A Philosopher With New Disciples ...

[Otto]

There's some Adorno here:

  Theodor W. Adorno Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda

 Theodor W. Adorno Culture Industry Reconsidered

 Theodor W. Adorno Erziehung nach Auschwitz

 Theodor W. Adorno Jargon der Eigentlichkeit

 Theodor W. Adorno Minima Moralia

 Theodor W. Adorno On Popular Music

http://www.textz.com/

Otto

----- Original Message -----
From: "Dave Monroe" <davidmmonroe at yahoo.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Saturday, September 14, 2002 10:27 AM
Subject: A Philosopher With New Disciples ...


> The New York Times
> Saturday, September 14, 2002
> A Philosopher With New Disciples (in Music, Not
> Philosophy)
> By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
>
> In Thomas Mann's "Doctor Faustus," the music teacher
> Wendell Kretschmar plays Beethoven's Opus 111 piano
> sonata for his students. As he plays, he speaks and
> shouts and stutters, commenting on the music,
> combining the most vulgar observations with the most
> sublime. He invents lyrics, singing along with the
> music's spare, otherworldly themes. He reveals how a
> single note confers an "overpowering humanity" on a
> simple musical gesture. And he spins out speculations
> about subjectivity and death, culture and barbarism.
>
> But Kretschmar's influence went far beyond his
> novelistic classroom. He was actually the voice of the
> German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, who, like Mann,
> was an émigré in California during the 1940's. Mann
> found Adorno's writing "subtle and deep" and his
> musical knowledge "enormous." Adorno, who studied
> composition with Alban Berg and piano with Eduard
> Steuermann, had even played Opus 111 for Mann.
> Adorno's teaching had as great an impact on Mann as
> Kretschmar's did on his pupils.
>
> Now, over a half-century later, Adorno's impact, far
> from diminishing, keeps growing. He was once popularly
> known for his 1949 assertion: "To write poetry after
> Auschwitz is barbaric." He was close friends with
> Walter Benjamin and a collaborator with Max Horkheimer
> at the Institute of Social Research. His collected
> works, which comprise 23 German volumes and 10,000
> pages, encompass critical theory, aesthetics and
> political theory. But his writings on music have had
> the greatest impact.
>
> In fact, no other figure has influenced American
> musicology more during the last 20 years. A major new
> collection, "Essays on Music" (University of
> California), scrupulously edited with commentary by
> Richard Leppert, a professor of cultural studies at
> the University of Minnesota, will codify that
> accomplishment further, adding new translations by
> Susan H. Gillespie to essays spanning Adorno's career
> ....
>
> [...]
>
> ... the most urgent questions. Why is so little
> contemporary music performed or loved? Why are
> audiences preoccupied so obsessively with repetitions
> of 19th-century repertory? Why does the art-music
> tradition seem less and less central? What is the
> impact of recording technology on music? How important
> are these abstract musical sounds? What did they mean?
>
>
> Adorno took such questions seriously and his insight
> was often profound. If we pay close attention to
> musical detail, he suggested, to the ways in which
> phrases are shaped and compositions constructed, then
> we begin to see not just arrays of chords and melodic
> lines, but ways of thinking, ways of constructing
> order. Like literature, music can be judged by the
> kind of world it portrays and the ideas it represents.
> For Adorno it becomes an intellectual drama, a form
> program music. It also possesses political meanings,
> since music constructs a society of sound, with its
> own laws and liberties, its own convictions and
> confusions.
>
> Adorno's interpretations, though, were not always
> felicitous. His accounts could be gnomic ("the
> ontological region that lies beyond subjective
> accident is exposed as subjective mastery over nature
> that has been absolutized as a mere technique") or too
> bluntly political ("if we listen to Beethoven and do
> not hear anything of the revolutionary bourgeoisie . .
> . we understand Beethoven no better than does one who
> cannot follow the purely musical content of his
> pieces.") But Adorno still succeeded in bringing music
> back into the world, showing that much was at stake in
> its sounds.
>
> [...]
>
> The difficulty, of course, is in knowing when one is
> discovering ideas in music and when one is imposing
> ideas upon it. Here, the record is more spotted. I can
> only point to one problem. As a Marxist, however
> idiosyncratic, Adorno believed that music should be
> politically "progressive." That meant, he explained,
> that it had to speak about suffering and its origins
> in bourgeois society without lunging into
> sentimentality or straining at transcendence or
> seeking distractions. For Adorno, the pained
> expressionism of Schoenberg's music was truth-telling,
> while the technologically crisp creations of
> Stravinsky were not.
>
> But why establish that kind of "progressive" standard?
> Why are expressions of suffering and assertions of
> oppression the primary measures of authenticity?
> Haven't other aspects of human experience also
> inspired artistry? And is there only one "authentic"
> way to deal with suffering? ... there are more
> possibilities in musical heaven and earth than are
> dreamed of in Adorno's philosophy.
>
> In Adorno, of course, there is frequent recompense -
> elaborate and suggestive readings, theories about
> music history and musical knowledge and the effects of
> technology. There is even something heroic about his
> philosophical enterprise. But there is also something
> perverse. For while with one hand he caresses the
> 19th- and 20th-century art-music tradition, mourning
> its marginality and meticulously teasing out its
> meanings, with the other hand he tries, again and
> again, to sweep away the contentious, striving,
> bourgeois world that gave it birth.
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/14/arts/music/14CONN.html
>
> Adorno, Theodor W.  Essays on Music.
>    Ed. Richard Leppert.  Trans. Susan H. Gillespie
>    et al.  Berkeley: U of California P, 2002.
>
> http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9275.html
>
> http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9275/9275.intro.html
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! News - Today's headlines
> http://news.yahoo.com

__________________________________________________________________

Gesendet von Yahoo! Mail - http://mail.yahoo.de
Möchten Sie mit einem Gruß antworten? http://grusskarten.yahoo.de