And at the same time, the situation for classical music, outside of a few oases of idealism, is not better, though certainly different. Our problem is that we turn out virtuosos and highly trained theorists and musicologists from a myriad of institutions and frankly, there are almost no jobs for them. There is a tiny minority who have won a place in the international virtuoso and scholar network, but for everyone else, there is little other than frustration. Mind you, we classical musicians can still get together and play chamber music to our mutual enjoyment while ignoring society and the wider audience. I don't know what pop musicians can do. Are there still "folk festivals"?
THE MUSIC SALON: classical music, popular culture, philosophy and anything else that catches my fancy...
Saturday, November 23, 2024
Commodification and Correction
Theodor Adorno saw the promise of Enlightenment ideals betrayed by commercialism, standardization and the misuse of technology--this was certainly the product of his experience with the promise of modernity, the destruction of European culture by Naziism and disillusionment with the "paradise" of America. I'm much more of an optimist because my experience has been a happier one, but there are aspects in which one has to admit that Adorno was right. Let's let Fil from Wings of Pegasus give his observations:
The combination of fear of not being "perfect" along with the commercialization (or rather industrialization) of music has led us to a very unhappy place. Everything he is talking about here is purely technical. It really has almost nothing to do with aesthetics. And frankly, it's nuts. Every singer I have ever worked with has shaded or bent the pitch for enhanced expression. This A-440 equal temperament standard is, of course, useful, but players of bowed instruments, singers and even wind instruments shade the temperament to enhance the performance. And pop musicians used to do this a lot. Equal temperament is actually pretty sterile.
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3 comments:
I think in pop music there's probably still variations of what used to be called the bar and club scene, but hausmusik has been around for a long time in classical music and hausmusik, if we reconsider the term in light of house party music was a thing in the 1920s when Thomas Dorsey was doing blues and had not yet shifted to Gospel.
And at least house party music wouldn't be subject to the secret police monitoring of Beidermeier era Vienna, right?
Oh, yes, Hausmusik has been around a long, long time and is still around in niches and crannies. We don't really have a term for it in English, though. In my early years in Canada, the weekend dances were ubiquitous and the music was a fiddle or two and a guitar, maybe a bass. But what Adorno feared seems to have come to pass: all that and most other forms of music making have been totally eclipsed by the commodified forms of commercial pop music.
I wonder about that, though. That the professional music industry has become increasingly hegemonic "does" seem to fit Adorno's warnings well but Adorno created that absurd double bind in which tonality was "used up" on the one hand and pop was not conducive to large scale forms due to the modular sausage factory approach to construction on the other.
But if there's a point the microtonalists have that has convinced me it's this--that the perceived "crisis of tonality" only really hit when there was a trans-Atlantic international standardized tuning (when 12TET finally became truly standardized, as noted by Kyle Gann, Ben Johnston and other microtonal composers). Adorno tipped his hand a bit in a footnote in Philosophy of New Music when he said that guys like Bartok could "maybe" use tonal systems and have it be legitimate, and Slavic groups that were behind the German times.
Uh, yeah, okay, so that hasn't aged well. :) Adorno dismissed the entire sweep of Soviet music as not even art. THAT hasn't aged well, either. I get his concern that "monopoly capitalism" and the "culture industry" were going to commodify and standardize music but the trouble was that he never sold me on the plausibility that tonality was "used up".
Conversely, Hindemith's contention was that the health of a musical culture should be measured by the activity of amateurs rather than professionals and I think in a way THAT is more what you're getting at, Bryan, that the professional scene has so overwhelmed amateur regional music-making that it's like there's that monoculture Ted Gioia has complained about (he gets to be right from time to time, after all) He's claimed, lately, that there's a lot of rebellion from "Below" at the top-down administration of "culture" from the higher ups and that the top-down culture gurus are frantically posing as if they understand what the masses really feel when they are just grabbing ideas and philosophies that make them seem like they don't still have a stranglehold on cultural output at the level of industry.
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