Current of Music E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1129

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Fleeing the Nazis, Theodor W. Adorno lived in New York City as a refugee from 1938 until 1941. During these years, he was intensively involved in a study of how the recently developed techniques for the nation-wide transmission of music over radio were transforming the perception of music itself. This broad ranging radio research was conceived as nothing less than an investigation, partly empirical, of Walter Benjamin's speculative claims for the emancipatory potential of art in the age of its mechanical reproduction. The results of Adorno's project set him decisively at odds with Benjamin's theses and at the same time became the body of thinking that formed the basis for Adornos own aesthetics in his Philosophy of New Music.

Current of Music is the title that Adorno himself gave to this research project. For complex reasons, however, Adorno was not able to bring the several thousands of pages of this massive study, most of it written in English, to a final form prior to leaving New York for California, where he would immediately begin work with Max Horkheimer on the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Robert Hullot-Kentor, the distinguished Adorno scholar, reconstructed Adorno's project for the Adorno Archive in Germany and provides a lengthy and informative introduction to the fragmentary texts collected in this volume.

Current of Music will be widely discussed for the light it throws on the development of Adorno's thought, on his complex relationship with Walter Benjamin, but most of all for the important perspectives it provides on questions of popular culture, the music of industrial entertainment, the history of radio and the social dimensions of the reproduction of art.

Leseprobe

Current of Music

CURRENT OF MUSIC

Elements of a Radio Theory

Edited with an Introduction by

Robert Hullot-Kentor

polity

First published in German and English as Current of Music © Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 2006

This English edition © Polity Press, 2009; Introduction © Robert Hullot-Kentor, 2008

Polity Press 65Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press 350Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9463-4

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.polity.co.uk

Contents

Editor’s Introduction: Second Salvage: Prolegomenon to a Reconstruction of Current of Music

1  Radio Physiognomics

2  A Social Critique of Radio Music

3  The Radio Symphony: An Experiment in Theory

4  Analytical Study of the NBC Music Appreciation Hour

5  ‘What a Music Appreciation Hour Should Be’: Exposé, Radio Programmes on WNYC and Draft

6  ‘On Popular Music’: Material and Text

7  Musical Analyses of Hit Songs

Other Materials

A  The Radio Voice

B  Memorandum on Lyrics in Popular Music

C  Experiment on: Preference for Material or Treatment of Two Popular Songs

D  The Problem of Experimentation in Music Psychology

E  Note on Classification

F  On the Use of Elaborate Personal Interviews for the Princeton Radio Research Project

G  The Problem of a New Type of Human Being

H  Some Remarks on a Propaganda Publication of NBC

I   Theses about the Idea and Form of Collaboration of the Princeton Radio Research Project

Discography

Notes

Index

Editor’s Introduction

Second Salvage: Prolegomenon to a Reconstruction of Current of Music

Another way to say the search for reality is to say the desire for completion. Clifford Odets

The centenary proceedings in celebration of T. W. Adorno’s birth in 2003 were a lugubrious display internationally, but most of all in Germany. There the event was headed up by a harness of three heavily shod biographies trudging in decade-long synchronization toward the publishing occasion, as if the goal were to make sure that no detail of Adorno’s life went untrampled. Even Adorno’s writing table and chair, in simulacra, were dragged into the Frankfurt ceremonies. Encased in a silicone cube, these mundane furnishings were established as a national treasure to be visited on Adornoplatz in hometown perpetuum. Suhrkamp Publishers and the Goethe Institute, working closely with a restaffed and now corporate-minded Adorno Archiv, distributed so absolute a mass of memento, chronology, and photograph – the known antipodes to Adorno’s philosophy itself – that even under scrutiny it was often hard to decide whether the topic was the writing of the Dialectic of Enlightenment or the framing of the Magna Carta. The jubilee successfully portrayed the life of the man as if in a single stride he stepped from crib to garlanded tomb, where the philosophy itself was put to rest. The biographical preoccupation, undermining the philosophy, finally undermined the biographical as well. Thus, one result of these centenary achievements is that now every next mention of Adorno’s life only helps steal away from the dictum that ‘Life does not live’ any sense that the apprehension ever troubled the person who made the dictum the frontispiece to Minima Moralia.

This bears directly on the intention of this essay to provide a first introduction to Current of Music. For, as is to be explained, Adorno left the manuscripts for this work in fragmentary condition; what is conceptually valuable in them now depends in part on reconstruction. An assumption of this reconstruction has been that, when a work is abandoned in fragments, reference to the life that left them behind can legitimately provide transitions to potentiate tensions of thought that, deprived of their final shaping efforts, would otherwise dissipate. Certainly this assumption might have been more naively pursued prior to the centenary year. The only alternative now – for this introduction in any case – is to look the situation in the face and acknowledge that what is biographical in the transitions established here to provision Current of Music with a degree of tensed coherence has recently been woven into something milled out by the mile, with no end in sight. Perhaps in this recognition, what is now lifeless, with the feel of having never lived, will at least half speak of this situation rather than further compound the recently achieved inertness.

New York City, 1938–1941

In 1937, T. W. Adorno had been living in England for three years, having fled National Socialism. Although he was formerly a Privatdozent – an independent lecturer – in philosophy at the University of Frankfurt, the Nazis had deprived him of the right to teach, and the hardship of immigration had set him back to the status of a student at work on a dissertation, a critique of Husserlian phenomenology. He was obliged to hope that a DPhil, taken at Oxford, in addition to his PhD, would provide the over qualification that an immigrant would minimally need to secure a position at a British university.1 In October, however, a telegram from Max Horkheimer caused him to revise these plans. Horkheimer had for some time wanted to bring Adorno to New York City, and the telegram proposed the means if Adorno were interested in participating in the Princeton Radio Research Project, a study supported by a Rockefeller Foundation grant under the direction of the sociologist and Austrian émigré Paul Lazarsfeld.2 The next day Adorno wired back his readiness to accept the position, but the decision was hardly made without ambivalence.3 On one hand, Adorno saw that catastrophe was inevitable in Europe; he had no real expectation of securing academic employment in prewar England; and his wife, Gretel, who was ill, found the English climate hard to tolerate, and it was hoped she might recover in the United States. But now that his plans to depart had become reality and, ‘contrary to all expectation’, imminent, Adorno expressed in a letter of 27 November to Walter Benjamin what had all along weighed most against the decision. ‘Uppermost’ – Adorno wrote – were his thoughts on Benjamin himself, and in this one word he lodged his distress as poignantly as possible between two men who after a decade of close involvement still addressed one another formally, as Sie. If Benjamin would realize, Adorno continued – emphasizing this uppermost of their friendship with a circumlocution of the greatest urgency for anyone as utterly familiar as was Benjamin with what Adorno held dearest – that second on his mind was that parting meant ‘the real possibility of never seeing my mother again’, Benjamin would be able to ‘imagine how I feel about’ the decision to leave.4 But, Adorno explained, he could not refuse Horkheimer’s proposal. He had been assured that fully half his time would be devoted to the Institute for Social Research, then affiliated with Columbia University, and collaboration on projects that he and Horkheimer had long envisioned, most of all a study of dialectical materialism. By early January, Adorno had met in Paris with Lazarsfeld, and by late that month had submitted to him a lengthy memorandum outlining his research plans.5 On 26 February 1938, Adorno and his wife arrived on the steamship Champlain in New York City harbour. Adorno would remain in New York City until November 1941, when – without renewed funding for his position at the Princeton Radio Research Project – he would again be compelled to move in order to secure his proximity to Horkheimer, who had decided to go on to Los Angeles, where his own fragile health, and the institute’s finances as well, could be better maintained. Adorno would not return to Germany until 1949, having spent almost one-quarter of his life as a refugee, a portion of that as an American citizen. He did not embrace German citizenship again until 1955.

Written in English

In his fifteen years as a refugee, T. W. Adorno wrote several major works, including Dialectic of Enlightenment (with Max Horkheimer, 1947), Philosophy of New Music (1949), and Minima Moralia (1951). Their dates of publication belie the years demanded by each of these seminal German texts that no doubt received Adorno’s most decisive conceptual energies. Yet, in addition to these and numerous other projects, Adorno in the same period also produced a substantial body of research written in English. The latter are distinctly secondary works from the perspective of the oeuvre as a whole but are nevertheless, in their own terms, of considerable interest. Among these writings in English are The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas’s Radio Addresses (1943) and The Authoritarian Personality (with Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford, 1950). Current of Music was the working title that Adorno proposed on various occasions for a volume that would have assembled the majority of the research that he completed during his first four years in the United States while affiliated with Lazarsfeld in New York City. The texts conceived under this title – comprising several thousand pages – constitute far and away Adorno’s most extensive work in English.

Yet Adorno did not succeed in his own lifetime in publishing this work whose topic and language were adopted under compulsion in the land to which its author fled. The study itself was rejected by a series of editors in the United States and was ultimately left incomplete among the many materials housed at the Adorno Archiv in Frankfurt. This essay intends to explain what Adorno meant to achieve in the book and why his efforts failed. It should be remarked at the outset, however, that this introduction in no way seeks pathos in defence of a work lost to history, as if deserving in reconstruction the rank of or , for it is neither. If passages of – both published and unpublished – did once antagonize and have the capacity to raise hackles again, it was not only ill will and happenstance that got in its way but just as much and more the work’s own deficiencies. It is in full cognizance of the limits of these writings that is now to be imagined into existence. This requires broad recognition and explanation of the complex situation in which this work in its many parts was written. In alliance with its own thinking, however, this reconstruction is certainly not undertaken here with the intention of setting the past back on its feet like a Golem conjured to walk the streets of another millennium, but rather by wanting to spark what is significant in that past when it is known selfconsciously from the perspective of the present.