Who's been reading their Adorno?
April 11 2010
Did Adorno ruin 50 years of music?
The Pianobabbler holds a Ph.D. He held an Associate Professorship. He does not launch lightly into a subject bedangled with academic tripwires. A subject like Adorno.
Theodore Adorno. 1903-1969. German-born philosopher. Prolific in his writings. Subject of much study, and even more influence.
Beyond these meager data I will not venture. The reader can find plenty on Adorno online and off.
Besides, I write here more about Adorno as a symbol than about his work specifically. A symbol of social principles that he helped create, nourish and shape in the last half of the 1900's. If I oversimplify his work, or mischaracterize something he said, save your pushback. As I said, the Pianobabbler does not launch lightly into subjects, and the subject launched into here is not really Adorno, but music and its pleasures.
Music. Pleasure. In the Adorno I superficially came to know and not love, pleasure was a four-letter word. A sign of decay or desensitization in a post-Auschwitz world. The value of art, of music, lay in its social function, not in individual euphorium.
The music business had made music business. The art had vanished. Pleasure in music betokened this decay. In a capitalist dystopia, where tyrannies rumbled, stumbled and tumbled over one another, how could it be otherwise?
I remember growing up hearing the music of classical composers like Samuel Barber and Rachmaninoff. Loved it. Emotional and intelligent, I believed, and still believe.
Well, oy oy oy and a bottle of glum. In the then prevailing Adorno-lytic ecosystem, I could have committed no greater sin. Barber, bah. Rachmaninoff, rot. The products of the bourgeois sensibilities. Capitalist decadence of the kind that delivered civilizations to Nazism and (in some interpretations) Marxist tyranny.
No, for the real music, one had to look to the likes of Schoenberg and to Stockhausen. In case you don't know their music... I admire some of it, and enjoy, really enjoy, very little of it. Think of it as the musical equivalent of raw broccoli.
In this stern atmosphere, although maybe not because of it, an oppositional divide emerged between Adorno-friendly music and the rest. The great vs the good. Art vs entertainment. The important vs the impressive. What you could not dislike vs what you know you did like.
Nothing better expressed the tone of the time than Milton Babbit's notorious article title: Who Cares If You Listen?
Whether or not Adorno bears direct blame, I hold him responsible for a lost generation of music. The horrors of Word War II, exiled Western music and its listeners to a dry desert of aesthetic desiccation. Along the way, we may have lost composers who would have otherwise produced tonal masterpieces. We may have been subjected to so much good-for-you ear scrubbing that some turned away from music. Maybe pop music lost some of the enrichment it would have otherwise had with input from great composers who, because of Adorno, could not risk being seen near anything with a following.
The composer Michel Legrand was tagged as a tragic case for having abandoned serious clasicall for film and pop, at which he excelled. What other Michel Legrands were there who could not suffer the arrows and slings? Which musical souls did not survive the onslaught of opprobrium ushered in by oppression's overseers of originality?
I feel safe in saying that Adorno's time has passed. We live in a time when entertainment may wed art. Enjoyment may couple with high-mindedness. Beauty may wed brains. Pixar, Take Six, Steve Reich can thrive. The segregation had ended.
Did Adorno ruin 50 years of music? The Pianobabbler doesn't Ador-know.
He asks only that we be grateful to live in these music-rich times. Enjoy.
The Pianobabbler has babbled.
>The Pianobabbler's blog posts appear weekly. Please remember to leave your comments and thoughts below. Subscribe to the RSS feed. Please subscribe to RonDavisNews by clicking on the link to the right. And follow us on Twitter.
- Click here for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Theodore Adorno
blog comments powered by Disqus
A brilliant adventure. On his latest recording, My Mother's Father's Song, Ron Davis embraces both his family's rich cultural heritage, and boldly re-engages with the jazz standard.
- click here for details
Please subscribe to Ron's monthly email with updates, announcements and photos. You'll get a free MP3 or PDF of Ron's music when you sign up.
- click here to join
