Some Thoughts on Music and Society

Gentle Reader,

  My efforts to derive completed books and essays from research and reflection have not succeeded. A great deal of what is probably best in my work, such as it may be, is in the form of aphorisms, short thoughts, sketches, surmises, and mulled possibilities. Apologies for the bits of untranslated German. Herewith a selection:

- An exceptionally curious regularity or tendency in western musics of the twentieth century: the rhythmic straightening out of uneven regular chains or sequences; ostensibly part of the abreaction to romanticism; announced in classical through partly ironic reinvocation of 18thc sewing machine rhythms Dumbarton Oaks I, SP opus 25, Hindemith Kammermusiken, and by telegraph rhythms of Schoenberg school, e.g., Webern op 19, Schoenberg opus 27; detectable as a trend sometimes in subtle absences (e.g. of dotted rhythms from Schoenberg op 25 finale), more so in the larger curves of rhythmic history, e.g. the rhythmic aspects of minimalism vis a vis avant garde serialism (which NB solved rhythmic unevenness at the level of phrase group and meter rather than beat, i.e. not through dotted rhythms but mathematical inequality)
o Jazz moves from heavy swing to light swing to polyrhythm to jazz-rock 8ths
o Rock moves from shuffle to even eighths to even sixteenths [funk] and even quarters [S Gadd, disco, eventually house, trance, and hip-hop]
- “Socrates, the illiterate,” mocks Nietzsche; but isn’t swing, in fact beat feeling generally, in fact all rhythmic momentum “that which can neither be written nor visually represented”? The genially elaborate metaphorical apparatus of a study like Cooper and Meyer’s {Cooper, 1960 #171} is at once an admission, denial, and demonstration…
- Again and nearly always, duration as a general model of rhythm is deficient. It ignores the constitution of beat from pulse, literally squashing flat the arcs of kinesis that animate the beat and meter, and inform them with the potential for sense. And it dilutes and mangles the real insight of Hanslick into the key reciprocity of form and rhythm. As durations, the profound thematic congruities between movements of a work like Brahms’s Piano Quintet or Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony are meaningless. In fact these connections are what make the sense of the entire experience; and they are not just intimately connected to but entirely a function of rhythm, understood, as it must be, not as a matter of temporal quantity but qualitative experience.
- If rhythm is understood as duration, jazz makes absolutely no sense. Durations are objective quanta, quantitatively (and hence temporally) invariant, measurable outside and without regard to the tangible context, and so defined in the strictest contradistinction to subjective, experiential quala. The animating pulse concept of jazz is intersubjective, at once objectively verifiable for anyone who has the time and a government research grant money to do this, and subjectively produced and generated. An unperceived duration is still a duration, since perception has no constitutive role; an unperceived beat is, quite literally, not a beat. (As I understand it so far, the cognitive approach is psychology’s attempt to cope with this elemental undermining of its aspirant objective foundations.)
- The holy grail of inquiry: unexceptionability; every objection is a misunderstanding or mistake. Husserl and Frege shared Eindeutigkeitswahn, of delusional faith in the chimera of univocal meaning.
- Despite his obvious reverence and deep artistic sympathy for the music of Bach, Mozart, and Haydn, Adorno’s conception of music clearly starts with Beethoven.
- High Post-modernism: once the holy state of (out)rage is attained, the need for reflection is transcended and abolished; even raising it as a memory, much less as the basis for a standard, is infra dig. Overcoming the obstacles to outrage as a privilege is the telos of inquiry, the post-modern version of intellectual and spiritual (self-)satisfaction.
- Any musical structure or relation that involves transposition is perforce tonal. (Does hip hop ever change key!?)
- An aestheticized ethics yields a grave misreading of Adorno. To unpack this comment means recalling, first, the radical weight of Wittgenstein’s suggestion that ethics and aesthetics are “the same”; second, that this was not always so (as enlightenment prose attests generally); third, that the connections between these two indistinguishable elements of a judgmental totality run in complex directions, and always at least both ways. Mere appreciation of Adorno’s brilliance, formidable as it so often is, cannot but lead to dialectical illusion; “ein Teil des Teils, das Anfangs alles war..”
- Adorno judges musical speech by the standard of musical writing, as if judging dinner party conversation or seminar discussion by the standard of essays and sonnets.
- (Listening to Jug & Groove play the blues:) Adorno’s association of jazz’s social unanimity with fascism is understandable, but syncretic. The intensely focussed, more-than-verbal collective excitement at the base of the jazz experience, swing, resembles the inchoate energy of a fascist rally only inasmuch as both are experiences irreducible to and tenaciously defiant of rational reflection and analysis. (I wonder if Adorno’s suspicions of opera, less often and corrosively expressed than his animadversions to jazz, may not be of a piece here? Adorno at his worst an Objectivist avant la lettre?)
- Representation in music is primarily a function of rhythm, if necessary as opposed to melody or harmony. Even the high-pitched violins in Verdi that represent angels and heaven typically lean on the enhancement of tremolo to make the symbolic point, and never move at a faster than heavenly tempo.
- Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Kraus, Mauthner, and Wittgenstein are entirely correct: moral accomplishment in inquiry is directly, if not entirely a function of suffering; on the part of the inquirer in the case of good and valid work, and by readers, where not.
- “Ahnung ersetzt Wissen.” No leftism believes this. The basis for the New Deal and Great Society was social compassion based in real knowledge of capitalism’s conditions, not in some abstract appeal to the innate. The anti-fascism of the non-Stalinist 20thc. left is quintessentially anti-essentialist.
- Adorno’s grounded anti-generic perspective is at once a surprisingly Husserlian or Weberian gesture of impatience with and resistance to presupposed categories and their attendant prejudices, and a remarkably lively invitation to rethink social and historical processes regularly hobbled by such categories. (Inter alia, this is the significance of his striking eschewal of Hegel’s terminological apparatus, and of jargon generally.)
- The problem with a notion of contradiction between lyric and music is that it perforce reduces one of these, usually the music, to a matter of tone, as in ‘tone of voice.’ The nuances of temporality are lost in the shuffle. Hanns Eisler’s eerie soundtrack for Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog, for example, is very much in contradiction to the subject matter of the film. But that is only true until one begins to understand the movie as a whole, to interpret it. That is not to say that interpretation suspends or overcomes contradictions, but rather that it often exposes the postulation of contradiction (“and leave it at that”) as common sense laziness.
- Can dialectics teach us when people mean exactly the opposite of what they’re saying? Can it help us with irony? O, doch..
- Warum denn hat Adorno keine eigentliche Sprachtheorie? Doch; sein ganzes Verhalten ist sie.
- Diamanda Galás: queen of the unintentionally comic wing of avant garde music. Have we forgotten the absurdities of organized religion so completely, and come to take ourselves so seriously that we no longer recognize how hell-fire sermons make their audiences titter nervously?
- Hegel: the absolute is subject. Husserl; the subject is absolute?
- Music analysts proceed uncomfortably often like clothing salesmen who are willing to break a customer’s legs in order make a pair of pants fit.
- Computer-composed music does not represent the adaptation of computers to human language and experience, but the reverse.
- Feminism’s crucial contributions to truth, have come at almost as great a cost in untruth as the insights themselves–like Freud, like Marx; like every other great contribution..
- On the sociology of syncretisms: when you misread something and speak from it as if from nurturing and sustaining source, you merely show that you need something else, but do not know how or where to find it; or where to find the courage to admit it when you do.
- Anything that can be labelled or identified with a small or capital letter belongs to structure, not to form; remarkably, this is as true of poetry as of music, and for entirely the same reasons; form is a result of structural combinations, not simply causally, or according to an apparent recipe, but in the sense of the dynamic or dialectic of parts and whole. Letters identify parts of the whole; form is the whole, or the relation of those parts to itself.
- Adorno’s nuanced skepticism about generic distinctions in music is of a piece with his doubts about definition and classification elsewhere. In music sociology proper, his quest is not as dissimilar to Schutz and Weber as it might at first appear. What these thinkers term intersubjectivity and verstehen are concepts aiming toward systematic insight that transcend equally subjective opinion and uninterpreted brute fact–a fair characterization of Adorno’s aims for music sociology.
- Critical concepts, concepts that are essentially critical, have destructive potential that can be difficult to understand and control. Should Orientalism®, for example, impel us to rule out Gunther Schuller’s marvelous invented Arab melody in Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee? Should a commitment to musical authenticity similarly preclude our potential appreciation of the clumsy (but undeniably endearing) pseudo-jazz of “Blue Devil” in the same piece? At the least, such unyielding conceptual deployments exercise a decidedly anti-dialectical influence on our lives. It is entirely possible to be annoyed or even appalled by the politics of representation unfolding in a work, yet engage it with sympathy, understanding, love, and learning, without offering up those qualities to the ostensibly enmeshed politics. Loving a work of art in no way equates to agreement with its message, always presuming it has one in the first place. There can hardly have been a more passionate Wagnerian than Anton Bruckner; but during a performance of Die Walküre he asked a companion a question so ludicrous that he plainly hadn’t the faintest idea what the story was, nor of any elements of the word-born “message” in the piece. To suggest that he was infected or even affected by Wagner’s sinister but wooly politics through his transcendent commitment to the scores is at best tendentious. What’s wrong with saying that critical concepts, or even all concepts, work best, help us most, when kept on a leash? That “leash” is our humanity.
- All desire has the form “I wish it were otherwise”–that I were 20 instead of 60, that I were healthy instead of sick; but equally “I wish that sandwich on the table were already consumed and my hunger were at an end right now,” and “I wish I had a sandwich on the table, that my hunger could end”–and “I wish the distribution of wealth in this society didn’t entail my starvation.”
- Pelleas a Freudian opera in no need of interpretation; it is itself the analysis.
- Logic is the analysis of a practice that sunders itself from that practice. Twentieth century logicians have spent much of their time coping with the consequences of this difficulty, evoked by Spinoza and Leibniz, and definitively formulated by Kant as transcendental logic. Compounding provocation from figures such as Gödel did not suffice to push their noses to the requisite grindstone. And it becomes clear now, depressingly, that even the cold water shock of ordinary language philosophy has not availed in the struggle against logic’s reckless positivism. Kant’s simple question, formidably tangible although diffused between the first and third critiques, remains unanswered: when you formulate a problem in either-or, quantitative terms, what exactly are you quantifying?
- Positivist musicology: notes cause music; like HIV causes AIDS..
- Some of the deepest syncretic illusions in Adorno’s animadversions toward jazz arise from a confusion of figure and ground. There are pieces that do not sound like what they are. Debussy’s remarkable Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp does not sound like the avant garde masterpiece it is, but like salon music. Of course attentive listening will suffice to reclassify it properly; but although attentive listening is or should be a given, its tasks and results are not invariant. Beethoven’s opus 132 “alla tedesca” is a similar case in point; it is the context of the whole piece that makes it plain this is not a cassation, however much the audible notes and rhythms suggest otherwise. Adorno certainly never addresses, and possibly never heard any of the jazz performances that make the profundity of standard song transformation obvious; Thelonious Monk’s “Carolina Moon,” Miles Davis’s and Bill Evans’s respective versions of “Someday My Prince Will Come,” and Gil Evans’s borderline unrecognizable rethinking of Kurt Weill’s “Barbara Song” are among the more august. What they signify about jazz as a musical possibility is quintessential, however, and something of a defining element of the music. The tune is virtually nothing more than a starting point for creative exploration and enunciation, whether through arrangement, performance, or improvised variation. Absent such a transformation process, the result cannot be jazz in the fullest sense. [[A slightly fanciful but apt comparison is the difference between sonata and sonatina; the latter lacks the development of musical ideas that is quintessential to the former. The difference is defined not so much by formal abstractions as the active, narrative role of ideas and intellectual process in the musical experience.]] That the majority of what one hears never achieves such status is coincidental to the point; Adorno recognizes [On Pop, beginning pages] that most classical composing is epigonal, too. Withal: jazz is transformation of given material. (This is true even in free improvisation, where the “given material” appears to be non-existent.) The commitment of authenticity, to the extent that it exists at all, is to the musicians on the stand, the audience–and the tradition. Insisting that the banal musical working material of jazz delimits its capacities for transformation is like calling milled steel a pile of rocks.
- There is no evidence for relativism; how could there be? By its own statutes, no reality can be established through externally derived conviction;  by definition, these are chimera. But there are experiences, logical and otherwise, that incline us to commit to relativism. Significant among these is the impossibility of imputation for broad and fundamental categories of our lives; it would be worth studying what all is included. Meaning itself is among the primary ones. It is impossible to tell someone that something is meaningful, or meaningless for that matter, and thereby make it so. The folk wisdom “you can lead a horse to water, but can’t make him drink” puts the matter smartly; it does not, however, prove that all horses are solipsists. It is on the one hand a peculiar and specific failing of western thought, especially in the massively positivist post-Enlightenment Cartesian age, that the intersubjectivity of crucial concepts is veiled, almost systematically rendered inaccessible. But, on the other, it is a tragedy of the human condition, beyond critique or, most certainly, blame. We simply do not live long enough to learn language..
- A definition is a guide to finding similarities. A strict definition provides rules, where applicable, and a loose definition, just intuitive suggestions; all definitions are loose.
- The shift to verbal expression by composers amounts to a shift in social role, and a change in discursive paradigm. The composer is someone who, having expressed himself, must now explain himself. The discourse of music becomes the discourse of the musician, as such incompletely meaningful or comprehensible on its own, unabetted terms, in need of elucidative treatises, interviews, and other reassurances of the composer’s character, intention, and other forms of self-generated paraphrase.
- Birdsong is objectively not music; subjectively, it is, or can be very easily. This is a good case for Adorno’s insistence on maintaining the subject-object distinction(s); attempting to resolve bird song as music intersubjectively could generate nothing but confusion. (Wittgenstein on the duck-rabbit and seeing as.)
- Structuralism: Kantianism without a transcendental subject. Animism: Kantianism with only a transcendental subject. The transcendental subject is not “the subject, only more so,” not a principle of individuation but, on the contrary, a guarantee of the generality of meaning. (Only in bourgeois philosophy and society could it be taken for an individual formation.) It is a principle of meaning, not of individuality; in this sense, the animist perspective is also Kantian, breaking away only in extending the synthesis of the manifold in all and every direction. Arguably, however, animism does not necessarily entail what Kant rejects as transcendence per se; but it casts the web of association and semantic connection far too widely for a Newtonian like Kant.
- The death of God does not begin with “God is dead to us,” but with “we are dead to God.” It is not a loss of perception, belief, or knowledge, but a loss of connection, of reciprocity & synthesis.
- mwm principle of coincidence rightly rejects the implications of chance, especially in the narrower senses, emphasizing that “a throw of the dice does abolish chance”; coincidence is the ultimate, farthest principle of Kantian synthetic order.
- What is Adorno’s conception of rhetoric? It is after all an historically crucial philosophy of the balance of semantic parts & wholes. In particular, the cultural sensitivity to the real spontaneity of improvised discourses seems virtually unavailable without a sympathetic and understanding view of rhetorical practice. Adorno’s charge the there is less improvisation in jazz than meets the ear is a case in point. Rhetorically, at least in broad principle, it doesn’t matter if every single phrase of a jazz solo is a pet lick; if they are well put together, which to say musically convincing, then the solo is good, and so is the music. Adorno’s argument attempts in principle to bar this possibility–which, that I can see, it cannot do, because such a ban is impossible, and false to the way meaning works.
- In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein treated ethics and aesthetics as “one and the same,” because they shared a common defect: what they aimed to say was true but unspeakable, incapable of coherent expression. In other words, the defect was an absent semantic basis. By the time of Philosophical Investigations, he came to a contextual, proto-sociological view of language that blocked aesthetic statements on new grounds, but opened the door to them on others. The former are the insistence that the worlds of everyday usage are the historical source of terms and concepts, and therefore normative; philosophical usage is aberrational. This is at once untrue and unfair. Western history has never been without a complement of philosophers and philosophical practitioners. And as long as there have been taverns, there have been denizens of them eager to discuss matters of artistic merit and quality. To rule out aesthetic statements as nonsense would require an examination of the language game contexts in which they transpire. Hence I was only half kidding in offering taverns as such a locus. To claim that philosophy is “language on holiday” is itself an ethical proposition, entailing a holiday of social purpose on the part of the philosophical speakers. Bar room arguments about the identity of the greatest rock band, or classical composer, or hockey team appear to be tailor made examples of discursive futility. Is that really all there is to aesthetics? (Even logical futility can be a valued practice.)
- Non-musicians ask when something happens in music; musicians ask where.
- This way lies madness–or sanity: because an idea or a practice is analogous in two systems, does that always mean it is comparable?
- After millennia of love tragedies, suddenly sexual tragedy emerges at the end of the 19thc.: Ethan Frome, Salomé [both versions], Spring’s Awakening & the Lulu plays (again, both versions); arguably, even, Gatsby; was all this the fruit of Freud & Weininger? Far more likely, the theory and the narrative practice are symptoms of the same moment of cultural realization. If that is so, Le Sacre, Munch’s Scream and the first of Schönberg’s Orchestra Pieces fit tidily into our list of artworks. The anxiety of the prewar years was libidinal; and, as Freud ultimately realized, libidinally connected to the agony of mortality.
- Recontextualization as a/the core principle of musical history: new lyrics for song principle, new uses/functions for dance, e.g., non piu andrai turned into dance music, the various Eroica Contredanses
- Academic composers are very well aware of the most expressive devices of harmony, and sometimes even rhythm; but they are rarely sensible of how to use them..
- There are two forms of anthropological disaster: the one that presumes relativism; and the one that does not. Prime examples of the latter include Heidegger’s and Freud’s, which err in universalizing, essentially through projection, certain western concepts and notions of concept. Heidegger supplements the error with foolish ethnocentrism. The relativist version, with which nearly everyone within the discipline of anthropology must struggle, tells a story likely without a beginning, and definitely without an end; absent these broad but crucial narrative markers, it struggles to find a meaningful middle, too.
- Like history, anthropology must presuppose some general canvas, of which each of its parts is a part. That is not to say that said canvas must entail a grand narrative or cosmic universal account of human nature. On the contrary, an anthropological perspective that aims for truth by riding roughshod over the relations of rule & exception will produce vacuous oversimplifications of the order of Oswald Spengler, or a night in which all cows are black. But the point is that ethnological exceptions are not exceptions to any rule, if by “rule” we understand a notion that is invariably correct unless otherwise demonstrated. There are no anthropological universals, save for such biological banalities as “all peoples eat, drink, reproduce, sleep, die, and speak.” That level of generality drains these verbs of their potential for social coherence, which can only arise in the situation of real actors and real actors’ dilemmas. As a number of excellent postwar anthropologists realized, the model anthropologist is Max Weber, who effectively universalizes nothing–the anodyne, near-tautological descriptive pair “means” and “ends” that constitutes rationalization can hardly count as concepts at all, much less universals–and generalizes only the social actors’ dilemma. His model of understanding builds in both the infinite variety of solutions to the general dilemma, and a possible level of coherent reaction to the intrinsic relativist riot.
- Does the philosophical concept of dialogue, as developed by Bakhtin & others, necessarily imply ‘with peers’? And would that stipulation predetermine the power relations involved? There may be different styles of or approaches to dialogue in the case of our awe-inspiring superiors, or with our indubitable inferiors. The latter means especially or even entirely, the less experienced. But nothing about dialogue intrinsically requires condescension or servility, for congruent reasons. Neither of these is respect, which is the true condition for dialogue. I cannot imagine someone worthy of listening to me whom I don’t find worthy of listening to myself..
- The purely specious causal connections of fad: because this is now relevant, that can no longer be..
- Music and society: regardless of whether arrived at intuitively or rationally, because this difference may well not obtain, “this belongs here rather than there” is no less a life decision than an artistic one; it both comes from and returns to incalculably broad and many-sided dimensions of both.
- Reading Mauthner’s Philosophical Dictionary: roughly contemporary with Saussure’s Course, and strikingly cognate on some important levels. The philosopher and the linguist agree on the social, so to speak anthropological bases of semantic process, and both understand these processes as the quintessence of human history; Wilhelm Dilthey is their ghostly cousin. Although an essentially Kantian conception, Saussure’s langue-parole distinction is strongly dialectically inflected, in that the connection between these two levels of semantic possibility is neither logically invariant, hierarchical, nor spatial, but temporal and suffused with the uncertainty of experimentation. (Saussure may the first to take this universal uncertainty of semantic outcome seriously.) Mauthner, the nominalist, already prefigures the anti-essentialism of post-modernism, and its purportedly innovative attacks on myths of origin. Like Saussure, Mauthner locates the very possibility of meaning in the origin-less process of change and adaptation, in quintessential and primordial borrowings that seem to defy innovation altogether. In some ways, the problem is minor, or trivial; a linguist is someone who concentrates on building materials and core design rather than on architectural creativity; perforce the latter’s light beclouds.
But where is process in Adorno? Of any of this description? His anthropology leans to essentialism, with socio-economic in place of platonic ideas; some of the vulgarity of vulgar Marxism infects his anthropology. [develop]
- Hmm; time to cut these rascals down to sighs..
- The two stances Adorno’s dialectic crowds out are: neutral and engaged. Virtually every other philosophy aims to push us toward one of these; Adorno pushes us away from both or, more concisely, confronts us with the real difficulties and limitations attendant on both. (In this respect especially, reducing the sense or merit of his thought to the limitations of his own projections, naked as these can be, is a ruinous, self-costly mistake; precisely as with Hegel or Marx–or any “founder of discursivity.”)
- Adorno only hears the finitude of the chord change cycle, not the endlessness of its variation; Haydn variation pieces could be heard in the same recklessly unsympathetic way, with the same misjudgment resultant.
- The melody of a tune in jazz is one level of consistency in a network of consistency and variation; neither less nor more.
- A genre is a set of possibilities more or less recognizably connected in their realization. Hence the futility of most genre discussions, which focus on the generic actuality of a work or piece, perforce on the basis of impossibly metaphysical criteria. Where possibility is invoked at all in generic evaluation, it is in the vacuous guide of the author’s intention–which rarely, if ever, makes anything possible.
- In classical music, the (general) form is precast, and the (particular) structure a result; in jazz, it’s the other way around. Even knowledgeable jazz listeners would have a hard time, while listening to formidable improvisers like Coltrane or Parker in mid-flight, imagining where the solo is headed. That doesn’t mean that it’s formless, however; it does mean that jazz lacks Fernhören, the simultaneous forwards and backwards connection of all functional ideas. Fernhören presupposes a clear formal shape, however, or a clear variation on a formal shape, such as Franck’s ingenious but instantly comprehensible cyclical versions of the sonata idea in his Symphony and Violin Sonata. The structures of classic jazz are precast–but not the form. It is not a coincidental affectation that from the beginning, musically profound improvisers such as Armstrong and Beiderbecke worked to push the structure into the background, to make its strongest points of articulation only sometimes clearly perceptible. At other points, they virtually work against the pre-composed articulation of structure, and even against the structure itself. (The bebop trick of suddenly handing the baton to the next soloist in the middle of a chorus is an extreme and melodramatic but subtly characteristic instance of the principle.) By the time of Charlie Parker, barely more than a decade later, “the assault on the barline” had picked up WMD. It is possible that some profoundly, quasi-Schenkerian theory of jazz might be able to uncover the larger patterns of Parker’s address to the beat. To my knowledge, no one has attempted this, because the freedom to start and end a phrase on any beat or part of a beat is evidently quintessential to Parker’s musical logic. Crudely put: even if there is a pattern, there is no pattern, because the phrase logic is conversational and rhetorical. The functional rationale for this formal freedom is exactly to make the structure disappear–as a temporal pattern, among other things. That is to say that it is often difficult to identify where Parker is in the unfolding structure without highly focussed attention, even for musicians, and genuinely impossible to say where he is in the musical form: because this only emerges, and only can emerge, once his performance is completed. Where classical form and Fernhören, based on the actions of a single controlling intellect, not only permit but virtually demand coherence in multiple directions of time, jazz only knows one, forward. Every attempt to impose Fernhören as a discipline on jazz improvisation has ended in embarrassing syncretic failure, just as insisting that Franck or Berg constantly break up the beat and measure would do to composition. [[There are exceptions, often fascinating. Anton Webern’s Orchestral Variations opus 30 constantly shift tempo and meter, and create a rhythmic effect broadly similar to jazz in some ways. But in others, the effect is exactly the opposite, as Webern achieves his variety by obscuring the pulse itself, where classic jazz intensified the beat while blurring the rhythmic articulation of the harmonic structure. Even when jazz musicians did obscure or complicate the beat, in the free jazz of Cecil Taylor and the later work of John Coltrane, the result was more akin to multiplication than substraction.]]
- The social premise and promise of rationality is its potential control over irrationality. At the least, the myriad analyses of ideology proffer rationality’s struggles to cope with its opposite through explication.
- Representation is foremost a narrative principle; if and when it becomes a political power principle, its is always under that aegis, and within those constraints–which are broad, but not infinite, nor infinitely malleable.
- Brahms: human perfection..
- A bizarre irony of synecdoche: if you quote an American hymn or parlour song, you are at the same time most often quoting Ives!
- “Beethoven’s late quartets raise profound philosophical questions.” “How do you know that?” If it is true that the latter can be posed in response to any statement, then it has the limitations of empty universality. In the guise of a question, it is a tautology. Behind its breadth of abstraction lies in ineluctable peril of endlessly heterogeneous answers. However much the single question may appear to be a universally bracing challenge to the responsibility of every possible speech act, the question itself cannot of itself successfully render coherent the range of outcomes and responses.
- It would be absurdly easy to show the externality and irrelevance of duration and sequence to musical time and rhythm, that they do not and cannot have constitutive roles in musical experience. Both can vary, virtually arbitrarily, with only secondary impact on the musical experiences. The repeats signs in Mozart and Haydn 18thc. works are almost never played. It is the custom, in other words, the radically change the sequences of these pieces. The sequence of parts and of individual tones, words, and sonorities is different in virtually every performance of Boris Godunov. As with 18thc. music, this affects the experience, and makes sometimes radical differences in its quality; but it does not make for a new experience every time. Duration, too, can change with little substantial or defining effect on the music; does Furtwängler’s ad lib rit. destroy Beethoven’s 5th? Duration and sequence are descriptive and secondary, not constitutive, appearances to the contrary! It is the relation between “durations” that defines the experience, not the durations themselves, in themselves.
- Adorno’s version of classical music essentially remains texts in contexts. What this perspective overlooks, to sometimes painfully aporetic effect in his “Reproduction” ms., is music’s capacities for auto-contextualization, its capacity to generate a social situation from its own flow and momentum.
- What is the sense of the inner movements of Mahler’s Ninth? The connections between the outer movements are complex but vivid and direct. I wonder if the Goethean leanings of the Eighth, tangible in much more than the text choice, don’t resurface here. Brecht sarcastically accused Adorno of being someone who never goes out to see for himself. Doing just that is a fundamental of Mahler’s aesthetic and music. The inner movements, then, are worldly..
- If the New Musicologists read Adorno with any care, the strong goal direction values of his philosophy of time should have soured them on him as a patriarchal sexist. But, then, these are folks who see the critical tools Adorno proffers as cognate to Joseph Kerman’s egregious Leavisite snobbism.
- Strait is the gate: Essentialism is not a deformed attitude or doctrine, but a self-deforming practice. From intellectual experiences that truly engage us, we derive vision that inclines us forward. The headlong impetus proceeds, more or less regardless of the complexity and syncretic misunderstanding involved in taking it up. The new-won vision defines for us qualities of desirable and undesirable experience, new value models to orient both our attitude and conduct. But of course undesirable conduct is more readily recognized and realized than desirable. In this quality, it seems to make little difference whether the inspiring force is the Dalai Lama, Karl Kraus, French feminism, libertarianism, or Adorno; the preposterous, ugly dogmatism of an Ayn Rand, L. Ron Hubbard, or Anthony Robbins is not required. Once the self-adaptation to the new idea moves forward, the exponent becomes vigilant in the search for symptoms of deviation from the projected norm. Intellectual and spiritual life become a series of more or less reasoned rearguard actions in defence of the ideal, effected entirely through the condemnation of symptoms of inadequation. In this way, even the finest truth becomes not only ideology in the abstract, but a form of religious faith in practice.
- Keith MacFarland: “You love or hate Dub Step, depending on whether you can dance to it or not..”
- Keith again: “You participate in culture; you do not own it.”
- Attribute – trait – style – stereotype – culture: the iron chain of positivist ponderousness, exacerbated rather than corrected by post-modern political obsession. The missing links include the above all the mechanisms of dissemination and pervasion that would, that alone could connect the chain into a truthful narrative.
- Is it possible that Bach the Borrower recycles rhetorically for similar reasons to jazz musicians? The relation of beat to time in the musics is actually comparable, regardless of the radical cultural differences? Roughly: weight on the constitutive beat does not diminish the significance of the whole, but eclipses the importance of entirely original parts..
- Civilization and its Discontents is about failure, about the defeat in a hopeless battle against our inextinguishable inner impulses that results in the elaborate pretense of having and keeping it together called civilization. To the extent Freud is correct–and it has always seemed to me that this is by far his most convincing analysis–it is something of a mystery why feminist critiques of patriarchy so regularly ignore the profound failure of agency its libidinal economy presents.
- It is no surprise that Foucault should have been so ardent a conceptual defender of space, over philosophy’s historical obsession with time. His intellectual roots, the first decade of his professional life, consisted of mental health work. And all the metaphors of mentality are spatial: “aberration,” “out of his mind,” “schizophrenia,” even “eccentric.”
- “Classical people are so uptight about the form that they forget the content!” Perhaps; even probably. But the last fifty years have proved them horribly right. Forget form, and music goes with it. Treat it with spite, or trivialize it, and you metastasize amateurism in the loveless sense.
- Authenticity & the Nazis - Nothing so starkly demonstrates the aporias of authenticity as the Nazi insistence that musical performance and composition were not just definite indexes of race, but exemplary demonstrations of folk soul. On the one hand, music could hardly be less to any devotee of a communitarian ideology. On the other, of course, however well music may work to express a folk soul, it is lamentably poorly at differentiating that soul from others, in particular from purported fake versions of itself. The simple test of blind listening for authentic black, female, or German music has always failed, usually sooner rather than later. The Nazi version of music, like any other group-authenticity version, fails not so much on its essentialism as on a demonstrable misunderstanding of form and content. Musical form simply does not stay still long enough to harden into the desired content; it cannot, and never will.
- Kant is the modern Aristotelean, par excellence; but the modern Aristotle is Hegel..
- All of Adorno’s comments on music presuppose address to time: time spent, time lived, time understood. If a social structure only has musical banality on offer, because that’s all its constraints allow us to prepare, the temporal possibilities it proffers suck. The reality and the symptom of this condition will be a series of patterns, seemingly endlessly repeated, that rechannel past patterns in a self-choking cycle of banality and pseudo-expressive handcuffs. The post-modernists’ syncretic reading or, to take a much-thumbed term of theirs, appropriation of Adorno sees in this position a blanket indictment of the past, because they themselves see nothing in the past but a traumatized engine for generating repressive patterns. As always, Adorno is far more radical; he neither sees the past in terms of the present, nor vice versa–because the scare-quotes around these nouns virtually required for such an operation are egregiously at odds with his understanding of immanent dialectics. Post-modernism’s wildly overdone and homeopathic critique of essentialism virtually precludes immanent critique, not to mention dialectic. Without these, Adorno is just a German in a perpetually bad mood.
- The elaborate, exhilarating instrumental virtuosity of much folk dance music–the Balkans, British Isles, and US South come to mind–are eloquent testimony to the necessity of understanding musical experience in genuinely conjunct emotional and intellectual terms. Greater virtuosic complexity neither enhances nor generates some separate intellectual layer of musical contemplation in dance music. On the contrary, the function is plainly to increase the animation of the music, which in turn animates the feeling of the dancers, and so enhances the entire experience. At the same time, listening–i.e., without dancing–to a skilled player of the tarogato or folk fiddle is an undeniably compelling musical experience, directly comparable intellectually to listening to any other kind of instrumental virtuoso. That is: the ostensibly distinct parameters of musical interest are in large part merely tentative, or even illusory. Comparing musical performances on the basis of the kind of interest they generate, or on which they are based and created, can only yield intrinsically partial results, emphatically incapable of categorical division.
- What is the dialectical method? Without presuming that all the differences affecting a problem are simple dichotomies, arrange and address them in a logical narrative order.
- [[Positivism’s knowledge-opinion dichotomy destroys the possibility of musical knowledge; Habermas probably right!]]
- “As a rule, it is more reasonable to look for the establishment than the origin.” As a rule? Are there any exceptions?
- There is a plain but not obvious performance function to nuanced yet familiar musical rhetoric: it facilitates confident, forceful delivery, at the same time enabling creative performers to interact with each other and individuate the performances as pieces, as works. This is the core of the jazz aesthetic; Adorno’s tortured definition of “musical material,” particularly in Philosophy of New Music, sometimes reads like a futile attempt to undercut it.
- Adorno & Hanslick: two aesthetics fundamentally grounded in autonomy–but in two entirely different–and incompatible?–conceptions.
- Adorno: music between escape and affirmation. The dialectic is not an “over against, opposed to, either/or,” not a contrast of black and white, but the constantly puzzling grey of indeterminate possibility, of rhetorical question. Is a redemptive music possible? An “oppositional discourse”? [Man, that’s so self-defeatingly trite that I sure hope not!] Seek–and ye shall find?
- History does not innovate ex nihil, it transforms, reconfigures, reinvents. The dilemmas addressed by any innovation, no matter how radical, are perforce archetypal.
- Psychologists will understand music only when they can formulate and understand history. The changes that constitute music history are invariably semantic; Tinctoris’s comment about “ancient music,” by which he meant music more than a few decades old, is a case in point. For Tinctoris, a few decades sufficed to change the meaning of a score fundamentally. But the dimensions of meaning that change in and as music history are at once confusingly minute variations on extant patterns and equally perplexing innovations in sound and sound ideal. Music is an ongoing practice, and so lacks a concrete basis in discrete events. A history of the dotted quarter note would lose itself in the thicket of performance practice inconsistencies and detail; a specifically musical history of woodwind instruments would be extremely difficult to reconcile in the correlation of detail and technology. A better example might be the decibel level of Heavy Metal and other recent popular music forms. Heavy Metal’s ear shattering volume level is a necessary condition for meaning in this music. That minimum acoustic condition is many times the volume level of the music genres engaged and appreciated by all previous generations. In that sense, it represents an absolutely novel historical development. One the one hand, however, isolating decibel level as an independent element of music experience, as such subject to historical change and analysis, is rash and misleading. Although there many informed surmises for the drastic shifts in volume level, it is impossible to establish with certainty or even clarity. Propounding any such conclusion requires isolating volume level as a distinct parameter from the broader value bases of musical experience. No one knows if this is even plausible, let alone how to do it. It simply will not do to presume this is possible, unless and until we can demonstrate that volume is an independent variable in musical experience, not inextricably tied to other, unknown variables.
- Thus, and on the other hand, musical experience is only comprehensible at the level of the synthetic breadth of history. No one has ever been able to argue for a unique or idiolectic music experience. The closest approximation to such a position is the formerly widespread aesthetic faith in the unique masterpiece, such as the Ninth Symphony, and the individual genius who produces it, such as that fellow from Bonn. But a masterpiece is every bit as much a repeatable experience as the meanest bit of hackwork. (The notion of artistic “immortality” speaks to the notion that the value of a work is infinitely repeatable.)
- Musical Parameters and Music History One of the more cogent reasons for difficulty in music historiography is the relative profusion of apparent semantic and operational parameters in music, as opposed especially to prose. The possibility of simultaneity of voices is the most evident and spectacular of these. Arguably, no other sign system deploys this feature with anything like the formative intricacy of music. [how to get to?:] It is a kind of paradigmatic ideational balance that forms the lived parameters and guidelines of music history, its aesthetic ideology if you will. The intellectual preeminence of Beethoven in the 19thc and later can be read off from the status of other musicians, who either did not excel at the same skills, succeed with the same ideas, or at least did not appear to do this. The trivialization of “Papa Haydn” as a childish fun-meister, whose music was about “the joy of a little boy opening his toys on Christmas morning” is a case in point. The minor key dramatics and major key, over the top exuberances of Beethoven were not Haydn; his reputation suffered accordingly. An even more germane example is Schubert, whose very excellence as a melodist perversely counted against him. In comparison, Beethoven did not make melody as much of a constructive element. The Leonore Overtures are no doubt short on melodic construction, compared to Rosamunde. But such a judgment, apparently in favour of Beethoven at Schubert’s expense, in turn depends on a particular durchaus contingent conception of the relations between musical parameters, a conception very much worth doubting. For one thing, it is pretty ridiculous to doubt the melodic brilliance of the composer of 9/III or opus 13 1/II. But for another, melody is widely distributed Boccherini menuet; no balance or role a priori; value symptom of age, ie acceptance of Beethoven not as great but as paradigmatic, resting on overt misconception of musical parameters as such and in balance
- Hydraulic Causality, Hogwash, & Musical Experience: models of pervasive social determination err invariably. It seems, in presuming monocausality. It is however entirely plausible that our experience, social experience, can at once be suffused with the behavioural pressure of gender conception, class interest, and subconscious desire structures. The interaction of these absolutely fundamental but necessarily uncountable forces is our experience, and make it at once irreducibly complex–but irretrievably multi-causal.
- Brian Hyer’s fine survey of the concept of tonality in Cambridge History of Music Theory: The historical breakdown of tonality was very much a matter of regional ontology, overwhelming and fundamental within that sphere but, for all the fervent triple heel-clicking, confined there. The fanatical efforts to find the abandonment of tonality binding on history foundered for several reasons. Most obviously, history will never be bound, not even by the best of good sense; ask an evolutionary biologist in the United States. Second, treating the achievements of Schoenberg and his successors as binding commits the fallacy of composition, treating that school as the whole of musical reason, when it is only a part; the misconception comprises a fallacy of definition, on the order of using “literature” to mean “good literature.” Finally, most subtly, these imbalances have made it even more difficult to see music history in any breadth of perspective. If it is already difficult to produce a coherent historical narrative for 19thc. music that yokes Rossini and Beethoven as contemporaries (Carl Dahlhaus’s History of Music in the 19thc., 1980, a history of 20thc. American music that balances Barber, Gershwin, and Ellington, much less Jimmy Rodgers, Henry Cowell, Billie Holiday, Glenn Miller, and Spike Jones has proven formidably elusive. To say the least, parti pris historiographical myth making hasn’t helped.
- Adorno’s dialectical three-step: the influence of social personality, scathingly rejected as even potentially integral to popular music, appears at chapter-length significance for Wagner, lavishly critiqued and inseparable from endless melody. When it comes time to explicate lessons from master composer Berg, however, the purely technical exercise of orchestrating pages of Wagner and comparing the results to Wagner’s own solutions is “an uncommonly instructive procedure.” What troubles me is the ad hoc fluid lines between “technical” and not. I think I side more with the stance of “On Popular Music,” which subordinates creative and performative personality to effluences of the musical structure–which, as Adorno so brilliantly realizes, is decidedly not equivalent to “the music itself”; no serious student of Hegel could ever work with so crude a category.
- Treatise on Musical Taste: Taste is an individuated path to judgment and preference. The reality of individuation is variable, complexly context dependent. The preference of one singer over another among adolescents will often evolve jointly and land on the same name, due to peer pressure and the shared anxieties of puberty that devolve into conformity. The perception of African percussion ensembles as “primitive” is plausibly not so much a function of racism directly as a confusion generated by the seeming unimportance and even absence of pitch as an organizational dimension of the music. For a culture that still takes “music” to mean “the art of tones,” i.e., notes, that unfamiliar conception would be enough to trigger the foolish adjective in reaction. The ostensible racism embodied in the term is itself neither a function of personal taste, nor even an indication. The aficionados of Jimmie Rodgers, Cherubino, and even Prince could be just as likely to blurt out the word; it betokens a collectively developed approach to perception, so to speak, and not an individual disposition. That racism is not exactly the correct term for this collective perception is further demonstrated in the kinds of negative Western reaction to Chinese music, especially Peking Opera. This exquisitely cultivated singing strikes Western listeners as discordant howling, comparable to the noises of cats. I imagine it would be possible, though immensely futile and stupid, to correlate the overtone balance of Peking Opera singing acoustically to cats–or sharks, or bats, or lawyers–and show some higher index than Lady Gaga or Renata Tebaldi or Elvis Presley. Even if this were true, it would only show that Chinese overtone preferences are not those of Tulsa or Peoria. Edward Said’s influential, lawyerly attempt to tie such general, de facto stereotypical perceptions to racism is, in the case of non-representational music, also difficult to confute, but emphatically misses the point. There is an intermediate step of musical (mis)understanding between listening to Yoruba drumming and enunciating the word “primitive,” between hearing Peking Opera and saying “howling,” that is crucial. Expressing a music reaction or judgment in adjectival terms is itself slippery at best, much more characteristically wrong in itself, both as a representation of what is heard and of what the listener makes of it. Crudely, adjectives are chosen from such an enfeebled range of representational possibilities that it is frankly absurd to give them credence as an expression of the realities of musical experience. However much they may or may not be adequate signs of attitude–herein the force of Said’s argumentation–due to their intrinsic indirection and second-handedness, they cannot be defended as representations of experience. None of these problems are even so much as addressed, still less solved, by discussions of taste. The birth of the atomistic (bourgeois) subject was an unholy 19thc. alliance of Enlightenment aesthetics and economics. Save for the excellent but undeveloped suspicions of Karl Marx, no attempt was made to examine the newly-minted “individual,” who now became the unquestionable bedrock of experience and truth. In particular, the roots and sources of the alchemical blend of metaphysical subject, economic actor, and solitary taste judge were obliterated in the concoction of the “individual.” It fell to Max Weber to try to disentangle these sources. After him, arguably, and despite the grand collective ideologies of fascism and communism, all attempts to explain human experience framed themselves in terms of the apodictic necessity of this very much contingent creation. The lunacy of the impossibly hybrid concept reached a nadir in the stentorian philosophy of Ayn Rand, which has the bleak virtue of propounding the dichotomy of individual and collective in a way that underscores the fatuity of both.
- A theme can be defined by or through its melodic and harmonic properties or dimensions. Functionally however, it is rhythmic. The obvious and obviously intentional similarity of the second theme of Beethoven 5/III to 5/I establishes connections in the way we experience both movements, connections that are themselves intentional. If we understand rhythm in any sense to be semantically synthetic, i.e., to establish patterns of similarity and difference, then theme is, on the basis of what it does, rhythmical.
- Power as the absolute: It is easy to overlook that even Foucault’s theory of micro power does not focus on its investment in exercising individuals such as monarchs, but in the individuals upon whom it is exercised, who absorb and internalize it. That does not make it a passive theory of power–a plain oxymoron. Rather, Foucault seeks to explain the intellectually complex diffusion of power and hence, like Hobbes, Weber, Marx, and Althusser before him, the formidable, formative role of ideas in power realities. The functional site of power is the recipient rather than the donor. Having a team of brutes on horseback show up at your door to terrorize you is nothing but a way to help you understand this; finding yourself desperate and pregnant, and the last abortion clinic in your state closed, is no different. In power, what is always more (functionally) important than who; and “what” is always a series of ideas of how things work. To be sure, any such “what” invariably operates on a ferociously fixed, pseudo-natural state of identity, a deliberately, indeed necessarily daunting order of “who.” Without an establishment of ideas, that order vanishes. The transition from Hegel to Marx rests entirely on this principle; without it, Hegelianism would not even be standing on its head, but aimlessly grazing out in Laputa somewhere.
- Academic Mandarins - In the name of a fatuous anarchy, you’d piss in your masters’ soup? How little you know your masters; how little you know yourselves.
- Mein Grundgedanke: classifying objects is a fundamentally different enterprise than categorizing experiences; almost tragically, the philosophy history view of Kant and Hegel as ‘idealists,’ abetted on one side by vulgar Marxist materialism and by logical positivism on the other, misses this crucial and radical logical insight, common to both.
- On Adorno’s definition: if “culture” means what people do, popular culture means what people have done for them; and so, ultimately, to them.
- George Steiner’s comment bucks a broad but curious disinclination among historians to address time and temporality, the human time sense. Is it based in aversion to metaphysical wrangling? The difficulty of quantifying time?
- Adorno seems to have missed the rhythmic potential of sequences to animate harmonic motion–eg K66 development section, and all of the E Major Praeludium. With the motive reduced to a single but specifically varied shape, the sole narrative emphasis and focus is on the transformations of the sequence motive from instance to instance–i.e., on the capacity of a sequential shape to embody harmonic forms, and thereby harmonic motion.
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