Nettl arrived at this dual-development view of dance music through his observation that such pieces began, as the century progressed, to use stylistic and formal devices that were farther from the province of simple utility and more aligned with some anticipation of a listening audience paying full attention.
In addition to these developments in the individual movements, they were organized into ever more extended and stylized suites, which greatly resembled other instrumental forms of the day.
Composers, regardless of their political views, were largely in favor of the Gebrauchsmusik concept at its outset because a recognized need and desire for occasion-tailored works would lead to a constant call for them.
All combatants in the political arena saw in community music-making a potential glue with which to unite the German people behind their respective agendas; rather than expend the often wasted effort of regaling them with rhetoric, left and right alike could simply awe the public with spectacle and envelop them in the ecstasy of art.
The right wing took Gebrauchsmusik as a tool when the former began its ascendancy, which is probably the main reason for the latter's increased discredit and abandonment as the decade progressed, and the most important German artists and thinkers departed for more hospitable locales.
Such a concept was anathematic to the art-for-art's-sake ideal which followed alongside that of community music in Germany since the days of Beethoven, who had ushered in the era of the well-regarded and financially successful free-lance composer.
[3] Earlier,[4][5] the critic Theodor W. Adorno had called the work of Hindemith and other Gebrauchsmusiker symptomatic of "false [social] consciousness", and condemned it as being not truly useful at all, due to what he considered its lack of emotional content.