Ethan Hein had a post recently on electric and electronic instruments in 20th century pop and he went through a grand litany of instruments, one of which was the Wurlitzer organ.
Of the many things to hate about Adorno's notorious essay "On Jazz" ... he categorically abominated the Wurlitzer organ.
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 objectifies it through this elimination. This is also true in coloristic terms of the unity of the pseudo-liberated and pseudo-immediate and of the march-like collective basic meter; the subjective-expressive sound; a subjective tone which dissolves itself by revealing its mechanical aspect. Of all the instruments, this coloration is most genuinely recognizable in the unbearable Wurlitzer organ. In it, the character of the jazz vibrato comes definitively to the fore. ...
Yeah, well, you know, that's your opinion man.
I recently finished Fumi Okiji's Jazz as Critique: Adorno and Black Expression Revisited, which is a short but frustrating read for me. Adorno's essay "On Jazz" remains one of the most infuriatingly wrong essays in the history of trans-Atlantic music criticism ... but Okiji's afropessmisitic/ontological blackness take on the experience of blackness Adorno didn't engage with seemed to misfire as a critique of Adorno. Adorno's damning remarks on jazz (however defined) were extended to all forms of pop music and to "light classical", which means he could contemptuously dismiss Sibelius alongside jazz.
The most cogent rebuttal to Adorno's worst ideas as a philosopher of music were articulated not by Roger Scruton but by Andrew Bowie (who plays jazz saxophone and is a philosopher)--Bowie pointed out that the unexamined surmises of Adorno were that there is a "state of the material" (tonality is "used up because Germans did "everything") and there is a "state of technique" (tonality is used up so only atonality remains as a "legitimate" option in composition). The problem, simply, is that there has never been a state of the material or a state of the technique and since Adorno was categorically and catastrophically wrong on those two counts the rest of his bad arguments against jazz can be shot down. My own impression has been Adorno never came up with a coherent or competent definition of musical time vs musical space. It's one thing to rant that in Stravinsky's music "spatialization is absolute" but what does that even mean? Worse yet, having finally heard some of Adorno's music my initial take was "This would be the kind of thing Paul Hindemith would've written if he didn't care how it turned out." Let the reader understand what a burn against Adorno that is.
But I may have to write about the Okiji book in more detail later because I like the idea of doing a rebuttal to Adorno on jazz but more and more I think the rebuttal has to be more than just a valorization of jazz on the part of its consumers (which would include jazz scholars). The problem with classical and pop is its partisans have balkanized and entrenched boundaries. Even Adorno recognized that in older eras before capitalism the high and low had a steady synergistic exchange. Adorno wasn't unique in this observation as it was a point made by another leftist highbrow snob, Dwight Macdonald. Charles Rosen, defender of atonality in the Cold War, went so far as to say that back in Haydn's day it was possible (for Haydn) to have his ear tuned into the virtues of street song and peasant music while using learned technique. I think that kind of fusion can be possible in every era but snobs on the pop and classical divides are more committed to enforcing the purity codes of their respective canons. None of this will be news to Ethan Hein since he's been reading my blog for years, but it's one of the holiday weekend riffs I have been thinking about. I can hang out with family and friends and talk about reading Alistair Kee on the evolution or claimed demise of liberation theologies in the trans-Atlantic world and then compare notes on season 2 of Dandadan.
I admire the idea of taking on Adorno's worst ideas but I don't think Okiji's approach ultimately worked. We can't refute Adorno's worst ideas by presupposing modes of racial identity that reinscribe essentialist neo-gnostic cults. I began to realize I had this issue more clearly reading Wesley Morris' essay in the 1619 Project when I saw he expressed an idea about black music having roots too deep to steal that mirrored Richard Wagner's canard that German was so true and soulful Jews couldn't truly copy it.
Ever since the end of the Cold War scholars across the United States and Europe have revisited just how American jazz has actually been. I have only gotten a few chapters into Jazz and Totalitarianism but I would never have guessed there has been jazz in Estonia since the 1920s, for instance (or Iran). But there has been jazz in Poland (within weeks of Stalin's death Polish intellectuals called for opening up concert life to jazz). That jazz has flourished even within totalitarian states belies claims that jazz registers protest of some kind. It "can" but Nikolai Kapustin wrote multiple piano sonatas emulating Oscar Peterson during the Cold War and his discovery was that so long as you have no improvised passages the state authorities didn't censor the works. There's a distinction to be made between saying jazz was pioneered by Black musicians and black musical geniuses and claiming that it ontologically "is" a/the music of blackness. George Walker found it annoying that whenever people met him and learned he was a composer they just assumed he played and wrote jazz. He didn't, but if you want a primer on George Walker's music check out Steven Beck's Bridge Records release that presents all five of the piano sonatas. I was thinking about transcribing/arranging parts of George Walker's piano sonatas for solo guitar at one point.
Those covers of "Summer Breeze" are pretty cool!
I gotta share something about the Mellotron because it was central to one of the most memorably brutal put-downs I ever read in Musician magazine. The writer mentioned some concert on some date and one of the bands was Queensrÿche. They apparently didn't put on the best of shows and the author wrote something like, "that was a pretty good Moody Blues impersonation but, next time, actually bring the Mellotron".
The Moody Blues aren't actually a bad band, even if it was popular to dunk on them in certain realms of rockism. I don't know if I'd say they're a favorite of mine but "Tuesday Afternoon" and "Nights in White Satin" are both actually really good songs. There, I wrote it. You could skip the rest of Days of Future Passed for all I care, though but it's worth mentioning to some (not all) Beatles fans that The Moody Blues came up with a concept album first. Sgt Pepper is far and away the better concept album but if we're going to have a race to the patent office paradigm the other band managed to make a concept album first.
I'm still partial to Dark Side of the Moon for the concept album.
Thanks to Ethan for mentioning 500 Songs. Since I am loathe to listen to podcasts (after that Mars Hill CT podcast I was reminded how much time it devours for me to listen to podcasts) I am delighted that Hickey has been transforming his podcast into book format!
Back when I was in a band I got to play Korg and a Hammond and it's easy for me, guitarist, though I am, to hear and feel how those keyboards became so popular. Decades ago when I was doing a stint learning piano I was mainly just teaching myself J. S. Bach, Scott Joplin and Paul Hindemith (despite my adoration of Haydn I never got to working on or through his keyboard music).
Andrew Hickey's early claim that rock is basically dead which means now is the perfect time to chart its history is a point I can agree with, polemical though it may be. It is because rock has become a tradition after half a century that the time seems ripe to show how readily the vocabulary of rock (and jazz and ragtime and blues) can be recalibrated into "classical" conceptions of musical form. We don't need the purification of all the existing genres, we need synergistic convergence and exchange. I am highly biase about this stuff and admit it. Being the son of a Native American low church Calvinist dad and a white Pentecostal mom I grew up with a possibly volatile mix of differing versions of Christianity and have a conservative but ecumenical streak I've tried to cultivate over my life. I'm Anglican these days but I never became a cessationist and I would never choose to give up my love of the music of Blind Willie Johnson, for instance, and I admire Scott Joplin's music now much like I admired it thirty years ago.
Adorno hated the Wurlitzer but I can't imagine having never heard the instrument.
I haven't written about the reading I've been doing of Theodor Vial or Andrew Bowie in philosophy and theology, or about M H Abrams. The short version is I know Ted Gioia thinks we need a new Romanticism and we're going to get one. I don't think we've solved the problems of Romanticism 1.0 yet so we don't need or want Romanticism 2.0. When European philosophers and theologians grappled with the problems they believed were inherent in the Cartesian split the attempts to transcend the subject/object dualism led to German Idealism and Romanticism. One path was to propose that truth is an ideal to aspire to that we know we will never attain or reach but the effort to attain it must always be taken up. Another path proposed is that the gap between the subject and object can't be overcome from within the subject itself and the intersubjective is what must be considered. Truth is communal and negotiated as a process of discovery.
The problem with how the European (and not necessarily "just" European) path of intersubjectivity played out is that the two default options most often chosen were the nation and the race. There were liberal ecumenical Protestants like Schleiermacher who proposed a panentheistic liberal Protestantism but Samuel Loncar has recently pointed out the obviously Marcionite/anti-Judaic element to such a liberal Protestant project that scholars have mostly ignored. Not all! Theodore Vial literally has a whole book on the unintended racist frame of some of the ideas of Schleiermacher and Herder (over against John Borstlap). Vial wrote a glowing introduction to Schleiermacher's thought and I am reading Andrew Bowie on how Schleiermacher's legacy in hermeneutics is pretty hard to avoid.
But the gist of what I'm reading through is I'm noticing that if the intersubjective paths taken in continental philosophy have inherited racial and national categories then there's nothing catholic (i.e. universal). The reactions to eighteenth century Deistic rationalism may have been understandable but they developed a counter-movement that can too often be predicated on what has amounted to modes of racial and national essentialism. We haven't overcome that in all sorts of ways, perhaps least of all in music. I think the constructivists have a great point about race being socially constructed but if this point is granted then the flip side is that music is constructed and if it is constructed there is no "essence", is there? To put this another way, I find it interesting reading people proposing there is some ineffable vital essence to music from this or that region, from scholars who would reject vitalism outright if it were being proposed in politics, lending, law enforcement, jurisprudence or medicine ... but in the arts ... suddenly vitalism is assumed.
One of the values of music theory, post hoc though it so often is, is that it gives us a chance to describe style as a thing that can be mastered and respected. The path away from racist essentialist dogmas about "authenticity" is not going to be to reject music theory as bunk but formulating and reformulating theories that allow us to articulate different cognitive modes. Kofi Agawu has a relatively new book out on African music, scholarship and techniques I just picked up I'm looking forward to reading.
I don't tend to dump autobiographical stuff into the blog but back in my college days I went to a private Christian school and several formative friendships in my underclassman days were with Christians from Kenya and Japan. For me there is no more aggravating and dishonest academic myth than the claim that Christianity is a "Western" or "white" religion. Too many formative Church Fathers were African for me to buy that nonsense. Christianity started firmly in southwest Asia. I also have Eastern Orthodox family and friends. I actually liked James Cone's Black Theology and Power even if I disagree with where he went later. I've been thinking about how the theories of the past can be straitjackets to conceptual breakthroughs in the present because I am finding that when Marxists talk about reification and the damage they say capitalism does to people they have secularist/materialist ideas that are functionally variations on apocalyptic literary tropes about the vicious unseen forces that subjugate humanity and render humanity inhuman and inhumane.
Back as a callow teenager near the end of the Cold War I was told, in direct and indirect ways, that all commies were the enemy and Marxism was bad. Some of my favorite composers were Soviet composers and one of my favorite filmmakers, Hayao Miyazaki, was a Marxist who became a pantheist. I don't plan to be either a Marxist or a pantheist but when the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union collapsed I was about to get out of high school and I thought to myself, whatever the future has for all of us as humans, the Cold War is no longer the way to think about the world. Now I had the opportunity to listen to music by Soviet composers whose music impressed me and there was no longer a political or dogmatic reason to say "You shouldn't listen to that because commies don't make art because they aren't in a free society".
Adorno was the type to not just dismiss the Wurlitzer organ but to regard the entire field of Soviet musicianship as incapable of even making art.
Yeah, well, plenty of people know the string quartets of Dmitri Shostakovich now and Adorno's string music is ... eh ... glad for his sake he wrote it but it doesn't do much for me. Why listen to Adorno when I can listen to Haydn, Bartok, or Ben Johnston?
Anyway, that's my ramble for the Thanksgiving weekend, here at the blog anyway. I'm going to start reading a book by Agawu this weekend and there's a new episode of Spy x Family I haven't seen yet.
