> I forget whether it's you or Ramsdell who's the big
> Adorno fan. Yesterday's
> New York Times reports that "In fact, no other
> figure has influenced
> American musicology more during the last 20 years. A
> major new
> collection, "Essays on Music" (University of
> California), scrupulously
> edited with commentary by Richard Leppert, a
> professor of cultural
> studies at the University of Minnesota, will codify
> that accomplishment
> further, by adding new translations by Susan H.
> Gillespie to essays
> spanning Adorno's career, from his 1929 examination
> of Berg's opera
> "Wozzeck" to essays written in the years before his
> death in 1969.
> The book seems a ready-made classroom text for the
> growing Adorno
> industry. Out of the scores of secondary-sources
> cited, nearly all come
> from the last two decades.
> That growth is astounding...." etc.
>
<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/14/arts/music/14CONN.html>
>
> I don't know about Rothstein's conclusion though:
> "...There is even something heroic about his
> philosophical enterprise. But there is also
> something
> perverse. For while with one hand he caresses the
> 19th- and 20th-century art-music tradition,
> mourning its marginality and meticulously teasing
> out its meanings, with the other hand he tries,
> again and again, to sweep away the contentious,
> striving, bourgeois world that gave it birth." Any
> comments? Anybody?
I'm unfortunately only familiar with the music essays in _Prisms_ - the new collection sounds great. As for the Rothstein's conclusion, might it not be eliding a bit?
>From _The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass
Deception_:
"Amusement and all the elements of the culture industry existed long before the latter came into existence. Now they are taken over from above and brought up to date. The culture industry can pride itself on having energetically executed the previously clumsy transposition of art into the sphere of consumption, on making this a principle, on divesting amusement of its obtrusive naïvetes and improving the type of commodities. The more absolute it became, the more ruthless it was in forcing every outsider either into bankruptcy or into a syndicate, and became more refined and elevated - until it ended up as a synthesis of Beethoven and the Casino de Paris. It enjoys a double victory: the truth it extinguishes without it can reproduce at will as a lie within. "Light" art as such, distraction, is not a decadent form. Anyone who complains that it is a betrayal of the ideal of pure expression is under an illusion about society. *The purity of bourgeois art, which hypostasised itself as a world of freedom in contrast to what was happening in the material world, was from the beginning bought with the exclusion of the lower classes - with whose cause, the real universality, art keeps faith precisely by its freedom from the ends of the false universality.* [my emphasis] Serious art has been withheld from those for whom the hardship and oppression of life make a mockery of seriousness, and who must be glad if they can use time not spent at the production line just to keep going. Light art has been the shadow of autonomous art. It is the social bad conscience of serious art. The truth which the latter necessarily lacked because of its social premises gives the other the semblance of legitimacy. The division itself is the truth: it does at least express the negativity of the culture which the different spheres constitute. Least of all can the antithesis be reconciled by absorbing light into serious art, or vice versa. But that is what the culture industry attempts."
Also, about this:
"For Adorno, the pained expressionism of Schoenberg's music was truth-telling, while the technologically crisp creations of Stravinsky were not."
This is understandable from one who writes: "The neurotic reaction is that which hits on the true state of affairs, while the one adjusted to reality already discounts the relationship as dead. The cleansing of human beings of the murk and impotence of affects is in direct proportion to the advance of dehumanization." [_Messages in a Bottle_: VII]
Alec
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