This article focuses on the phenomenon of listening to music via radio transmission. In an examination of linguistic findings and media archaeological observations, the specific performance characteristics of mediatized music are worked out using the example of a radio broadcast of a Beethoven symphony. The music-aesthetic and sociological essay “The Radio Symphony: An Experiment in Theory” (1941), written by Theodor W. Adorno during his stay in New York, is subjected to a re-reading. Although Adorno showed the full scope of his cultural conservatism in this essay, his thoughts nevertheless exemplify a function of technically mediated music reception that seems to be constitutive for the concept of musical performance as a whole.