Celebrations for this year's centenary of the birth of Theodor Adorno have centred on Frankfurt, the city where he was born and where, apart from his exile during the Nazi era, he spent his academic life. An international symposium was held there in September and a square renamed in his honour. Several biographical works have appeared in Germany and further afield there have been conferences in Paris, Graz and London. He is best known as a moving force behind the Frankfurt school of Marxist "critical theory" which tried to rethink the relationship between culture, politics and society. What is striking is how important is music within his project. He was a theorist, critic and composer (he studied with Alban Berg in the 1920s, and himself gave courses on composition at the influential Darmstadt summer school in the 1950s). 40 per cent of the more than 10,000 pages of his Collected Works concern music.
If anything in his work is likely still to have popular appeal, it is his sustained championship of the avant garde. Since so much contemporary art also regards itself as in the business of confounding the bourgeoisie, Adorno may be seen as someone to give intellectual credibility to the violation of conventional aesthetic values and forms. It would be a mistake, however, to allow him to be appropriated by those who look to modern art merely to provide novelty for its own sake, and who lay claim to an artistic tradition whose central purpose is a tendency to shock and a desire to be scandalous. There was, for instance, no greater musical scandal than the first performance of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, but Adorno nevertheless condemned it for its "folklorism" and formal complacency. Stravinsky was excluded from the true avant garde because to be avant garde, music had to spring from and react to a tradition and to express this in its form.
This is what explains Adorno's suspicion of popular music. For him what is distinctive about serious music is that each piece is unique; its form is determined by the character and possibilities of its musical parts, but its parts are given significance only because they occur within the structure of that piece. Popular music, in contrast, aims to be instantly appreciable and so must fit some standard mould. This makes it dehumanising; it subsumes the individual within the collective. In listening to a new piece of serious music, one cannot understand it by recognising in it the exemplification of some standard form set by works one already knows. In any such work, there must be a relationship between the recognised and the new, but determining that relationship is something that requires the undetermined response of the listener as much as of the composer. Serious music requires one to go beyond conditioned responses; popular music serves only to reinforce them.
What Adorno deplored was the failure to take music seriously in its own terms, and to subordinate it to other goals, whether commercial or political. He was duly scornful of Soviet realism and thought too that Brecht's politically engaged theatre could amount to no more than propaganda. In a 1945 lecture in New York on the arts under Nazism, he argued that what helped to prepare the cultural soil for the growth of Nazism was the "decultivation" of the German middle classes. Looking back to the previous century when there were groups of people who, without being professional musicians or artists, were nevertheless capable of "a subtle and discriminating understanding," he maintained that it had been the alienation of the middle classes from "the tradition of great German culture," that contributed more to the fascist climate than any allegiance to "even so nationalistic" a composer as Richard Wagner. What encouraged the fascist frame of mind, he thought, was not valuing what there was to value in Wagner, but the inability to value any music for its own sake.
From our own post-revolutionary perspective, however, it will be Adorno's suspicion of the commercialisation of art - with its political counterpart the demand for accessibility - that will have the greater resonance. For he has something to say both to those who require that the arts should be intelligible to the untrained ear and eye, and to those whose supposed radicalism is due to a failure to understand what has been done before. No doubt Adorno's own sense of what is valuable in music was too restrictively formalistic. It is surely true that he undervalued such old-fashioned virtues as elegance and beauty in the music of the composers he did admire. (Anyone who thinks of the music of Berg or Webern as ugly is missing something.) But in an age in which aesthetic sensuality is so often privileged over form, this at least provides a useful corrective.
Given Adorno's championship of the avant garde, it is always tempting to emphasise his insistence on the need for the new and so to downplay the importance of the received, the recognisable. But we should take him at his word: serious music, like all serious art, must involve both the new and the recognised. Appreciation of the genuinely avant garde only comes from understanding the tradition from which it is both a departure and thereby a continuation. It is as easy to produce something worthless and novel as it is to produce something worthless and conventional. Novelty for its own sake is no more serious than art produced for the mass market, and no less commercialised. However shocking new art is, the shock it gives will be meretricious if it does not arise from an understanding of what it is reacting against.
What we should take from Adorno is both the urgency of the demand that we should be ready for the new, and the reminder that such readiness can only come from the kind of educated engagement that will allow one to recognise it for what it is.
It was the loss of a public capable of such engagement that Adorno lamented in his New York lecture, a lament whose force has hardly been diminished by time: "The German boy of our age who has no longer heard, as his father might have, the Kreutzer sonata played by friends of his parents, and who never listened passionately and surreptitiously when he was supposed to go to bed, does not merely miss... something which might be recognised as educational. The fact that he has never been swept away emotionally by the tragic forces of this music bereaves him of the very life phenomenon of the humane. It is this lack of experience of the imagery of real art, partly substituted and parodied by the ready-made stereotypes of the amusement industry, which is one of the formative elements of that cynicism that finally transformed the Germans, Beethoven's own people, into Hitler's own people."
