Junk for Code

Adorno, rock music, language

I often wanted to introduce more of the work of T.W.Adorno into junk for code, but to do so in a way that his aesthetic categories can help us to understand what is happening in our rapidly changing culture. Music may be one way to do this.

Theodor Adorno is conventionally seen as the ascetic high priest of high culture by many of those who did cultural studies in the 1980s.

They have given us the usual reduction of Adorno's work to a face-off between mass-produced entertainment and the high modernist aesthetics he championed. We even have suggestions that Adorno was politically conservative because he didn't like American mass culture of jazz and Hollywood movies.

Yuk. Another example of the poverty of academe.

When Adorno died in 1969, Western popular music was going through a technological rock mutation----eg., the Grateful Dead's dark acid rock improvisations (including noisy, jarring electronic feedback) which created a feeling of angst enhanced by the jungle of dissonances and percussions.

No doubt, Adorno would have considered this kind of popular music to be even more "barbaric" than the jazz he so roughly condemned.

This commodity music would have been seen as yet another affirmative nail in the coffin of enlightened humanistic individualism and a dancing on the grave of a critical autonomous modernist art that resists an unfree society.

What would Adorno have thought of Jimi Hendrix, heavy metal or punk? This certainly was not decorative music that made itself pleasant to people to reconcile them to a consumer society. It was more of an aggressive assault on the senses. Adorno's judgement would be that Hendrix or an electric Miles Davis had nothing to do with art of a high quality or aesthetic truth. Was it really music? No doubt the judgement would have been along the lines of musical illiteracy.

So you can see why Adorno is not on the must read lists of the lovers of rock music, and the many and varied fans of the Australian singer-songwriter Nick Cave. Cave and Adorno--now there's an idea.

Adorno gives us something to make sense of the music of 1969--his idea of music resembling a language. This quote is from the opening page of Adorno's text Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music:

"Music resembles a language. Expressions such as musical idom, musical notation, are not simply metaphors. But music is not identical with language. The resemblance points to something essential but vague. Anyone who takes it literally will be seriously misled." (p.1)

Great opening huh? The particular piece of writing is called Music and Language: A Fragment

Adorno continues:

"Music resembles language in the sense that it is just a temporal sequence of articulate sounds which are more than just sounds. They say something, often human. The better the music, the more forcefully they say it.The succession of sounds is like logic: it can be right or wrong. But what has been said cannot be detached from the music. Music creates no semiotic system."

So true.

Of course, Adorno was thinking of modernist classical music, such as that composed by Mahler and the new music of Arnold Schoenberg and Alburn Berg.

Adorno most certainly was not thinking of the Grateful Dead's exploratory Anthem of the Sun, despite its aural montage from divergent performances taken from tapes of live shows and its explicit references to the electronic music of John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, atonality and chance. It is an aural representation of an LSD trip in which strange sounds fade in and fade out whilst moods flow into one another at dizzying speed.

Anthem of the Sun indicates that the Grateful Dead were one of the most musically erudite rock groups. As Piero Scaruffi observes the band was aware of the atonal compositions of the European avantgarde, the modal improvisation of free-jazz, and the rhythms of other cultures as well as transforming guitar feedback and odd meters into the rock equivalent of chamber instruments.

Was not the innovative music of Anthem of the Sun (it was created through studio editing) as hostile to an administered society as that of Berg or Webern? Can we say that popular music sometimes created art works?

If we pick up on Adorno's idea of music resembling language then we can say that interpretation in music means performance. Adorno again:

"To interpret music means: to make music. Musical interpretation is performance, which, as synthesis, retains the similarity to language, while obliterating every specific resemblance. That is why theidea of intereptretion is not an accidental attribute of music, but an integral part of it."

Both the Grateful Dead and electric Miles Davis were deeply involved in interpretation as performance. Their improvisation meant that they were not entertainers.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at June 12, 2005 08:30 PM | TrackBack