7.
Adorno’s legacy
on aesthetics and popular music by way of Roger Scruton
We’re going to repeat a lot of material presented so far but there’s a
reason to do so. Adorno was
catastrophically wrong in his verdict on jazz as a musical art but along the
way he made arguments against popular song that, as we’ll see, have been
preserved in the works of the anti-Marxist conservative philosopher Roger
Scruton. It may be a testament to the
influence of Adorno in the philosophy of the aesthetics of music that Scruton
took up so many of Adorno’s concepts even as he rejected Adorno’s Marxism and
Adorno’s damning appraisal of jazz.
But first let’s get to a passage from Adorno we haven’t already quoted
that may help establish what Adorno saw as a problem in the American concept of
a “music appreciation” regime. Plus, as a mostly life-long Haydn fan I can’t
resist quoting Adorno on how he was sure Haydn’s work was misunderstood and
misrepresented in American contexts:
CURRENT OF MUSIC
Theodore W. Adorno
Polity Press
(c) 2009 by Polity Press
Introduction by Robert
Hullot-Kentor
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4285-7
ISBN-13:
978-0-7456-4286-4(pb)
page 190
The allegation that Haydn
"standardized" the sonata form, is a fatal blow to the life of
musical forms. Standardization is a term applied to industrial mass production
and not to works of art, but apparently the commentator is under the spell of
the industrial age to such an extent that he does not even notice its
inadequacy. Haydn crystallized the sonata form, not as a rigid standard, but as
a highly dynamic framework responding to any impulse of the composer in the
specific work he is writing. The standardized sonata form would cease to be a
living form and would become nothing more than a schoolmaster's set of
prescriptions. The real danger is such statements is that they promote the idea
that it is the task of a composer to "make things easier", as if it
were Haydn's merit that after him it was easier to compose; actually and
fortunately, it became more difficult after Haydn to write symphonies. Musical
development is not like gadgeteering.
As long as the idea of
making things easier prevails in musical education, no actual musical
understanding can be expected to develop. Such understanding consists in the
very spontaneity of the listener's response that is jeopardized by the feeling
that everything has been settled for him by other people who have standardized
the forms.
As I write in early 2020, in the
wake of Roger Scruton’s passing it might be tempting for those on the
conservative side to note what a dedicated opponent of Marxism Scruton was
while those on the progressive or left or liberal sides (none of which I
personally find able to view as equivalent or commensurate) may note that
Scruton softened his views but that his views were, in the end, rejections of
the idea that inequality could be eliminated.
It’s important to consider which
ideas a philosopher budges on and why when assessing a philosopher’s
legacy. I think a case can be made that
Roger Scruton’s assessment of popular musical styles and forms was ultimately
little different in terms of his negative assessment of pop as Theodore
Adorno’s was throughout his own career.
That one of the more famous anti-Marxist conservative philosophers laid
out an argument for the limitations of jazz and popular music which merely
recapitulates arguments made previously by one of the more famous Marxists,
Adorno, who was a founding thinker in critical theory is any irony that can’t
be overstated.
As decades passed Scruton
regarded jazz as an actual form of musical art, a point that Adorno was
reluctant, to put it discreetly, to agree with.
In the end, Roger Scruton’s view of jazz might be likened to the point
raised by Hiram K. Moderwell a century ago, that millions of Americans find
ragtime appealing and musically satisfying may not make them “right” but if you
give the music a chance you may enjoy it until someone reminds you (someone
like an Adorno) that you shouldn’t.
Scruton ultimately decided that the pleasures of jazz as musical art
were worth defending.
Yet that both Adorno and Scruton
made a common argument as to why jazz and popular song fell short of the art in
“serious music” is not difficult to establish from what the two men wrote. Since Scruton’s legacy of writing critically
about pop so post-dates Adorno, let’s start with Adorno first. Rather than draw upon Adorno’s more infamous
piece “On Jazz” I want to shift toward his post-US stay writings because it is
in these later writings he was better able to articulate the kinds of arguments
that we shall see, at length, were basically replicated by Scruton.
Introduction to the Sociology of Music
Theodore W Adorno
Seabury Press
ISBN 0-8164-92662-2
pages 21-22
...
Conversely, as long
as the objective spirit was not yet wholly planned and steered by
administrative centers, the higher art would recall the extent to which its own
principle involved injustices to the many. Time and again it felt the need of
something else, of something that would resist the formative esthetic will and
that might serve as the touchstone of that will-and so, whether unintentionally
or intentionally, it would absorb elements of the lower music. Some of this
shows in the old custom of parody, of setting spiritual texts to profane
melodies. Bach did not shrink from borrowing from below even in his
instrumental works, as in the Quodlibet of the "Goldberg Variations,"
and neither Haydn nor the Mozart of The Magic Flute or
Beethoven would be conceivable without an interaction of what by then were
separated spheres. [emphasis added] The
last instance of their reconciliation, utterly stylized and teetering as on a
narrow mountain by pass, was The Magic Flute-an instant still mourned and
longed for in such structures as Strauss and Hofmannsthal's Ariadne auf
Naxos. There were times far into the nineteenth century when it was
possible to write decent popular music. Its esthetic decay is as one with the
irrevocable and irrelative dissociation of the two realms. [emphasis added]
page 26
... The higher music's relation
to its historical form is dialectical. It catches fire on those forms, melts
them down, makes them vanish and return in vanishing. Popular music, on the
other hand, uses the types as empty cans into which the material is pressed
without interacting with the forms. Unrelated to the forms, the substance
withers and at the same time belies the forms, which no longer serve for
compositional organization. [emphasis added]
page 33
The social function of jazz coincides
with its history, the history of a heresy that has been received into the mass
culture. Certainly, jazz has the potential of a musical breakout
from this culture on the part of those who were either refused admittance to it
or annoyed by its mendacity. Time and again, however, jazz became a captive of
the culture industry and thus of musical and social conformism [emphases added];
famed devices of its phases, such as "swing," "bebop,"
"cool jazz," are both advertising slogans and marks of
that process of absorption. Popular music can no more be exploded from within,
on its own premises and with its own habituated means, than its own sphere
points beyond it.
The modular construction of a
pop song and the recursive repetition of the core chart chords in jazz were
commensurate with an age and society of mass production. There was a
dialectical relationship between “high” and “low” music that, in the era of
monopoly capitalism, Adorno asserted had broken apart. This rupture between “serious” and “light”
music was not simply at the level of the means of production, it also involved
a parallel break in the modes of cognition which were used to both produce and
perceive “serious” and “light” music.
Adorno would expand upon his criticism of popular music in Current of Music. There was a distinction to be made between
serious music and light classical music and popular song. Adorno described that difference as follows:
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
From
“On Popular Music”, which is also published in Adorno’s Current of Music.
pages 439-440
Serious music, for
comparative purposes, may be thus characterized: Every detail derives its
musical sense from the concrete totality of the piece which, in turn, consists
of the life relationship of the details and never of a mere enforcement of a
musical scheme. For example, in the introduction of the first movement of
Beethoven's Seventh Symphony the second theme (in C major) gets its true
meaning only from the context. Only through the whole does it acquire its
particular lyrical and expressive quality--that is, a whole built up of its
very contrast with the cantus firmus-like character of the first
theme. Taken in isolation the second theme would be disrobed to insignificance. [emphasis added] Another example may be
found in the beginning of the recapitulation over the pedal point of the first
movement of Beethoven's Apassionata. By following the preceding
outburst it achieves the utmost dramatic momentum. By omitting the exposition
and development and starting with this repetition, all is lost.
Nothing corresponding
to this can happen in popular music. It would not affect the musical sense if
any detail were taken out of the context; the listener can supply the
"framework" automatically, since it is a mere musical automatism
itself. The beginning of the chorus is replaceable by the beginning of
innumerable other choruses. The
interrelationship among the elements or the relationship of the elements to the
whole would be unaffected. In Beethoven, position is important only in a
living relation between a concrete totality and its concrete parts. In
popular music, position is absolute. Every detail is substitutable; it serves
its function only as a cog in a machine. [emphases added]
...
page 441
To sum up the difference: in Beethoven and in good serious
music in general--we are not concerned here with bad serious music which
may be as rigid and mechanical as popular music--the detail virtually contains
the whole and leads to the exposition of the whole, while, at the same time, it
is produced out of the conception of the whole. In popular music the
relationship is fortuitous. The detail has no bearing on a whole, which appears
as an extraneous framework. Thus, the whole is never altered by the individual
event and therefore remains, as it were, aloof, imperturbable, and unnoticed
throughout the piece. [emphasis added] At the same time, the detail is mutilated by a
device which it can never influence and alter, so that the detail remains
inconsequential. A musical detail which is not permitted to develop becomes a
caricature of its own potentialities.
pages 441-442
The previous
discussion shows that the difference between popular and serious music can be
grasped in more precise terms than those referring to musical levels such as
"lowbrow and highbrow," "simple and complex," "naive
and sophisticated." For example, the differences between the spheres
cannot be adequately expressed in terms of complexity and simplicity. All
works of the earlier Viennese classicism are, without exception, rhythmically
simpler than stock arrangements in jazz. Melodically, the wide intervals
of a good many hits such as "Deep Purple" or "Sunrise
Serenade" are more difficult to follow per se than most
melodies of, for example, Haydn, which consist mainly of circumscriptions of
tonic triads, and second steps. Harmonically, the supply of chords of the
so-called classics is invariably more limited than that of any current Tin Pan
Alley composer who draws from Debussy, Ravel, and even later sources. Standardization
and non-standardization are the key contrast terms for the difference.
[emphases added]
Structural
standardization aims at standard reactions.
[emphasis original] Listening to popular music is manipulated not only by its
promotors but, as it were, by the inherent nature of this music itself, into a
system of response mechanisms wholly antagonistic to the ideal of individuality
in a free, liberal society. This has
nothing to do with simplicity and complexity. In serious music, each musical
element, even the simplest one, is "itself," and the more highly
organized the work is, the less possibility there is of substitution among the
details. In hit music, however, the structure underlying the piece is abstract,
existing independent of the specific course of the music. This is basic
to the illusion that certain complex harmonies are more easily understandable
in popular music than the same harmonies in serious music. For the complicated
in popular music never functions as "itself" but only as a disguise
or embellishment behind which the scheme can always be perceived. [emphasis added]In jazz the amateur
listener is capable of replacing complicated rhythmical or harmonic formulas by
the schematic ones which they represent and which they still suggest, however
adventurous they appear. The ear deals
with the difficulties of hit music by achieving slight substitutions derived
from the knowledge of the patterns. The listener, when faced with the complicated,
actually hears only the simple which it represents and perceives the
complicated only as a parodistic distortion of the simple.
No such mechanical substitution by stereotyped patterns is
possible in serious music. Here even the
simplest event necessitates an effort to grasp it immediately instead of
summarizing it vaguely according to institutionalized prescriptions capable of
producing only institutionalized effects. Otherwise the music is not
"understood." Popular music, however, is composed in
such a way that the process of translation of the unique into the norm is
already planned and, to a certain extent, achieved within the composition
itself.
The composition hears
for the listener. This is how popular music divests the listener of his spontaneity
and promotes conditioned reflexes.
Not only does it not require his effort to follow its concrete stream; it
actually gives him models under which anything concrete still remaining may be
subsumed. The schematic build-up dictates the way in which he (page 443)
must listen while, at the same time, it makes any effort in listening
unnecessary. Popular music is "predigested" in a way strongly
resembling the fad of "digests" of printed material. It is this
structure of contemporary popular music, which in the last analysis, accounts
for those changes of listening habits we shall later discuss. [emphases added]
page 462
Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley may be
dream factories. But they do not merely supply categorical wish-fulfillment for
the girl behind the counter. She does not immediately identify herself
with Ginger Rogers marrying. What does occur may be expressed as follows: when
the audience at a sentimental film or [hearing] sentimental music become aware
of the overwhelming possibility of happiness, they dare to confess to
themselves what the whole order of contemporary life ordinarily forbids them to
admit, namely, that they actually have no part in happiness. What is supposed
to be wish-fulfillment is only the scant liberation that occurs with the
realization that at last one need not deny oneself the happiness of knowing
that one is unhappy and that one could be happy. The experience of the shop
girl is related to that of the old woman who weeps at the wedding services of
others, blissfully becoming aware of the wretchedness of her own life. Not even
the most gullible individuals believe that eventually everyone will win the
sweepstakes. The actual function of sentimental music lies rather in the
temporary release given to the awareness that one has missed fulfillment.
The emotional listener listens to everything in terms of
late romanticism and of the musical commodities derived from it which are
already fashioned to fit the needs of emotional listening. They consume music
in order to be allowed to weep. They are taken in by the musical expression of
frustration rather than by that of happiness.
The influence of the standard Slavic
melancholy typified by Tchaikovsky and Dvorak is by far greater than that of
the most "fulfilled" moments of Mozart or of the young Beethoven. The
so-called releasing element of music is simply the opportunity to feel
something. But the actual content of this emotion can only be frustration.
Emotional music has become the image of the mother who says, "Come and
weep, my child." It is catharsis for the masses, but catharsis which keeps
them all the more firmly in line. One who weeps does not resist any more than
one who marches. Music that permits its listeners the confession of their
unhappiness reconciles them, by means of this "release", to their
social dependence. [emphasis added]
page 468
... we cannot content ourselves with
merely stating that spontaneity has been replaced by blinded acceptance of the
enforced material. Even the belief that people today react like insects and are
degenerating into mere centers of socially conditioned reflexes, still belongs
to the facade. Too well does it serve the purpose of those who prate about the
New Mythos and the irrational powers of community. Rather, spontaneity is consumed
by the tremendous effort which each individual has to make in order to accept
what is enforced upon him--an effort which has developed for the very reason
that the veneer veiling the controlling mechanisms has become so thin. In
order to become a jitterbug or simply to "like" popular music, it
does not by any means suffice to give oneself up and to fall in line passively.
To become transformed into an insect, man needs that energy which might
possibly achieve his transformation into a man. [emphasis added]
It
hardly needs to be said this is a harsh assessment of popular music and of
jazz. Although Adorno in his later
writing could grant that the most accomplished jazz musicians displayed real
skill and talent his argument that popular music as a whole was a product of
the culture industry incapable of rising to the level of serious music as an
art form did not shift much. In his
later writings he had comparably harsh things to say about rock:
Aesthetic Theory
Theodore Adorno
Copyright (c) 1997 by the Regents of
the University of Minnesota
Continuum
ISBN 0-8264-6757-1
pages 319-320
The demise of art, which is today being
proclaimed with as much glibness as resentment, would be false, a gesture of
conformism. The desublimation, the immediate and momentary gain of pleasure
that is demanded of art, is inner-aesthetically beneath art; in real terms,
however, that momentary pleasure is unable to grant what is expected of it. The
recently adopted insistence on culturing uncultivation, the enthusiasm for the beauty
of street battles, is a reprise of futurist and dadaist actions. The cheap
aestheticism of short-winded politics is reciprocal with the faltering of
aesthetic power. Recommending jazz and
rock-and-roll instead of Beethoven does not demolish the affirmative lie of
culture but rather furnishes barbarism and the profit interest of the culture
industry with a subterfuge. The allegedly vital and uncorrupted nature of such
products is synthetically processed by precisely those powers that are
supposedly the target of the Great Refusal: These products are the truly
corrupt. [emphasis added]
Shifting from Beethoven to the
Beatles would do nothing at all to attenuate or weaken the power of the culture
industry. No amount of imputing radical
or critical political discourse onto a style like rock or punk or any form of
music derived from Anglo-American standardized music was going to change the
totalitarian mass-produced tendencies that Adorno perceived in popular music as
it evolved in the last century.
Neither did Adorno, later in
life, concede that tonality was no longer “spent”. Despite his scathing criticisms of John Cage
and Karlheinz Stockhausen, Adorno did not concede as Arnold Schoenberg did that
there was still good music to be written in the key of C major. While Adorno could summon praise for Edgar
Varese and Gyorgy Ligeti (and I admit I enjoy some of their music), his stance
against tonality remained firm:
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]...
Adorno’s last quote which I have
quoted is interesting for what he specifically said, that we should not
dispense with the objections of reactionaries in the manner of an apologist but
we should learn the measure of correct insights they have to offer. Why?
The objections of the reactionaries about the arts frequently give them
an advantage over moderate progressive cultural liberalism. It would seem, then, that the counsel of
Adorno was that we should learn the measure of correct insights offered by a
reactionary. If Roger Scruton can be
considered a reactionary and not just a conservative then what criticisms of
contemporary post-tonal music and popular music did Scruton write?
Understanding
Music: Philosophy and Interpretation
Roger
Scruton
Continuum
Copyright (c)
Roger Scruton 2009
ISBN 978
184706 506 3
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]
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. ...
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. [italics original, bold added] 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 ...
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.
Having discussed Adorno’s scathing criticisms
of Stockhausen, Boulez, American serialism and John Cage’s aleatoric reaction
in some detail elsewhere; I don’t wish to dwell on what I regard as Scruton’s
somewhat lazy engagement with the full range of Adorno’s commentary on
post-tonal modernist styles. That Adorno
made even more trenchant criticisms of Cage and Stockhausen in 1967 than
Scruton made throughout his career should be a warning to contemporary
conservatives that in the midst of worrying about cultural Marxism it’s not
merely possible for conservatives to seemingly unknowingly repeat the criticisms
a Marxist (namely Adorno) made of the mid-20th century avant garde,
it has been something of a cottage industry fashion to repeat Adorno’s argument
minus both Adorno’s Marxism and giving him any credit for having criticized
Cage and Stockhausen first.
If Adorno turned against the post-tonal avant
garde as he saw its advocates turning to what he regarded as more inhuman and
technocratic methods pursued for the sake of method (a criticism that was echoed by Jacques Ellul), Scruton shifted toward a more generous
view of the possibilities of popular song as a rejuvenator of tonality. Scruton, at length, could not continue
rejecting popular song as incapable of being a musical art the way Adorno
seemed to. But let’s notice that
Scruton, in considering what he saw as the weaknesses of jazz and popular song,
was still taking up what we saw of Adorno’s complaint about the standardization
and modular construction of pop songs and the recursive schemata of jazz:
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 clichés, 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 cliché,
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. [emphasis added] 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. ...
In the long run Roger Scruton budged more in
recognizing that popular song had virtues, if perhaps partly in reaction to
what he regarded as the inhuman and inhumane technocratic tendencies of the
post-Schoenberg post-tonal schools of music.
I have my own reasons for thinking Scruton was less generous to
Americans rejecting what they saw as a repressive and oppressive legacy from
German idealism in American music education than he could have been but it’s
not because I don’t adore the music of, for instance, Haydn and J. S.
Bach.
Even with Scruton’s affirmation that jazz and
the American songbook had given the world real musical art Scruton was on the
same side as Adorno when it came to answering the question of whether or not
those popular songs were compatible with the “argument” of sonata forms. I
recognize this observation may be a point that is only salient to musicians but
I’m making it anyway, it can be too easy for non-musicians who may align
themselves with a Scruton or an Adorno on ideological grounds to amplify the
differences between the two philosophers so as to not see where they strongly
agreed. If Roger Scruton was a reactionary
for thinking American popular song was not compatible in terms of its substance
with sonatas or fugues then Adorno was a reactionary and was a reactionary
despite being a Marxist. Surely this
should suggest to us that such a reductionist reading of either Adorno or
Scruton will not do justice to either the best or even the worst of what they
said and wrote.
That they both regarded the vocabulary of
jazz in particular and popular song more generally as incompatible with the
“argument” and formal developmental syntax of “serious music” is, in my
estimation, a shared failure. Both men
could be thought of as being too beholden to the legacy of what scholars have
called “the long nineteenth century”.
One of the apostates of serialism Scruton has invoked was the American
composer George Rochberg and it has been striking to consider the ways in which
Scruton presented Rochberg as returning to tonality. I am not so sure I agree but I find it
interesting that when Scruton set out to find an example of a composer who
repudiated the dead ends of post-tonal modernism he settled on a particular
American composer:
...
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.
Scruton’s late career
suggestions that 1) we look to the American songbook for a new approach to
tonality and 2) we take Rochberg’s work (and theory) as the starting point for
a new direction in classical music in which popular music is not automatically
cut off, show us that, whatever disagreements people may have with his various
views, at the end of his career Scruton staked out a consistent opposition to
Adorno’s mentality. That Scruton did not
manage to implement the possibilities of the position he articulated can hardly
be held against him since, as he noted, gifted composers have rarely been able
philosophers and notable philosophers have rarely been gifted composers. We may no more need the music of Nietzsche or
Adorno than we need political tracts from J.S. Bach. To everything there is a
season, and a time and a purpose for everything under heaven.
In the long run Scruton flinched
where Adorno did not. The reason, as
Scruton told us in book after book in the last decade, came down to recognizing
that popular songs might be full of kitsch but there was no aesthetic judgment
requiring a person to ignore a memorable tune.
Scruton conceded Adorno’s point about American pop songs being full of
kitsch and made a counter-proposal, that kitsch tells us something truer about
the cultures we have been living in than the truth Adorno heard in the music of
Schoenberg.
Generations of critical theory
scholars have been squeamish about Adorno’s lacerating attacks on jazz and
popular music with cause. Adorno can
come across like he was a racist elitist.
It is not, necessary to state, let alone imply (as Scruton swiftly did)
that Adorno’s criticism of jazz was predicated on a more general criticism of
tonality. Adorno was clear enough that
the issue was not as simple as the schematic nature of tonality. Were Adorno alive today he could point out
that a I-V-vi-IV power ballad by a Lewis Capaldi is a musical and textual fraud
regardless of the faux-sincerity of the pop star’s crooning. The issue is how mass-produced and
mass-directed the music is for a mass audience in a mass industry.
Adorno would not have consented
to Scruton’s concession that perhaps kitsch is true in a way and that kitsch in
song does not preclude that song being art.
Forty years since Star Wars
and some ten movies later the monomyth is arguably the most potent formula to
pander to all those Adorno regarded as philistines that the culture industry he
rejected could have possibly come up with.
In many respects even conservatives would now probably simply say that
Adorno was right and that contemporary popular culture proves Adorno was right
but they would not for one second grant a corollary concession to a Marxist
critique of mass culture. Adorno, for
his part, could not concede that the Soviet Union was capable of producing
music that was really art, and yet here we are in a century in which the string
quartets of Shostakovich have made it into the chamber music canon. That what has so often been dismissed by
serious philosophers of aesthetics and connoisseurs of Western concert music
could be coded to be played and heard at more than just the level of kitsch is
a point that, perhaps, philosophers like Adorno and Scruton, on either side of
the Marxist and capitalist divide of the twentieth century, may have struggled
to understand in the way practicing and practical musicians have.
Adorno advised that we not
ignore the objections of a reactionary to the failures of modern music and
Scruton leveled criticisms toward popular song that recapitulated Adorno’s
complaints about the failure of popular music and popular song to rise above
the assembly line modular construction of song-making machines. Adorno rejected tonality and Scruton affirmed
it but what neither philosopher managed to do in their lives was suggest ways
in which practical musicians could do something that could be a rebuttal to the
criticisms both men made of the possibilities of popular song by making sonatas
out of themes drawn from popular songs.
I’ve seen plenty of people write
plenty of words to say that Theodor Adorno or Roger Scruton is right or wrong
in terms of words, in terms of their ideas.
I think both men were wrong but I think it’s paramount that musicians
demonstrate that both men were wrong not just in words, though I could write
plenty of words about why I think both men were wrong and right about a variety
of things, but to demonstrate that they misread the possibilities of music that
can be made drawing inspiration from popular songs in music.
I don’t see any reason that a capable and committed
musician can’t take in and take on the criticisms of Adorno and Scruton alike
and still make music that shows that they misjudged the asserted limitations of
the musical vocabulary of popular song. Anyone can simply say that these
men were wrong but saying why in both words and music takes a lot of work and a
lot of thought. I think both philosophers were in error but in a way that
invites careful thought and which invites a musical as well as a philosophical
and theoretical response. I owe both philosophers a great debt of
gratitude for writing as cogently as they did on music even where I strongly
disagree with them and I think that if their work is taken together they point
to problems and possibilities that musicians should relish considering at the
level of philosophy, aesthetics, theory and music-making.
In order to get a clearer sense of why Adorno cordoned off
popular music from “serious music” we’ll have to get into the issue of his
ideas about modes of musical cognition or, as the American composer George
Rochberg would put it, philosophical concepts about music in time and space.
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