Adorno on Music

Robert W. Witkin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136215445
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Adorno is one of the leading cultural thinkers of the twentieth century. This is the first detailed account of Adorno's texts on music from a sociological perspective. In clear, non-technical language, Robert Witkin guides the reader through the complexities of Adorno's argument about the link between music and morality and between musical works and social structure. It was largely through these works Adorno established the right of the arts to be acknowledged as a moral and critical force in the development of a modern society. By recovering them for non-musicologists, Witkin adds immeasurably to our appreciation of this giant of twentieth-century thought.

1

MUSICA MORALIA

There is a Zen Buddhist description of Zen truth as being ‘like a ball of fire stuck in your throat: you can’t get it up but neither can you get it down’. This uncomfortable image can easily be fitted to the idea of truth which informs the work of Theodor Adorno. It is impossible to read Adorno without hearing, in the authorial voice, all those signs of high bourgeois cultural sensibility, of a bourgeois sense of truth, individuality, freedom, humanity, suffering. But in Adorno’s writings, the world which might make sense of that authorial sensibility, the world of the ‘heroic’ phase of an entrepreneurial capitalism, is fast disappearing and is being supplanted by a monolithic, rational-technical commodity capitalism. The poisonous gas of that ‘totalitarian’ world, its anaesthetic, is the dream-stuff pumped out by the culture industry, by the Hollywood dream machine, Tin Pan Alley, advertising jingles, ‘lollipop’ music concerts, jazz, radio and so forth.

Adorno was closer than his modern readers to Auschwitz and to all which that implied. For him, Tin Pan Alley, Stravinsky, Hollywood, jazz and the culture industry belonged — however bizarre it might seem to many modern readers — in a configuration which included Auschwitz. In his aesthetic sociology he set, in powerful opposition, all those products of mass popular culture on the one hand, and the works of avant-garde musicians in the ‘classical’ tradition on the other. Within the latter category, he set up a further opposition; on one side there was serious and responsible music — true music — which developed, to the highest degree possible, the historical tendencies inherent in the ‘musical material’ and which conveyed the truth of the human condition — the suffering of the subject — in late capitalist society; and on the other side, the enemies of musical truth, musicians who did not acknowledge the obligations imposed by the historical demands of the musical material, musicians who retreated behind some notion of a world of pure musical effects and who sought musical models that were remote from the demands of the present, embracing ‘primitivism’ and ‘neo-classicism’. Adorno saw these latter musicians as annihilating the subject and extinguishing genuine expression, ultimately as collaborating with the forces of oppression and alienation. Mahler, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern and the second Viennese school of composition provided him with his principal exemplars of music high in truth-value, while Stravinsky, Hindemith and the neo-classical composers were assigned to the camp of the enemies of true music.

More than half of Adorno’s published works were devoted to his studies in music. Arguably, these studies represent the most formidable contribution so far to the development of a sociological theory of modern music and, more widely, of ‘aesthetic modernity’. As Harold Blumenfeld put it:

The writings of Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno have stirred up a whirlwind which has cut a widening swathe across the musical thought of the entire middle half of this century. Adorno — always provocative, sometimes provoking — places the musical act under a scrutiny which is at once exhaustive and multidimensional. His critique remains unexampled in terms of the sheer multiplicity of vantage points from which it probes its subject. Rooted in Hegel, Marx and Freud, his thought is often complex and complicated in expression — factors which have tended to make it stick in the throats of friends and foes alike.

(H. Blumenfeld 1991:263)

Belonging, as he did, so completely to music, philosophy and sociology, Adorno possessed all the cultural capital necessary for the task of constructing a sociology of the musical art work. Moreover, his credentials could not easily be challenged by musicologists. How many of them could boast, as could Adorno, of a sophisticated musical training as a pupil of the best teachers — among them Alban Berg — of membership of the avant-garde Viennese circle surrounding Schoenberg, of being in touch — often having close personal contact — with some of the foremost philosophical and musical talents of his day and of being a practising composer and a skilful instrumentalist for whom the choice between philosophy and a career as a professional musician had been a real one? Adorno’s credentials for writing about music were clearly beyond question and his name, at least, is widely known among music specialists.

Of all the arts, music is perhaps the most profoundly sensuous in its capacity to stimulate emotions and feelings. But the power of music to excite or to gratify or to engage our sentiments is not, of itself, life-enhancing or a moral good. Adorno was surrounded by musical models in both the classical and the popular or light music traditions, which were regarded by their devotees as exciting and as appealing to the emotions; many of these models he despised and rejected. His rejection of music ranging from Stravinsky to Louis Armstrong was not based upon the fact of their popular appeal nor their power to stimulate emotion or to excite; it was, rather, based upon his belief that such music was ‘manipulative’, that it colluded in the weakening and undermining of the subjects it appealed to, that its claim to spontaneity or genuine expression was untrue. While he was unstinting in his admiration for many composers from Beethoven to Schoenberg, from Mahler to Boulez, the music against which he declaimed knew no more devastating or relentless a critic than Adorno. He despised any music — compositions or performances — that he saw as being in league with the inherently totalitarian tendencies of late bourgeois society, and he supported his arguments with analytical discussions of specific musical works.

Such a fierce stance presupposes that music has some serious function, that it is not simply diversion or entertainment, that it can even be judged and found wanting over the heads of its devotees or, in the case of a great composer like Bach, it can even be rescued from its devotees (T. Adorno 1982a). Inevitably Adorno ran the risk of being dismissed as an intellectual mandarin, a European dinosaur, legislating aesthetic choices for the rest of mankind. Such a judgement would not only be unjust to Adorno: it would miss the point altogether. In a world in which art and the aesthetic domain had been marginalised and their products trivialised, Adorno did more than any other philosopher to raise their profile and to establish beyond all doubt their right to be taken seriously, to be acknowledged as a moral and critical force in the development of a modern consciousness and a modern society. As Martin Jay pointed out (M. Jay 1973), Adorno viewed intelligence as a moral category. He deplored the tendency to separate feeling from the understanding and believed that philosophy must return to its original intention, ‘the teaching of the correct life’. I seriously doubt that Adorno’s will be the final judgement on Stravinsky’s music or on jazz, but I am personally in no doubt that his arguments concerning both enlarge our whole perspective on the relationship between music and society.

The notion that artists have a moral obligation to reflect the truth of the subject’s condition in society is a peculiarly modern one and has to be seen in the context of the historical evolution of art as an institution. In feudal times, what we recognise as art was not an autonomous social institution but was subsumed within other institutions — the princely courts or the Church. From the time of the Renaissance, art became progressively more independent as a social institution until by the nineteenth century it had virtually achieved autonomy status. The growing artistic freedom of the artist reflected the growing rationality of economic life, a rationality that squeezed out the elements of the non-rational — the sensuous, personal and aesthetic aspects of life. At the point at which art became more or less irrelevant to the service of the institutions and powers in modern society, the artist acquired freedom from the interference of the state; the artist could henceforth compose or paint in whatever ways s/he chose, provided of course that buyers could be found for the work.

The freedom of the modern artist is at the same time the mark of exile, of separation from any personal fulfilment in the forms of official or public social life. This describes the condition not only of the artist but of the sensuous life generally. Modern rational-technical society is one in which the individual subject is said to be free to make value choices, to live as s/he chooses, and so forth. At the same time, precisely because of the condition of exile, the choices that the subject makes have no real import in the rational-technical machinery of social life; they find no fulfilment or meaning in the modern institutional order. It was this disjunction between the individual subject and the society which confronted him or her as an external force, together with the weakness of the former and the overwhelming domination of the latter, which Adorno saw as the crisis of modernity. The reproduction of this disjunction, together with the crushing disparity in power, in the inner cells of works of art and of music was seen by Adorno as being the real measure of their truth-value.

Because art’s awakening to its autonomy was also an awakening to its exile, modern art necessarily stood in a critical relationship to modern society. Criticism, here, did not mean that art preached or propagandised or offered a message of any kind; rather, it meant that in depicting the objective truth of the power of the collective force of modern bureaucratic society and the weakness of the individual subjects who are its victims, an artist like Kafka struck from it an expression of the suffering of the victims, a sense of what had been done to them, of what was withheld from them, of loss and absence. In the presence of this absence, as disclosed in the sufferings of society’s victims, the artist provided a via negative from which to glimpse Utopia. What was true of Kafka was true, too, of the music of modern composers such as Mahler, Berg and Schoenberg: a music of seismic shocks and of dark forces, a music in which the de-individuating, atomising and fragmenting forces of modernity permeated all its textures.

Given the moral significance that Adorno perceives in music, together with his insider knowledge as a musician, one might imagine that musicologists would have embraced him as a worthy champion of modern music. That is far from being the case, however. The sociological sophistication Adorno brings to musical analysis and the difficulties of his language and philosophical ideas render his work opaque to many music specialists. Commenting on the disjunction of conventional musicology and the wider social concerns of Adorno, Edward Said writes:

And while I am very far from rejecting all, or even a significant portion, of what musicologists do by way of analysis or evaluation, I am struck by how much does not receive their critical attention, and by how little is actually done by fine scholars who, for example, in studying a composers notebooks or the structure of classical form, fail to connect those things to ideology, or social space, or power, or to the formulation of an individual (and by no means sovereign) ego. Theodor Adorno may have been the last thinker about Western classical music to attempt many of these bigger things. I have little idea what his influence or status is in musicology today but I suspect that his intransigent theorising, complicated philosophical language, and vast speculative pessimism do not endear him to busy professionals.

(E. Said 1992: 13)

Among musicologists, Rose Rosengaard Subotnik is one who stands out as a pioneer in the field of Adorno music scholarship, having produced a profound and philosophically informed appreciation of Adorno’s contribution to musicology (R. Subotnik 1990, 1996). Her work has contributed greatly to the recognition of Adorno’s importance to musical criticism with her lucid and sympathetic reading of Adorno’s ideas concerning the late music of Beethoven. Her expositions on other aspects of Adorno’s work have contributed to the growing frequency and respect with which Adorno’s works are now translated and discussed in musicology journals.

However, it is important to acknowledge the boundaries of this interest. It may seem curious to the lay sociologist that in those modern books on musical analysis which deal with a topic that is central to Adorno’s concerns — the modernist aesthetic revolution involving, in the case of music, the transition from tonal to atonal and twelve-tone serial music — and which discuss in depth the work of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, very little use is made of Adorno’s writings on these subjects beyond the occasional passing reference and the more or less obligatory footnote or endnote. In part this is due to the fact that Adorno’s formal analyses of musical works are preoccupied with meaning in the context of a hearing of the works. Adorno’s analyses develop a sophisticated appreciation of what he hears as ‘significant’ in the music. Typically, he will discuss the effect of a single chord or even a single note in a Beethoven sonata on the hearing of an entire movement. Sometimes, his analyses can, to the layperson, seem extremely dense and technically demanding, as in his book on Mahler; however, they are still analyses centred more on a ‘composed hearing’. Such analyses may not be particularly illuminating to musicologists for whom an accurate, detailed and close reading of the score is closer to their ideal of formal analysis and whose analytical purposes are, in any case, usually quite different. Adorno brings to musicology a consciousness that has been formed in the discourses of philosophy and sociology, and his construction of musical projects and purposes still appears alien to many musicologists.

The book’s project

The focal concern of my book is to explore, from a sociological perspective, Adorno’s critical and philosophical texts on modern music. I have taken those which appear to me to be the most important among the many texts he produced on music and have sought to develop a reading of the texts themselves, drawing them closer to the concerns of sociologists and even (Chapter 5) to see the parallels at a structural level, between the development of modern music and the development of modern sociology. What my book does not attempt to do is to offer an exposition of Adorno’s analyses of specific musical works. Wherever such works are referred to in the text it is solely to illustrate or support Adorno’s line of reasoning concerning the relationship between music and society. I have tried to explore, for a sociological readership, some implications of Adorno’s ideas about music in relation to society and, for a musicological readership, the implications of his ideas about society in relation to music. However, while I have made some effort to remain true to Adorno’s most fundamental ideas about music, I have made no attempt to ground them in a comprehensive account of his vast speculative interests and his critical immersion in German idealist philosophy, or even to locate his work in the context of the history of the debates and discussions that constituted the intellectual life of the Frankfurt Institute. There is not one Adorno for a reader to discover, but many, and there are a number of works which treat Adorno’s work contextually in terms of both his Marxism and his role in the Frankfurt Institute. Although what I have offered here is essentially a reading of primary texts (in translation), there is a select but very fine secondary literature on Adorno that has undoubtedly helped to shape my perspective; it includes some of the most comprehensive, scholarly and yet readable texts on Adorno’s work. The most obvious to name here are a few of those I have particularly enjoyed: Martin Jay’s brilliant study The Dialectical Imagination (M. Jay 1973) which is still the finest and most readable account of the Frankfurt school and Critical Theory; Susan Buck-Morss’s The Origin of Negative Dialectics (S. Buck-Morss 1977), a work of brilliant scholarship and analytical depth which provides a real insight into Adorno’s philosophical origins and ideas, his relationship to Walter Benjamin, Schoenberg and the many formative influences that shaped his consciousness and provoked his critical spirit; Gillian Rose’s The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor Adorno (G. Rose 1978), a wide-ranging and intelligent discussion which provides some useful sociological discussions of Adorno’s ideas, particularly the concept of reification, as well as exploring both Adorno’s language and his mode of expression; J.M. Bernstein’s The Fate of Art (J.M. Bernstein 1993) contains an insightful analysis of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory in a book about aesthetic alienation in modern European philosophy. Two very different texts which readers will find particularly helpful regarding the ideas on music are Rose Subotnik’s philosophically informed studies in two volumes, Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music and Deconstructive Variations: Music and Reason in Western Society (R. Subotnik 1990, 1996) and Max Paddison’s Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music (M. Paddison 1993) — wide in its coverage of the range of Adorno’s music studies.

Bringing the relationship between society and music out of the texts themselves is not easy. Adorno yields little to a reader unwilling to engage creatively and dialectically with his thinking. His works are opaque to passive reception. They demand that one contribute some theorising of one’s own to the encounter if one is to gain anything of substance from them. It was not until I had completed work on another book, Art and Social Structure (Witkin 1995), that I felt sufficiently prepared to engage with Adorno in this dialectic. My doubts at the time sprang from my lack of technical expertise in music and musical theory. I have always enjoyed listening to music and have an average listener’s appreciation of the classical music repertoire, as well as some of the more popular forms of jazz and rock music, but no real technical knowledge. I had to teach myself as best I could. However, there were two things that I quickly discovered. The first was that Adorno himself could be a helpful teacher if one was prepared to be an attentive pupil. Guided by him, I listened to modern music in a way that I had never done before. My musical tastes are not the same and I do not accept all of Adorno’s judgements — I confess to enjoying much music that he hated and to engaging in listening practices of which he would have disapproved. Nevertheless, there is no doubting the fact that my appreciation of music has been irrevocably changed as a result of reading Adorno. While typing the chapters of this book I frequently listened to the music of the composers I was writing about — a practice that he might well have deplored — although, with the exception of the late Beethoven quartets, I preferred not to match the particular composer listened to with the text being written about. Often I listened to music not discussed, such as Bach’s Mass in B minor, simply because I enjoyed listening to it while working. And in the latter stages, when I was revising chapters, I listened to Adorno’s own music, in a recording by the Leipzig String Quartet of some early pieces he composed between the ages of 17 and 21. I enjoyed particularly his Two Pieces for String Quartet Opus 2. Alban Berg wrote to Schoenberg of this piece following its first performance, recommending the talents of the young Adorno:

The performance of Wiesengrund’s incredibly difficult quartet was a coup de main for the Kolisch Quartet. … I find Wiesengrund’s work very good and I believe it would also meet with your approval should you ever hear it. In any event in its seriousness, its brevity and above all in the absolute purity of its entire style it is worthy of being grouped with the Schoenberg school (and nowhere else).

(J. Brand et al. 1987: 355)

The second discovery I made was that if I restricted my concerns to the sociological focus that was d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• International Library of Sociology
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Musica moralia
• 2 Society in sonata-form
• 3 Beethoven late and soon
• 4 Wagner
• 5 Breaking the code
• 6 Mahler and Berg
• 7 Schoenberg
• 8 Stravinsky
• 9 The culture industry and all that jazz
• 10 Taking a critical line for a walk
• References
• Index