antw. A Philosopher With New Disciples ...

[lorentzen-nicklaus]

      "absehbar wird eine musik der gesellschaftlichen entropie."

 teddie adorno ("einleitung in die musiksoziologie", 1962, lecture xi: moderne)


Dave Monroe schrieb:

> 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
>
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