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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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.
It's true that a lot of Adorno has not aged well, but it seems to be the case that he remains pretty much the most serious thinker about music despite his turgid prose and Germanic tendency to over abstraction. I'm reading a lot of Adorno these days and I'll do a post on him soon. He has this pessimistic tendency to paint himself into a corner and see dilemmas and crises on every hand.
What I wrestle with is when I was a young person growing up, a lot of people played and sang in an amateur sort of way and some even wrote poetry. They did it just for personal fulfillment and it was shared with others. That all seems to have gone away and what has replaced it doesn't seem healthy to me.
Adorno may have thought tonality was used up, I'm not entirely sure, but his idol Schoenberg certainly didn't think so.
I have half a dozen of his books, actually. I think he was wrong about the "what" of tonality being used up. I also think he was disastrously wrong in the "what" of his appraisal of pop music being incapable of "sustained form" (Schoenberg contended that the best shot at US music being taken seriously was in its "light music", which I'm sure you read at some point, along with Schoenberg's enconium to Gershwin). But in his analysis of the "how" of why he considered American song and dance music to fall short of organic and sustained large-scale forms he was remarkably insightful. And the crucial distinction between an Adorno and a Scruton is that Adorno contended that pop music DIDN'T develop large scale approaches to form within its modular musical vocabulary whereas a Scruton would insist that it COULDN'T and that is where I think Scruton failed to adequately engage Adorno's best musical insights and to merely replicate Adorno's snobbery.
There's a propensity that can show up among philosophers and theologians to insist that if the Big Idea promoted by a thinker is wrong the whole body of work can be dismissed. Scruton did this with Adorno somewhat on the issue of Marxism and I'd agree but Adorno was right in his secondary ideas about commodification to the point that Scruton felt somewhat obliged to agree. Scruton insisted that because "we" know that the neo-Platonic cosmology Augustine drew upon in De Musica was discredited that that approach is no longer relevant. But Augustine's opening claim was music was a science and that its core included grappling with the nature of human memory and cognition as the medium through which we even perceive music to exist. If we look at Augustine's approach not through the lens of cosmology but theological anthropology then his insights into the relationship between memory, time and music have not really been improved upon over the millennia. George Berkeley's anti-materialism may not convince many people but his observation that the mind must interpret visual stimuli before they can mean anything can still be taken for granted. For instance, at the risk of TMI I can read with one eye but not the other so I have had to think about that kind of issue Berkeley considered on a weekly basis.
Philosophers and theologians generally like to dismiss the Big Idea and the rest that goes with it, but I think with figures as significant as Adorno (and, obviously) Augustine, it behooves us to not dismiss substantial and pretty well-established Secondary Ideas (like music and memory) because the Big Idea (Christian Platonism) may not appeal to modern sensibilities.
Adorno's arguments for HOW pop music failed to develop large scale forms can be precisely the means through which we can develop sonata forms built from blues or ragtime. As Terry Teachout put it, a truly great critic can help us more by being disastrously wrong than an average critic gets done by always being right because the great critic can be wrong in ways that spur further reflection. In proving the great critic wrong the critic helped us out by having actual arguments that can be disputed and not just aesthetic judgments that leave us with either saying "Yes" or "No".
So by that standard Adorno is still great even when I think he remains disastrously wrong.
Wenatchee, I entirely agree with everything you are saying here.
Well, I found these videos rather addictive...! He makes an interesting point about how, in the past, performers famously protested about being forced to mime. A curious change. There are now also many classical guitar videos where the audio is recorded and edited, and then the players goes to a visually-attractive venue and mimes to their recordings, which get implicitly promoted as performances. I understand why they do it, but it feels disingenuous.
One of my favourite recordings is the first Johnny Cash American Recordings album. Absolutely nothing but him, alone, playing guitar and singing. No added tracks or post-production fiddling, unlike the later albums. It has an astonishing intensity. I wish there were more like it.
Perhaps we are heading towards a time when Swift et al. do not even sing their vocals on the recording. It's conceivable that an AI could do it instead. Which makes me idly wonder whether an AI Maria Callas, or AI Segovia, say, be invented.
I used to make this joke that classical musicians used to be known for not selling out, but when they finally decided to sell out, they found that few were buying. Ok, not very funny!
Yes, there are classical guitar videos out there where the performer is in a natural setting, trees, lakes, etc. But the recorded sound is obviously from a studio.
Johnny Cash, yes, and one of my favorite recordings is the Bob Dylan album John Wesley Harding, absolutely minimal production. The real deal.
As for AI Segovia, please, no more dystopian visions!
Re AI dystopias, have you encountered Google's NotebookLM? It generates an audio AI podcast conversion based on any text you submit. The project is in its early stages, but nevertheless I find it the most disturbingly clever AI invention yet. For example, I just fed it your post 'Authentic Mime', and here is the result: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TMoY0y1DQqzBadihNyytX-KEjcwTGfV5/view?usp=drivesdk
I was eager to see what this was, but apparently I have no app that can play it? I do have a "No Google" policy.
Ah, hold on I'll try and email it to you...
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