Re: music (Adorno autonomously)

[Dennis R Redmond <dredmond@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 4 Jun 1999, S Mure wrote:

> 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.'

Eh? (1) Beethoven *did* get his hands dirty, by working ferociously hard
to revolutionize the prevailing musical vocabulary. (2) If Beethoven's
music has a model, it's the American and French revolutions: a formal
emancipation, riven by deep contradictions. It's the contradictions which
make the music interesting: Napoleonic hauteur rubbing shoulders with
peasant dances, gorgeous polyphony matched by amazing orchestration, etc.
The Revolution is still in the music, preserved for all time, if you tune
your antenna to it. The opera-goers in Berlin in 1990 who went to see
"Fidelio" rose up and gave a standing ovation when the libretto rang out
Beethoven's centuries-old denunciation of tyranny. What the total system
of this most globalized of all capitalisms tells us to think of as past
is present; what we're told is the present is actually future; what we're
told is the future is really the past.

-- Dennis