Re: [microsound] essay on TWiki site

[Bill Ashline <ashline@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 15 Jan 2005 14:38:55 -0500, Matthew Mitchell
<matmi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> In those Adorno quotes, there's certainly a persistence of attempts to
> present as fact something that is essentially a matter of personal taste, which
> is ultimately what makes music criticism so suspect.

No.  There's an attempt to read music according to its unquestioned
ideological alignments.  Adorno was far too subtle to simply look for
a justification for his own tastes.  that would be an unbelievably
dumb reading of Adorno.  Adorno was rather looking at culture after
industrial capitalism to interrogate its most degrading aspects. 
We're not talking Stanley Crouch here--we're talking a stellar social
thinker forced into exile during the period of Nazi control of
Germany.  If anything, Adorno was overly sensitive to the degrading
cultural conditions that produced the Nazis, which is why he was wrong
about jazz.  But he wasn't necessarily wrong about certain aspects of
popular culture.  It's easy to forget that jazz was a popular form,
perhaps the preeminent one, when Adorno and Horkheimer wrote the
Dialectic of Enlightenment.

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