From the perspective of a totally corrupt theorist, the response may not entirely be a positive thing. Richard Taruskin wrote about it in the opening essay of T

From the perspective of a totally corrupt theorist, the response may not entirely be a positive thing. Richard Taruskin wrote about it in the opening essay of The Dangers of Music and other Anti-Utopian Essays[1]. > So much one may elicit from a pithed frog, and—if you remember your high school biology class—under conditions that are not dissimilar. Philip Glass, indeed, speaks frankly of eliciting a “biological” response from his audience. Here are his own words on the opera whose effects Wilson described: > I decided that I would try to write a piece that left the audience standing, and I’ve almost never played that music without seeing everyone leave his seat; it’s the strangest thing, almost biological. In fact, sometimes I’ve done concerts where I’ve played the Spaceship [i.e., the Einstein finale], and then as an encore played the last part of the Spaceship, and the same thing happens again. > But no, there is nothing strange about this: it’s basic behavior-modification therapy, and so far from spontaneous or liberating, it is calculated authoritarian manipulation. I find it sinister. My first contact with P&P came in June 1983 (yes, I’d been avoiding it) at a little festival sponsored by the New York Philharmonic and organized by the orchestra’s then composer-in-residence, Jacob Druckman, around the theme “Since 1968—A New Romanticism?” Druckman’s keynote essay in the program spoke optimistically of the “reemergence of . . . Dionysian qualities: sensuality, mystery, nostalgia, ecstasy, transcendency.” What I heard, in John Adams’s Grand Pianola Music, was an attempt to reduce me to an autonomic nervous system. My body responded to the programmed thrills and chills even as my mind protested. I, too, felt gooseflesh—and, I’ll admit, gooseflesh at a new-music concert was indeed a novelty. But it was a gooseflesh brought about not by way of evocation or epiphany but by anesthetizing the conscious mind and then administering a series of galvanic shocks. For me the experience was frightening. What had won so many over left me feeling diminished and degraded. And I guess I’m sounding like old man Adorno in spite of myself. [1] https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520268050/the-danger-of-music-and-other-anti-utopian-essays https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520268050/the-danger-of-mus...