Re: music (Adorno autonomously)

[S Mure <panic@xxxxxxxxxx>]

In article <199906041429.KAA205415@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, shandley
<shandley@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes
>Simon wrote:
>>I also
>>find the music that Adorno allowed some saving grace - Beethoven and
>>others - quite discredited now, a celebration of the division of labour
>>that created Culture as a separate domain in the first place.
>
>>Simon Smith
>
>How and when were Beethoven and Vienna II "discredited"?

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to refer to the second Vienna School. They are
much more interesting to me because they tried to refuse the rigid
conventions on which classical music was based, conventions which assume
or enforce a shared understanding between composer and listener which
was always based on class and which really cannot be said to exist in
such an estranged society as 'ours'. The music of Schoenberg and later
Stockhausen was quite uncompromising in this regard. That is some of the
least sycophantic music ever made.
Art only exists because of the alienated state of humankind, that it
needs a separate realm to fulfil its dreams. But of course this
fulfilment is illusory. In presents circumstances all affirmative music
appears as a lie, one which performs the function of creating a
semblance of sociality.

> How do they
>celebrate the division of labor, any more OR any less, let's say, than female
>back-up singers' (or ANY back-up singers') relation to the "featured" singer?

The division of labour is enshrined in the *form* of the music. As
Hullot-Kentor puts it - '...there is not a line of Beethoven played
correctly that does not somehow say: I have been chosen not to get my
hands dirty. All art, but most of all classical music, is the
spiritualised world of privilege.'
--
Simon Smith