Music to Hear on Here: Adorno - Taste is Obsolete

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Adorno - Taste is Obsolete

"Nothing really new is allowed to intrude, nothing but calculated effects that add some spice to the ever-sameness whithout imperiling it" ("Popular Music" p. 26).

"The sacrifice of individuality which accommodates itslef to the regularity of the successful, the doing of what everybody does, follows from the basic fact that in broad areas the same thing is offered to everybody by the standardized production of consumption goods" ("On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening p. 40)

This project, taking two "different" songs and cuting them at various points to interchange them, reavels that the two songs are exactly the same. Taking Adorno's theory of the schema of pop music requiring strict adherance so as to produce the same "standardized" form of song is here furthered. Not only do they abide by the rigid mold of pop music, but they are in fact the same song, with minute differences in lyrics and artist. That both of these songs were independantly popular and gained a lot of success, exemplifies Adorno's argument of taste having vanished. The songs themselves are consumer goods, rythmically the same, yet both are consumed by mass culture. This also emphasizes the "liquidation of the individual", as taste is manipulated.

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Course Description

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture." Martin Mull (or Elvis Costello)

Thinking about the meaning and value, intellectual, affective and neurological experiences, and aesthetics of music has occupied an important position in modern and contemporary philosophical writings. Central to the philosophy of music is a questioning of what music is insofar as it is an art form and practice, akin to but different from other arts, such as drama, literature, painting, sculpture, to name but a few examples. Claims have been made, in fact, that music’s effect, when performed and listened to, surpasses those of the other arts because of its abstact purity, of its universality, and of its singular capacity to express, represent and incite emotions. This course will explore such issues in 19th-20th century philosophy. We will begin with introductory readings of what composes the field and discipline of the philosophy of music. We will read—among other philosophers, novelists, critics and musicologists—Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Barthes and Adorno’s writings on music. Finally, we will have the occasion to read about and listen to specific musicians, both high and low, and explore the contexts of their work, concentrating on the historical and political dimensions of the practice, performance and art of making music.