Thinking Hard, Listening Deeply

Given that whole careers are devoted to elucidating the thought of Theodor W. Adorno, an interested neophyte reader might well approach his work with trepidation. The ideal reader of his essays on music would have a thorough knowledge of the classical repertoire since Bach and philosophy since Kant as well as Adorno’s other work, which runs to 20 volumes in the German collected edition.

Yet this new selection of Adorno’s “Essays on Music,” edited with great skill by Richard Leppert, is designed to be accessible to the serious general reader, who will be amply rewarded if he approaches the book with patience. For even at his most abstract and theoretical, Adorno’s writing is always oriented toward real life. Like Marx, he seeks to understand the world in order to change it.

Born in Germany in 1903, Theodor Wiesengrund--he adopted his mother’s maiden name later in life--grew up in one of those Jewish households that revered German culture. As a young man he studied composition in Vienna, immersing himself in the challenging work of Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and the Second Viennese School. Though he continued to compose avocationally throughout his life, Adorno turned to scholarship, and by 1932 he was associated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. Along with Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse and Max Horkheimer, Adorno would become one of the powerful minds of the Frankfurt School, where critical theory--a sophisticated application of Marxist thought to cultural and social practices--was born.

With Hitler’s rise to power, the institute left Germany in 1934 for New York, where it became associated with Columbia University. Adorno went to London. By 1938, he too had immigrated to America, living first in New York and then, from 1941 to 1949, in Los Angeles, where he joined Thomas Mann and Schoenberg in the local galaxy of German emigres. Unlike those two, however, Adorno returned to Germany after the war, settling in Frankfurt by 1953 and remaining there until his death in 1969.

Adorno’s time in Los Angeles was tremendously important for his development: “I believe 90 percent of all I’ve published [since returning to Germany],” he wrote in 1957, “was written in America.” To give an idea of the range of Adorno’s interests, his Los Angeles period produced not only major philosophical works such as “Dialectic of Enlightenment,” but also a book on composing for films and a monograph analyzing the Los Angeles Times astrology column. At the same time, he gave crucial assistance to Mann in the writing of “Doctor Faustus.”

The paradox of Hollywood in the 1940s--Schoenberg on the one hand, Louis B. Mayer on the other--is writ large in “Essays on Music.” Most of these pieces, which span his entire career, fall into two categories: those dealing with popular music, which Adorno treats as a commodity churned out by the “culture industry,” and those dealing with serious, or “classical” music, which has a genuine spiritual and social function.

Adorno regards music from a Marxist point of view: Culture is the superstructure built on the foundation of economics, and inevitably it reflects the injustice and alienation of society under capitalism. But the focus of Adorno’s analysis is not, as in classic Marxism, the proletariat: It is the thinking individual.

In the bourgeois 19th century, this individual, or “subject,” was in a heroic phase of struggle, hoping to reconcile individual freedom and social justice. Music, especially that of Beethoven, expressed this humane aspiration and marks a high point in the world’s spiritual history. The corruption of capitalism had not yet permanently divided the artist from the ordinary listener. In the 20th century, the rise of monopoly capitalism and mass culture has “colonized” the subject, turning the individual into an interchangeable unit within an oppressive economic and cultural system. As a result, serious music--that which expresses and confronts the human predicament--is condemned to be difficult, rebarbative, the pursuit of a few; while “light music,” really a form of mass distraction and false consciousness, seeps into the subjectivity of almost everyone else. The analysis of the New Music of Schoenberg and the critique of popular music forms such as jazz are two parts of a single diagnosis.

Adorno’s essays on serious composers are the more difficult, since they assume an extensive knowledge of European music, and are frequently extravagantly theoretical and metaphorical. His thesis, however, becomes clear: Music is at bottom an expressive art, analogous to language, though it does not speak in concepts or specifics. Rather, in a semi-mystical sense, “music tends toward pure naming, the absolute unity of object and sign.” But from Beethoven to Schoenberg, composers increasingly felt that what they had to express--the growing alienation of the individual in society--was at odds with the musical language they inherited. Tonality and traditional form became inadequate to the mounting sense of crisis produced by capitalism.

The composers Adorno admires confronted this disparity head-on and addressed it either through parody--as did Mahler and, to a lesser extent, Weill--or through a complete break with musical tradition, a la Schoenberg, for whom Adorno has immense admiration. This new music earns respect because it faces our true situation:

“Nobody really believes in the ‘culture’ any more, the backbone of spirit [Geist] has been broken, and anyone who pays no attention to this and acts as though nothing had happened, must crawl like an insect, not walk upright. The only authentic artworks produced today are those that in their inner organization measure themselves by the fullest experience of horror.” But as T.S. Eliot wrote, “human kind cannot bear very much reality.” Most listeners want only to be distracted and entertained, and so they flee from music that offers a full experience of horror. The most authentic music is, almost necessarily, the least popular. Music is “tolerated as the private activity of specialists” but is prevented from becoming the liberating force that Adorno believes it can and should be. As long as society remains sick, music will be sick. As Adorno movingly says, “the idea that music today could save itself with its own powers has something absurd about it, while at the same time it can scarcely be saved otherwise than with its own powers.” But though serious music is shriveling, popular music is spreading like a cancer, its fecundity a proof of its morbidity. It is in his discussion of popular music that most readers will take issue; indeed, even Leppert is notably apologetic about some of Adorno’s conclusions. But it is exactly here that his critical intellect becomes most passionate and exhilarating, and no one who reads these essays attentively will ever look at popular culture the same way again.

For Adorno, popular music is anti-music, a product shoved down the throats of passive consumers by a culture industry devoted to profit. It is not just a substitute for good music but a drug, a poison: “Regressive, too, is the role which contemporary mass music plays in the psychological household of its victims. They are not merely turned away from more important music, but they are confirmed in their neurotic stupidity.... “

Whereas art music is demanding and enlightening, pop music is formulaic and soothingly familiar: “The composition hears for the listener.” At the heart of this Marxist analysis is the idea that such music is an opiate for the masses, encouraging a false and unjustified pleasure in the midst of actual despair and alienation. Enjoying jazz is a form of false consciousness: “The illusion of a social preference for light music as against serious is based on that passivity of the masses which makes the consumption of light music contradict the objective interest of those who consume it.” The passion of this critique leads Adorno into penetrating, detailed analysis of the way pop music is produced, sold and heard. Writing in the 1930s and 1940s, he comes up with an analysis of “plugging”--the selling of hit songs--that uncannily describes the Britney Spears phenomenon. He convincingly explains the phenomenon of “corniness”--the mockery of the trends of the recent past, familiar to any watcher of “That ‘70s Show”--as a form of self-hatred: “[L]ikes that have been enforced upon listeners provoke revenge the moment the pressure is relaxed. They compensate for their ‘guilt’ in having condoned the worthless by making fun of it.”

This analysis is bound to provoke resistance. Adorno neglects the important category of irony, so central to our dealings with mass culture, which allows us simultaneously to use and reject the inferior products that surround us. He also refuses to see any gradations in popular culture--what appears to us as the wit of the Gershwins, the liberating improvisation of Louis Armstrong or the authentic testimony of Billie Holiday vanishes for Adorno into a thick slab of pablum.

To some extent, this seems simply a bias in favor of the German high culture in which he was raised. But even Adorno’s approach to serious music raises some questions: His idea of musical progress seems to imply that every composer must contain and advance upon every previous composer, a technological conception that certainly does not hold true for, say, literature. Yet to read Adorno dialectically--to respond actively, rather than consume passively--is to remain true to the rational, liberating impulse of his work. As he says about difficult music, Adorno’s writing “demands the work and effort of listening, the force of attention and memory, actually love.”