who are able to appreciate their degree of devotion. This is the only reference group that really understands them; they share the same object of affection, and because of it, fans come back time after time to find someone to share the experience with.

In their case, opera is a field of microdifference made of minutia and multidetailed activities and venues. Whereas to the outsider the phrase “I go to the opera” is heard as “I do one particular thing,” for the insider, the phrase stands in for many things: attending the premiere of a never-seen-before title at the main opera house; attending the second performance of the same title to compare both the performances and the reactions it elicited on himself or herself once the novelty power of the piece has waned; attending a recital of tenor arias with a young singer and a pianist; attending a second title, this time in a secondary opera house, to check a local soloist who does not get to perform in stellar roles at the main stage; attending a third performance of the title before mentioned, to see the second cast of soloists; going to the movie theater that shows the Met or the Covent Garden in high definition; attending a second performance of the opera at the secondary stage as to focus this time on the passages the soloist has excelled at, this time more interested in enjoying than analyzing it, and so on.

The impossibility of explaining this—of being able to provide the necessary background knowledge to enjoy this activity—to outsiders, who see only repetition and boredom where the insiders see variety, novelty, and excitement, results in further isolation from the outside as well as in the reinforcement of selfhood. That is why listening to opera is not a casual experience, easily integrated with the other objects of attention in daily life or one among a menu of enjoyable cultural experiences. One interviewee revealed that he did not like to hear recorded opera music while making love; it ruined the sexual act because the music distracted him too much.

Upper-class Ritual Formality

The Confucian gentleman epitomizes the upper-class stance everywhere, Weber generalizes: Respect for the proper forms and traditions maintains social order. In microinteractional terms, the upper classes rule by making themselves the center of attention in formal rituals. Primacy is given to the Goffmanian front stage, keeping up a dignified front and subordinating private feelings. Thus upper-class participation in ceremonial religion is deliberately superficial, avoiding fanaticism and emotional involvement. ⁶ It goes along with dislike of working-class and peasant emotionality, whether of the orgiastic or the salvation-repentance varieties.

The same attitudes operate toward music. The early Confucians (sixth century BC) polemicized against upstart lords who arrogated to themselves more elaborate musical entourages than they were entitled to by tradition; types of musical performances were rigidly ranked as the accompaniment of social hierarchy. Sixteen centuries later, in the Sung Dynasty (eleventh century AD), Confucian mandarins were still extolling proper musical ceremonial: “To hope for perfect government without restoring ancient and changing modern music is to be far off the mark” (W.-T. Chan 1963:473). The Western equivalent similarly emphasizes external formal. Music is expected on particular social occasions because it is traditional. One attends because it is proper to do so. Personal tastes are irrelevant; for thoroughly front-stage persons—the characteristic upper-class way of life—backstage feelings are of little importance.

Lower-class Emotionalism

Weber’s comments on peasant and working-class religious emotionality can be extended to lower-class tastes in music. Both the orgiastic harvest-celebration type of religious ritual and the hellfire-and-repentance type are versions of Durkheimian collective effervescence. The mandarin style is formality and dignity, into rhythms of which the gentleman displays himself harmoniously; the lower-class style is to stir up emotion and bodily movement to a high pitch, losing oneself in the frenzied crowd. The upper-class attitude toward emotional religions has been to regard them as both undignified and dangerous to social order; similarly with music. Popular music (in the sense of music of the ordinary people) has been condemned in upper-class-dominated regimes precisely on mandarin grounds. In an era of mass democracy and mass-market cultural consumption, the emphasis has been on forms of musical performance that generate the strongest collective effervescence, most easily created by loud noise, strong and simply marked rhythms, and repetitive musical forms. The conflict of mandarin-versus-peasant styles remains today but with most of the public attention focused on the latter.

Middle-class Salvation Religion

The religions of ethical prophecy shifted away from mere ceremonial participation toward an inner, moral stance; not formal behavior but the condition of one’s heart was to be the pathway to salvation. In the case of music, as in religion, there were still assemblies to be attended, but the emphasis shifted from being seen there observing the proper forms to one’s sincere attention to the music itself. James Johnson (1995) describes the transition from the behavior of audience during the mid-eighteenth century, in which members of the audience, arranged in their boxes at the royal opera house by very strict rules of status, spent the performance talking and strolling from box to box, occasionally listening but paying far more attention to one another than to the opera; in contrast was the 1840s, in which the concert hall is full of silent rows of intent listeners, who will glare and shush at anyone who whispers or makes noise.

Music, like high culture generally, became regarded as “good for you”; it is pursued with sobriety and discretion. This is not necessarily the same thing as enjoying music; it is duty, even hard work. ⁷ It is not simply an inner taste but an attitude about what one ought to concentrate on. It is closely analogous to the devout layperson in an ethical salvation religion; achieving the right attitude toward music is like salvation, a goal to be aimed at, but for the most part a distant goal that one must discipline oneself toward.

Over time, the middle-class ethic turned into the pattern classified as snobbism, an instrumental means for achieving distinction from other groups. Here, differentiation from others is achieved thanks to the access to ritualized contents and the etiquette that goes together with them, without the particular ethic of salvation that was implied in the original mode of consumption. The movement from a sublimated ethic of salvation to conspicuous consumption can be understood within the status dialectic of imitation–usurpation–differentiation, analyzed in the work of Simmel (1957).

Still more recently, in the late twentieth century, patterns among upper- and upper-middle-class individuals have mutated from snobbish to omnivorous. Unlike the previous relationship, which implied strong boundaries to access, omnivorous consumption works by appropriating cultural content from lower-class groups (see Ross [1989] for a reference besides those already mentioned). This appropriation does not imply a strong commitment to a cultural genre in particular but, rather, the ability to poach from many different levels in the cultural hierarchy (Bryson 1996; Peterson and Kern 1996). Khan (2011) shows the relationship is not based in a particular interest in the content but rather operates as pure form, playing with it in an ironic, distanced way; this reestablishes the use of culture as means of social differentiation on a more reflexive level. For some audiences today, consuming music may be the secular equivalent of salvation religion, but where there is a strong social pressure or prestige for being omnivorous in one’s tastes, this leaves an opening for yet another of Weber’s orientations to both religion and music: virtuoso religiosity.

Virtuoso Religiosity

Virtuoso religiosity is the commitment of the full-time religious specialist, the monk, or the layperson who gives up all else to concentrate on religious experience. Weber himself uses a musical metaphor to indicate the process of individual self-cultivation, in contrast to mere class-based standards of taste. Emphasis can be either on the ascetic aspect—commitment and eliteness shown by how much one gives up in material and bodily comfort—or on the experiential aspect, mysticism.

Some full-time musicians and music professionals approximate the ascetic monk, insofar as they reap meager rewards from their dedication to music. This is especially the case with those committed to music that is esoteric or avant-garde, cutting them off from both upper-class patrons and popular audiences.

Through a process of obsessive self-cultivation, the musical enthusiast becomes a high-seeking mystic, cut off from others, organizing their personal quest as an exemplary prophecy. They dissect the opera performance as a cultural product that ordinary audiences might go to hear, focusing less on the whole work and more on the particular musical passages that allow them to become vessels and to lose themselves in the experience. This path sometimes leads to an orgiastic contemplative asceticism, rejecting all worldly social relationships one might establish through music and disciplining oneself to the work of preparedness to enter into a dimension out of this world.

Like ethical religion generally, musical intellectualism tends to become critical, even an enemy, of conventional orientations toward music. The upper-class mandarin style is what musical virtuoso consumers identify themselves against; music is an art for its own sake, not to be degraded to mere expression of social class eliteness. Musical virtuoso consumers also identify against popular music, even though its followers sincerely like it, because it is too easy. Some opera fanatics look down also on too-popular operas because their own experiences are of a different order, the result of hard work and dedication to the skills of listening.