Stylistic distinction in music, and its political role, is a central theme in the material of all four texts we read for Wednesday. Bodek says that “Social Democratic cultural theorists…took pains to differentiate between what they believed was class-conscious proletarian activity and that which merely appealed to the working class.” (Bodek, 40) He locates the radicality of the DASB chorusus in their creation of “a climate where high and low, old and new, traditional and experimental could mix,” (Bodek, 68) presumably in favour of the proletariat. As an organization aiming toward, broadly, the solidarity of the working class through the arts, they thus create a milieu of style which can be seen as appropriating bourgeois-marked art forms for the cultural life of the working class. Meanwhile, in the texts dealing with Weill’s work, the practical considerations to the business of music is closely tied to attention to his audience’s limits of listenability (in terms of duration, style and setting of his work), creating a situation wherein Weill’s playful experimentation initiates a deconstruction (or at least, an interrogation) of how to create modern, financially viable work for an increasingly working-class audience. I’m interested in the tension produced by differentiating between high and low brow music, and its relationship with aesthetics, proletariat vs. ignorant masses narratives we’ve encountered (especially with regard to Schoenberg), and the crisis of listenability (and implicit impact on the business end of the theatre). If we consider that academic aesthetic thought, and its emphasis on the practice of classical music as an aesthetic, moralizing practice, are at this point in Germany marked as bourgeois and/or upper class, then how can one consider the full political and intellectual implications the DASB’s stylistic milieu in its programming? How do Schoenberg and Adorno’s aesthetic ideologies conflict with the goals and practices of the DASB?