Music Chat: Fun With the Impenetrable Theodor Adorno

[@ОлександрКрестін]

The translator is a real hero. It's easier to write that book than to translate it.

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

Very true.

[@SarahLeizer-fc1jq]

The good thing is nobody will notice or even care if you translate things wrongly.

[@georgesdelatour]

In Jonathan Cott’s book of Conversations with Stockhausen, Stockhausen tells the story of his youthful confrontation with Adorno at the Darmstadt Summer Schools during the 1950s. Adorno came to lecture the young composers, much to the annoyance of the young Stockhausen. Stockhausen felt that Adorno was trying to steer their music to fit his own pet musical theories. During one lecture, Stockhausen got up and told Adorno he was "trying to find a chicken in an abstract painting".

[@jimcarlile7238]

It’s wild to think that Jonathan Cott was once a bestselling author. I’ll check for that book.

[@ahartify]

The funny part was when Adorno said that the adagietto from Mahler's fifth would never catch on and no one in the future would listen to it.

[@williamsu5552]

It is really the weakest work from Mahler.

[@ahartify]

@@williamsu5552 How so?

[@yomibraester5063]

More of this, please! As others have commented, Adorno on jazz is an easy shot. Yet it's been a while since you've discussed other critics (not the same as the masterclass series). When I agree with you and when I don't, David, your professionalism as a critic shines, and reading other critics through your eyes is fun.

[@iblamesummers]

great segment. excellent commentary.

[@LyleFrancisDelp]

Fun suggestion for a Music Chat. the Joyce Hatto debacle. How one particular critic panned a certain recording of the Brahms 2nd Concerto by Ashkenazy, but later praised to high heavens when he thought it was by Joyce Hatto.

[@gevenliu1931]

Oh plz do continue this series! It’s such a delight to see Dave’s presentation of Adorno excerpts as bedtime stories. However nonsense Adorno could be, his words fill my heart with so much warmth!

[@DvdAndrsn]

Don't forget that Adorno was buddies with Thomas Mann in their California exile and Mann went to Adorno for technical advice when he was writing Doktor Faustus, and then their fellow exile Schoenberg threw a fit, claiming that Mann had stolen his "intellectual property" for his fictional composer. Read Carl Dahlhaus in German next. Almost as much fun.

[@daigreatcoat44]

I think it's unlikely that Adorno ever listened to jazz. He was probably referring to dance-band music, which was often (not always) superficial. I can't imagine that he ever listened, for example, to Ellington. My favourite quotation about him was in one of Schoenberg's letters. I'm quoting from memory, so not verbatim, but the gist of it was "I keep trying to tell Wiesengrund (Ted's middle name) that I write twelve-tone MUSIC, and not TWELVE-TONE music; but I can't get this through to him."

[@michaweinst3774]

I think it says something about Adorno that despite being a Schoenberg fan, Schoenberg still dismissed him for being too extreme

[@marceloforones6939]

Since my childhood I have been a voracious reader. There is just one book in all those years that I couldn’t understand almost nothing: “Philosophy of new music” by T. Adorno. So, Dave, your video just made my day! Thank you 🙏🏻

[@sdg1685]

Very interesting. I'd love to hear your impressions of Charles Rosen, specifically his book The Classical Style. His writing completely revolutionized the way I think about Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. I love the way he describes tonality in sonata form, and also about the static expression of the baroque vs the dynamic drama of the classical period.

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

It's a terrific book--I loved it when it first came out, even though I was only like 12 at the time--it was the general enthusiasm for the topic that grabbed me rather than the theoretical bits, which went way over my head--some of them still do.

[@sdg1685]

@@DavesClassicalGuide it is a really dense read (perhaps not as dense as Adorno!) Charles Rosen and Donald Tovey are my two favorite writers on classical music. They bring the basic building blocks of the classics to life for me. Michael Steinberg is also a favorite (more for subjective impressions than theoretical analysis).

[@christopherwilliams9270]

Adorno emigrated for a while to SoCal, where he hung out, naturally, with Thomas Mann (whom he helped write Doctor Faustus) and with Schoenberg's secretaries Dick Hoffmann and Leonard Stein, who told some funny stories about him. He was an egotist, but had some profound and sympathetic insights about music. He never did understand jazz, but I think it was the improvisational aspect that confused him. He never got past the Whiteman-style, drilled ensembles he first heard in Germany. My favorite quotation, which shows his sense of humor, was "every simple statement is a lie."

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

"Every simple statement can be expressed in impenetrable prose."

[@ThreadBomb]

Adorno never 'understood' anything. He was only concerned with justifying his prejudices.

[@1-JBL]

He's like so many other intellectuals, confusing his subjective views with objective truth. "I don't like jazz, so I must explain to everyone that no one should ever like jazz" -- and off to the typewriter to hammer out another 600 pages of his own opinionated twaddle.

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

Yes, I myself have been accused of that by those who don't recognize objective TRUTH when they see it. Go figure?

[@philippecassagne3192]

@@DavesClassicalGuide I think that objective truth is impossible, because reality is inaccessible. It is the same difference between a map and a territory, or between a mathematical model and the reality. But subjectivity can be strongly mitigated.

[@Sulsfort]

Adorno liked to be polemic. I think one of his role models was Nietzsche, who he often quotes. With his _Philosophy of New Music_ he wanted to promote the Schoenberg school. But Schoenberg (who referred to Adorno as the one who expresses himself so complicated) dismissed his criticism of Stravinsky. And Adorno even had to correct this criticism, after Stravinsky began to compose with tone-rows. On the other hand Leonard Bernstein turned this dogmatism around in favor of Stravinsky in his Norton Lectures, although he talks much more warmly about Schoenberg than Adorno does about Stravinsky. But for me reading Adorno is not all in vain. There are so many little observations and associations, that give me food for thought. His radio essays and lectures are far more digestible. And in _The Faithful Répétiteur_ he finally makes the effort to analyse individual pieces (e.g. Webern's _Bagatelles_ op.9).

[@johnmontanari6857]

As you were reading, I thought of a roughly contemporaneous quote from Sayyid Qutb, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, after spending a few years in the US: "The American girl is well acquainted with her body's seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs-and she shows all this and does not hide it." It strikes me that both Adorno and Qutb enjoyed, um, *researching* their respective topics more than they let on. Even still, Adorno demonstrates his lack of awareness of jazz's humble origins, the genius of its finest practitioners, and decidedly non-industrial postwar developments. I mean, did Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, et al., exemplify mass culture? If anything, they were its antithesis. Isn't it often the case that those who disparage something with the broadest brush are utterly ignorant of the thing they're disparaging?

[@jimcarlile7238]

When were those passages written? I think he might have been talking more about dance music like swing - the white commercial stuff - and not so much what they used to refer to as “race music.” Like a lot of those guys he basically just had an aversion to anything they thought was lightweight and commercially frivolous and intellectually decadent. I think Adorno’s right about a lot of things, it’s just that the defects he sees are not as culpable as he makes them out to be.

[@johnmontanari6857]

The Adorno is from 1933, so he probably meant "jazz" in the same sense as Shostakovich in his "Jazz Suites." Even by that time, Armstrong, Bechet, Ellington and other geniuses had taken Europe by storm. Qutb was writing in 1950.

[@clementewerner]

Qutb was a member, but the Brotherhood was founded by Hassan al-Banna in 1928.

[@Boepyne]

"The series is, in general terms, the germ of a developing hierarchy based on certain psycho-physiological acoustical properties, endowed with a greater or lesser degree of selectivity, with a view to organising a finite domain of possibilities..." Pierre Boulez. Talk about impenetrable. And the whole book reads like that (forgotten the title - I don't have it anymore)

[@thomasdeansfineart149]

Listen to Stravinsky do this. You get genius without the palaver.

[@robkeeleycomposer]

Adorno wrote an opera based on Huckleberry Finn. I kid you not. Schoenberg for one, was not impressed by the man, especially for his calumny against Stravinsky, whom he respected if not sympathised with.

[@loiccery1419]

I couldn't agree more. Adorno is best suited to footnotes in theses and dissertations, in musicology and philosophy. His reading is torture, as is often the case with German philosophers, on the model of Heidegger. That said, as with all intellectual chatter, sometimes - and I do mean sometimes - an interesting idea or two emerges. In France, his texts on Beethoven were collected and newly translated in 2020. Of course, there's a lot of blah, blah, blah, as we've become accustomed to reading. But occasionally, an interesting idea emerges, such as his analysis of the Missa Solemnis in Beethoven's entire oeuvre, its status and particularities. But to get to these points, you need to have stuffed yourself with approaches that give themselves the air of elevation, but in the end, are more often than not based on an immense intellectual pretension.

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

I don't deny some of his ideas are interesting. I said as much about his book on Mahler. But the style is atrocious, and inexcusable given its pretensions to represent elevated thought.

[@MrMazzada]

I am a jazz lover and cannot agree more on what Wikipedia says: " Even a fellow Marxist such as the historian and jazz critic Eric Hobsbawm saw Adorno's writings as containing "some of the stupidest pages ever written about jazz"

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

As opposed to Hobsbawm, who wrote "some of the stupidest pages ever written about history."

[@DeflatingAtheism]

“It is not mere fashionability, for that is by now largely a past fashionability, which suggests that the "normal" and "revolutionary" oscillatory historical paradigm is particularly suitable to situate chronologically and characterize idealogically the fragmented, pluralistic, disarrayed, thus revolutionary, condition of musical creation over the past seven or so decades. This is a period so long-and with no normalcy in sight- that one might be tempted to tamper with the paradigm and declare such an extended reign of coexistant, though almost discrete, revolutionary musics as, finally, the normal music. I do not mean for this lighthearted equivocation to be taken seriously except to lighten our heavyhearted awareness of our complexly delicate musical condition and to heighten our awareness that in music, at least, what further characterizes a revolutionary period is that it reexamines its past, and this by reexamining past and present examinations, "theories" of the past." - Milton Babbitt

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

LOL!

[@ahartify]

It's just a pity that Adorno couldn't write!

[@luciodemeio1]

Bruno Walter had the same opinion about jazz, as something which will eventually die out. He ddi express this in few simple words, though.

[@jimcarlile7238]

And hasn’t he been proven correct? The people who like stuff written down have gone to classical, and those who like swinging improv are into rock and the later popular.

[@rodrigosanchez4007]

That could become quite an interesting series! As however insightful Adorno's many radical takes on music seem to present themselves, one will always find that his language has some sort of a vile tone of exaggerated and unnecessary repugnance towards his dislikes to it and then, sometimes one will come across a tender and almost boyish admiration for the music he really cares about. It can be a huge pleasure to read paragraphs from an author that was intellectually as committed to certain aesthetic principles as Adorno was - even though (or because?) he was the musical propagandist par excellence. But the most fun little bits (buried in various corners of his texts on music) are probably his many anecdotes on his student years with Alban Berg, for example about Berg's most prized possession: Mahler's piece of toilet paper on which he had first written down the Chorus Mysticus theme from his Eighth Symphony... There are a lot of gems to uncover in Adorno's works, but digging them out sure is no easy task.

[@jimcarlile7238]

I think he’s kind of funny. He reminds me of a lot of 60s rock critics in the way they just threw out angry lines for discussion and to make a point.

[@robkeeleycomposer]

@@jimcarlile7238 teddy’s idea of a fun night in was the Boulez 2nd Piano Sonata….

[@composingpenguin]

Do his views on Sibelius next. Yikes.

[@ericleiter6179]

Sad how his closed minded views on Sibelius carried some weight and gained traction in Europe, and thus Sibelius was rarely programmed for decades...at least in English (and Finnish) speaking countries, we knew better!

[@thomasdeansfineart149]

@@ericleiter6179 Sibelius and his dismissal of Stravinsky are two good reasons that I dismissed him. One closed mind deserves another.

[@sybedijkstra1]

more, more, please!

[@zionfortuna]

I wonder how well he would fair in one of yours music criticism masterclasses 😂

[@colincomposer]

"Dubious trips to the beach." Ha!!

[@NateSassoonMusic]

Do you think there are similarities between how Adorno writes, and how he composed his music?

[@semanj]

Adorno regarding anything as sexless is amusing, but a saxophone! I nearly spit my coffee.

[@heatherharrison264]

I have encountered Adorno's writings on multiple occasions. His work is important in literary theory; that is where I first encountered him. Later on, I read some of his writings on Mahler. His writing style is difficult, but this is not unusual for writings related to literary theory, so I didn't find the difficulty of his work to be too far out of the ordinary. (Try reading Derrida if you really want to sink your teeth into some difficult text.) I think his observations on Mahler's music can be useful, but I simply cannot get behind his opinion of jazz. He certainly can go off the deep end, and when he does, making fun of him is a worthwhile activity. I would love it if this video ends up being the beginning of a series.

[@ThreadBomb]

I think you are making the mistake of respecting Adorno because he is called an 'authority'. In fact, he is a crank, pure and simple. His opinions, when stripped of their deliberately obscure style, are at best prejudiced and at worst downright stupid.

[@quinnsine1650]

“He was just ANTI” is the best way to describe Adorno

[@christopherwb1]

True! One of his most important books is called "Negative Dialectics." Adorno often dwelled on what he called "the power of the negative" and never seemed happier than when denouncing whatever anyone actually enjoyed. ("The fascism of mass (i.e., popular) culture" as one of his favorite aspersions.) And so - he was certainly a most censorious old Anti! ;-)

[@WMAlbers1]

And then to note that Sibelius loved Jazz! (or at least appreciated it...)

[@GeorgeFrideric71]

It's hard to dislike a man who once wrote to Frankfurt Zoo asking them to bring back wombats because he identified with them. It's also hard to reconcile that request with the image of the man produced by the writings.

[@fredcasden]

Two aspirins, anybody?

[@waynesmith3767]

Adorno is never my idea of fun but the people who think he’s profound can be very funny.

[@danielmarquard828]

Noone mentions his book about Mahler, his real masterpiece in writing on musical topics ):

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

I did.

[@clarkebustard8672]

I followed Adorno's reasoning and found some observations insightful. He quasi-celebrates improvisation, an interesting sort-of-dissent from high-modernist compositional strictures of his time. I can imagine what a slog that paragraph would be in German. I'll bet the first edition was in the old Fraktur typeface, so you could periodically screech to a halt to decide whether that letter was an f or a k.

[@murraylow4523]

Sadly, I have that book on my shelf here, also his ones on Mahler and Berg. He was a terrible snob for some kind of Marxist, but could write short, pithy and even humorous things (eg in Minima Moralia or when he is making fun of Martin Heidegger). I doubt I will read that book of essays, so as I am clearing things out currently, maybe that’ll go to the charity shop….

[@robkeeleycomposer]

The idea of Teddy making fun of Heidegger sounds unmissable! I’m intrigued by the implication at a Marxist couldn’t also be a terrible snob, though!😀

[@DeflatingAtheism]

Somewhere, a child’s face lights up with joy on Christmas morning as they rip the wrapping paper off a present to uncover the words, “Dialektik der Aufklärung”.

[@robkeeleycomposer]

@@DeflatingAtheism that made me laugh, thank you!!! 😀😀😀

[@murraylow4523]

@@robkeeleycomposer Well, he was a high culture snob yes, but yeah, I don’t think trashing working class taste is exactly ‘Marxist.’ The book re Heidegger (and others) is The Jargon of Authenticity..

[@robkeeleycomposer]

@@murraylow4523thank you for this

[@lesonyrra]

T. A. rather famously disliked Sibelius ...

[@robkeeleycomposer]

And Stravinsky. Anything that normal people enjoyed. His influence was baleful indeed, in many areas, academia above all.

[@lesonyrra]

@@robkeeleycomposer I confess I haven't really read him -- unless it was some snippet I've forgotten from my Ph.D. program. I can't remember where I read about his put-down of Sibelius ...

[@ahartify]

Mainly because he was popular, no doubt.

[@steveschwartz8944]

Pardon my Pseudogemeinschaft, but one thing that always annoyed me about Adorno was that it never occurred to him that even great composers might have just wanted to write a piece of music. Also, simple rhythms in jazz? HA!

[@patrickhackett7881]

You should find a paragraph so vague (and pseudo-profound) it could apply to anything musical or non-musical.

[@jujukoba6924]

To tell the truth: it is even more foggy in German, so you get lost anyway and everywhere

[@SarahLeizer-fc1jq]

Bruno Walter abhorred jazz even more, expressing himself in much plainer terms than Adorno. In an interview he regarded jazz as an example of utter decadence and a danger that appeals to the lowest instincts of the masses. The interview, with these and other pleasantries on the subject is available somewhere on KZbin.

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

Yes, he certainly had a blind spot there.

[@ahartify]

Mind you, Mahler wasn't exactly impressed with jazz either, I believe.

[@arnaudb.7669]

​@@ahartifyMahler died in 1911 so his opinion on jazz is VERY limited to say the least...

[@GenniferBradshaw]

Okay. His compositions are more accessible than his prose. Would you care to review his music? Or comment on philosophers as composers --- you could look at Nietzsche as well ...

[@LucianoFaricelli]

I would love to hear Dave's thoughts on Nietzsche's piano music. It's so bad.

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

Those are my thoughts exactly.

[@emusic4269]

Oh, German philosophy... truly paradoxical in how its substance and sheer word-volume are inversely proportional.

[@DeflatingAtheism]

Hundertprozentigwortvolumen.

[@c05.63]

@@DeflatingAtheism They should learn putting together many word to make a new one doesnt make it more profound lol, its the epitome of pretenciousness as well as futile linguistic excercise, even if you argue back with the efficiency argument, if you really want to say all that in a words make a new one that is short, not put them altogether Lmao.

[@tom6693]

Alex Ross writing in the New Yorker some years back remarked that Adorno was "the dark prince of intellectual life, the connoisseur of the dense, the difficult, the dire" who never met an apocalypse he didn't like. And how his "after Auschwitz" position allowed for some 50 years of fetishizing dissonance and making a virtue of the ugly. Have to say the article didn't exactly make me a big fan.

[@ahartify]

Adorno didn't like the 'redemptive' Mahler symphonies such as the 1st, 2nd, the 3rd and the 8th. A pity!

[@michelangelomulieri5134]

I share your view that his writing and style was pretty complex to understand. But his reflections were also affected by the complexity of the phenomenons he investigated and his style of writing accordingly so.

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

Nice try.

[@ahartify]

I'm not sure that Mahler was deliberately trying to write 'complex' music - he was just trying to express his feelings and ideas about the entire world at large as he saw it and to try to contain this world in his music, which admittedly was an ambitious undertaking.

[@edwardmalone5339]

Adorno hated everything that post war America represented: jazz, consumerism, Hollywood, the "American dream", so called, and went back to Germany as soon as he decently could in the 1950's, seemingly ungrateful to the nation that saved his life from the Nazis.

[@murraylow4523]

Well ok, I understand that. However he also worked for US intelligence during the war and we now know a bit more about that

[@AlexMadorsky]

Adorno’s ideas and writings have aged very poorly, if indeed they had any merit at the time he was considered a towering public intellectual. All the more reason I am grateful for this video. 4000 videos, 40,000 subscribers, Yasher Koach!

[@raguifarag3688]

I know he was important in criticizing fascism and that he had ro escape Germany for that. but in music, all that I know that he just hated Stravinsky and adored Schoneberg... it seems after seeing your video that it would have been better that he focus on phylosophy & politics and leave music alone

[@Johnwilkinsonofficial]

marxists and post modernists have done such incalculable harm to humanity and the western world i think ill spare myself this particular displeasure, though i do not doubt the occasional insight.

[@ThreadBomb]

Ironically, Marx as a writer was relatively straightforward.

[@jorgemittelmann620]

Adorno’s aesthetic opinions were sometimes so wrong! His principled and over-philosophical rejection of Sibelius and jazz are overwhelming blunders! Apocalyptic non-sense! He also contributed to the misunderstanding of Mahler through his spurious association with left-wing, extra-musical, considerations!!