Reading Adorno: In Search of Wagner (2) ‘Gesture’

 

In this piece I shall address Theodor Adorno’s essay on ‘Gestures’. In this essay, Adorno wears more of a musician’s hat than his many other hats, like say, the Freudian psychoanalysis hat; the sociologist hat; or the philosophers’ hat.

 

Give them what they want – The Allegory of the Running Man 

 

Perhaps the most informal way of trying to understand this essay, and that is by no means to say that I do in fact understand it; is to try and make a couple of cultural touchstones. There’s an expression among my friends which comes from the film ‘The Running Man’, which is about a totalitarian imagined future (from a 1980s perspective) where in order to ignore the reality of martial law, entertainment is used to pacify the audience, to use crass consumerism and aspiration as a ploy to accept the dominion of the status quo. One of the tools to do so is by the entertainment show ‘The Running Man’, where convicted persons go on a sadistic game show to fight for their lives. The character Killian says at the start of the show: ‘We give ’em what they want’. What an interesting parable to allude to when discussing a Marxian theorist of culture. The film itself is almost like some Frankfurt School parable. Later on in the film, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character makes a step towards overturning  the false class consciousness of the audience and then before he kills Killian, Arnold’s character (Ben Richards) recapitulates the phrase but giving it a new context: ‘and right now, I’m going to give the audience what I think they want’.

 

While I could say more about how this film is a parable for the Culture Industry thesis of Adorno, I might instead talk about Adorno’s damning essay on ‘Gesture’ that accuses Wagner not merely of bad character as he did in the essay ‘Social Character’, but of poor composing ability. I think the most salient and boiled down version of what Adorno says of Wagner in this essay is that the Saxony composer wrote unstylistically, and perhaps even unmusically. Wagner is putatively understood for being the composer of long phrases and lucious chromatics, building tensions and creating erotically charged dissonances, but to Adorno, there is compositional merit to this, and the reputation he has built on his composing is effectively a shallow populism: it is akin to Killian’s ‘give them what they want’. 

 

The Wagnerian Gesture 

 

One of the things I hate about academic writing is when a term is used, and can even be an everyday term, but it is not defined. I’m probably guilty of this myself on occaision. As this essay concerns the gesture. We might ask what is a gesture. Instead of giving a definition as such, Adorno points towards how Wagner’s work is gesture-like. Perhaps that is the closest we can get to for understanding a gesture.

 

One point Adorno makes is that as a person, Wagner’s traits show in his music, and both in terms of his music, and personality; Meister Wilhelm is a dilettante. Perhaps another crude way of putting this is to say that Wagner is a Jack of All Trades, and master of none. Wagner in his later operas put much effort into elements outside of the music itself: the libretti, mythology of the texts. It is even said that Wagner put much effort into the costumes and even the physical considerations of a concert venue in his Bayreuth opera house. Wagner was an ambitious person, and his music met such ambitions. However, to be dilettante is to be amateur. Adorno’s acusation is something as follows: Wagner’s ambitions were shallow, and this is reflected in the lack of depth in his music. This is what seems to me the meaning of a gesture.

 

Wagner as a bad composer 

 

Adorno does not say this without reasons. There are specific things that, within the musical work of Wagner’s work (in contrast to say the mythology of the libretti). Adorno has very specific things to say to accus Wagner of being a bad composer. They are the following:

 

Wagner emphasises the role of the conductor as a ‘master’ of the music. In historical context one may accept this and see this as leading to a future where conductors are on a level of musical artists as say, the composer. A generation after Wagner, notable composers had reputations as conductors, in particular Mahler must be mentioned. Mahler was almost as much a superstar conductor of his day as he was a notable composer!

 

Adorno also makes the point that the music Wagner makes is compatible with or conducive with the emphasised nature and centrality of the conductor with specific respect to tempo. Wagner also makes a claim that I’m still trying to work out in my own head, that there is a distinct atemporality to his music. I may take this to mean the way that the harmonies and textures of the compositions are atemporal both in terms of being otherworldly and not obviously alluding to the work of past composers. Compare this to say Brahms, where in much of his work the Beethovenian and Baroque elements are quite evident (and much pleasantly so). Not being an expert on Wagner, I will take this on face value about atemporality.

 

The other point about atemporality may be construed in terms of being immaterial to the historical based conditions of the music and the settings of the grand stories of Wagner’s operas. Atemporality also refers to the respect that the melodies don’t go anywhere interesting. Instead they simply and frustratingly stay in the same places without a good amount of development. Atemporality is something Adorno is using in a variety of senses, some ideological, some psychoanalytic, but all musically justifiable. To provide and example of the atemporality as a lack of melodic development, Adorno appeals to the infamousTristan concert prelude.

 

Wagnerian gestures try to speak of a grand view through big instrumental sounds of the symphony orchestra, but they are gestures because of the poor score-writing. Adorno specifically refers to poor modulations and disapproves of the secondary modulations present in much of Wagner’s score-writing to be sloppy.

 

Adorno references another Wagner commentator, Alfred Lorenz. Lorenz put forward a notable study of Wagner’s work and points out specifically the use of ‘bar form’ in Wagner’s work. Adorno picks up on this as a lack of form, and this is a big part of what Adorno seems to find disapproving in Wagner. I think something that wikipedia noted to me is that Lorenz is considered as a discredited authority on Wagner, due to the former’s associations with Nazi ideology. Adorno in the purposes of this essay, however, takes the bar form (AAB melodic phrasing) as horribly generic and unstylistic.

 

If I were to pretend to be Zizek and be facetious, I might give a crass analogy. Adorno here is employing something of an Oedipal fascination and protection of his mother against what he percieves as a threat to his mother, the father. In this crass parody of a Freudian analogy (which I urge you not to take seriously), the unwelcome father is Wagner who is courting the mother’s affections.

 

So who is the mother? In this essay I might take it to mean the ideals of Viennese Classicism. But to me this is not a good enough answer. If Adorno valorises the greatness of Mozart and Beethoven, I contend it is only mediated through the other masters of Viennese form: Adorno’s own divinities: Schoenberg and Webern. But let’s take a step back and talk about Viennese Classicism.

 

Viennese Clasccisism

 

What Adorno refers to as Viennese classicism refers to a golden age around the middle of the 18th Century (ah, the 18th century, my favourite time in philosophy), where the greats such as Mozart, Beethoven and Haydn developed stylistic innovations which emphasised a particular brand of balance, and form over feeling. I am led to feel that this historical ideal of the 18th Century is clouded by Adorno through the Schoenberg perspective. Late Beethoven cannot be said to exhibit balance in its emotional temperament. Perhaps Adorno’s understanding is anachronstic. It is often said that talk of a ‘First and Second Reich’ only came about when the Third Reich was conceptualised as a notion. Likewise, there seems to be no Viennese Classicism in Adorno without what had come to be known as the Second Viennese school. There are reasons to support this interpretation in other essays where Adorno compares and contrasts Wagner’s composing and scoring to Schoenberg. The essay ‘Colour’ comes to mind when thinking of Adorno comparing to another ‘Viennese great’, which I shall write about hopefully soon enough.

 

Why is Viennese Classicism so important? This to me is the real issue of this essay. If Wagner is a composer of gestural motions, it is because he does not pay attention to the innovative aspects of his forebears such as Beethoven. Beethoven and Mozart were masters of form when it came to composition, they were masters of developing melodic lines and harmonies and of transitioning keys. I take this to be more than a musical opinion but a strong personal conviction. However I am sceptical of Adorno’s disapproval. I understand the ideological and cultural grounds for saying that Wagner fails as a composer compared to Beethoven. Then again, almost every other composer fails to compare to Beethoven, and those that dare to surpass him number on a four-fingered hand. Of course Adorno would think Schoenberg numbers among that four (as do I!).

 

The Tristan passage which Adorno is highly distainful of, I find hard to be convinced that this is terrible part writing. Adorno talks more about the Tristan passage in his essay ‘Motiv’. Which particularly goes into what I consider as a very contraversial view about Leitmotif. If Wagner was a composer of gestures, then he has fooled even me that his harmonies are luxurious. Indeed Meister Wilhelm even convinced Nietzsche for a time. Adorno stated in his own musicological way of the shallowness of Wagner’s writing which has a simultaneous appeal to it, because it is gestural. Adorno says this where Nietzsche says in much pithier words: Only sick music makes money today.

 

Some conclusions

Part of me wonders as I read this book, and as we had also written an essay on Glenn Gould on this blog some weeks ago: what would have Gould thought of Adorno? Adorno very much resembles one of the personalities that Gould adopted in his broadcasting work, of the avant-garde radical composer. Both are fans of Schoenberg, I keep emphasising this because there are very few of us in the world, living and dead! However, for very similar reasons, Gould enjoys Bach where Adorno valorises the Vienna 18th Century. Gould however, was no big fan of Beethoven or Mozart (Gould once made the infamous comment that ‘Mozart died too late’). Part of me wonders whether Adorno’s vision of music prefigured a character like Glenn Gould, or whether Gould’s later piano career could be seen as reflecting some of the musical ideology that could be said to be ‘Adornian’. This is a thought that I will try to develop more hopefully as I am going further along in assessing these essays.

A serious point is to be made here. I could take Adorno’s views here seriously, and I would respond to say I am not convinced that a lack of form is such a bad thing in something like the Tristan concert prelude. However, I find Adorno’s reasons very apt, if they were applied to other music. Something that I have also been suspecting about Adorno is finding textual evidence. Namely, that Adorno could have been a formalist aesthetically speaking. Formalism is the view that what makes something beautiful is the form of it, and the underlying rules and principles that govern that art form. Those are the things that made Beethoven great, those are also the things that made Schoenberg a great composer too. But if Wagner were a great composer, it would only be for him as a dilettante. But that said, that to me is not necessarily a bad thing. This is an essay where Adorno is uncharitable, but his points force me to take them seriously because of the strength of the psychoanalytic association between Wagner’s character and the shallowness of his writing. Perhaps if we are to take formalism seriously as an aesthetic view, we may draw from an essay like this to evaluate its merits, by looking at the demerits of its alternative.

Michael

Reading Adorno: In Search of Wagner (1) ‘Social Character’

In Adorno’s Essay ‘Social Character’, the philosopher attempts to go into a character study of the composer himself, through a selective history and a look at the Wagnerian texts. In particular I would like to highlight what I shall call ‘the Wagnerian joke’ and internal conflicts about the ideology of Wagner. I should say as I regularly do when I write commentaries like these, that my thoughts are always subject to change, and I am hardly authoritative when thinking and writing about Adorno. I write as if this blog were my digital moleskine diary.

 

A summary of this essay would be that Adorno tries to psychologise Wagner. In doing so, Adorno gives us a reason to consider the composer as a self-aggrandising egotist who relies on the middle-upper classes to fund his composing while at the same time critiquing the order of the status quo. Wagner also portrays his ideological vision of the world using the Jews, or rather, a stereotyped characterisation that his audience would recognise as a Jewish sentiment, as problematic to society. Adorno points out how there is an internal inconsistency, or conflict in the ways that Wagner both relies on the bourgeoisie patronage, as well as the status quo of a culture which celebrates opera; against Wagner’s supposedly revolutionary sentiment. The other ‘conflict’ relates what is casually referred to as Wagner’s secret. Namely, the accusation (which is not explicitly stated in Adorno but only alluded to), that Nietzsche knew ‘the truth’ of Wagner’s parentage, that in spite of all of Wagner’s anti-semitism, he himself may have had a Jewish heritage. So that’s a summary of the essay. I could just end my blog post here! But of course, I never do end at the beginning.

 

The Wagnerian Joke 

 

The Wagnerian Joke reflects a certain personality trait that Adorno is trying to trace in looking at Wagner historically. Adorno draws from materials such responses to Wagner’s earlier works and his own descriptions of them, testimonies about the composer as well as other stories and relationships that are documented. Such as Wagner’s letters to the Romantic heavyweight composer, Franz Liszt; Wagner’s contact with Friedrich Nietzsche and Wagner’s contact with Nietzsche’s sister, Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche, the latter who became infamous for her antisemitism, but that’s another story.

 

What I would call the Wagnerian joke draws a certain unitary concept from the testimonies and characterisations that Adorno seems to string together about the way Wagner believed in his own cultic status and revolutionary character. Wagner’s sense of self-celebration is depicted also in select characters of his works.

 

The Wagnerian joke, as drawn from this essay can be understood in the following ways:

 

1. Wagner ridicules the plight of a character whose malady comes from a concrete social situation

2. By doing this Wagner creates a sense of humour while also attempting to create a form of celebration. The joke, and response of laughter serves as a rationalisation and acceptance of the plight in question. Instead of thinking critically about it, we laugh.

3. A consequence of this is that Wagner makes himself in a janused fashion both malicious behind a magnanimous and friendly face

 

The Wagnerian joke is deeply sinister, and it is imbued within the comedy around Mime’s character. Another example of the Wagnerian Joke is the anecdote of Hermann Levi conducting Parsifal. Levi was a Jew and one might think that this could be something to allay the concern of Wagner’s anti-semitism. Adorno refers to a story in which Wagner gives Levi a letter written anonymously to the effect of telling Levi to step down from composing Parsifal. Levi asks why Wagner gave the conductor this letter and Wagner answers in a way that appears both kind but also deeply sinister and ugly at once. Apparently after Wagner gave the letter to Levi, the latter was deathly silent at a dinner engagement to which Wagner asked Levi why he was so quiet, which was in some darkly way, a gesture of intimidation clothed behind the appearance of concern. The Wagnerian joke is something Adorno describes and I am trying to conceptualise (by calling it the Wagnerian joke), but realistically speaking, I cannot really have a grasp on it as a notion.

 

Perhaps the closest thing that came to mine was the comedy of Ricky Gervais. Particularly in the way that Gervais uses embarrassment and humiliation as a way of breaking a character down and revealing the facade and fakeness that was really underneath. I’ve had conversations about this kind of Gervais reactionhumour (another term I made up on an ad hoc basis) and this seems to be the basis of the dislike or like of Ricky Gervais as a comedic writer. I personally am a fan of the ugliness of the Gervais reaction as there’s something very awkward and untimely about it, television sitcoms and acting seem to have this polished nature to it and the Gervais reaction is an instance of how something in real life happens that is not comedic and not timely. Whether one finds this funny, seems to be the defining question of whether one is a fan of Gervais or not.

 

Wagner’s inner conflicts 

 

Another aspect of Wagner’s social character seems to be the internal conflicts present within his work and his character. One dimension of this is the relationship with the bourgeosisie that Wagner has. Wagner is dependent on the Bourgois classes as patronage and as a paying audience. Adorno notes how Wagner occupied a time before state provisions were introduced for artists, and also when the influence of opera was waning. As such Wagner occupied a position of a bohemian, the artisan without a patron. It is interesting sociologically speaking, to think about the ways in which artists and musicians of the various times in history may find financial support before they become properly established, if they ever become established at all. This is an issue that many people in bands or many artists face today. Have we really escaped the age of the Patron. In the UK we have things like the National Lottery and the Arts Council, who are in some ways not so much different to the House of Esterhazy or Ludwig II of Bavaria.

 

Wagner’s narratives reflect a feudal mentality, and one which is in some respects against the bourgeois status-quo. Adorno points out the compromise of Wagner’s integrity to take the thalers of patrons and appealing to bourgeois sensibilities, while also trying to provide a revolutionary sentiment of a different social order. How far can one be revolutionary while conforming to the modes of the status quo? In some ways this is not a unique issue. Another book I’m currently reading, by filmmaker Kevin Smith: “Tough Shit: Life Advice from a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good”  speaks about the early days of Miramax and the indie films he made with them. Smith speaks about how the rise and rise of Smith’s career was due to a commitment to a specific vision of his stylised view to filmmaking. Smith later admits that the intervention of studio executives interfering with various aspects of his filmic vision led to a compromise and a loss of interest from a large part of his audience. I think the film that Smith refers to as destroying him in the book was ‘Cop out’. Back to Wagner…

 

This kind of compromise might look disingenuous. But I do wonder if Adorno meant it to be so. This kind of tension is based on the social conditions of creating music. If I were to create music today, I’d need access to quite a fair bit of equipment. I would need some fancy software and fancy recording equipment and it’s not too easy to get a hold of a lot of that stuff without a studio, or making one! I’m actually having this problem lately as it happens with another project. On the other hand, Wagner’s ideology that underpins his opera libretti are deeply imbued as social narratives and visions of society. One reading of this inconsistency is suggestive the necessity of a consideration of the means of production in the culture industry and thinking along that narrative, another reading reveals the strained relationship with the bourgoisie that Wagner had following a textual consideration.

 

The other inconsistency needs a bit of unpacking. Wagner as an anti-semite characterised these behaviours and characters that an audience of his time would associate with Jewish connotations and the negative stereotypes of their day, as well as reflecting cultural worries. Wagner’s vitriol was a point of contention when it came to his friendship with Nietzsche. Adorno points out how Niezsche alluded to ‘Wagner’s secret’ or the inconsistency of knowing the truth about Wagner in the light of these antisemitic characterisations and attitudes in the latter’s work. I am slightly perplexed at the way Adorno words this issue, because it seems not explicit. After some digging, I think what Adorno was alluding to in not enough words was the controversial claim that Richard Wagner’s father was not Carl Wagner, but his stepfather, Ludwig Geyer. Also by extension, the rumour that Geyer was Jewish would by this line of speculation entail that Wagner had a Jewish heritage. I think it is reasonable that this is what Adorno is alluding to with Nietzsche’s allegation, which I think comes from Nietzsche’s 1888 work Der Fall Wagner.

 

With this line of thought I am unsure of how seriously to take this. Adorno goes into detail of how the characters Alberich and Mime reflect Wagnerian ideosyncracies which rely on cultural prejudices and the “Race theory [which] assumes its rightful place in the no man’s land between idiosyncracy and paranoia” (Adorno 2009: 15). Adorno thinks that the racialised characterisation and the ‘ideosyncracies’ as he calls it, reflect and betray the deeply anti-semitic character of Wagner’s work.

 

Concluding thoughts 

 

Adorno reads into the ugliness of Wagner’s character in this essay. The beautiful music and lyricism of works such as Der Meistersingers von Nürnberg are met by the inexorable ugliness of the character of Wagner. Reading this book we are led to ask that open question: how do we square this circle of a great composer who is, according to Adorno, ugly to the core. Perhaps this is an ongoing question we should have when reading this book.

Another thing I might worry about when reading Adorno is that there seems to be an internal logic to reading this book. If one is reading ‘In Search of Adorno’ as a way to interpreting Wagner, we would be dealing with the simplistic reading of ‘is this how to interpret Wagner?’, and the answer to that is probably better answered by reading some more specialised Wagner literature. There does seem however, to be another alternate route to reading this text, and that is by a principle of charity, taking serious the internal logic and argumentation of where Adorno is going with his line of thought. This involves a suspension of judgment more akin to when I’m reading say Descartes or Kant. An example of this would be: when reading Descartes on the soul or on God, or Kant on his metaphysics, one simply has to assume we can validly talk about the soul, or God before engaging critically with their thoughts, failing to do so is failing to be an exegete. That said, I do wonder how far Adorno’s internal logic is seperatable from reading the text without having such a charitable hermeneutical perspective.

Michael

The Cult of Glenn Gould

 

As many of you can tell, I’ve been blogging a lot about music lately. I have always had thoughts and Ideas about music and I always considered that eventually I would come to speak my views or embed them in unsystematic places through other discussions, such as my commentary blog pieces on Adorno.

 

However I thought I might just try and address some of the thoughts and issues directly. With that in mind I thought I would write about my favourite Musician: Glenn Gould, and try to articulate some of the things I find interesting about the pianist-broadcaster. Part of the reason I felt it important to talk about Glenn Gould is because part of his insight will, I suspect continually be referred to if I continue to write on issues musical. Gould is as a pianist, as influential to me as say Kant is as a philosopher.

Why I like Glenn Gould 

 

Glenn Gould is one of my all time favourite musicians. I say musician and not concert pianist. Gould composed works in his own time which have been of little recognition, Gould also had very deep thoughts on music history. Glenn Gould worked with Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in producing programming that engaged with the public about music, in the way that the likes of Carl Sagan or Richard Dawkins did for science, or Marcus deSautoy for Mathematics today. I consider Gould not just as a performer, but someone who was a performer with a composer’s mentality, someone with ideological views on music, its direction and its history. Gould was someone who lived in the age that transitioned the end of classical music as we know it and saw the emergence of popular music styles which took the place of the big composers.

 

Gould is a divisive figure, many have a dislike for him for giving the impression that’s okay to play the piano with poor pedagogy, or while humming, using an inappropriately low chair. On the other hand, it is the eccentricity of the man that I love. It is the out of this world nature of his personality, that also reflects the other-worldiness of the composers that he favoured: Bach and Schoenberg. I will consider the many different dimensions of Glenn Gould and have some closing reflections on the ‘cult’ of Glenn Gould.

 

Who is Glenn Gould? 

 

Gould the performer 

 

One of the things I am attracted to about Glenn Gould are his performances. The way that Gould makes 18th Century J.S. Bach come alive in a way that gives it a distinct freshness. Gould’s interpretation of the Brandenburg Concerto is considered a benchmark, and Gould’s career can be book-ended by his early recording and his late recording of the very same piece

 

One thing I find particularly interesting about Gould is the choice he made for his recordings. Gould avoided Romanticism a great deal, and expressed a certain Baroque-ness in all of the pieces he recorded. Gould’s choices in music reflects a lineage, from Bach to Schoenberg, from Rhineland old to Rhineland recent. There are however some choice exceptions to Gould’s work: his interpretation of Mozart leaves much to be desired, and the choice of recording Scriabin leaves me unsure of what to think. I am particularly surprised at some of the Richard Strauss lieder recorded by Gould.

 

Gould the ideologue 

 

Gould nailed his colours to the mast about many issues. Perhaps bold enough to say that Mozart ‘died too late’ as a form of disapproval of the latter’s later work. Gould was a pianist who was known more for their voice than his hands. Gould was very vocal on his feelings for Bach and Schoenberg and many of the ideological baggage that he carried has chimed a lot with my own musical upbringing and influences. In a way Gould is a natural extension of my musical worldview. I particularly like the way that Gould conflates or expands (depending on how you see it) the role and position of what a concert pianist should be. Should a pianist play, or contribute to a conversation about music and what music means?

 

Gould the Studio Musician/perfectionist 

 

Glenn Gould famously refused to be part of the concert scene and chose not to engage in live performing. Gould had distinct reservations about the way in which music is performed to an audience, and the way that the distinction was made between performer and audience. Gould was then led to taking a more studio oriented approach to performing and propagating his music. There are amazing videos out on youtube showing the ways in which Gould had been involved in the studio process of making music, not just in terms of playing the piano, but in the post-production stages of mixing audio and cutting tape. I’ve lately been working in some home studios with very fancy software like Digital Audio Workstations, but I am astonished at an age where cutting up a recording and splicing with other takes literally involved cutting tape! Gould was a perfectionist of the classical music variety, in an age where the studio was emerging. Gould made himself a recording artist from a performer, and this is something very telling about the status of musicianship today and the scope of what musicianship involves.

 

Gould the firebrand/anti-conservative 

 

Gould is a figure who is inherently disagreeable to some, or may I even say many. This is a fundamental aspect of what makes anyone a firebrand. There is a story of Glenn Gould meeting another notable musician (and musical intellectual) who found Gould’s interpretation disagreeable, but noteworthy enough to deserve engagement. That musician was Leonard Bernstein, someone who I also have great admiration for as a musician and a composer (and no I’m not so big a fan of West Side Story).

 

Gould held strong opinions, from Romanticism to Modernism; Bach to recording methods. Gould remained a distinct face and one who ruffled feathers by his distinctness and presentation. Glenn Gould was not just an eccentric and a passionate person of the world of classsical music, but was distinclty a person of 20th century sensibilities as well, doing things that other classical performers would not do. Like this!

 

Gould the broadcaster 

 

Glenn Gould’s greatest legacy may very well be not in his playing, but the efforts he made to educate the public in music and culture. Very similar to Leonard Bernstein, Gould made entertaining material from discussing the history of music, discussing style and reaching audiences through CBC broadcasts in an accessible fashion. We speak of the public intellectual like a rare breed of broadcaster these days. We also normally think of such intellectuals for science, mathematics or even history and philosophy –  but …whither music? The Unanswered Question.

I particularly enjoyed the ways in which Gould would parody the pretentiousness of the world of classical music by the various fake characters that he would perform, and at the same time embody in all seriousness the very kind of persons that he would lampoon. Such a strange and contradictory state of affairs it is to be Glenn Gould. It is with greatness that one can both parody experimental composers and music critics, and both be an advocate of Serialism in all seriousness as well as having very strong views on issues musical. This contrast between the serious and playful/funny Gould is something that any public intellectual can learn from. Gould contains great comedy as well as seriousness. As evidenced from things such as his ‘so you want to write a fugue’. A fugue about writing a fugue. Talk about parody as a form of art.

Gould the ‘bad example’

Gould is, lets face it, a bad example to emulate as a pianist. Gould does a lot of things ‘badly’, pedagogically speaking. The chair he sits on is too low, Gould strikes with an overhand that is too dominant; humming is not desirable plus the movements are far too eccentric. Of course when it comes to virtuosi they are a law unto themselves. Like performers like Louis Armstrong, their eccentricities are evident of their skill, but not things for mortals to emulate.

Gould’s in wider historical cultural context

Glenn Gould was born in an age where notable composers wrote notable works, but then composers became less notable and their works less notable still. We think of composers more now as institutionalised figures from the universities who studied composition, or jobbing composers who work in film or commissions. This kind of historical situation gives less of a scope or an opportunity in my view, for the kind of classical music we may have envisaged of earlier centuries, or perhaps the whole notion of a classical music is an anacrhonism in itself. Gould acknowledged that there was a world outside of the classical, there was music outside of the world of R. Strauss and Hindemith. In that way I see Gould as a transitional character in the grand scheme of things. One who engaged with a changing world, where things like television and radio media are innovative ways of engaging with the public, and that engaging with the public is a social good. It’s a vastly different world from the old masters. Although to a lesser extent than Bernstein, Gould did make an effort to bridge these worlds together in a way where he seemed to both belong to them and be apart from them.

Conclusion: The Cult of Glenn Gould

Glenn Gould has something of a cult of personality about him. Gould’s eccentricities and his views are a package deal. I refer to Gould’s following as a cult in that fewer people these days are familiar with his work and fewer people still remember what he represents. As I am getting more engaged with music I find some inspiration from Glenn Gould, not just as a musician and as someone with a stylistic outlook, but as someone who talked about these things rather than just doing it, and as someone who shows the potential of being a public intellectual about music. That, and few other people in the old world of music make me laugh as much as him.

Michael

On being part of a musical ensemble (and my sudden interest in Faure)

It used to be back in the day when I practiced and learned pieces as a Piano soloist, that I’d be interested in the intensive pianistic writings and performances pieces by the likes of Chopin, Rachmaninov and Liszt. You know, the showoffy type of music that exhibited ‘big fat chords’, rich harmonies and shimmeringly fast melody lines.

Lately as an ensemble performer I have found working with a group of musicians with differing musical interests is a conversation. Trying to put forward your ideas, trying to be open to others and having that very important but polite conversation about disagreeing.

One of my friends, an actor by trade and training, likes to suggest crooner songs and early jazz. Another friend, interested in the early 20th Century, Jazz and a trumpet player, is in broad agreement with this cultural tendency and this gathers influence. I am not so familiar with Jazz (despite my former piano teacher being a former Jazz musician), and I quite enjoy learning about the new chords, enhancing my chord vocabulary and stretching myself to new styles.

One of the things that has surprised me is the way I have been drawn to chamber music  and composers who I normally wouldn’t consider. Working with the piano makes one think mostly or almost completely of the pianists-composers like Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin. It’s always important to remember that there were non-pianist specialising composers as well, and not all classical music is defined by that one instrument.

I’ve lately been drawn to Gabriel Faure. Faure has a beauty and darkness, a gentility and subtlety to it that communicates beauties of the human condition. Faure is also technically interesting because he is said to write his piano work like an organist. There is a philosophical distinction that I learned from my logic lecturer, Finn Spicer years ago, the difference between ‘being hard to do’ and ‘being tricky’. Faure’s works as I have come across them have been tricky, I’ve had to do some hard thinking about fingerings and stylistic considerations.

I think many of his popularly known works show beauty: the Sicilienne (which I want to try on Bb Clarinet, but I’m also playing as accompanist), the song ‘Apres un reve’ (After a Dream), which I wish to perform with cellist. There is the wonderful ‘Cantique de Jean Racine’ which I once performed as a bassist at Westminster Cathedral (which I have fuzzy memories of now). Lately one piece in particular has taken me, has enamoured me, has dared to look me into the dark abyss, which is the Opus 24 Elegie, which I aim to one day play as an accompanist.

Lately it has been a great joy to perform as part of an ensemble, not just with long time friends (where I feel the shared feeling of love shows in our playing), but also the way that performing as a musician forms a powerful medium. I often like to think of myself as a person of few words, despite the fact that I go on and on and on when I’m blogging on here about a variety of topics, there is nothing I can say that is more profound and complete than the expression of music. There is a beautiful ambiguity sometimes in music, and at other times, or even simultaneously, a great degree of specificity. The C-minor introduction asserting the tonic in the Op 24. Elegie is definitely a C-minor tonic (specificity), but what it expresses is so powerful and can also mean many different things to many people -representing many different mental objects in the same sonic experience.

I think it’s odd how I’ve come to enjoy Gabriel Faure so much. I thought that the next composer I might be enamoured with would be say, Haydn, or going deeper into Beethoven, or Mahler, following my interest in the likes of Schoenberg, Bach, or the Romantics. There is a moderation to Faure that appeals to me, a gentility that does not always need to go to the extremes of the human condition in the way Schoenberg or many Romantics would.

Michael

Rediscovering musicianship in 2013

I think its fair to say that its official. It’s only been a few rehearsals so far, but I am part of a group of musicians who are performing together. We are a group of about 4-6 friends (depending on who is available/venue/available instruments) and between us is a lot of friendship, love and passion for performing.

I think it becomes official that we are a committed group when my friend who hates playing the Cello announces to great shock: I think its time to bring this along to our playing sessions. I have been rediscovering my musicianship over the past couple of years, by regularly practicing piano again and performing last year to an audience. Rediscovering involves an inward reflection of finding what it was in my past that made me a musician and re-learning what I used to know.

Lately I have gone beyond rediscovery and I am going into new and uncharted territories. I have experience playing as a piano soloist, but I am now going into accompanist mode. I’ve been playing accompanist lately for a singer, a trumpeter and a saxophonist. I’ve attempted to go through a piano duet (Faure’s Bercuse from Dolly Suite) and I am exploring some pieces that I’d love to play in an ensemble context. However it seems that I have a lot of emphasis on Gabriel Faure’s repetoire. There is an odd thing that the music I listen to is vastly different to the music I perform, and the classical music that I tend to lean to is vastly different to the music I want to play.

As a performer I am strongly leaning to the Romantic and to a much lesser degree the classical and baroque period. However if I were to talk intellectually about music my interests lay in composers like Bach and Schoenberg. I arrogantly said this week that ‘Beethoven may be a brilliant composer but Bach is a genius’. There is an odd tension between my performing life and my intellectual and aesthete sensibilities. On the way to the rehearsal I had a lot of heavy metal playing on my mp3 player. I play a lot of indie and other various genres on my monthyl playlists and I am very wide about trying to find music that I want to discover and listen to, but when it comes to musicianship as a form of self expression – things like black metal, heavy metal or Schoenberg go to the wayside in favour of Debussy, Faure and ballad like pieces. I’m a contradiction: Romantic at heart, but modernist at mind.

I think there should be more to be said for this strange contradiction. I may explore my musical sensibilities in future posts, especially as my involvement as a musician has expanded greatly recently. What a joyous thing it is to be able to perform with friends! I’m also going to try and break out my clarinet in the next couple of months…

Michael

Barriers to Aesthetic Criticism

I think there are two barriers to having valid critical appraisals. One is having an opinion, and two is having a disposition to a view. By the term critical appraisal, I shall consider cultural artefacts as the object of criticism. By the term criticism, I take to mean the act of praising the merits or demerits of a work on the basis, or at least on the guise of an informed and considered view.
 
Lately I’ve been reading quite a bit of critical thinking on cultural artefacts. Some things are very evidently laden with feeling, perhaps praise or perhaps derision. I myself have been writing quite a bit of critical prose on music, film, comics and television within and without NR.

The ad hominem

Sometimes I wonder if for instance, there is any worth in engaging in criticism of culture when one makes a name prior any given opinion, if they have already tied their flag to the mast. If for example I were to go on a diatribe about how Justin Bieber or Nicki Minaj represented everything that was ill and sick about a culture, many may agree or disagree, but maybe not for the reasons elicited. It may be that the assent to a view is sufficient to assent to an identification of a feeling, or an identification to a clan. There is no criticism in the activity of assent or dissent to a conclusion. This kind of clade behaviour defies thinking, but appeals to feeling, namely, the feeling of approval. When appraising critism works in this way, or the sole materials of our critical framework is to be based on a feeling, it would seem prima facie difficult to make this communicable. All we can communicate is how it feels, and whether others or not have felt similar or the same before is not up to us.

Dispositions

Similar, but not the same to the ad hominem of simply holding to a view and stating it in writing, or as a spoken utterance, for example: ‘Nickelback is aweful, overly-produced generic rock for the masses!’; the notion of a disposition poses a similar challenge to aesthetic criticism .To have  a disposition is to hold to a family of views that you are inclined to agree with on the basis of something (that may not need to be specifed).

I wonder for instance what the worth of reviewing books one has an inclination to hate, if they are speaking from the dispositions they have. A Christian may dismiss all books by anyone who claims to be an atheist, and whether or not as an explicit speech act, may harbour tacit biases and may be primed against any positive (or negative) view against a given cultural artefact. Dispositions can come from many things, habit, a limited pool of experience and familiarity, or even something like cultural context and orientation. Some dispositions are by choice, or have been developed over time, and some things are not. Many cultural prejudices we don’t even know we have sometimes.

Disinterest

Why are these things important? Lately, as part of a book review, I’ve been reading an anthology on children’s literature (and its relation to philosophy). One of the things I have noticed is a distinction between what I might call ‘good’ and ‘bad’ criticism. I thought I would try to elucidate something general to highlight what I thought was problematic about some of the articles I read and where the perspectives were coming from.

Criticism is lazy when it is simply a mouthpiece for a point of view. However, sometimes being a mouthpiece for a point of view is a very important thing, An example of this is the discussion of Lana Del Rey in early 2012. My favourite such example was in (I think) Spin magazine.The criticism was directed not so much to the music of Del Rey, but the packaging of her music, and the preferred ways it had been described, as well as the iconography and multi-media nature of her celebrity presence. As a cultural critique this communicated a lot, and it also gave a more systematic treatment to what essentially is what one may consider a cynical reaction to a cynically produced cultural product.

Criticism is poor when it serves as a front for one’s own views. A good example of this would be the way in which Slavoj Zizek appropriates many things, such as Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. I think that the activity of eisegesis has its merits, but to put it forward as criticism is unwarranted and lazy thinking. Of course, it should be said that when Zizek appropriates cultural references he does not (I think) take it to be a form of literary or film critcism. I also think that even the hallowed Adorno may be guilty of skirting on this kind of prejudice at times. To appropriate a cultural artefact as an accessory to your own views is different to criticism. To take the cultural artefact sui generis, to take it on its own merits, as its own object, and not necessarily in relation to other things (although this may be relevant if we are in a discussion of say, genre), is to give a more sensitive view of the work. In a sense it may seem contradictory to consider how our own prejudices are a barrier to an appraisal of a work of culture. I also see these barriers to criticism as a neat way of framing aesthetic appraisal in terms of the role of disinterest.

Destre and Michael

On returning to the piano

On Returning to the Piano

At the start of the year I made a resolution to keep to specific targets, call this my way of being honest about improving myself with a view to keeping a new years resolution. I resolve to 7 separate targets which I measure on a weekly and monthly basis to determine if I have upheld them. I’ve found that on the whole, I’ve been attending to most of them, although some weeks I do more of one task than the minimum requirement and less of others, due to the inevitable variance of everyday life, family and work commitments.

One such task that I set myself was to try and get back into music. This could be a vague thing from practicing piano to some other music related activity. I joined a choir late last year for example. I was then asked by my cousin in March to perform at her wedding reception. What an honour it was and I accepted hastily. I have a mixed relationship with performing, and in many ways performing is a metaphor for life, I find practicing piano a metaphor for life in other ways too when it comes to dull pedagogical issues of fingering in particular.

Back in the day I used to perform for ensemble and solo outings. I sang bass vocal part, played the  clarinet (mostly in ensemble) and I thought that my piano abilities were relatively speaking my stronger asset. I was kind of put off performing once I realised a physical peak to my abilities due to an issue I have with limited motor skills. I found that my mind could learn and memorise music that I was in fact, incapable of physically playing. This led to a certain frustration of sorts about my abilities and life in general. I felt a sense of injustice about it.

I hated performing, but I kept doing it. I wish I could explain what drove me in those days. In a way it seems to be my general mindset with many things in life, that I’m attracted to difficulties and challenges that can be painful, boring and adverse in other respects. When I was asked to play for my cousin’s wedding, I had to think of a repertory that was completely different to what I had before, and think of things to play that were suitable for the audience. When I performed solo I usually didn’t think about what others wanted to hear and felt that my performing was a brute form of self expression.

I rediscovered the joy of practicing piano again this year. I enjoyed having a goal to work towards and that worked as a very good incentive. I remembered the pressure and anxiety I felt just before I performed. I made a point of not drinking any alcohol or any heavy food just before my time to play in the wedding reception, and a testimony of my brother’s friend that he saw me finishing half a bottle of white about a minute before I was meant to play.

Playing again made me realise how much joy and creativity comes from performing. Playing again was a discovery of a part of me that I’ve been ignoring for so long. I found a new ability in learning to improvise and my aural listening skills have recently come into use when I was spontaneously jamming with a few friends of mine last week. For me, performing is a form of self-criticism, healing, laughter and an opportunity to bond with others. Performing and listening to music makes me understand the viewpoint of some of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (the latter an amateur pianist and composer himself), my musical education has been a great influence on my outlook in life whether I perform or not and even to a large extent my philosophical views. I can’t believe I stopped playing for so long.

Michael

Cultural Connections: Music Fetishism

One of the things that I carry on my person at any given time outside of the home is my MP3 player. I suppose its a fetish of mine, or a totem (the subtle difference between the two is an ommitted discussion for now), I of course mean fetish in the traditional (and non-sexual) sense of the term. I try to be as aware as I can about my music listening habits, and in a sense it helps that there are such things as metadata, and even apps which analyse music listening statistics. I have recently put a manual record system to pasture which used to keep a note of my music listening habits, solely for the fact that it was no longer relevant or coped with the comparatively advanced ways that I can analyse and order my music preferences. I suppose you could say that I am a music fetishist, perhaps more so than others, but according to Adorno, it is an inevitable social condition.

Reading ‘On the Fetish-Character in Music’ was a delightful, yet exceptionally difficult essay. I read sections of it as an undergraduate, and I now realise that my lecturer omitted the sections about Schoenberg and the more technical musical terminology of the essay. If you thought Kant was hard, try reading a work which requires you to have a background in music theory and intimate familiarity with the work of Bach, Mahler, Schoenberg or Wagner. I must admit that I’m a little sketchy on details about Wagner and Mahler. For this piece I shall consider distinct themes:firstly I shall address the notion of Commodity Fetishism in relation to music specifically, then the ‘regression thesis’, I will then consider in perhaps an artificially seperate fashion the specific cultural examples that Adorno brings to highlight his case and I shall close my considerations by reflecting on the possibility of modern examples of Adorno’s fetishism as well as addressing a topic that is implicit in a lot of my writing about music which I have taken deeply to heart from my early reading of Adorno, namely, the cultural importance and superiority of composer Arnold Schoenberg. 

 

Commodity Fetishism revisited

One of the really powerful ways in which Marxism’s general thesis of the ideological control of society can really take force is if we look at Culture. Engels and Marx make a good attempt at this through their look at journalism and some anecdotal cases, but it is in the decades of the Twentieth Century where Culture takes to a more Marxian analysis. One general thesis about Marxism (I’m in no knowledgeable position to be an exegete on Marx) is that of Commodity Fetishism (CF). CF can be understood as the notion that value of an object becomes distinct and independently valued from its means of production, and the consumption of that object (whether it is food, or technological, or cultural) from the process in which it was manufactured. The criterion of value is solely based on its consumption or other social forces that relate to its consumption, but explicitly not by means of production value.

(As a lemma, a contrasting set of terms can be applied which originates in Aristotle’s Politics (which Marx himself borrows), between Chrematistics and ‘Oikonomikon’ (sic). As with most thins, a discussion on Aristotle is fruitful and relevant to Marx, but we’ll have to skip this for now..)

For Adorno, music has become an extension of what the Marxists saw around them as a capitalist appropriation of music and wider culture. Adorno makes two appeals to this claim, the first is stylistic/musicological and the second appeal is subjective (that is, focusing on the social subject). Music is repetitive, and popular music appeals to hooks and certain ideosyncracies in order to be listenable, appealing and satisfying. This may be the equivalent of saying in modern terms: pop music appeals to the lowest common denominator and a bunch of old tired cliches, appealing to our indulgences and sense of pleasure and contentment. Adorno is implicitly making the critical point from a musical perspective that popular music is usually not very good either. Adorno notes for instance how few musicians in Jazz for instance barely know how to play instruments and learn by ear or by ‘sign-posting’ notations (I think he must mean some form of Tablature) instead of the traditional stave-and-line means of music.

Why is this important? It’s important because music lacks subtlety and accuracy. Traditional heresies and rules of writing good music (e.g. don’t double your 5ths, avoid consecutive octaves) are not only ignored, it makes the modern audience of Adorno brandish him as some kind of ‘elitist’ and probably undermines the case that Adorno makes by such readers. The ‘signposting’ or ‘traffic signal’ method of music notation that Jazz and other such popular music (that is, popular by the standards of 1938) lacks the sophistication of making chords more sophisticated than simple triads and melody lines. Music is made simple so that it can be reproduced easily. This can also be true not just for (what we now call) live performance but also in terms of listening for the ear. Jazz is easy listening, as is the music by the crooners.

Now on to the subject. The social subject treats music as an object, a thing that is a means to an end. By objectifying music, we ignore the process of its creation, or other factors such as the underlying musical style features or whether it is innovative. Music becomes part of the social life and an objectified object just like many other social phenomena. Perhaps we can liken the kind of objectification to the ultimate form of objectification: sexual. Music has become appropriated as a thing for use, a thing for deriving pleasure or perhaps sorrow, but essentially a tool to be used for the satisfaction of the user. It helps to have norms such as identifying ownership such as associating a performer or composer with the song, or appealing to a canon of Jazz standards. Music has become isolated from its means of production, or any meaning that was originally imbued into it.

For Adorno, commodification divorces music from its original value. In a sense, it doesn’t even matter whether a song is good or not when it is commodified, because in a fundamental way, its value is divorced, alienated from any kind of critique internal to the piece itself, and is ideologically construed by its locus to the consumer. Creativity and originality are no longer relevant terms, as they have been reconstrued and defined with an ellipsis. Creativity is ‘creativity….in relation to the consumer’.

The ‘regression’ thesis

The further prong of the music fetishism discusion relates a particular aspect of the way music is consumed. Music, when fetishised enforces a set of values, these values are distinctly conformist and promote sameness. Commodified also has the psychological affect of creating a ‘regress’ in mentality. Critical adults are made into children by commodified music. Perhaps the best way that Adorno highlights this is by the metaphor or speaking. When an adult speaks, a child is supposed to listen. Music operates in a similar way by silencing people and promoting the subject’s role to listen to music. Listening in this way gives a relationship of authority and education to music, music can be the mediator of values and norms by this way. By inducing the silence of the listener, music also becomes a silencer for critical thought and space for the individual’s thought. While that is not to say that individuals cannot speak or think, but within the context of music, they will have to speak through listening to it.

Regress occurs in the manner of taking the subject back, this may be in terms of a ‘golden age’, of a better past, or a sentimental time when things were seemingly simpler. In my translation, the word ‘retardation’ is used, which is perhaps an apt term to describe the way in which the listener is forced to a less critical and more receptive state (although not very politically correct these days). By regress, music can stunt the emotional and psychological development of a person. Music can also be a powerful ideological tool, as a means of mediating messages such as: the past was a much better time, we should return to it. Regression is important because in the metaphor, if one is to make a listener more child like, it also makes them more amenable to subservience and obedience.

Critically speaking there are a plurality of ways that regression occurs:

1. Emotional regression: Regress to emotional simplicities which are comforting, Depressive and Suicidal Black Metal can sometimes do this by emphasising the negative modalities.
2. Social regression: Some songs emphasise the simplicity of relationships, such as the value of ‘finding the right boy/girl to romance’ as well as the ironically incompatible cultural companion of this: just plain sex. Songs which are commodified rarely put forward a complex or nuanced message
3. Ideological/political regression: Some songs emphasise a particular history which is inherently political ‘dark satanic mills’ or ‘green and pleasant lands’ were originally lines from Blake, who was an avid Romantic and sentimentalist, what better way to communicate such values by singing it before an England Rugby match!

 

I shall now consider Adorno’s examples.

Adorno’s examples

1. Beethoven’s Fourth

Adorno mentions how some classical music has been made into packaged and sanitised objects which are repeatedly played until it becomes part of the social consciousness. When it is played so much, the sonic experience of music is isolated from its original context. What would have been the great beauty of Beethoven is now an annoying ringtone, what value is left in such commodified music is not from the context of Beethoven the composer, and an emphasis is made on pieces to create a canon. Adorno notes how Beethoven’s fourth symphony is almost never played, he doesn’t even mention number five, but the point is, we are already thinking about it and it doesn’t even need to be stated that the work has become an iconic example of a commodity.

2. Mahler

One of my raconteur conversation pieces is that I don’t understand why people love Mahler so much, to my humour its an enjoyable experience because it’s actually my way of gauging a conversation by judging their response. I do however, feel that I just don’t understand why Mahler is in such high repute and after reading Adorno, there is an extent to which I still am not. Adorno gives the example of Mahler to emphasis regress, because commodification takes place in high art as well.

Mahler exemplifies regression sylistically. Mahler emphasises repetition and long drawn out melodic phrases, in a grossly hyperbolised way, this is much like how popular music standards work. Mahler is considered the height of innovation, yet by the time he was composing, his style was already ‘old’. What Adorno means by this is that in isolating music’s value from its production by emphasising the consumer, the genuine musical innovations are lost, and things which are called innovations and modern are already established tropes. This cannot be more true of Mahler, who represented the High Romantic. In some respects, Adorno is being unfair to Mahler, but the emphasis for highlighting Mahler as an archetype makes more sense when compared to a contemporary of the composer: Schoenberg. I’ll get back to this later.

3. Jazz music

Adorno is given a lot of flack about Jazz, Adorno does have a low opinion of Jazz and many call him elitist (see aforementioned comment), or accuse him of not understanding what Jazz was. Adorno had a range of cultural interests, and like myself, I suspect he probably made a point of listening to music he didn’t like in order to understand it. Adorno identifies the sentimentality of Jazz, as well as anticipates phenomena such as the unwritten Jazz songbook of standards, as well as the other amusing archetype of the ‘White Jazz Collector’. The White Jazz Collector is usually a man, and usually white, they are also probably from a middle class background, and they obsessively collect jazz records. Such a jazz collector emphasises a holy canon of jazz music, where performers such as Miles Davis or Louis Armstrong take positions much akin to saints. Songs are fetishised and worshipped in terms of which recording they are, what year or who the performer/producer/collaborators/recording artists were. Now, although Adorno didn’t refer to such an archetype, that he describes jazz in the fetish way directly anticipates this phenomenon. Also notable is the ‘white’ aspect of the collector, as Jazz was initially a Black endeavour, there is the implication that the music had become established, perhaps civilised and able to be appropriated into the comfortable conformity of bourgeois (or as its also known, BBC Radio 3 audiences).

There are variants of the White Jazz Collector, Rock Enthusiasts, or even subcultural enthusiasts such as Punk obsessives or Metalheads also fit the similar mould of the White Jazz Collector. I think that Adorno wasn’t as unfamiliar with the culture of Jazz as his critics think, especially considering that he was a German man who barely knew English during the 1930s.  Another remark I wish to add is tha the canonification of the jazz standard is much similar today to a canonification of a popular music songbook. Consider for instance how shows such as the X Factor (both in the UK and US, and probably numerous other countries now) canonise pop songs by covers. Songs such as Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody are covered and parodied so much that they were probably first known by someone referencing it rather than the original. The phenomenon of the cover song emphasises the canonicity of certain songs and gives a near mysterious quality to cultural works.

4. The ‘Radio Ham’

One unexpected example of cultural fetishism is what Adorno eccentrically calls ‘The Radio Ham’, as a 21st Century reader of Adorno, I barely understood this example, although I have heard a little bit about Ham Radio. The Radio Ham is a person (almost always a man) who is probably socially isolated, and probably has poor prospects with women (Adorno’s words, NOT mine!). One way of mediating this sense of inadequacy is by learning the skill of detecting short wave radio and discovering secret messages and communications. In a sense I did not understand the point of this example or where it was going, but then Adorno says that the hallowed skill of the Ham Radio became a way of expressing individuality or seperateness and was a behaviour that was exemplary of fetishism. After reading this article and talking with Antisophie and Destre about it, they commented amusingly that this archetype comfortably fits into the geek/nerd duality (perhaps more nerd than geek), where technical skill and obscure interests may seem different or deviant to commodifiation fetishism, but it is basically another flavour of the same brand of pie.

Our allegiance to Schoenberg

“The terror in which Schoenberg and Webern spread, today as in the past, comes not from their incomprehensibility but from the fact that they are all too correctly understood. Their music gives form to that anxiety, that terror, that insight into the catastrophic situation which others evage merely by regressing [Adorno, 2005]“

My final word goes to Schoenberg. Schoenberg is the archetype of greatness for Adorno, but reading this essay does not make the composer as revolutionary as I think he is. Schoenberg subverts classical music by using the traditions of it and by the innovation of dodecacophony (serialism) created somehing quite new out of a tradition that was otherwise old. Adorno insinuates but doesn’t go as far as I would like, that Schoenberg’s music differs from his notion of cultural commodification, in a sense, it resists commodification in the way that Mahler and Beethoven did. While the music of the past did in fact have revolutionary potential, it eventually becomes subverted into conformity and commodity. If it is not for the inaccessible and difficult to understand musical style of Schoenberg that makes his music difficult to commodify (Adorno seems to imply this isn’t a good accusation), it is what his music represents: discomfort, despair and the dissonance that characterised the Twentieth Century. Schoenberg’s music was a mirror on the state of the world, where cultural commodification was more like the mirror owned by the Queen in Snow White: looking at ourselves to the ignorance of everything else.

Michael

Burzum- A Lost Forgotten Sad Spirit

Leonard Bernstein on great works of the past century