SOURCE: “All That Jazz Again: Adorno's Sociology of Music,” in Popular Music and Society, Vol. 15, No. 3, Fall, 1991, pp. 31-40.

Theodor Adorno's “On Jazz” is as infamous in academic circles as it is misunderstood. In the Winter, 1988, issue of Popular Music and Society, William P. Nye renewed the attack on Adorno, dismissing not only his analysis of jazz, but his work in general, that of other Frankfurt School members, and the claims of critical theory to be a scholarly, oppositional means of understanding popular culture. The subtitle of Nye's article is “A Critique of Critical Theory,” and he quotes Zoltan Tar's damning one-sentence summary of the Frankfurt School: “Critical theory is the document of the disintegration of old Central European bourgeois society and the tragic fate of a group of intellectuals of that society.” While many of their positions have been absorbed, modified, and revised by the current generation of theorists, the ideas of Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse and other Frankfurt School members are still influential in current debates about aesthetics and politics.¹ A 1990 book on Adorno, Fredric Jameson's Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic, argues for “the special relevance of Adorno's Marxism, and of its unique capacities within our own equally unique ‘late’ or third stage of capitalism” (12). In this far briefer response to William Nye's article, I want to challenge some of Nye's claims and suggest why readers of Popular Music and Society might give Adorno's work a second look. My aim is not to renew Adorno's critique of jazz but to contextualize it.

One can criticize Adorno's understanding of jazz without, as Nye puts it, “intellectually discrediting his theoretical perspective.” Like other Frankfurt School theorists, Adorno's premise is that all cultural products, including those of so-called “high art,” participate in a larger social logic, one which, under capitalism, is subservient to “exchange value.” Just as one worker can be replaced by another, so can, and must, one popular song or style of dress replace another. Written when the bourgeoisie was still a progressive class, the production aesthetic of “serious music”—its formal structure—escaped subjection to commodification, only to be threatened by capitalist modes of distribution and reception. Unlike Walter Benjamin, author of “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Adorno was pessimistic about the effects of twentieth-century technology (the cinema, radio, phonograph album), fearing the standardization of culture. The ten-inch 78 rpm record, for example, restricted recording time to three minutes, with obvious formal constraints on the complexity and duration of the music (Harrison 574). Adorno and his colleague Horkheimer wrote a long essay called “The Culture Industry,” in which they articulated their critique in detail.

It was the culture industry against which the critical fury of the Frankfurt School was directed, not popular culture forms per se. Indeed, the term “culture industry” was chosen to refute the very idea of an authentic, potentially counter-hegemonic popular culture. Adorno understands twentieth-century American and European popular music as written for consumption, not for aesthetic contemplation; unlike the uncompromising music of Schoenberg, pop music refuses to acknowledge either the horrors or the routine of an era of assembly lines, world wars, and concentration camps. It is “affirmative,” in contrast to the “negative aesthetic” that Adorno considered truly oppositional and the only strategy for art in a society in which everything is up for sale. (In non-Marxist parlance, Adorno is talking about commercialism—as in recent explanations of New Kids on the Block as an example of an artificial, prefab, marketing success.) In his Aesthetic Theory, Adorno speaks of “the ability of art to incorporate into its formal language those phenomena that bourgeois society outlaws, revealing in them a natural other, the suppression of which is truly evil” (137).

The reference to a “formal language” is important for the subject of jazz, which Adorno understands in terms of both its musical structure and the construction of the subject/listener. But what does Adorno mean by “jazz”? The term has to be historicized; clearly, since “On Jazz” was published in 1936, it does not mean the improvisations of Keith Jarrett or even some of the later, extended compositions of Duke Ellington, like the 1943 work Black, Brown and Beige. The entry on jazz written by Max Harrison in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980) begins as follows: “Attempts at a concise—even a coherent—definition of jazz have invariably failed. Initial efforts to separate it from related forms of music resulted in a false primacy of certain aspects such as improvisation, which is neither unique nor essential to jazz, or swing … which is absent from much authentic jazz, early and late” (561). Harrison then states: “the conventional view that jazz emerged from a balanced meeting of African and European musical characteristics is an oversimplification” (561). In other words, “jazz,” like “the novel,” presents a genre problem: what are its origins, what belongs to it, what lies outside? The Grove goes on to describe “the slowly assembled mixture of mutually influential folk and popular styles” as indigenously American and neither predominantly black nor white: “the diverse elements making up this idiom—in effect a broad and composite ‘matrix’—gave it a potential for development … whose fullest realization is found in jazz.” The prehistory that the Grove describes does imply a partial refutation of Adorno's critique: namely that if jazz has origins that predate the culture industry, then its structure may not be totally dominated by commodity logic. The Grove states: “There has indeed been an evolutionary succession of styles, and this has maintained the continuity, logic, and inner necessity that characterizes real art” (562).

If jazz cannot be formally defined, and if Adorno himself does not define his use of the term, to what music was Adorno referring? He does not engage in attacks on specific albums or musicians. One good guess is that “On Jazz” is really about swing, the dominant form of popular music in the 1930s and a form dominated by white musicians—not, of course, because they were more gifted but because they were more saleable to a predominantly white society. Attali points out that the first jazz recording was that of a white band, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, and that in the early days of jazz recording, the best-known musicians, such as Benny Goodman, Paul Whiteman, and Stan Kenton, were white (Attali 104). And Jameson writes that Paul Whiteman is “the proper referent for what Adorno calls ‘jazz,’ which has little to do with the richness of a Black culture we have only long since then discovered” (Late Marxism 141).

This is significant because the lurking suspicion about “On Jazz” is that it is racist. That Adorno was Eurocentric in his attitudes is not in doubt. According to the Grove, however, jazz was for decades taken more seriously as an art form in Europe than in America, and “Europe became a haven for American jazz musicians” (577). If Max Harrison is correct in his claim that jazz is a melting pot of white and black folk idioms and is indigenously American, not African, in origins, then the equation of jazz with black music becomes problematic. Adorno himself did not make this equation, remarking, “It is difficult to isolate the authentic Negro elements in jazz” (Adorno “Perennial” 146). Consequently, the assumption that Adorno is a white European snob lashing out at African-American music ignores three issues: the mixed racial prehistory of jazz, its commercialization by white Americans, and its positive reception by many Europeans.

Despite his generally critical stance, some of Adorno's observations in the later essay “Popular Music” would surprise William Nye. Adorno remarks, for example, that “the minuets of lesser seventeenth-century composers were as fatally alike as our pop songs” and “within pop music, jazz has its unquestioned merits. Against the idiotic derivatives from the Johann Strauss type operetta it taught technique, presence of mind, and the concentration which pop music had discarded, and it developed the faculties of tonal and rhythmical differentiation” (Adorno, Introduction 32-33).

Admirers of Adorno's work point out his weaknesses as well as his strengths. In Understanding Toscanini, Joseph Horowitz devotes considerable attention to Adorno's account of the commodification of Western art music; he observes that “the strength of Adorno's ideological grounding is its heuristic breadth. Working from a general base, he is attuned to issues, even musical issues, that other writers on music overlooked or could not take seriously” (Horowitz 242). On the other hand, Horowitz admits, “Adorno's shortcomings of tone are unignorable. More often than not, his anger at commodity society seems mainly directed at its victims, whom he holds in contempt” (Horowitz 239). An authority on the Frankfurt School, Martin Jay describes Adorno as follows:

Adorno's relentless animus towards mass culture was among his most controversial characteristics, often leading to the charge that he was an elitist snob, an arrogant mandarin, and even (because of his hatred for jazz) a covert racist. These glibly defensive epithets fail to acknowledge the extent to which the very same criticisms he levelled against mass culture were often directed as well against most elite culture, which he refused to fetishize as inherently superior … although he may have been overly eager to demonstrate the sadomasochistic core of jazz, he was no less willing to discern the same pathology in the music of Stravinksy

(Jay 119).

It is the discussion of sadomasochism and castration that is the most offensive part of “On Jazz.” Contemporary critics would probably understand some of the same issues in terms of gender rather than psychopathology and would substitute rock music for jazz. The datedness of Adorno's 1936 essay is evident in its references to jazz as a “mass phenomenon”; in fact, much of “On Jazz” is simply out of date, given the different strains of jazz produced since it was written and the revisions of Freudian psychology that have appeared in the past decade. But Western art music is still, as Adorno implied then, culturally coded as feminine or effeminate in opposition to a supposedly robust and masculine popular music. Such gendered cultural codings have nothing to do with the intrinsic qualities of the music or its performers but spring rather from perceptions of class (the social class above, in its relative refinement, perceived as feminine) and cultural stereotypes (Europe gendered as feminine, America as masculine). Adorno argues, in effect, that this cultural coding intimidates younger American male listeners from expressing an interest in art music.

Adorno is not alone, however, in some of his formalist criticisms of jazz. Carl Dahlhaus, the late German musicologist, makes similar observations in an essay entitled “Composition and Improvisation.” His argument, unlike Adorno's, is not only about jazz, is almost purely formal (Dahlhaus doubts the very project of a sociology of music), and lacks the harshness that sometimes mars Adorno's work.² For these reasons Dahlhaus can be helpful in elucidating Adorno's formalist analysis.

Improvisation is not, as William Nye's article implies, foreign to Western art music.³ If you look up the term in a reference work like the New College Encyclopedia of Music you will read that “the fame of J. S. Bach in his lifetime rested chiefly on the powers of improvisation which he showed in well-known instances,” that “Handel used improvisation freely in playing his organ concertos,” and that “Mozart and Beethoven were renowned for their improvising of cadenzas and of complete movements” (Westrup and Harrison 332). Improvisation is thus something that jazz and art music have in common historically, even though the emphasis in the latter has shifted to aleatory techniques and electronic music. In both cases it has functioned as a sign of the performer's virtuosity.

Dahlhaus describes the emotional content of improvisation as “the hope that musical improvisation is the expression of, and a means of achieving, an emancipation of consciousness and of feeling” (Dahlhaus 265). The word “emancipation” implies, as Adorno would quickly point out, a pre-existing state of oppression or slavery; freedom depends upon its absence in a dialectical relationship. The longing for utter freedom in improvisation suggests that more is at stake than music; the belief that such freedom is possible implies a denial of social as well as musical constraints. Like Adorno, Dahlhaus is doubtful about the degree of freedom in improvisation, whether in jazz or in other kinds of music:

Analyzed soberly, improvisation almost always relies to a large extent on formulas, tricks of the trade, and models. … The improviser must be able to fall back at a moment's notice on a repertoire of cliches, on a store of prefabricated parts, which he may indeed modify or combine differently, but which he does not invent on the spur of the moment if he does not wish to get into difficulties or grind to a halt. The idea that he can commit himself entirely to the vagaries of chance is a fiction

(Dahlhaus 268).

Dahlhaus understands improvisation as opposed to composition, which “tends to balance the various aspects of compositional technique … melody, rhythm, and harmony”; in contrast:

Improvisation is almost always one-sided. It almost always concentrates on a single, isolated feature of the music, be it rhythm, harmony or tone color. And the real object of the improvisation stands out from its surroundings on account of its novelty, its differentiation or surprise effects, whereas everything else, being a mere foil, remains conventional and formalized

(Dahlhaus 269).

In the course of this article, the binary oppositions African/American, American/European, and masculine/feminine have emerged and broken down. The opposition improvisation/composition suggests another, that between orality and literacy. Jacques Derrida has treated a version of this opposition—speech and writing, presence and absence—at length in Of Grammatology. Ever since Plato, according to Derrida, Western philosophy has privileged speech and presence over writing and absence: “Speech is seen as in direct contact with meaning: words issue from the speaker as the spontaneous and nearly transparent signs of his present thought, which the attendant listener hopes to grasp” (Culler 100). It is obvious how this description would apply to a live concert. William Nye's critique of Adorno is oddly full of terms which Derrida, Roland Barthes, and other poststructuralist thinkers have successfully put into theoretical disrepute. “Voice,” “mastery,” “signature,” and “possession,” language which Nye uses to defend jazz, are now recognizable as crucial terms in Western metaphysics, a philosophical tradition constructed upon binary oppositions—male/female, self/other, white/black, etc.—in which one term is privileged over the other with oppressive socio-cultural implications. “Voice” belongs to the logocentric discourse that Derrida finds in Plato and throughout Western thought. “Mastery” implicitly excludes women from the achievement it describes; “possession” belongs to the discourse of private property that Barthes exposed in “The Death of the Author.” “Signature,” which Nye uses as a variant of “possession,” is the subject of an amusing debate between Derrida and another philosopher, John Searle, in which Derrida deconstructs the concept to reveal its internal contradictions.

In rejecting Adorno's formal analysis of jazz, William Nye does not offer another formal analysis of his own but retreats instead to value judgments like “wizardry,” “mastery,” and “wondrous things.” Such terms stand in contrast to Adorno's elaborate musical analyses, his exegesis of a musical text to expose its governing logic, and his recognition of the social implications of musical logic. Adorno was himself a student of the composer Alban Berg and possessed a musician's sophisticated understanding of theoretical issues. It is the combination of musical and philosophical erudition that makes his work impressive; those readers who dismiss it are most likely offended by its Western Marxist premises, its assumption that art, psychology, politics, and economics cannot be cleanly separated from each other but are instead intermeshed. Adorno's analysis of jazz should be refuted by someone who uses Adorno's own weapons; the Grove entry, which addresses both the formal strengths and weaknesses of jazz and which is far more specific than Adorno in its references to musicians and composers, is a better potential critique.

In defending jazz improvisation, Nye writes, “good jazz musicians improvise in the fullest sense of the word and the truth of this is given in the sense of awe with which many accomplished ‘serious’ or classically trained musicians regard the best and even the better jazz musicians.” There are at least two problems with this defense. One is that the value judgment “the fullest sense of the word” begs the question of what, technically, improvisation is; secondly, by appealing to classical musicians' “sense of awe” (another emotional claim substituting for an analytical one), Nye reinscribes the superiority of “classical training” that he sets out to refute.

Nye's characterization of classically trained musicians—that they “sound more alike than different”—is also misconceived in several respects. It is true that listeners expect to recognize a Mozart piece when they hear one, not to be misled by an unduly whimsical or self-aggrandizing interpreter; there is thus the same emphasis on a distinctive, although theoretically problematic, individuality in Western art music as there is, according to Nye, in African music, but the primary emphasis is on the composer, not the interpreter. A Mozart concerto, for example, is not only an opportunity for a performer to showcase her own abilities; it involves complex textual and interpretive decisions. Nonetheless, Nye underestimates the differences between classically trained musicians, the more accomplished of whom are almost instantly distinguishable. I remember once standing in a record store while a symphony was being played on the store stereo system; a young man walked in the door and remarked, “It's the BPO (Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra)!” Similarly, I once surprised a musician friend when I walked into a room where the radio was playing Bach and said, “It's Glenn Gould.” In both cases, recognition of the performers was virtually simultaneous with recognition of the composers.

Ultimately, what's wrong with Nye's strategy is that he attempts to rescue one musical tradition from attack by attacking another, thus replicating Adorno's own fault. If Adorno misrepresented jazz, misrepresenting “classical” music will not repair the damage. Jazz and “classical” music are not inherently oppositional; not only do many listeners enjoy both, but performers and composers in the one have been influenced by or performed the other. Modernist composers like Milhaud, Ravel and Stravinsky drew enthusiastically upon jazz idioms, and Charlie Parker asked avant-garde composer Edgar Varese to tutor him in composition.⁴ In 1938 Benny Goodman recorded the Mozart clarinet quintet with the Budapest String Quartet and commissioned Bartok's Contrasts (Grove 577). In 1990 the Kronos String Quartet and the Modern Jazz Quartet appeared in concert together in Berkeley, California. If the musicians themselves take such an interest in each other's music, why should listeners be hostile? Indeed, there has probably been more cross-fertilization between jazz and “classical” than between any other major forms of music in the West. The antagonism is not musical but social. The privileged position Western art music has maintained, its associations with wealth and class, have also marginalized it; in the United States, with its ambivalent attitudes toward Europe, “classical” music is often regarded with a kind of xenophobic animosity, sometimes tainted with homophobia. We need to understand how social and institutional contexts situate musical discourses, not to essentialize those discourses. One-sided attacks on either jazz or “classical” music tend to contain within them the kind of binary oppositions that privilege the “civilized” over the “primitive,” or else merely invert the opposition, as Nye does, without deconstructing it. This while is ultimately an appeal for openness, in the hope that music may provide, on occasion, a utopian moment in which social tensions are sublated.

Notes

1. A 1989 book edited by Christopher Norris, Music and the Politics of Culture, cites Adorno often; particularly interesting in this context is Ken Hirschkop's contribution, “The Classical and the Popular.”

2. Dahlhaus's Schoenberg and the New Music contains his critique of the sociology of music.

3. William Nye objects to Adorno's use of the term “serious music”; this is not unique to Adorno but is fairly common in music criticism. A more recent but also problematic version is “art music.” “Classica” is a period term; Adorno called its wider usage “vulgar.”

4. Parker wrote Varese the following: “Take me as you would a baby and teach me music. I speak in only one voice. I want to have structure. I want to write orchestral scores” (quoted in the Grove, 576).

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor W. “Perennial Fashion—Jazz.” Prisms. Trans. Samuel and Sherry Weber. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981. 119-132.

———. Introduction to the Sociology of Music. New York: Continuum, 1988.

Attali, Jacques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.

Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.

Dahlhaus, Carl. “Composition and Improvisation.” Schoenberg and the New Music. Trans. Derrick Puffett and Alfred Clayton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. 265-73.

Harrison, Max. “Jazz.” The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Stanley Sadie, ed. London: Macmillan, 1980.

Horowitz, Joseph. Understanding Toscanini. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Jameson, Fredric. Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990.

Jay, Martin. Adorno. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1984.

Westrup, J. A. and F. Harrison, ed. The New College Encyclopedia of Music. New York: Norton & Company, 1960.