Essays on Music:
Selected, with introduction, commentary and notes by Richard Leppert; new
translations by Susan H. Gillespie
Theodor Adorno
University of
California Press
ISBN 0-520-22672-0
ISBN 0-520-23159-7
(c) 2002 by Regents of
University of California
Difficulties (1967)
page 648
The methods that are
linked to the traditional language of music have become retrospectively
problematic as a result of those that were discovered later--namely, they have
become schematic. [emphasis added] One hears, through what is newer, weaknesses of the old that
were once hidden. There are very many things that sound stereotyped that were
not stereotyped at the time. Richard Wagner, who was very alert in these matters, already registered this. Disrespectfully,
but forthrightly, he said that in some of Mozart's pieces he could hear the
dishes clatter on the table--Tafelmusik,
even when it was by no means intended as such. It was possible to follow this
schema as long as it was not evident as such, as long as it was still of a
piece with the self-evident preconditions of composing. But once composing, and
the relationship of the composer to the schemas, has lost its virginity, then
the schemas not only emerge baldly and annoyingly, but lead in many places to
anomalies, contradict the moments that have meanwhile been emancipated. [emphasis added]...
... The person who
commits himself to what is older only out of despair at the difficulties of the
new is not comforted, but becomes the victim of his own helpless nostalgia for
a better era that, finally, never actually existed.
On the other hand, one
should not dispense with reactionary objections in the manner of an apologist,
but should learn the measure of correct insights that they offer, which so
frequently give them the advantage over moderate, progressive cultural
liberalism. [emphasis added]...
Roger Scruton died this week and he was known as a conservative and as a philosopher who dealt with aesthetics, particularly the aesthetics of music. He would be regarded by many admirers of Adorno as a reactionary, perhaps even "the" reactionary on matters of the arts and the art of music. So it is useful to remember that no less than Theodor Adorno himself wrote that we should not dispense with the reactionary who comments about the problems in contemporary music simply because they have reactionary or conservative political views.
People who only read Scruton's writing on aesthetics and music in the 1990s would not have necessarily kept up with changes in his philosophy, arguments and aesthetic verdicts, much like those who only read Adorno's Philosophy of New Music and didn't move on to read his writings on music from the 1950s and later would not be in a position to know he began to reassess his positions on music and new music (i.e. high avant garde modernist post-tonal music). It's necessary and fair to both Adorno and Scruton to note that both men began to budge on some issues and that they eventually articulated comparable criticisms of both Cage and Stockhausen, even if those who avidly read only Adorno or Scruton seem all too apt to not know this.
Although I could quote from Scruton's other works the clearest statement he made regarding Adorno on pop music and classical traditions came from Understanding Music.
Understanding Music: Philosophy and Interpretation
People who only read Scruton's writing on aesthetics and music in the 1990s would not have necessarily kept up with changes in his philosophy, arguments and aesthetic verdicts, much like those who only read Adorno's Philosophy of New Music and didn't move on to read his writings on music from the 1950s and later would not be in a position to know he began to reassess his positions on music and new music (i.e. high avant garde modernist post-tonal music). It's necessary and fair to both Adorno and Scruton to note that both men began to budge on some issues and that they eventually articulated comparable criticisms of both Cage and Stockhausen, even if those who avidly read only Adorno or Scruton seem all too apt to not know this.
Although I could quote from Scruton's other works the clearest statement he made regarding Adorno on pop music and classical traditions came from Understanding Music.
Understanding Music: Philosophy and Interpretation
Roger Scruton
Continuum
Copyright (c) Roger Scruton 209
page 211, "Why Read Adorno?"
... his attack on mass culture should be seen in the Old Testament spirit, as a repudiation of idolatry, a reaffirmation of the age-old distinction between true and false gods--between worship that ennobles and redeems us, and the superstition that drops us in the ditch. ...
page 216
One conclusion to draw from the history of American popular music is that we should take the world "popular" seriously--far more seriously than it was taken by Adorno. [emphasis added] Pace Adorno and Horkheimer, this music was not imposed upon the American people by an unscrupulous `culture industry' eager to exploit the most degenerate aspects of popular taste. It arose `by an invisible hand' from spontaneous music-making, with a large input from Afro-American music, both secular and religious. When that music later spread around the world it was not by some imperial venture of a conquering civilization but by the same process whereby it arose--the spontaneous taste of ordinary people. [emphasis added]
...
...
. . . Well, it's exactly that claim that has been contested by a variety of scholars in the West, that the spread of jazz was not some imperial venture. Music historians have been compiling work in the last twenty years on the evolution of jazz in the Soviet bloc and other totalitarian states. The Peter Lang Edition series Jazz under State Socialism has at least four volumes. I've only begun cracking open two of them and have a copy of Bruce Johnson's Jazz and Totalitarianism published by Routledge. Super short version for now, the Soviet bloc viewed jazz as a form of cultural and musical imperialism and an emerging body of history chronicling the work of the CIA funding arts in the Cold War era makes a cumulative case that if Frances Lauren Stoner's version is a bit tilted toward treating the CIA as bankrolling modernist art, music and literature to a fault, there are more nuanced variations of the case that African American popular music was presented as indicative that in spite of reports of racism and racial segregation it was possible for black American musicians to achieve fame and success, thus Mark Burford's Mahalia Jackson and the Black Gospel Field, which I personally can't recommend enough. In sum, Marxists would view the spread of American popular music as a form of imperialism no matter what someone like Roger Scruton would say or write.
At the same time, there's a kind of counter-argument within a celebration and historical survey of American popular music. Even if we set aside Soviet or Marxist allegations that American popular music was imperialist, there are other issues raised as to whether what was marketed was a reflection of what was going on in day to day musical life or whether what was on sale was a tailored product.
There has been some revisionist scholarship since the end of the Cold War that argues somewhere between Adorno and Scruton by proposing that, yes, American popular music was immensely popular and reflected popular musical styles and interests but that where Scruton's statement has some truth Adorno's has some truth, too. To put it simply, in a work like Segregating Sound by Karl Miller and others music historians have been pointing out that there was still a top-down aspect to what Adorno called the culture industry. If Adorno acrimoniously insisted in his earliest writings jazz was a false amalgam of march and salon music (arguably true!) and not in any way provably linked to authentic African or Afro-American music (indisputably false!), another element of his polemic against the culture industry was that formulaic music was presented as the music of freedom and as black musicians by the industry. Adorno was wrong about the "what" but may have had a point about the "how"--Miller's Segregating Sound makes a long-form case that there was a Jim Crow regime built within and sustained by the recording industry that pervasively and persistently marketed musicians on the basis of racial and racist stereotypes.
John W. Troutman's Kika Kila is a history of the steel guitar tradition and he points out in his book and in some interviews that we've been sold a history of American popular music that is cast in terms of white and black when the fuller and richer history is in technicolor--advocacy for African diaspora music by mid-20th century musicologists, folklorists and music historians ironically advocated on behalf of the African origins of the slide guitar in a way that obliterated Native Hawaiian contributions to American popular music. I'm still working through Troutman's book on steel guitar (which he plays himself) and want to get to his monograph on Native American song and ceremony but as I'm working through his writings I get a sense that revisionist musicology and music history can be dismissed by conservatives as trying to attack some venerated musical styles and that's not exactly the case. Arguing that well-intentioned white liberal and progressive scholars and black activist writings may have used a white-black script to era Native Hawaiian, Native American or Asian contributions to the evolution of American popular music is hardly making an argument that there's something wrong with the symphonies of Beethoven or Mahler.
None of which, of course, is what I recall Scruton proposing. Scruton, the most conservative of conservative philosophers dealing with the aesthetics of music, took it as given that jazz is both music and art and that the American songbook and song in general had proven the lifeblood of musical life and practice still anchored to some form, however abstracted and modified, of tonality: .
pages 216-217
The great days of American popular music may now be past: rock `n roll changed the Blues from a lyrical confession to a Dionysian display, and the long-term effects are now being felt, not only in America, but all across the world. Nevertheless, visitors to America are still astonished by the number of spontaneous musical episodes that they encounter: marching bands at football matches; barber shop singing; church choirs and `praise dances'; jazz combos in the clubs and Blue Grass in the tavern. ...
... The American song exists because people have enjoyed it and asked for more. It is the musical expression of consumer sovereignty. And like everything typical of America it gets up the intellectual nose, precisely because it seems to leave no opening for the would-be priesthood. Intellectuals on the left have never been able to accept that the spontaneous choices of ordinary people might be the final explanation of their social world. ...
..
..
Against Adorno's claims that American popular son was full of kitsch Scruton's rejoinder could be summed as "Yes, so what? Kitsch may be more true than Adorno's idea of `truth' about modern urban life" What Scruton wrote was:
page 219
It is undeniable that this musical tradition is full of kitsch and false sentiment. But there is another way besides Adorno's of looking at that fact. The American popular song arose from the spontaneous desire of ordinary Americans to celebrate the world that they themselves had created. It has never been a critical idiom, any more than the folk-music of old Europe was critical. It takes America as it comes, and its lyricism is a lyricism of acceptance. Kitsch is there in the music because kitsch lies all around. If this music were to make an effort to eliminate kitsch and false sentiment it would not be seeing through lies but telling them. There is a kind of realism here, to which Adorno closed his ears, just as he closed his mind to the real function of song in the life of ordinary people--which is to help them to be at one with their social condition, and to normalize their sufferings and their joys. As their social conditions change, so do their songs ...
What Scruton wrote around is a topic the blues and jazz historians have described as different levels of coded meaning in song lyrics. It might suffice for the moment to touch upon that without much discussion since I'm writing this in the week of Roger Scruton's death but it seems worthwhile to point that within Scruton's point about kitsch being with us and that the kitsch may be more honest about what life is like in our culture--something may be kitsch and simultaneously dealing with human experience at another level that isn't perceptible to people who are not conversant in the norms and conventions and symbols and signs being played with in the context of an art work. To break it down in a more colloquial and concrete way, Mahler can be simultaneously kitsch and serious. Samurai Jack can be an adventure cartoon kids can watch but that adults can watch in a different way.
There were moments where Scruton made claims about Adorno that led me to think he had not seriously engaged with Adorno's later work. This passage in particular comes to mind from Understanding Music.
page 223
Adorno's defense of the avant-garde of his day was based on the view that `standardization' could not take root in this idiom, which would always question its own status as a commodity and refuse to be driven by aesthetic routines. But the routines soon arose and, from the tin-cans of John Cage to the bombastic operas of Stockhausen, the musical landscape today is strewn with avant-garde kitsch.
The trouble with that is that it seems Scruton didn't get around to Adorno's blistering condemnation of Cage and Stockhausen and integral serialism. I wrote about that at some length in a piece called "Between forms of non-choice: Adorno’s criticism of serialism and aleatory as techniques that obliterated the decision-making subject, Leonard Meyer’s observation on the abjection of choice in modernist musical history, and some brief thoughts on jazz"
As far back as 1955 Adorno wrote the following:
This is, ultimately, where we can see that what Adorno said to condemn the inhuman technocratic tendencies of 20th century modernism that abandoned the traditions necessary to provide a contextual meaning to any rebellion against it as evidenced in the works of Schoenberg, Berg, Bartok, Stravinsky and even Hindemith, gets recapitulated sans Marxism by Roger Scruton. In other words, Adorno warned "us" to not dismiss a Roger Scruton's criticism of a Cage or a Stockhausen just because Scruton's a reactionary or a conservative. Adorno himself argued that Cage and Stockhausen developed techniques that obliterated the decision-making subject.
As I've written in the past it was possible for a Marxist Maoist like John Tilbury or Cornelius Cardew to find a problem in John Cage that was substantially mirrored by the criticism of the Presbyterian minister Francis Schaeffer. That piece was "The Music of John Cage and the Self-Extinguishing Avant Garde", which surveys Schaeffer and Cardew and Tilbury and Richard Taruskin and Leonard B. Meyer if you want to read that. Call it the bias of being an American but I think it was possible for both Scruton and Adorno to have too harsh an assessment of what Cage was attempting to do. There are some posts on that here and here. Since I only really enjoy his music for prepared piano I defer to Kyle Gann and others to articulate a defense of what Cage said he was trying to do in contrast to what philosophers such as Adorno or Scruton told us Cage was trying to do.
Of course here I am thousands of words into this essay and I've been exploring points of agreement and disagreement between Adorno and Scruton on aesthetic, music, pop music, and art. I've quoted extensively from Scruton's chapter titled "Why Read Adorno?" Scruton did not write that as a rhetorical question with an answer of "You shouldn't". Scruton read Adorno. I think he may not have read enough Adorno but it's my own case that Adorno and Scruton both budged within and shifted from their earlier more categorical claims about popular music. Eric Oberle has a dense but intriguing monograph out on Adorno, "the wound" and how being an exile in the United States and seeing how racism against blacks and anti-semitism forced him to start rethinking his earlier stated views on a variety of topics. Adorno died before he arrived at the shifting position that Eric Oberle is arguing was beginning to take place in Adorno's thought. Scruton has just died so he, too, may have died having observed and articulated the nature of a philosophical and artistic set of problems that others may have to tackle.
Adorno came to respect the musicianship of black jazz musicians without coming around to conceding jazz itself, as popular song, was really art. Scruton, as we've seen, affirms the American songbook and song tradition as the music we'd best draw from in contrast to John Cage or Stockhausen. On this Scruton and I agree.
Scruton aimed to take Adorno's accusation of kitsch and the standardizing mass effects of pre-digested emotions seriously. Scruton also took seriously an argument from Adorno's Philosophy of New Music that would likely be impossible for non-musicians or musicians not deeply steeped in the Western literate traditions of music to even pick up. Scruton put it as follows (bold emphases are mine):
page 224
Adorno argued that the addiction to musical fetishes--by which he means the standardized effects of popular music--produces a `regression' in the art of listening, what we might today call a shrinking attention span. People are content with snippets that they can hum or whistle, and--thanks to mechanical reproduction--will listen to a movement, a tune or a bar detached from the work to which it owes its significance. Inevitably, therefore, the old art of listening, which involves following a complex development over long stretches of time, gives way to an interest in catchy fragments, shortened sequences that can be detached from their context and repeated at will. And it is just such fragments, Adorno implies, that become cliches, which the ear of the listener and the mind of the composer prefer to the hard work of harmonic and melodic argument.
Now Adorno has a point here ... Whatever we think about tonality, there is no doubt that it has lent itself to a new kind of music, in which the lengthy paragraphs of the symphonic tradition have been replaced by the repetition of statically conceived cells--as in the ballets and symphonies of Stravinsky. The architecture of a Beethoven or Bruckner symphony, in which the modulation from tonic to dominant might take place over a span of minutes, and in which every scale degree is conscripted to the task of transporting the material from one solid foundation to the next--this wonderful art-form is less and less present in the tonal writing of modern composers, and the `developing variations' which Schoenberg discerned in the classical style and sought to revive through his serial language are now rarely encountered. The American popular song deploys the tonal language in a manner that is short-breathed and quickly exhausted; and the idiom of jazz, which has taken tonality in a new direction, and discovered harmonic sequences and dissonant cadences which have no place in the classical repertoire, has not produced any comparable expansion of the musical argument. On the contrary, where there should be development there is usually only improvisation, and where there might be the exploration of emotion and the building of character, there is usually the repetition of the same cheerful smile.
page 225
... Something is right in what Adorno is saying. But all attempts to pin down the thesis come up against the immovably singular nature of aesthetic judgement. And the failure of Adorno to produce any prescription, other than his entirely negative advocacy of atonality against the tonal cliche, leaves the matter hanging in the air.
page 226
In the light of this it seems to me that we should retrace our steps and revisit the attempts by composers to learn from the example of song--both folk song and the jazz-influenced songbook. Although this means a return from large-scale forms to the strophic idiom of natural music, it also involves a return to the crucible of tonality, in which the tonal order is first crystallized in the soup of sound. That, it seems to me, is the direction taken by Debussy; and he was followed by Janacek, Dutilleux, Britten, Messiaen and many more--brilliant musicians who were led by their ears and not by theories, even if they were capable, like Messiaen, of theorizing at the highest level. ...
Now there are quite a few things I could say in response to this. Scruton has summarized an argument Adorno made that since Stravinsky introduced hebephrenic schizophrnia into music by way of brutal and mind-numbing motoric music in Rite of Spring there has been a rupture between what Scruton has described as symphonic or sonata "argument" and the mind-obliterating "grove" of dance. Adorno notoriously insisted that once "argument" and "groove" as modes of musical cognition became separated they both became false. Scruton does not affirm that. On the other hand, he could be taken to have argued that jazz has groove and harmony and melodic art but that it was trapped in the cul de sac of a performance tradition that encouraged "strophic" composition and performance. To put this in a way that may be more understandable to classical musicians, the argument is that jazz has gotten stuck in the dead end of continuous variation as both form and technique.
It was hardly always the case. I can think right now of Kyle Gann's analysis of James P Johnson's Harlem Symphony. Whether or not the "argument" was at a level that Adorno or Roger Scruton would regard as "serious" Johnson wrote a symphony that clearly has sonata forms and he did this back in the 1930s around the time Paul Hindemith was extracting the Mathis der Mahler suite from his opera. Speaking as a Hindemith fan the opera is a bore but the symphonic suite is remarkable.
Not all of Scruton's fans will be willing to go along with what I'm about to say. Scruton, in sum, told us that if we had to choose between the arch-modernist direction of John Cage and Boulez and Stockhausen or American popular song to go with American popular song. Of course Scruton was more nuanced than that. He also all too briefly touched upon the life and work of the American composer George Rochberg:
What Scruton wrote around is a topic the blues and jazz historians have described as different levels of coded meaning in song lyrics. It might suffice for the moment to touch upon that without much discussion since I'm writing this in the week of Roger Scruton's death but it seems worthwhile to point that within Scruton's point about kitsch being with us and that the kitsch may be more honest about what life is like in our culture--something may be kitsch and simultaneously dealing with human experience at another level that isn't perceptible to people who are not conversant in the norms and conventions and symbols and signs being played with in the context of an art work. To break it down in a more colloquial and concrete way, Mahler can be simultaneously kitsch and serious. Samurai Jack can be an adventure cartoon kids can watch but that adults can watch in a different way.
There were moments where Scruton made claims about Adorno that led me to think he had not seriously engaged with Adorno's later work. This passage in particular comes to mind from Understanding Music.
page 223
Adorno's defense of the avant-garde of his day was based on the view that `standardization' could not take root in this idiom, which would always question its own status as a commodity and refuse to be driven by aesthetic routines. But the routines soon arose and, from the tin-cans of John Cage to the bombastic operas of Stockhausen, the musical landscape today is strewn with avant-garde kitsch.
The trouble with that is that it seems Scruton didn't get around to Adorno's blistering condemnation of Cage and Stockhausen and integral serialism. I wrote about that at some length in a piece called "Between forms of non-choice: Adorno’s criticism of serialism and aleatory as techniques that obliterated the decision-making subject, Leonard Meyer’s observation on the abjection of choice in modernist musical history, and some brief thoughts on jazz"
As far back as 1955 Adorno wrote the following:
On the Aging of the New
Music (1955) translated by Robert
Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will
page 195
... The reproach that
the critics have not understood the most recent compositions of unchecked
rationalization can hardly be maintained because such musical reasoning wants
only to be demonstrated mathematically, not understood. If one asks after the
function of some phenomenon within a work's total context of meaning, the answer
is a further exposition of the system.
...
page 196
... Musical logic
becomes a caricature of logic, one that is certainly implicit in it from the
start, in the rigid interdiction of anything that the system finds foreign, the
latter being left to atrophy. Already in the first measure the listener senses
with resignation that he has been turned over to an infernal machine, which
will run its course mercilessly, until fate has completed its cycle and he can
breathe again.
To be sure most of the
younger twelve-tone composers are less demanding. Unfamiliar with the real
accomplishment of the Schoenberg School and in possession only of the rules of
twelve-tone composition, which has become apocryphal through separation from
its accomplishment, these young people amuse themselves with the juggling of
tone rows as a substitute for tonality, without really composing at all. This touches on a genuinely paradoxical
situation: the disappearance of tradition within New Music itself. The
innovators, Schoenberg, Bartok, Stravinsky, Webern, Berg, even Hindemith, were
all raised on traditional music. Their idiom, their critical stance, their
resistance, all crystallized around that tradition. This tradition is no longer
a living part of their successors. In its place they turn what is in itself a
critical musical ideal into an artificially positive one, without summoning up
the spontaneity and effort that it requires.
This failing can hardly be cast as a reproach. ...
...There is reason to
suspect that those who have not mastered the new material are also unable to
control the other, that they cannot compose an irreproachable four-voice
Palestrina setting, and in many cases can hardly harmonize a chorale. The
pedagogical virtues of the academy have been lost without the realm of freedom
having been entered.
Even music criticism
hardly helps. Critics and composers only rarely meet on the same level. Most
critics are even less able than the averagely educated musician to judge a
demanding new score according to its inner coherence, its level of form, its
individual power. Instead they fulfill their service with substitutes such as
reports about their chance pleasure or displeasure in the music, or provide
journalistic information. The critic more or less routinely brings forth
everything possible about the impression a work makes, its history, style, and
author without carrying out what the name of his profession demands: critique,
making a judgment, debatable though that judgment might be. ...
This is, ultimately, where we can see that what Adorno said to condemn the inhuman technocratic tendencies of 20th century modernism that abandoned the traditions necessary to provide a contextual meaning to any rebellion against it as evidenced in the works of Schoenberg, Berg, Bartok, Stravinsky and even Hindemith, gets recapitulated sans Marxism by Roger Scruton. In other words, Adorno warned "us" to not dismiss a Roger Scruton's criticism of a Cage or a Stockhausen just because Scruton's a reactionary or a conservative. Adorno himself argued that Cage and Stockhausen developed techniques that obliterated the decision-making subject.
As I've written in the past it was possible for a Marxist Maoist like John Tilbury or Cornelius Cardew to find a problem in John Cage that was substantially mirrored by the criticism of the Presbyterian minister Francis Schaeffer. That piece was "The Music of John Cage and the Self-Extinguishing Avant Garde", which surveys Schaeffer and Cardew and Tilbury and Richard Taruskin and Leonard B. Meyer if you want to read that. Call it the bias of being an American but I think it was possible for both Scruton and Adorno to have too harsh an assessment of what Cage was attempting to do. There are some posts on that here and here. Since I only really enjoy his music for prepared piano I defer to Kyle Gann and others to articulate a defense of what Cage said he was trying to do in contrast to what philosophers such as Adorno or Scruton told us Cage was trying to do.
Of course here I am thousands of words into this essay and I've been exploring points of agreement and disagreement between Adorno and Scruton on aesthetic, music, pop music, and art. I've quoted extensively from Scruton's chapter titled "Why Read Adorno?" Scruton did not write that as a rhetorical question with an answer of "You shouldn't". Scruton read Adorno. I think he may not have read enough Adorno but it's my own case that Adorno and Scruton both budged within and shifted from their earlier more categorical claims about popular music. Eric Oberle has a dense but intriguing monograph out on Adorno, "the wound" and how being an exile in the United States and seeing how racism against blacks and anti-semitism forced him to start rethinking his earlier stated views on a variety of topics. Adorno died before he arrived at the shifting position that Eric Oberle is arguing was beginning to take place in Adorno's thought. Scruton has just died so he, too, may have died having observed and articulated the nature of a philosophical and artistic set of problems that others may have to tackle.
Adorno came to respect the musicianship of black jazz musicians without coming around to conceding jazz itself, as popular song, was really art. Scruton, as we've seen, affirms the American songbook and song tradition as the music we'd best draw from in contrast to John Cage or Stockhausen. On this Scruton and I agree.
Scruton aimed to take Adorno's accusation of kitsch and the standardizing mass effects of pre-digested emotions seriously. Scruton also took seriously an argument from Adorno's Philosophy of New Music that would likely be impossible for non-musicians or musicians not deeply steeped in the Western literate traditions of music to even pick up. Scruton put it as follows (bold emphases are mine):
page 224
Adorno argued that the addiction to musical fetishes--by which he means the standardized effects of popular music--produces a `regression' in the art of listening, what we might today call a shrinking attention span. People are content with snippets that they can hum or whistle, and--thanks to mechanical reproduction--will listen to a movement, a tune or a bar detached from the work to which it owes its significance. Inevitably, therefore, the old art of listening, which involves following a complex development over long stretches of time, gives way to an interest in catchy fragments, shortened sequences that can be detached from their context and repeated at will. And it is just such fragments, Adorno implies, that become cliches, which the ear of the listener and the mind of the composer prefer to the hard work of harmonic and melodic argument.
Now Adorno has a point here ... Whatever we think about tonality, there is no doubt that it has lent itself to a new kind of music, in which the lengthy paragraphs of the symphonic tradition have been replaced by the repetition of statically conceived cells--as in the ballets and symphonies of Stravinsky. The architecture of a Beethoven or Bruckner symphony, in which the modulation from tonic to dominant might take place over a span of minutes, and in which every scale degree is conscripted to the task of transporting the material from one solid foundation to the next--this wonderful art-form is less and less present in the tonal writing of modern composers, and the `developing variations' which Schoenberg discerned in the classical style and sought to revive through his serial language are now rarely encountered. The American popular song deploys the tonal language in a manner that is short-breathed and quickly exhausted; and the idiom of jazz, which has taken tonality in a new direction, and discovered harmonic sequences and dissonant cadences which have no place in the classical repertoire, has not produced any comparable expansion of the musical argument. On the contrary, where there should be development there is usually only improvisation, and where there might be the exploration of emotion and the building of character, there is usually the repetition of the same cheerful smile.
page 225
... Something is right in what Adorno is saying. But all attempts to pin down the thesis come up against the immovably singular nature of aesthetic judgement. And the failure of Adorno to produce any prescription, other than his entirely negative advocacy of atonality against the tonal cliche, leaves the matter hanging in the air.
page 226
In the light of this it seems to me that we should retrace our steps and revisit the attempts by composers to learn from the example of song--both folk song and the jazz-influenced songbook. Although this means a return from large-scale forms to the strophic idiom of natural music, it also involves a return to the crucible of tonality, in which the tonal order is first crystallized in the soup of sound. That, it seems to me, is the direction taken by Debussy; and he was followed by Janacek, Dutilleux, Britten, Messiaen and many more--brilliant musicians who were led by their ears and not by theories, even if they were capable, like Messiaen, of theorizing at the highest level. ...
Now there are quite a few things I could say in response to this. Scruton has summarized an argument Adorno made that since Stravinsky introduced hebephrenic schizophrnia into music by way of brutal and mind-numbing motoric music in Rite of Spring there has been a rupture between what Scruton has described as symphonic or sonata "argument" and the mind-obliterating "grove" of dance. Adorno notoriously insisted that once "argument" and "groove" as modes of musical cognition became separated they both became false. Scruton does not affirm that. On the other hand, he could be taken to have argued that jazz has groove and harmony and melodic art but that it was trapped in the cul de sac of a performance tradition that encouraged "strophic" composition and performance. To put this in a way that may be more understandable to classical musicians, the argument is that jazz has gotten stuck in the dead end of continuous variation as both form and technique.
It was hardly always the case. I can think right now of Kyle Gann's analysis of James P Johnson's Harlem Symphony. Whether or not the "argument" was at a level that Adorno or Roger Scruton would regard as "serious" Johnson wrote a symphony that clearly has sonata forms and he did this back in the 1930s around the time Paul Hindemith was extracting the Mathis der Mahler suite from his opera. Speaking as a Hindemith fan the opera is a bore but the symphonic suite is remarkable.
Not all of Scruton's fans will be willing to go along with what I'm about to say. Scruton, in sum, told us that if we had to choose between the arch-modernist direction of John Cage and Boulez and Stockhausen or American popular song to go with American popular song. Of course Scruton was more nuanced than that. He also all too briefly touched upon the life and work of the American composer George Rochberg:
...
Our model for the future should therefore not be the sterile works of Stockhausen and Boulez but the patient attempts to adapt the old to the new, and to find notes that touch the hearts of listeners because they express the heart of their composer. George Rochberg's music points us in this direction. But it raises the question that surely troubles all serious music-lovers now, which is whether we can find our way to a musical syntax which is as expressive as the tonal language of Rochberg, but which is not shut off from the surrounding world of popular culture. This is the theme to which I shall address myself in the next post.
Now I've written at some length on my belief that what Scruton called Rochberg's rejection of serialim in favor of tonality is better understood as Rochberg adopting code-switching as a compositional technique.
I happen to agree with Scruton that we're better off turning to the American songbook for musical possibilities than John Cage or Pierre Boulez. I sort of agree that in its commercial form blues and jazz have not tended to be used in ways that lend themselves to symphonic "sonata" level argument but this would, ironically, be what Adorno warned the music industry was not likely to let happen. Even here, however, I'm planning on getting to the Wynton Marsalis violin concerto that just got released. My concern with philosophers like Adorno and Scruton is that they have often been so busy formulating their philosophical arguments about the nature of musical arguments that the questions they raise may have, somewhere and somehow, already been given answers in musical works that they don't hear because the world and the people in the world are so abundant and varied no one can know or hear all of it on this earth.
Jazz as a music that is simultaneously popular music and art music has presented philosophical and aesthetic challenges to the concert music traditions in the West and East and by "jazz" I use the term to refer not just to jazz as jazz historians would call it but to all of ragtime and even Tin Pan Alley, too. Why? Because, invoking Roger Scruton, all of this is tied together by song, not high art song as much as the music of the streets. Scruton became known as a conservative philosopher on music and aesthetics but as a conservative he concluded that a revitalization of tonality that repudiates Adorno's stance against tonality as stretched to its hackneyed limits by the late Romantic composers is going to happen by taking popular song seriously. Not all of Scruton's admirers were, have been, or will ultimately be willing to follow that path as Scruton has prescribed it. Even Roger Scruton may have possibly balked at taking that path himself.
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