>The Jameson quote is interesting. I'm not familiar with Jameson. Is this
>essay relatively recent? His comments on the nature of polyphony and monody,
>or rather his idea of what is "natural" and "unnatural" in each, would be
>hard to excuse if expressed in a time such as our own, in which it is really
>not TOO difficult to hear, say, classical Indian music. For, there is an
>example of music which is not polyphonic, yet manifests the same "concert"
>psychology that he attributes purely to the Western (European) polyphonic
>world. In short, these comments ignore the reality of music as it is, not to
>mention their apparent and too convetional cultural bias. You might do
>better examining this for yourself, rather than relying on Jameson's
>authority.
Marxism & Form was published in 1971, and Adorno's musical thought was formed in the 1930s and 1940s. I doubt Jameson could have lived through the 60s without exposure to Indian music, but Adorno's probably another story. He had no interest in anything nonwestern, did he?
Doug