Theodor Adorno really, really didn't like jazz music.
That’s the most obvious conclusion that emerges from his essay "Über den Fetischcharakter in der Musik und die Regression des Hörens" (The Fetish Character of Music and the Retrogression of Listening), the lead piece in the 3/1938 issue of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. Adorno (1903-1969) by this time was using the last name Adorno rather than Wiesengrad-Adorno by this time.
It's a substantial article, dealing with the philosophical concept of how music acquires the character of a "fetish" in the mass market. He is not referring to a psychological, sexual fetish, but to the concept in Marxist philosophy and economics in which the products of human activity come to appear to people as something objective, as something independent of human activity. And his concept of "regressive hearing" is an interesting and provocative one. The notion is that commercialized music becomes one more factor in integrating people into a capitalist system that restricts human freedom in major ways.
Still, much of this essay reads like a philosophical-minded fan of art music (popularly called "classical music") who just doesn't understand why the kids today like all this jangly jazz and pop music and why they are into all this wild, decadent dancing. Adorno was in his mid-30s in 1938, a little young to be sounding like a grouchy uncle who doesn't like any music written in the last 20 years. (It’s interesting in this regard to note that he could get pretty grumpy about student radicals in the late 1960s in Germany, even though many of them were inspired by the ideas of the Frankfurt School itself.) This was the year he emigrated to the United States from England and became a member of the Institute for Social Research (Frankfurt School) in exile.
But his argument in this article comes down to argue for the superiority of art music to popular music. It is important to understand how the market and changing technology affects the reception of art of all kinds. Up until around 1900, music was experienced as a live experience. You played music yourself, or heard your neighbors play music, or participated in music performances at church or community events, or went to live concerts, whether in Western bar or Stephen Foster music show or an opera or symphony concert. With the technologies of phonographs, radio, talkie movies, television, tape recordings, the Internet, I-phones, and other variations in the way we experience music today, music as a whole is a different experience in 2010 than it was in 1938, which in turn was a very different experience than in 1900 or 1850.
So it makes plenty of sense for an aesthetic and social philosopher like Adorno to look at how those changes affect our understanding of music. One could take from Adorno's essay the sense that with the mass-production of music, so that one hears music seemingly everywhere all the time, often in the context of commercials for products, the function of music that allows one to step back from the fog of daily life, to experience life in a different way for some period of time, is being severely diminished.
I once heard the folk singer Nanci Griffith say that a song should be a way of letting people be somewhere else for a few minutes. Nobody is going to go start a revolution, or even campaign for more humane immigration laws, just because they stop and listen to a Beethoven symphony or a Lady Gaga song. But entirely apart from any explicit messages in the lyrics, music can give people a sense of perspective that is potentially progressive in the sense that it provides a hint, a sense, a new perspective on things that reinforce a person’s ability to imagine better and more humane conditions of life.
Religious fundamentalists and political dictatorships tend to grossly overestimate the subversive potential of musical productions. But they aren't entirely wrong in worrying that something happens in musical experience that can promote impulses toward freedom that can escape the control of the religious or political authorities. On the other hand, it’s not as though even in the most repressive societies that music is suppressed altogether. The Taliban regime in Afghanistan was unusual in that regard. People can have good taste in art music and support some very repressive political ideas. David Koch, one of most important financial patrons of the Tea Party, is also a generous financial patron of the arts in New York City, serving as a member of board of trustees of the American Ballet Theatre. (See Jane Mayer, Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama New Yorker 08/30/2010.)
The progressive folk music tradition is closer to understanding the democratic impulses in popular music than Adorno was in this 1938 essay. In the United States around the time of Adorno’s essay, singers like Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter Family and Woody Guthrie were tapping the traditions of American folk music to not only produce great entertainment but also to continue the tradition of expressing the real troubles that ordinary people experience in everyday life, making a protest against unjust conditions and situations even without being explicitly "political" songs.
Adorno was onto something real with his notion of "regressive listening." But he also seemed to be missing the simultaneous opportunity that the mass media was opening to people to tap into the riches of music, including the kind of musical experience that expanded people's consciousness of the potential for a better life. And that would help them develop personal perspectives that could go beyond the limitations of prevailing repressive ideologies.
Tags: adorno, frankfurt school, frankfurter schule
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