This passage from Jameson is very fine. But, how is it that a violin expresses life but a saxophone only simulates it? A jazz saxophone, for example, certainly seems capable of great expressiveness.
michael yates
Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> Daniel wrote:
>
> >But, Doug, if you cannot appreciate Schoenberg,
>
> I do, personally. But I spent lots of years studying & listening to the
> Western musical canon. Now, though, I listen mainly to arty rock & roll.
>
> ?why do you jump to the
> >conclusion that it has something to do with education?
>
> There may be some people who find a tone row instinctively compelling, but
> I doubt there are very many. It doesn't necessarily require formal
> education, but it does require experience and socialization.
>
> >The reasons for the cultural domination of popular music today have their
> >origin in the political economy.
>
> True. And some of it is very very good, too, to apply recklessly standards
> of aesthetic value. But on the oddity of classical music and the origins of
> the popular kind, it's hard to do better than this passage from Jameson's
> Adorno essay. I hadn't read in 20 years. Damn, it's good.
>
> Doug
>
> ----
>
> [from Jameson's Marxism & Form, pp. 12-15]
>
> Yet even the specialized is sometimes taken for granted, even highly
> sophisticated techniques can come to seem natural in the general
> indistinction of everyday life. So it turns out that to assess the full
> originality of Adorno's historical vision, we must try to bring a new
> unfamiliarity to some of the social phenomena we are accustomed to take for
> granted: to stare, for instance, with the eyes of a foreigner at the row
> upon row of people in formal clothing, seated without stirring within their
> armchairs, each seemingly without contact with his neighbors, yet at the
> same time strangely divorced from any immediate visual spectacle, the eyes
> occasionally closed as in powerful concentration, occasionally scanning
> with idle distraction the distant cornices of the hall itself. For such a
> spectator it is not at once clear that there is any meaningful relationship
> between this peculiar behavior and the bewildering tissue of instrumental
> noises that seems to provide a kind of background for it, like Arab
> musicians playing behind their curtain. What is taken for granted by us is
> not apparent to such an outsider, namely that the event around which the
> concert hall is itself established consists precisely of attention to that
> stream of sound patterns entering in at the ear, to the organized and
> meaningful succession of a nonverbal sign-system, as to a kind of purely
> instrumental speech.
>
> For Western polyphonic music is "unnatural" precisely to the degree to
> which it has no institutional equivalent in any other culture. Though it
> has its origins in ritual, though its earliest forms are not essentially
> distinct from the dance and chant, the pure monody of other cultures,
> Western music in its most characteristic forms has severed its ties with
> those primitive musical activities in which the musical substance, still
> involved in concrete life and social reality, may be said to have remained
> representational, to have preserved something like a content. There is no
> longer a mere difference in degree, but rather an absolute one in kind,
> between the older, functional music and this, which has developed an
> autonomy of its own, has acquired the status of an event in its own right,
> and requires its participants to suspend their other activities in the
> exercise of some alert but nonverbal mental capacity which had never been
> used before, with the conviction that something real is taking place during
> fifteen or twenty minutes of practical immobility. It is as if a new sense
> had been invented (for the active, interpretive concentration which marks
> such listening is as distinct from ordinary hearing as is mathematical
> language from ordinary speech), as if a new organ had been developed, a new
> type of perception formed. What is particularly noteworthy is the poverty
> of the materials from which such new perception has been fashioned; for the
> ear is the most archaic of the senses, and instrumental sounds are far more
> abstract and inexpressive than words or visual symbols. Yet in one of those
> paradoxical reversals that characterize the dialectical process, it is
> precisely this primitive, regressive starting point that determines the
> development of the most complex of the arts.
>
> Finally, we must observe that inasmuch as Western music is not natural but
> historical, inasmuch as its development depends so intensely upon the
> history and development of our own culture, it is mortal as well, and has
> it in it to die as a genuine activity, to vanish when it has served its
> purpose and when that social need which it once answered has ceased to
> exist. The fact that the production of so-called classical records has
> become a big business in the present day should not make us lose sight of
> the privileged relationship between the golden age of Western music and a
> Central Europe in which a significant proportion of the collectivity
> performed music and knew it from the inside, in a qualitatively different
> fashion from the passive consumers of our own time. In much the same way
> such a genre as the epistolary novel loses its very reason for being and
> its social as well as linguistic basis in a period when letter writing is
> no longer an important everyday activity and an institutionalized form of
> communication. So also certain types of lyric poetry vanish from cultures
> in which conversation and verbal expression are colorless and without life,
> lacking in any capacity for those twin forms of expansion which are
> eloquence or figuration.
>
> So it is that Western music at the very outset marks itself off from the
> culture as a whole, reconstitutes itself as a selfcontained and autonomous
> sphere at distance from the everyday social life of the period and
> developing, as it were, parallel to it. Not only does music thereby acquire
> an internal history of its own, but it also begins to duplicate on a
> smaller scale all the structures and levels of the social and economic
> macrocosm itself, and displays its own internal dialectic, its own
> producers and consumers, its own infrastructure.
>
> In it, for instance, as in the larger world of business and industry, we
> find a tiny history of inventions and machines, what might be called the
> engineering dimension of musical history: that of the instruments
> themselves, which stand in the same ambiguous relationship of cause and
> effect to the development of the works and forms as do their technological
> equivalents (the steam engine) in the world of history at large (the
> industrial revolution). They arrive on the scene with a kind of symbolic
> fitness: "it is not for nothing that the newly soulful tone of the violin
> counts among the great innovations of the age of Descartes ." Throughout
> its long ascendancy, indeed, the violin preserves this close identification
> with the emergence of individual subjectivity on the stage of philosophical
> thought. It remains a privileged medium for the expression of the emotions
> and demands of the lyrical subject, and the violin concerto, much like the
> Bildungsroman, stands as the vehicle for individual lyric heroics, while in
> other forms the massed orchestral strings conventionally represent the
> welling up of subjective feeling and of protest against the necessities of
> the objective universe. By the same token, when composers begin to suppress
> the singing violin tone and to orchestrate without strings or to transform
> the stringed instrument into a plucked, almost percussive device (as in the
> "ugly" pizzicati, the strummings and "weird" falsetto effects of
> Schoenberg), what happens to the violin is to be taken as a sign of the
> determination to express what crushes the individual, to pass from the
> sentimentalization of individual distress to a new, postindividualistic
> framework.
>
> In a similar way, the rise of the saxophone, in that commercial music which
> replaces the older folk art of the masses, has symbolic value: for with it
> vibration, the oscillation back and forth in place, supersedes the soaring
> of the violin as an embodiment of subjective excitement in the modern age,
> and a metallic sound, all pipes and valves, yet "sexually ambivalent" to
> the degree to which it "mediates between brass and woodwinds" ("being
> materially related to the former, while it remains woodwind in its mode of
> performance" ), replaces the living warmth of the older instrument, which
> expressed life, where the newer one merely simulates it.
>
> And if musical forms evolve in response to their public (church and salon
> music being little by little supplanted by middle-class spectator forms),
> so also they are influenced by the changing social functions of their
> performers as well. Wagner, himself a great conductor, for the first time
> undertakes to compose music in which the role of the virtuoso...