4. Adorno’s “On Jazz” and his later
polemics against the popular music
It may seem impertinent to consult Adorno’s writings against jazz in a
work called Ragtime and Sonata Forms. This will, however, only seem to be the case for those who insist
on a much firmer separation between ragtime and jazz then I think is
historically defensible. Yes, there are
arguments that the shift from ragtime to jazz was a shift from 2/4 to 4/4 time,
and there are also arguments that jazz introduced swing in a way that not
everyone agrees existed in ragtime.
Yet if we consider the scope and vitriol of Adorno’s arguments against
jazz, whether its foursquare phraseology or, especially, his claim that jazz
constituted a “false amalgam” of the march and salon music, we’ll find that the
substance of Adorno’s polemic against jazz can be addressed as accurate or
dubious by way of the music that preceded it.
Only the most pedantic scholastics would refuse to concede that ragtime is
the trunk from which manifold popular American styles have grown. It does not seem too strong a point to
propose for the sake of this work that, whatever Adorno’s arguments against
jazz were, can be taken back in time to address ragtime. An argument for the compatibility of the
musical vocabulary of ragtime with sonata forms can then be “brought forward”
to encompass possibilities for jazz sonatas (as if no one on earth knew about,
for instance, the piano sonatas of Nikolai Kapustin by now).
So, let’s get to Adorno on jazz.
As notorious as this essay is, it’s worth revisiting.
Essays on Music: Selected,
with introduction, commentary and notes by Richard Leppert; new translations by
Susan H. Gillespie
Theodore Adorno
University of California
Press
ISBN 0-520-22672-0
ISBN 0-520-23159-7
(c) 2002 by Regents of
University of California
"On Jazz"
1936
pages 472-473
... Jazz is not what it
"is": its aesthetic articulation is sparing and can be understood at
a glance. Rather, it is what it is used for, and this fact clearly brings up
questions whose answers will require in-depth examination. Not questions like
those pertaining to the autonomous work of art, but rather like those brought
to mind by the detective novel, with which jazz has in common the fact that it
maintains an inexorably rigid stereotypology and at the same time does
everything it can to let that stereotypology be forgotten by means of
individualizing elements, which are again themselves ultimately determined by
the stereotypology. Just as in the detective novel the question of the identity
of the criminal is intersected with that which is implied by the whole, so in
jazz the question of the alien subject, who both quivers and marches through
it, is intersected by the question of what its purpose is, why it is there at
all, while it asserts its existence as something self-evident which only
conceals how difficult its own vindication of it must be.
To translate the vitriol into twenty-first century terms, Adorno could
have been saying that jazz as music is to the art of music what contemporary
superhero movies are to the art of cinema, prefabricated non-art built around
the most egregious and juvenile clichés where all efforts to transcend
stereotypology reveal how inescapably the entire genre is beholden to and
inextricable from a base stereotypology.
We are, a century after the dawn of jazz age, able to regard Adorno’s
invective as absurd but as highbrow vitriol goes, there’s always something new
to put down, whether it’s hip hop or superhero films or romance novels. As Roger Scruton once put it, Adorno’s
innovation on behalf of fellow Marxists was making it stylish to hate mass
culture for the sake of the working classes.
Adorno did not for a moment believe that European composers making use
of jazz would reinvigorate concert music.
page 477
... The belief in jazz as an
elementary force with which an ostensibly decadent European music could be
regenerated is pure ideology. The extent to which jazz has anything at all to
do with genuine black music is highly questionable; the fact that it is
frequently performed by blacks and that the public clamors for "black
jazz" as a sort of brand-name doesn't say much about it, even if folkloric
research should confirm the African origin of many of its practices. Today, in
any case, all of the formal elements of jazz have been completely abstractly
pre-formed by the capitalist requirement that they be exchangeable as
commodities. Even the much-invoked expressions, the hot passages and breaks,
are merely ornamental in their significance, and never part of the overall
construction or determinant of form. Not
only is their placement, right down to the number of beats, assigned
stereotypically; not only is their duration and harmonic structure as a dominant
effect completely predetermined; even its melodic form and its potential for
simultaneous combinations rely on a minimum of basic forms: they can be traced
back to the paraphrasing of the cadence, the harmonically figurative
counterpoint. The relationship between jazz and black people is similar to that
between salon music and the wandering fiddle players whom it so firmly believes
it has transcended--the gypsies.
Adorno’s declaration that jazz had little, if anything, to do with
genuine black music is one of his more legendary and dubious assertions. The emergence of jazz from ragtime, and the
development of ragtime by African American musicians is pretty easy to
establish.
And yet … we might have to remind ourselves that many a white middle class
woman such as May Aufderheide composed rags.
That ragtime was composed by African American musicians and middle class
white women would likely have made the style anathema to men whose conception
of the musical sublime was rooted in German Idealism and Austro-German
symphonic and concert music. That Adorno
was, to so many of us who love jazz and ragtime, obviously wrong, may need to
framed with some caveats. He was wrong
overall but even in his most egregious statements there are aspects of the
history of jazz (and ragtime as its forebear) that aren’t entirely wrong.
Take Adorno’s comment that the hot passages, the breaks, are merely
ornamental in their significance. He
took it as given that such solo passages were decorations of cadences ending
phrases that were, as we’d recognize today, pretty beholden to 32-bar form and
the conventions of Tin Pan Alley.
Adorno heard in the hot breaks and the solos obvious attempts to paper
over the formulas of the songs, none of those miniature cadenzas could hide the
half cadence turnaround phrase that led to the next iteration of the same chord
changes that came before. To put all of
this another way, if Adorno heard the roots of early jazz in the formulaic
assembly-line aspects of Tin Pan Alley and popular song and he was completely
wrong then what are we to make of the free jazz movement of the mid-twentieth
century? Didn’t the free jazz movement
signal that many of the core criticisms Adorno had about the formulaic nature
of early jazz may have had at something right about them? I still think that in the end Adorno was
catastrophically wrong about jazz and popular song but when you go through
school from high school through college you hear teachers say that you should
try to respond to the strongest forms of your opponent’s arguments.
If Adorno’s admirers have spent generations attempting to get him off
the hook for seeming like an elitist chauvinistic racist Adorno’s adversaries
often consider things settled at the philosopher’s Marxist commitments and chauvinism
without necessarily engaging Adorno’s arguments at his level, an explicitly
structural and procedural set of arguments about why song and dance failed to
live up to the artistic possibilities of what we could translate as the
substance of sonata and fugue.
But, let’s face it, Adorno made a lot of sweeping assertions:
page 484
... whatever jazz has to
offer in the way of vertical stimulation has been taken from Debussy. And even
the treatment of melody, especially in the more serious pieces, is based on the
impressionist model. The resolution into the smallest motif-formulae, which are
not developed dynamically but rather statically repeated, and which are only
rhythmically reinterpreted and appear to circle around an immovable center, is
specifically impressionistic. But jazz
deprives it of its formal sense; the impressionism which it appropriates is at
the same time depraved. If, in Debussy, the melodic points form their
coloration and temporal surfaces from out of themselves following the constructive
command of subjectivity, in jazz, they are harnessed, like in the false beat of
hot music, into the metric-harmonic schema of the "standard" cadence
of the eight-bar period. The subjective-functional distribution of the melody
remains impotent by being recalled, as it were, by the eight-bar condensation
into a leading-voice form which merely toys with its particulars rather than
composing a new form from them; this is true in the case of the complex
harmonies when they are caught again in the same cadence from which their
floating resonances want to escape. Even yesterday's music must first be
rendered harmless by jazz, must be released from its historical element, before
it is ready for the market. Once on the market, these impressionistic trimmings
function as a stimulant. ... But the
individual element which is inserted into jazz through impressionism does not
generate or have control over itself. It has become rigid, formulaic,
spent--the individual elements are now in just the same position as social
convention was previously. It is easy to rob it of its formal sense because
that has already escaped of its own accord in post-Debussy epigone music; as a
conventional element that can be fitted seamlessly into a convention. The individually modern element in jazz is as
illusory as the collective archaic element.
That word “schema” is one chosen by a translator but it’s a fascinating
translation choice to me. I have been
reading Robert Gjerdingen’s writings on schemas and galant compositional and music educational
norms and it’s interesting to consider the ways in which Adorno was, as David Roberts
has put it, beholden to a “dialectic of Romanticism”. I’ll let you consult Dialectic of
Romanticism by Peter Murphy and
David Roberts on your own time. The
short version of Roberts’ three book argument
against Adorno’s aesthetics is that:
1) Adorno lacked the capacity to grant that ironic reappropriation and
distancing were possible in music and other arts the way they became possible
in literature since the eighteenth century.
This was particularly notable in Adorno’s rants against the “masks” of
Igor Stravinsky.
2) Adorno was blind to the essentially Romanticist roots of his own
critique of Western culture and thus he formulated his denunciation of the
corruptions of Western cultures that targeted Romantic decadence but
paradoxically embodied a Romanticist philosophy of history, however formally
negated its form
3) Adorno’s condemnation of American popular culture is explicable in
light of European disillusionment with the Wagnerian concept of the total work
of art which, by World War II, had shifted from Europe to the United States as
a lodestar for what Adorno condemned as the “culture industry”
4) the ambition of the total work was, from its inception, a European
modernist bid at developing a revolutionary fusion of the arts intended to
catalyze a utopian future and to develop an alternative to the collapse of
feudal Christendom as the acknowledged unifying thread of European cultural
traditions
I’ll get back to the idea of this fourth point later on. For now we’re still rooting around in
Adorno’s first historically significant fusillade against jazz:
page 485
... The subjective pole of
jazz--subjectivity itself understood strictly in the sense of a social product
and as something which has been reified into a commodity--is salon music. If
one wanted to describe the phenomenon of interference in jazz in terms of broad
and solid concepts of style, one could claim it as the combination of salon
music and march music. The former
represents an individuality which in truth is none at all, but merely a
socially produced illusion of it; the latter is an equally fictive community
which is formed from nothing other than the alignment of atoms under the force
that is exerted upon them. The
effectiveness of the principle of march music in jazz is evident. ...
Now I know that Eric Oberle has been working on not just one but two
books on Adorno and the concept of negative identity. The first book, Theodor Adorno and the Century of
Negative Identity, as of early
2020, has been out for a couple of years and the second is on the way. Oberle’s argument that Adorno had a crisis in
the United States confronting what he regarded as the underlying cultural
forces that catalyze antisemitism and that his encounters in the United States
with racism forced him to reassess his early concepts of identity. This reappraisal process was cut short by
Adorno’s death and Oberle makes a case that Adorno was not attempting to
formulate racist arguments against the artistic legitimacy or illegitimacy of
jazz. As it stands, Adorno died and,
more to the point, he did not waver in condemning rock when rock came along
just as he condemned jazz.
Adorno, as I suggest we see argued above, claimed that the subjectivity
of jazz, a subjectivity that had been commodified and reduced to formula, was a
subjectivity that was descended from salon music. Now Ethan Iverson, for instance, could
highlight that many a jazz pianist made a point of knowing the music of
Chopin. Adorno’s assertions seem acrid
but his claim that jazz “subjectivity” was descended from salon music isn’t
entirely wrong. His assertion that the
individuality of the jazz performer or composer is not true individuality at
all is simple assertion. Go through the
history of ragtime and chart is roots in coon songs, minstrelsy, but also salon
music and marches and Adorno’s declaration that jazz was a “false amalgam” of
salon and march music is mere assertion, but Adorno accidentally grasped the
roots of the music he denigrated. The
problem with Adorno’s assertion is that’s all it was. He never made a case for why the harmonic and
melodic vocabularies of Debussy or the salon composers of the Romantic era had
to become “false” by the time American composers of popular songs and nascent
jazz made use of those influences.
Adorno kept going and moved on to some Freudian proclamations as to the
nature of the failure of subjectivity and the failure of the jazz subject. These are the passages where Adorno comes
across as most embarrassingly of his time:
page 490
... The rhythmic categories
of hot music are themselves eccentric categories. The syncopation is not like
its counterpart, that of Beethoven, the expression of an accumulated subjective
force which directed itself against authority until it had produced a new law
out of itself. It is purposeless; it leads nowhere and is arbitrarily withdrawn
by an undialectical, mathematical incorporation into the beat. It is plainly
"coming too early," just as anxiety leads to premature orgasm. ...
... As a clown, the hot ego
begins to follow too weakly the standard of the collective which has been
unproblematically set, reeling with uncertainty like many of the figures in
American film grotesque genre, such as Harold Lloyd and occasionally Chaplin
himself. The decisive intervention of jazz lies in the fact that this subject
of weakness takes pleasure precisely in its own weakness, almost as if it
should be rewarded for this, for adapting itself into the collective that made
it so weak, whose standard its weakness cannot satisfy. ... The sex appeal of jazz is a command:
obey, and then you will be allowed to take part. And the dreamthought, as
contradictory as reality, in which it is dreamt: I will be only be potent once
I have allowed myself to be castrated.
page 491
... the specification of the
individual in jazz never was and never will be that of a thriving productive
power, but always that of a neurotic weakness, just as the basic models of the
"excessive" hot subject remain musically completely banal and
conventional. For this reason, perhaps, oppressed peoples could be said to be
especially well-prepared for jazz. To some extent they demonstrated for the not
yet adequately mutilated liberals the mechanism of identification with their
own oppression.
Jazz, the amalgam of the
march and salon music, is a false amalgam: the amalgam of a destroyed
subjectivity and of the social power which produces it, eliminates it, and
objectives it through this elimination.
After all his writing, Adorno’s initial argument against jazz in “On
Jazz” amounts to simple assertion. He
may have even accidentally gotten something right by describing jazz as the
amalgam of the march and salon music, since arguably the roots of ragtime and
subsequently the roots of jazz could be heard as an amalgam of these traditions. But by declaring jazz a false amalgam Adorno
was not really making an argument. At
some level he probably knew it, because he would eventually make a somewhat
extravagant argument against popular song, and by extension jazz, as being
serious musical art. “On Jazz” was the
initial shot Adorno fired at jazz.
The second shot was hardly more charitable:
Farewell to Jazz (1933, on
the occasion of a Nazi ban on jazz)
page 498
... In jazz, the charm of
the ninth chords, of the endings on seventh chords, and of the whole-tone
daubings are shabby and worn out; it conserves a decaying modernity of the day
before yesterday. No different, on second glance, are those achievements of
jazz in which people thought they perceived elements of a fresh beginning and spontaneous
regeneration--its rhythms. In a master like Brahms, for example, it is
accomplished with incomparably greater richness and penetrating depth of
construction than in the jazz writers, in whose work--as the
"textbooks" of hot music unwittingly but all the more drastically
reveal--the apparent variety of rhythmic constructs can be reduced to a minimum
of stereotypical and standardized formulae. But then--and this explains the
stereotypical quality--the rhythmic achievements of jazz are mere ornaments
above a metrically conventional, banal architecture, with no consequences for
the structure and removable at will.
You could almost get a sense that Adorno was arguing that if you could
in any way actually dance to the music then it was music you could not take
seriously as art. Adorno would go on to
more or less articulate that point in Philosophy
of New Music. Adorno didn’t leave
his attacks on jazz at the early stage of declarations about “false amalgam”
and questioning whether jazz had any legitimately African roots. He would go on to make more philosophical
arguments involving form and aesthetics and even conceptions of musical time
and space. He would also make arguments
that there were categories of listeners and modes of musical cognition.
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