>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.
>
This comes off like someone who doesn't realize that social and economic justice have a primary role in the change of musical audience. But that couldn't be true, could it?
>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.
>
Jeez, what an imperialist snob. What about Sumo wrestling, that's a world in itself, as I'm sure many other eastern idioms were.
>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.
>
I gotta get some of this stuff! Sounds great.
>replaces the living warmth of the older instrument, which
>expressed life, where the newer one merely simulates it.
>
What a bunch of elitist crap. I've got a tuba solo on a Carla Bley album
that almost makes ya cry.
>And if musical forms evolve in response to their public (church and salon
>music being little by little supplanted by middle-class spectator forms),
>
Almost sounds like he yearns for a time when the rabble didn't bother their
betters.
>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.
>
>Daniel
I think Jameson is trying to justify the difficulty of Adorno's writing here, by saying that you shouldn't question something without a privilaged position of exposure ie, you know all the background, and everything the author knows. Reminds me of the nuns I used to drive batty on Tues. afternoons.
You're right Doug, the writing is flawless, but the motives are suspect.
pms