Is there a "Meaning" of Music today?

Music History, Hilary Term, Oxford University, K.Ho

Writing in his Philosophy of Modern Music (1948) Theodor Adorno painted a rather grim and bleak picture of the state of things to come in the realm of classical music. Over the past fifty years Philosophy and many other prophecies Adorno spelled out in other writings have come true, hoever, the contemporary classical music scene isn’t as bleak as Adorno would have had you believe. It is perfectly understandable why and how Adorno would have come to such a pessimistic prediction of things to come. After all, World War II was still painfully fresh, fundametally new issues arising from records and radio broadcasts were coming to bear, these issues combined with a general feeling of crisis were the context in which Adorno was writing. Adorno places very little faith in anyone—composers, performers, much less audiences. Having said that, though, Adorno was very correct in saying that music was becoming (and it has become) a commodity that is traded and purveyed by large money-making institutions. In this essay, I intend to show how artistic interpretation and composition have become standardized as a result of technology which is based in that culture industry, that has debased and discredited classical music. However, this is not to say classical music is on its deathbed today; there are a few considerations that Adorno did not foresee which include beneficial side-affects from the record age, and the persistence of personalities who try to adhere to an artistic tradition that may, just maybe, shape a new and ‘true’ form of classical music that is a valid form of artistic expression. In addition to that, I will try to present the current of thought running throughout the latter part of the century that tries to refute Adorno’s lack of faith in the audience.

Early on in Philosophy… Adorno placed the ‘blame’ for compromised classical music entering the repertory on a combination of ignorant audiences and composers who composed to the whims of audiences and music critics who turned a blind eye to all of this. (Adorno 1948: 8) As a result of the mass availibility of music through a limited and controlled bandwidth, Adorno asserted that no one had an idea of what “good” or “bad” taste was. The marked “decline” of music into a “retrogression into the traditional,” which was a direct result of this culture industry. (Ibid., 5) With this discussion Adorno raises a few questions in my mind. First, and foremost, who is Adorno to purvey good taste? It’s almost certain that pieces Adorno likes, many others would not, and vice versa, this doesn’t and shouldn’t, though, give any one opinion more credence than another one. By attacking other views than his own, Adorno discredits himself. Interestingly, though, I cannot simply dismiss Adorno’s arguments, as he compensated for his earlier statement of his lack of faith in audiences by offering a hypothesis for serial music’s lack of popularity by saying it is a music filled “with dissonances which horrif(ies the audience into) testifying their new conditions.” (Ibid., 9) From this we can establish that Adorno wants the audience challenged directly, however, if an audience is challenged, where does the line between alienation and enlightenment begin? This begs the question of whether it is the responsibility of the orchestra or concert performers to challenge audiences. Should they leave the audience uncomfortable, to make them shift around in their seats out of unfufillment. Or is it the duty of the orchestra to give the audience a “good show;” one that is sugar coated and leaves the audience leaving fulfilled and ready for bedtime.

It is my opinion that orchestras must do both.

Using personal experience as a guide, I would have to say programming and placement of pieces is the key. Two concerts I attended speak to this fact. The first concert by the St. Louis Symphony, consisted of fairly lyrical and “nice” pieces: the Saint-Saens Second Piano Concerto followed by an interval with the Debussy Nocturnes, afterwords, the program was completed with a piece by Varese. By the middle of the Varese piece people were walking out and turning off their hearing aides, obviously, a poorly programmed concert. In contrast, another concert I attended with the Concertgebaouw Orchestra of Amsterdam featured the Brahms Violin Concerto, an interval, then the Schoenberg Five Pieces with the Brahms Second Symphony concluding the concert much to the delight of the audience. The success of this concert can be viewed in very realistic terms; the audience was quite literally captive. The dissonance of the Schoenberg, which was sandwiched between to relatively lush and lyrical pieces, made audiences aware of themselves and the music they were listening two. It challenged them for a bit, but didn’t alienate them too much. Hence, the net result was that audiences were enticed to hear music that isn’t tonal or “happy” but combined with the other pieces on the program, everyone ended up relatively satisfied.

But an even more underlying question than what pieces audiences hear, is whether what they’re hearing ‘means anything.’ Does the music mean anything on a metaphysical, philosophical, or artistic level?

In her article “Interpreting the Emotional in Music” author F.M. Berenson, discusses the emotional content of music, and gives much more credit to composers and audiences alike than Adorno. In a discussion of the Mahler Fifth Symphony, she said that the suffering Mahler conveys does not fall on deaf ears, but that audiences respond a great deal and seek to get involved with the piece. Berenson discusses how critics, like Adorno, are missing a great deal through their detached perspective, which is concerned with a fruitless semantic debate:

Here then the talk is of content of music described in emotive terms. The understanding of and response to that content is what constitutes primary aesthetic experience we are constantly engaged in interpreting what is that has the power to affect us. The analysis of a work in terms of how the given content was achieved is, and has to be logically secondary. Those who limit themselves to the pursuit of secondary features of music perform a valuable service but aestheticians have a much richer field of endeavor, emotional responses are related to the interpretation of the experience of music. The former plays a role in explaining the latter, in part only. (Berenson in Krausz 1993: 65)

Eventually, Berenson argues that critics like Adorno are pessimistic and unreceptive to emotional content music because they are incapable of intimacy. While I don’t pretend to know what Adorno’s personal character was, Berenson does point out that audiences care and, to a certain extent, her work shows that music is still a valid art form in the respects that expression is still happening.

This point of the significance of the musical experience is expanded upon by noted philosopher Roger Scruton in his “Notes on the Meaning of Music.” Scruton argues that while music does not mean anything on its own right, it is the audiences’ sympathetic response that makes music a valid form of expression. Scruton recognizes that audiences are sill capable of deciphering meanings in music. Scruton:

The importance of art derives largely from the fact that it can present fictional objects for our sympathetic feelings. I can identify wholly with a fictional object without, however, being exposed to any real predicament. This is the unique situation in which we are free to feel. Our emotions can therefore be educated through sympathy, without exposing us to the dreadful obligations of the real human world. Our response to music is a sympathetic response: a response to human life, imagined in the sounds we hear. (Scruton in Krausz 1993: 199)

Both of these modern philosophers have placed a great duty in the audience, and with Berenson’s article, she resents any lowering of the position of the audience in modern times. Audiences, therefore, must be active and attentive ones for this system of expression to work. In the earlier part of the century, composer Ernest Bloch addressed the issue of conveying musical meaning by placing the onus on the audience and encouraged audiences to work at finding a meaning, and not to be passive:

Just what do I seek when I hear something? I am seeking, when I listen, to grow richer and greater in content. But I shall receive nothing if I join in by merely sitting back and relaxing. I shall only receive it by fetching it myself, going further in terms of content, beyond passive enjoyment. (Bloch 1918: 84-86)

Bloch addresses this point further when he discusses musical analysis and terminology by saying that terms like “movement, contrapposto, and Neapolitan sixth,” are only “broken-winded phrases” that can only begin to communicate the far greater idea of music. Bloch sees music brimming over with meaning, calling that meaning the “Utopian Castle.” However, finding the way to this castle proved difficult in the early part of the twentieth century as illustrated with his discussion of Schoenberg. Using Schoenberg’s music as a reference point, Bloch discusses the relationship between expression and formal regulation to a great extent. By stating that no key stands alone, Bloch credits Schoenberg with exploring new possibilities of the augmented triad and by using “vagrant chords” (i.e. chords that were alien to a key) that all combined had no real key, no real references to major or minor. Bloch asserts that these attributes of Schoenberg were a valid form of expression. (Bloch 1912: 96-98) However, Bloch continues to say that music, even serial music, can become trite, and warns audiences to be aware:

[Even] the brilliant and harsh diminished seventh was once new; it gave the impression of novelty and so could represent anything—pain, anger, excitement and all violent emotion—in the music of the classical masters. Now that the radicalism has worn off, it has sunk irretrievably into mere ‘light music’ as a sentimental expression of sentimental ideas. (Ibid.)

These sentimental ideas, it was thought, would make people wallow and wane and become self-absorbed. In addition to being active listeners, audiences, according to this cadre of composers, also had to be continually challenged, lest art be diminished. However, these composers had another issue that transcended than compositional issues—the emerging influence of the mass media.

Either recognizing the world around him, or growing trends of future things to come, Adorno very accurately warned us of a forthcoming cultural industry that diminishes art into commodity, today we call it the mass media. Adorno warned us of an impending “culture industry” which, through the media, would gain a position of the total management of cultural goods that had the power to control of what and what didn’t conform.

Because the monopolistic means of distribution music stood almost entirely at the disposal of artistic trash and compromised cultural values, and catered to the socially determined predisposition of the listener, radical music was forced into complete isolation during the final stages of industrialism. (Adorno 1948: 6)

As a result of this mass marketing of music, music that catered to “feeble-mindedness;” of superficial whims of the audience would become commonplace. Adorno accused composer Paul Hindemith of bowing down intellectualy and being a submissive composer who was committed to nothing. (Ibid.) So it is of no great surprise that in “A Social Critique of Radio Music” (1945) Adorno was, in my mind, reacting to technology as another force of alienation for audiences. By the time Adorno penned these words, audiences were not only alienated artistically and philosophically, with the emergence of radio were also physically separated from the concert halls themselves! Adorno grew concerned at whether audiences would listen to Beethoven in the ‘right’ way:

…is radio actually an adequate means of communication? Does a symphony played on the air remain a symphony? Are the changes it undergoes by wireless transmission merely slight and negligible modifications or do these changes affect the very essence of the music? Are not the stations in such case bringing the masses in contact with something totally different from what it is supposed to be, thus also exercising an influence quite different from the one intended? And as to the large numbers of people who listen to ‘good music’: how do they listen to it? (Adorno 1945, in Strunk 1998: 195)

Obviously, in this passage Adorno felt that music became totally discredited and debased by transmission to the masses, as broadcast audiences might not be hearing the ‘correct’ things that they should be. It comes off to me as another arrogant statement by Adorno, in the respects that classical music is only meant for an elite group, whereas many others feel that the masses deserve great music. However, even these elite listeners incur Adorno’s wrath, as they too have lost credit in his eyes:

In the Wagnerian period, the elite listener was eager to follow the most daring music exploits. Today the corresponding group [thanks to standardization] is the firmest bulwark against musical progress and feels happy only if it is fed Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony again and again. (Ibid., 198)

Again it is not to say that Adorno is totally off-base though. The point of losing the essence of music is not a point to be taken lightly. By removing a performance from a concert hall setting, the music invariably becomes distorted, even in such oxymoronically named ‘live recordings’ this is the case. Performed music, it would seem, is not conducive to mass distribution. Adorno addressed this by saying that “sacrosanct traditional music has come to resemble commercial mass production.” (Adorno 1948: 10) The phenomena associatedf with recorded music was elaborated upon some 30 years after Adorno’s prophecy by German music critic Joachim Kaiser in 1973. Writing in the Suddeutsche Zeitung Kaiser discusses a whole range of issues that Adorno only hinted at:

We live with records. There are specialists whose only contact with music has been made via records. The record enshrines the one-time performance; it also enshrines a specific mood and interpretation. It has emerged as a call to standards—a threat to standards everywhere—in the most remote village [to] the most private dwelling. (Kaiser 1973 in Haskell 365)

Further on in his article, Kaiser offers that even the greatest artists only get a rare chance to re-record a piece to meet a new interpretation or circumstance that they might have arrived to. There are a couple of major consequences that arise with this phenomenon. With any recorded piece of music only one interpretation is heard. One representation of a piece is presented. Of course, there are other recordings with other conductors, but with limited shelf space and marketing demands of music shops ensures that every interpretation will not be heard. However, on an even more basic level than that, a standardization of interpretation is created with recordings. A codified standard of interpretation is created and perpetuated with a strict dependence on recordings. Along with that, a standard repertory is also created, therefore the entire oeuvre of a composer is rarely ever heard. Even more important though, audiences may come to the concert hall with unfairly high expectations of what they’ll hear. With Studio recordings post production procedures edit mistakes out, ones cannot be corrected out in a live concert setting.

However, there is a bright side to this phenomena (well, really a more positive side, Although Adorno would be hopping mad!) In a discussion on rock music, postmodernist writer Steven Conner points out that the media creates a desire in people to want to see music—to experience it authentically, not to just have a representation of it. It’s only natural, isn’t it? Speaking to the immense popularity of live Bruce Springsteen performances in the 1980s, Conner demonstrates his point with more than a hint of sarcasm:

This ecstasy of desired identification is a comparatively recent phenomenon in mass culture and turns out to depend oddly upon the technology of mass reproduction and communication; for it is only when the means exist to provide audiences with various kinds of substitute for the presence of the star—films, records, tapes, pictures—that this ecstatic yield of pleasure can be obtained from being in his [Springsteen’s] actual presence. In fact [the rock industry]…depends upon the kinds of desire that high fidelity reproduction stimulates, the itch for more, for more faithful reproductions of the ‘real thing,’ the yearning to move ever closer to the ‘original.’ (Conner 1989 in Strunk 1998)

In Bloch’s discussion of music he refers to a trumpet, it can both be seen and heard. However, Bloch asserts, music is somewhat intangible. The idea and the phenomena of music, then, must be boundless and free of parameters, therefore restricting it to such media forms as television and recordings does, as Adorno asserts in 1948, in fact alter the experience. Television has tried to merge the sights and sounds of music together in the form of broadcast concerts, but fundamentally, television’s method of transmission is inappropriate to convey music. Television is, by definition, a visual and passive medium. It’s effortless to watch t.v., however, accepting Bloch’s definition of music, where effort is required, a fundamental incompatibility is exposed. This incompatibility is, perhaps, why broadcast concerts are not seen in great numbers, because they are deemed tedious. O the ones that are broadcast, the pieces seleceted typically revolve around a “Three Tenor” style of short and catchy pieces.

Media aspects aside, more confirmation of Adorno’s thoughts can be seen with the general trends in composition. Writing in 1986, Gérad Condé, music critic for Le Monde, said the musical world is ever-changing. In “Consonances for Tomorrow” Condé predicts that composition and performance of music is moving towards a resurgence in tonality, which was proclaimed dead at the beginning of this century. Condé:

Ten years from now we many see a wholesale return to tonality, long since pronounced dead, and hence a convergence of language between ‘serious’ music and the other kind. Like it or not, everything is pointing in that direction, and less commercial composers should seriously set about recapturing a broader public, to avoid seeing their conquests reclaimed by ‘easy-listening’ confections. To be surprising is no longer enough—audiences aren’t turned on by making an effort. For composers, seducing their listeners is a matter of artistic life or death. (Condé 1986, in Haskell 1996: 376)

With that general pronouncement we see Adorno’s prophecy is again fulfilled.

Adorno’s work was groundbreaking and it certainly didn’t spare anyone or any idea. As I said earlier, the last fifty years has seen the realization of his ideas, especially with his prediction of the emergence of a culture industry that treats music like a commodity. However, as I also said earlier, things are not as bleak as he thought they would be. The forces that control the supposed culture industry have not suppressed his works, artistic expression still exists and the debate about the meaning of music, the role of audiences, and performers still goes on unabated. Thanks, at least partially, to the efforts of those like Adorno.

Works Cited

Theodor W. Adorno. The Philosophy of Modern Music. (Anne G. Mitchell & Wesley V. Bloomster, trans.) London: Sheed & Ward, 1973 (translation, originally published in German, 1948)

Theodor W. Adorno. “A Social Critique if Radio Music.” (1945) in Robert P. Morgan Ed., Strunk’s Source Readings in Music History, vol 7, The Twentieth Century. New York & London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1998.

Ernest Bloch. Essays on the Philosophy of Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985 reprint.

Gérad Condé. “Consonances for Tomorrow,” in Le Monde. (22 November 1986) in Harry Haskell, Ed., The Attentive Listener: Three Centuries of Music Criticism. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Steven Connor. From Postmodernist Culture (1989) in Robert P. Morgan Ed., Strunk’s Source Readings in Music History, vol 7, The Twentieth Century. New York & London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1998.

F. M. Berenson. “Interpreting the Emotional in Music,” in Michael Krausz Ed., The Interpretation of Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.

Joachim Kaiser. “Music and Recordings,” in Suddeutsche Zeitung. (1 June 1973) in Harry Haskell, Ed., The Attentive Listener: Three Centuries of Music Criticism. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Roger Scruton. “Notes on the Meaning of Music,” in Michael Krausz Ed., The Interpretation of Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.