It becomes easy to claim that Adorno agreed with no music at all, as for
him jazz and Tin Pan Alley was the antithesis of the modernist project he
was committed to. Yet at the end of his essay on the Fetish Character,
there is a ray of hope conveyed in certain forms of artistic music: ‘such
music does not subconsciously use regression to ignore or evade the
terrors of reality’ (Briccetti, 2010). This can be embodied in Adorno’s
attitudes to Schoenberg. For Adorno, he was the musical representation
of was music should be doing -confronting society. The increasingly
sophisticated methods of marketing make it difficult for popular and
classical music to resist its fate as a commodity (Paddison, p103).
However, Schoenberg uses new, yet logical, atonal music to dismiss the
limitations of music and what is expected of him: ‘Schoenberg leaves
nothing unformed, every tone is developed from with the law of motion
of the thing itself’ (Adorno, 2002, p630). The key difference between
his attitudes to classical, popular and modernist music can therefore
be attributed to what concedes to its designated role by the bourgeois
capitalist collective, and what fights back, what refuses to become a
regressed commodity and what remains individual.
If Schoenberg makes good music, it is because Adorno believes that at
a musical level, he makes the ‘proper’ response to the ‘collective’ forces
that threaten to overcome the individual in society. The same cannot
be said of Stravinsky, which is supposedly bad as it regresses into
‘infantilism, primitivism and traditionalism, growing ever more complicit
in… celebrating the triumph of oppressive collective forces’ (Witkin,
1998, p145). For Adorno, Stravinsky’s constant style-shifting offers
empty clichés rather than traditional tonality as it is only a music about
music – he is imitating art. The Rite of Spring only confirms the primitive
sacrifice of the individual to the collective. We can draw a comparison
here between Stravinsky and the jazz that Adorno detests, as both are
seen to be wearing a mask to disguise their inability to address their
responsibility as music creators.
There are problems with Adorno’s critiques of music. It seems that Adorno
makes a case either for or against styles and individuals on personal
opinion. His writings degrading popular music seem to be marred by
the fact that he hated the music on a personal level, tainting even valid
criticisms as ‘mere justifications of his own prejudices’ (Paddison, 1996,
p112). There’s strength to this argument when we consider that Adorno
never commented on The Beatles, whom he would have seen during
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