> I really want to get around to reading Adorno's stuff on music first
> hand because he's such a bugbear for 'snobbery'.
I agree with Dennis R. that Adorno's writing on music is unprecedented and excellent, especially in its attention to the relation between the music and social-political-economic conditions. It's in moments like the one I quoted, and in his stuff on popular music, where he relies on transcendent critique, with its universals and criteria and standards, but those moments are pretty localized and usually occur in his more polemical moments.
>I agree with you on
> both counts. His counterposing of Schoenberg (yay) and Stravinsky
> (boo) (or so I have heard) might be a more interesting one since
> clearly something seemed to be at stake in the divergent directions
> they took music, but from today's perspective there doesn't seem to be
> any barrier to thinking they were both pretty awesome.
Yes, I agree. I don't remember his exact objections to Stravinsky very well, but I remember thinking as I read them that they were basically ideological. That is, like his criticism of Sibelius, the music, and its devotees, is suspect because it shares some common philosophical position with Nazism/fascism/capitalism. That's fine so far as it goes, but what I liked about the blog post was that it emphasized that even the most rigid of "forms" have their elements of escape (lines of flight), their deterritorializations amid the territorial cries. Adorno is often very blind to these.
> By the way, have you checked out 'Noise and Capitalism'? - pdf at
> http://www.mattin.org/ Although I fundamentally disagree with most of
> the contributors I've found it a pretty interesting book.
I downloaded it a while ago and read one of the essays (Brassier's?) and it didn't do much for me so I didn't read anymore. But I'll check out some of the other articles.