Adorno on music
On MUSI320: Aesthetics of Music, students compare and contrast Adorno’s attitudes to classical
(including modernist) and popular music, with reference to his On the Fetish Character in Music and
the Regression of Listening. This essay is by Natasha Covill, taking BA Music with a Year in China.
Adorno holds some bold ideas, and it speaks to the provocation of
Adorno’s ideas that there is so much examination of his work. On the
surface, he appears to discard popular music in favour for classical and
modernist. Yet Adorno was influenced by Marxism, and his more general
views on the falsehood of society, pseudo-individuality and the reduction
of everything into objects of commerce seep through into his judgments
on music. This essay will compare and explain Adorno’s interpretations
of popular and classical music.
Adorno interprets music as having political and social influence, therefore
giving the composer responsibility. Classical music, in particular, has the
potential for expressiveness, psychological insight and profundity, so
even more responsibility is held by classical composers (Young, 2014).
Adorno recognises specific composers as having altered both human
and musical conventions in light of this responsibility. Mahler holds a
strange position in the western art music canon; the symphonic form
was becoming exhausted, and romanticism was ending. Yet Mahler’s
symphonies are the first to utilise music to create space and an entire
programmatic world (Floros, 2000). Adorno sees Mahler’s works as a
comment on society, he is the liberator of themes from an overriding
symphonic structure. Take the hammer blows in the final movement of
the 6th, for example- this was highly irregular and untraditional – an
act akin to liberating the layman from the bourgeois (Floros, 2000,
p163). This is the true significance of Mahler for Adorno; he is ‘using
the archaically corroded material of romanticism… in protest against the
bourgeois symmetry of form’ (Adorno, 2002, p608). The bourgeois is
a culture which rejects all that does not moderate it, and it is exactly
Mahler’s intention of making music which does not fit the status-quo
which constitutes for Adorno a rebellion against the formulaic society in
which he lived.
Despite Adorno’s high view on Mahler, he does not think so highly of all
classical music, particularly what it has become. To Adorno, liking and
disliking something should no longer be considered appropriate terms in
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