8.
Philosophy of New Music and norms of musical cognition
PHILOSOPHY OF NEW MUSIC
Theodore Adorno
Copyright (c)2006 by the
Regents of the University of Minnesota
translated by Robert
Hullot-Kentor
ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-3666-2
ISBN-10: 0-8166-3666-4
page 31
... Music knows no natural
law, and this fact accounts for the dubiousness of all psychology of music. In
seeking to make the music of all ages invariably "understandable,"
the psychology of music presupposes an unchanging musical subject. This
assumption is more closely related to that of the constancy of a natural
material than the actual psychological differentiation would allow. ...
... an ontological law is on
no account to be attributed to the tonal material in itself, or to what has
been filtered through the system of temperament. However, this is precisely
what occurs in arguments that want to conclude, for instance--whether on the
basis of the physiology of the ear or the relation of overtones--that the triad
is the necessary and universal condition for any possible musical understanding
and therefore that all music must be committed to it. ...
Now what springs to mind for me, reading this passage again, is
something Richard Taruskin pointed out in the work of the late Leonard B. Meyer
in Cursed Questions. Being an admirer of Meyer’s work myself it’s
not hard to find the passage Taruskin quoted:
Leonard B. Meyer
Volume XVI * Number 1 *
Winter 1998
The Journal of Musicology C
1998 by the Regents of the University of California
pages 3 to 25
From page 3
To explain why human beings
in some actual cultural-historical context think, respond, and choose as they
do, it is necessary to distinguish those facets of human behavior that are
learned and variable from those that are innate and universal. But it is a
mistake-albeit a common one-to conceptualize the problem as a search for
"musical" universals. There are
none. There are only the acoustical universals of the physical world and
the bio-psychological universals of the human world. Acoustical stimuli affect
the perception, cognition, and hence practice of music only through the
constraining action of bio-psychological ones.
Taruskin’s summary of Meyer was Meyer looked for universals not in the
nature of music (a cultural product of humans) but in the nature of sound and
the nature of human cognition (Cursed
Questions, chapter 10, “Essence or context? On musical ontology”, location
6497 if, like me, you’re using the Kindle edition).
So if in the acoustic “material” from which we can music there is no
“natural law” then how (and why) are we supposed to believe that “tonality”
ever became “used up?” Adorno was pretty
certain that in his day it was no longer possible to regard all tonal
combinations to be equally at the disposal of the composer “today”. Thus not far into Philosophy of New Music we get this:
page 32
By no means do all tonal
combinations ever employed stand indifferently at the disposal of the composer
today. Even the duller ear perceives the shabbiness and tiredness of the
diminished seventh chord or of certain chromatic passing notes in the salon
music of the nineteenth century. For the technically experienced ear, vague
discontent of this kind is transformed into a canon of prohibitions. If all is
not deception, this canon now bars the means of tonality, which is to say, the
whole of traditional music. Not only are these sounds obsolete and
unfashionable. They are false. They no
longer fulfill their function. The most advanced level of technical procedures
prescribes tasks compared to which the traditional sounds prover to be powerless
clichés.
page 33
... When a contemporary
composer, such as Jean Sibelius, makes do entirely with tonal resources, they
sound just as false as do the tonal enclaves in atonal music. Admittedly
reservations are required here. What is decisive in the truth and falsity of
chords is not their isolated occurrence. It is measurable exclusively by the
total level of technique. The diminished seventh chord, which sounds false in
salon music, is correct and filled with expression at the beginning of
Beethoven's Sonata opus 111. Not only is
the chord not patched in here, not only does it emerge from the constructive
layout of the phrase, but the niveau
of Beethoven's technique as a whole, the tension between the most extreme
dissonance that was possible for him and the consonance, the harmonic
perspective assimilating all melodic events, the dynamic conception of tonality
as a whole, all confer on this chord its specific weight. However, the
historical process through which this chord has lost its weight is irreversible.
The defunct diminished seventh chord itself represents a state of technique
that as a whole contradicts that of today.
Rather that concede the possibility of having consumed too much of
something, a philosopher transforms a surfeit of consumption into a falsehood
imputed to those who produce the product the philosopher has wearied of
consuming. The first horror movie you see can shock you but the fiftieth horror
film you see probably has few, if any secrets.
The diminished seventh chord was that genre of film, and Adorno let it
be known that he was tired of the chord.
That the diminished seventh chord was a stock musical device to
telegraph horror and surprise as far back as the silent film era can certainly
be taken as evidence that something in the arts can pale through overuse.
But it seems just as plausible to me to say that there are scholars,
journalists and philosophers who have consumed so much in the arts they get
sick of it; as a proverb warns us that although to a hungry man even bitter
things are sweet, honey will taste bad to someone who is full (Proverbs 27:7
for those who don’t already know the proverb). Adorno was full and loathed
honey. His next step, unique in musical history, could be counted as a
long-form argument as to why everyone else should consider what was musically
bitter paradoxically sweet.
Adorno wouldn’t make this point without inveighing against the fascist
music of Igor Stravinsky (who, it must be said, was openly sympathetic to
Mussolini, at one point in his life):
pages 122-123
... The concept of dynamic musical form, which
has dominated occidental music from the Mannheim school to the contemporary
Viennese school, presupposes precisely a motif that is clearly shaped and fixed
in its self-identity, however infinitely small it may be. Its dissolution and
variation is constituted exclusively through contrast with what is enduringly
maintained in memory. Music knows development only to the extent that it knows
the solidified, the definite; Stravinsky's regression, which would like to
reach back prior to this stage, therefore replaces progress with
repetition. ... His music knows nothing
of memory and thus nothing of any temporal continuity of duration. Its movement
is a sequence of reflex gestures. The
fateful error of his apologists is that they interpret the deficit of anything
fixedly established in his music, of any subject matter in the strictest sense,
as a guarantee of vitality. But this deficit obviates any breadth of form, any
continuity of process, and ultimately any "life". The amorphous has nothing of freedom but
rather imitates the constraint of mere nature.
So in terms of what Stravinsky’s music deliberately “failed” to
do, his ballets embraced a mechanical music of mid-obliterating “groove” by
sacrificing what Adorno regarded as a kind of developmental “argument” that
would appear in occidental music in a form such as a sonata or a fugue. Stravinsky’s music was the music of the mosh
pit, so to speak. What was wrong with
Stravinsky’s music embracing relentlessly “groove” based music? Adorno had
quite a bit to say about that:
page 141
... Spatialization becomes
absolute. ...
pages 142-143
... in Stravinsky--music
casts itself as the arbiter temporis
and prompts listeners to forget the experience of time and deliver themselves
over to its spatialiazation. Music glories in the disappearance of life as if
its objectivation were the music's achievement. In return it reaps revenge
immediately. One trick defines every manipulation of form in Stravinsky and is
soon used to exhaustion. Time is suspended, as if in a circus scene, and
complexes of time are presented as if they were spatial. ...
By renouncing what temporal
relations might achieve--transition; crescendo; the distinction between spheres
of tension and resolution, of exposition and sequel, of question and
answer--all artistic means are condemned except for his one clever trick. The
result is a retrograde development that is legitimated by the
literary-regressive intention but turns fatal the moment the absolute claim to
music is raised. The weakness of Stravinsky's work, gradually recognized over the past
twenty-five years and remarked by even the most obtuse ears, is not
compositional exhaustion on the composer's part but the result of the
compositional approach itself, which degrades music to a parasite of
painting. This weakness, this
nonintrinsic aspect of Stravinsky's musical complexion, is the price that he
must pay for the limitation of music to dance, which once seemed to him to be a
guarantee of order and objectivity. From
the beginning, it demanded the servitude of the composition, demanded that it
renounce autonomy. Real dance, in contradistinction to mature music, is a
temporally static art, a turning in circles, movement without progression. It
was in consciousness of this that the sonata form transcended the dance form,
at once conserving and abolishing it [emphasis
added]; throughout the entire history of modern music, with the exception
of Beethoven, the minuets and scherzos were almost always more modest and of a
secondary rank in relation to the first movement of the sonata and the
adagio. Dance falls this side of the
subjective dynamic, not beyond it.
Why would it be bad that Stravinsky attempted to build his music around
dance? What’s the problem with dance
music? Asserting that dance music forces
musical compositions to renounce autonomy is a meaningless argument if a person
doesn’t subscribe to the ideal of aesthetic autonomy. That “real dance, in
contradistinction to mature music, is a temporally static art” that Adorno’s
argument begins to drift toward making a point.
The condescension toward dance as a kind of enemy of “mature music” is a
bit of browbeating but Adorno is getting to a point where he’s going to make an
actual point.
But first, he’s got to get to saying that there were vices held by
those who found Stravinsky’s music appealing. It is here, in a passage imputing
the vice of ego-divestment to Stravinsky fans, that Adorno begins to make his
actual point about modes of musical cognition:
pages 144-145
Just as his music appeals to
all those who would like to be free of their own egos--because in the total
system of the regimented collectivity their egos stand in the way of their own
self-interest--so this music is intended for a spatial-regressive listener. Two types can be discerned, not as given by
nature but rather as historical constitutions with which prevailing character
syndromes can respectively be associated.
They are the expressive-dynamic and the rhythmical-spatial listening
types. The former has its source in singing; it aims at surmounting time
through its fulfillment and, in its supreme manifestations, inverts the
heterogeneous movement of time as a force of the musical process. The other type obeys the beat of the drum,
intent on the articulation of time through its division into equal quantities
that virtually abrogate and spatialize time. ... The idea of great music
consisted in a reciprocal interpenetration of these two types of listening and
the compositional categories that conformed to them. The unity of rigor and
freedom was conceived in the sonata. From dance it received a patterned unity,
the intention of achieving the whole; from song it received the opposing,
negative impulse, in turn producing the whole by its own rigor. ...
These two ways of experiencing music have today
separated from each other entirely and, torn from the other, have become
untruth. [emphasis added] This untruth, prettified in art music, becomes
apparent in light music; its shameless inconsistency disavows what in higher
music occurs under the mask of taste, routine, and surprise. Light music is
polarized into schmaltz--expression that is both arbitrary and standardized,
torn away from any objective temporal organization--and the mechanical, that
tootling whose ironic imitation schooled Stravinsky's style. The new that he
introduced into music is not the spatial-mathematical type of music as such but
its apotheosis, a parody of Beethoven's apotheosis of the dance. ...
So Adorno claimed that there were two types, and these two types are
not “given by nature” but are … historic constitutions with which prevailing
character syndromes can be associated.
It looks suspiciously like we’re seeing Adorno deal with Stravinsky on the basis of a set of stereotypes about who his fans are. Another way of putting this is to say that Adorno reviewed the audience and made some inferences about totalitarian tendencies on their part.
Nevertheless, Adorno’s declaration has a potential insight within
it. He claimed there were two prevailing
modes of musical cognition definable not as absolutes but as preferred ways of
interacting with music or creating within musical conventions. Adorno further declared that these two modes of
musical cognition, which I could summarize as a kind of song-based “argument”
and a dance-based “groove” had fractured and, having come apart, were both made
“false”. Adorno simply asserted that
without coming up with any reason why his assertion has any merit.
Even so, if we grant the assertion, what’s interesting about Adorno’s
philosophical writings and polemics about music was that he never really seemed
to come up with any ideas for how the expressive-dynamic and rhythmical-spatial
approaches to music could be reintegrated.
For the purposes of his polemic in Philosophy of New Music, it was
sufficient to Adorno to lump Stravinsky fans into that second category:
pages 145-146
...
The work addresses itself
exclusively to the rhythmical-spatial type, the joking-skillfully dexterous
sort, whose numbers today, along with the hobbyists and mechanics, proliferate
without end as if they were tossed up by nature and not by society.
Stravinsky's music presents itself to this joking-skillfully dexterous listener
as a task to be mastered.
So if in Adorno’s accounting of the birth of sonata the idioms of the
modes of listening derived from song and dance were dialectically made one in
the emergence of the sonata then wouldn’t it stand to reason, based on Adorno’s
own claims, that a way to restore the fracturing of these two modes of
listening could be in formulating a new conciliation between the “song” and the
“dance”; between the “argument” of one form of listening that informs
composition and the “groove” of the other approach to listening? Adorno cast his claims in terms of
conceptions of music as time and music as space, which is why I’m going to
eventually get to the writing of George Rochberg. Taking Adorno’s claims is not a given. We could decide that Adorno was just wrong to
insist that the modes of listening for the expressive-dynamic and the
rhythmical-spatial types were separated or that, even if they were separated,
any resultant music informed by one and not the other mode of musical cognition
is necessarily “false”.
What I think we need to consider is that Adorno would go on in the
1950s and 1960s to lambast integral serialism and aleatory in Western music on
the grounds that these two schools of thought were technocratic methods that
obliterated the decision-making subject, they were shortcuts to relieve new
composers of making decisions. It might
be easy to get a sense that Adorno set up a spectacular double bind. Tonality was “used up” but if you embraced
methods of organizing music apart from tonality of which Adorno did not approve
or that Adorno regarded as lacking meaning you were not even making music any
more.
Through all that Adorno never seemed to really explain how, if his
modes of listening had fractured and become “false” the two could be
reconciled. He could declare that the
ethos of the “song” and the “dance” could be fused into “sonata” but with all
those tonal idioms “used up” there was nothing left but Schoenberg’s heroic
failure and, oh, maybe some promising new possibilities from Varese and Ligeti
(whose music I do kind of enjoy so I’m not going to knock Adorno for having
licked those composers).
But in a sense what both an Adorno and a Scruton have shown through
their work is that diagnosing a problem in the arts rarely seems to come from
those who are able to, through their actual artistic endeavors, solve the
problems they see. However rudimentary
the attempts, what I hope to propose in this work is a way to reconcile the
developmental syntactics of sonata forms with the vocabulary of ragtime as the
proto-American popular style.
But I’m still not done with Adorno just yet. We have to see how little he thought of
movements within “serious music” to get a sense of what a dead end his
prognostication of Western music ended up being.
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