13 Read more at location 2602
Note: 13@@@@@@@@@@@@ adorno rispettato x la sua fede politica. il parallelo con eliot parla chiaro critica della cultura consumistica da sinistra x s: la condanna di a è corretta ma è formulata su premesse sbagliate francoforte vs marx 1968: poichè è ridicolo negare la librrtà capitalista (il cfr è con l URSS), si dice che la librtà capitalista è illusoria. Adorno viene allora preso sul serio il grano di verità in adorno era già presente nella bibbia: non sostituite gli idoi a dio kitsch: godimento senza sforzo... mancanza di coraggio ed eroismo jazz/rock: è l america che colonizza l europa. a. nn può che condannare. a. critica tutto sdoganandi chi digrrisce di tutto oggi o si è contro o si è a favore del pop quel che nn si può fare è discriminare tra canzone e canzone tonalità. a.: la tonalità si è esaurita... è un cliché. s: ok ma l avanguardia non ci salva certo dai cliché. cosa c è di + noioso e scontato dell ennesimo duchamp o dell ennesimo cage contro a. ci sono parecchi esempi Edit
But his lack of clarity, his jerky and unsequential style of analysis and his attempt to politicize the entire discussion of modernism in music, so as to force it into a neo-Marxist framework that has lost whatever plausibility it might once have had, place great obstacles before the reader. The least we might say is that his contributions to musicology are flawed by a narrow-minded obsession with ideas whose time has passed.Read more at location 2603
Richard Taruskin, in his History of Western Music,' treats Adorno with the impatience that he invites, this is a rare departure from the now routine adulation that is bestowed by the American musicological establishment.Read more at location 2606
His criticism of popular music is presented from an avowedly left-wing perspective, as part of the cultural critique of capitalist society.Read more at location 2608
In the first instance, therefore, we should see the adulation of Adorno as politically inspired.Read more at location 2611
He showed American musicologists that you can despise popular culture and still believe in the ideological rescue of its captives. You can be a cultural elitist and yet on the side of the underdog. Read more at location 2612
Eliot defended high culture as the citadel in which the past and its treasures are sequestered, maintained by people conscious of their membership of an elite, who must nevertheless cultivate within themselves the kind of humility and self-sacrifice that have been associated with the Christian religion.Read more at location 2616
As a result Eliot's book has had little impact on the academic establishment in America, and the critique of mass culture has proceeded as though it were a left-wing monopoly. Read more at location 2618
Yet Eliot was a modernist, who believed modernism to be continuous with the great traditions of European artistic expression. He vindicated the artistic experimentsRead more at location 2619
Ordinary Americans, in Adorno's view, were oppressed by the music that they had been misled into liking, just as they were oppressed by advertising, by the consumer culture, by Hollywood, by the idols of the marketplace-inRead more at location 2625
critique of their musical culture was primarily a critique of the capitalist systemRead more at location 2626
Now I believe that Adorno, bad manners apart, was right to care about the decline of popular taste, and right to think that it matters what we listen to and how. But I believe that he arrived at this position from the wrong premises,Read more at location 2637
Culture, according to Marx, belongs to the institutional and ideological superstructure of society. It is the by-product of economic processesRead more at location 2641
Against that vision, which seems to relegate culture and the arts to the historical sidelines, the Frankfurt school (Horkheimer and Adorno in particular) argued that a properly theoretical approach to criticism would undermine the false consciousness that facilitated `bourgeois relations of production', and so contribute to loosening the grip of the capitalist economy. The enslavement exerted by capitalism is exerted at every level-theRead more at location 2643
Adorno took his cue from the theory of `commodity fetishism' expounded in Das Kapital.Read more at location 2648
In a capitalist economy, he suggested, people are enslaved not by others but by themselves, falling victim to the charm with which they invest the commodities that glitter all around them.Read more at location 2655
The cultural fetish is marked by its `standardized' nature, its routine presentation of predigested material, and its refusal to question its own status as a commodity. Read more at location 2664
in the mass culture of capitalism subjects become objects and objects become subjects!Read more at location 2674
But this observation is tortured into philosophical jargon,Read more at location 2679
The jargon merely evokes a conclusion that Adorno fails to prove, namely that Bach is great because his music is on the right side of history-the side that seeks utopia, and which preserves, in objective form, the real freedom of the subject. Read more at location 2681
This question returns us to the revolutionary spirit of the Sixties and Seventies.Read more at location 2682
Adorno's attack on mass culture belonged to the same movement of ideas as Marcuse's denunciation of `repressive tolerance'.Read more at location 2686
Having said that, I want to acknowledge that the Frankfurt critique of the consumer society contains an element of truth. It is a truth far older than the Marxist theories with which Adorno and Horkheimer embellished it. Indeed it is the truth enshrined in the Hebrew Bible, reformulated time and again down the centuries: the truth that, in bowing down to idols, we betray our better nature.Read more at location 2695
By turning to God we become what we truly are, creatures of a higher world, whose fulfilment is something more than the satisfaction of our wishes.Read more at location 2698
worship that ennobles and redeems us, and the superstition that drops us in the ditch.Read more at location 2702
here is where Adorno profoundly differed from the revolutionaries of the Sixties, even while speaking a language which they thought they could use.Read more at location 2704
But the redemption that Adorno promised was not to be achieved by social reform: it was a personal salvation, a turning away from fantasies, on a voyage of self-discovery.Read more at location 2706
`liberation' which adds sex, sin and idleness to the list of consumer products is merely another name for the old enslavement.Read more at location 2710
It is about art, and the difference between true art and its idolatrous substitutes. True art matters because it puts us in touch with what we really are,Read more at location 2713
Like other such critiques, from Ruskin and Arnold to Eliot and Leavis, it is downstream from the Old Testament condemnation of idolatry.Read more at location 2717
The only revolution that Adorno can envisage is one that takes place in the world of culture itself-not a political but an aesthetic revolution,Read more at location 2719
First, there is the attempt to give a general theory of kitsch, and a justification for avoiding it.Read more at location 2725
Thirdly (and derivatively) there is the attack on tonality and the defence of the Schoenbergian alternative.Read more at location 2726
A new human type has emerged, for whom commitment, responsibility, heroism and heartfelt love are all to be avoided,Read more at location 2731
The world of kitsch is a world of trinkets, which we cling to as proof that we can be good without effort and loved without pain. By contrast, every true artistic gesture constitutes an appeal to our higher nature, an attempt to affirm the other realm in which moral and spiritual order prevails.Read more at location 2734
The American song is not art in the manner of Schubert or Brahms, still less in the manner of Schoenberg or Berg: its every feature spoke to Adorno of big business, celebrity singers and mass entertainment.Read more at location 2749
During Adorno's youth composers and musicologists set out to collect and preserve the folk music of Europe.Read more at location 2753
The explanation has something to do with industrialization and the loss of status of the rural way of life. But it also has much to do with the conquest of Europe by America.Read more at location 2759
Europeans had begun to be captivated by that `Great American Songbook'Read more at location 2762
One conclusion to draw from the history of American popular music is that we should take the word `popular' seriously-far more seriously than it was taken by Adorno. Pace Adorno and Horkheimer, this music was not imposed upon the American people by an unscrupulous `culture industry' eager to exploit the most degenerate aspects of popular taste. It arose `by an invisible hand' from spontaneous music-making,Read more at location 2776
Animated by what Paul Ricoeur called `the hermeneutics of suspicion', they have looked for the hidden power behind every custom, and the `structures' that control every choice. Read more at location 2791
His alternative is not another and better popular music. His alternative is utopia,Read more at location 2824
In other words, by teaching that popular music must be rejected in its entirety, Adorno opened the way to the inverse attitude, that popular music must be accepted in its entirety. A blanket criticism is no criticism at all.Read more at location 2829
Adorno has been useful to the postmodern musicologist. By presenting judgement as a form of total condemnation, Adorno consigned judgement to the dustheap.Read more at location 2832
It is only by making discriminations within the realm of popular music that we can encourage young people to recognize the difference between genuine musical sentiment and kitsch,Read more at location 2833
what should we think of modernism, in the other arts as well as in music, now that its manifesto stage is over? Adorno's claim in The Philosophy of Modern Music was that tonality had exhausted itself.Read more at location 2841
We have no doubt that cliches are, in the artistic context, a fault:Read more at location 2846
Those approaches to musical cliche recall the treatment of verbal cliche by a writer like Samuel Becket, who uses cliches against themselves,Read more at location 2857
opposite-the equivalent in music of a transformational grammar."Read more at location 2860
Cliche is an aesthetic, not a syntactical, defect-a misuse of language that belongs to the order of style rather than that of grammar. And we must, if Adorno is right, say something similar about tonality. Read more at location 2861
If tonality is not a grammar, then the faults that have arisen in the use of tonality will not be cured by inventing a new musical syntax.Read more at location 2863
revolt against figurative painting soon produced abstract, cubist and fauvist cliche-indeed,Read more at location 2867
Adorno's defence of the avant-garde of his day was based on the view that 'standardization' could not take root in this idiom, which would always question its own status as a commodity and refuse to be driven by aesthetic routines.Read more at location 2869
the musical landscape today is strewn with avant-garde kitsch. Read more at location 2871
Adorno argued that the addiction to musical fetishes-by which he means the standardized effects of popular music-produces a 'regression' in the art of listening, what we might today call a shrinking attention span.Read more at location 2874
Works like Adams's Harmonium or Torke's colour poems are essentially static, using repetition and rhythmic pulse to generate a forward movement that is led neither by the harmony nor by the melodic voices. The experience of `unfolding' which we associate with the great works of the classical tradition seems to have been lost,Read more at location 2889
Adorno's alternative than it tells against the attempts at symphonic form by the tonal modernists-as in the Walton and Britten concertos, or the symphonies of Shostakovitch.Read more at location 2895
The best that the serial idiom has achieved in the direction of sustained argument is surely the Violin Concerto of Berg, which leans at every point upon tonal relations and reminiscences, to the point of belonging fairly within the tradition of voice-led harmony that Schoenberg, in his own Violin Concerto,Read more at location 2896
shortened attention span and the emergence of addictive forms of entertainment are products of the new media rather than residues of the tonal tradition. Read more at location 2902
it seems to me that we should retrace our steps and revisit the attempts by composers to learn from the example of song-both folk song and the jazz-influenced songbook.Read more at location 2903
Although this means a return from large-scale forms to the strophic idiom of natural music, it also involves a return to the crucible of tonality, in which the tonal order is first crystallized from the soup of sound. That, it seems to me, is the direction taken by Debussy; and he was followed by Janacek, Dutilleux, Britten, Messiaen and many more-brilliant musicians who were led by their ears and not by theories, even if they were capable, like Messiaen, of theorizing at the highest level.Read more at location 2904
