Re: music (Adorno autonomously)

[S Mure <panic@xxxxxxxxxx>]

In article <Pine.PMDF.3.95.990604154737.541102450D-
100000@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Dennis R Redmond
<dredmond@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes
>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
>
>
>
Beethoven's music, like any other form of art, relies for its effect on
the acceptance of a set of conventions which are ultimately socially
derived. The element of 'expression' that he introduced depends on the
manipulation of these conventions. His was the music of the Revolution
as you say - of the early bourgeois subject, which is long dead. The
modern concept of 'expression' also came along at this time and is now
utterly shot, as far as I can see.

I'm not an academic by the way, just calling things as I experience
them, informed by some books I've read. I'm very open to contradiction
by people with a greater knowledge of things and times.
--
Simon Smith