Adorno's Critique of Popular Culture - The Case of Jazz Music

Adorno's Critique of Popular Culture: The Case of Jazz Music
Author(s): Lee B. Brown

Source: The Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Spring, 1992), pp. 17-31
Published by: University of Illinois Press
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Adomo's Critique of Popular Culture:
The Case of Jazz Music
LEE B. BROWN
Evaluating Theodor W. Adorno's version of the Frankfurt School analysi

of cultural phenomena is a tricky matter.' By applying his abstractions to
the specific case of jazz music, I hope to cast some light on how his ap-
proach works. I shall explain why, although often trenchant, it is unreason
ably elitist. Adorno's work contains germs of a response to this charge tha
are worth considering, however. While arguing that Adorno's view is in
the end still inadequate, I shall briefly mention a way his approach migh
be redirected while saving its general spirit. Finally, by showing where
Adorno goes wrong, I hope to say something illuminating about the natur
of jazz itself.
Theoretical Framework
A central concept in Adorno's aesthetics is autonomy.2 He likes to say that

the function of art is to be nonfunctional.3 By this he means that art consti-
tutes an immanent, autotelic sphere that cannot be explained by reference
to the purposes of, for instance, political, religious, or economic institutions.
From another point of view, however, this very lack of obvious functional-
ity returns to art certain further functions. These functions themselves have
a double aspect. On the one hand, artworks are able to serve as standards
against which life can be measured by proffering in them "what in the out-
side world is being denied" (p. 14 [6]). Further, they are able to mock the
system from which they spring, a system in which everything is a com-
modity. On the other hand, by creating a well-rounded totality, art tends to
give the false impression of vindicating reality (p. 10 [2]). It is impossible
that either side of the duality within autonomous art should give way com-
pletely to the other. While artworks exist as superior things cut off from the
conditions of their production, they are at the same time commodities like
Lee B. Brown is an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy, The Ohio

State University. His most recent articles have appeared in the British Journal of Aes-
thetics and the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. He is working on a book on the
aesthetics of jazz music.
Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 26, No. 1, Spring 1992

?1992 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
18 Lee B. Brown
other commodities, except that they tend to hide the labor processes
make them possible.
Now art in the broad sense has a wide range of possible relationship
society beyond what is suggested in the foregoing. When Adorno spea
social significance, he sometimes includes both the social effects of ar
the social content we can find in the art. A central task for critical theor
course, is the analysis of such networks of social significance. This an
is not restricted to artworks that have autonomy, however. Critical theo
also interested in the diagnosis of cultural artifacts that are heterono
(p. 373 [356]). Such artifacts serve the aims of institutions that lie main
wholly outside the immanent sphere of the aesthetic. Critical theory trie
pinpoint the way both heteronomous and autonomous artifacts often
to validate the systems that produce them. Heteronomous "art" often
ply baits the customer with a variety of nonaesthetic psychological sat
tions. Autonomous art, however, is capable of embodying currents of
tance to the very system it officially endorses. Such currents of resist
exemplify what Adorno calls truth, or Wahrheitsgehalt (pp. 335-37 [350
Adorno cites certain works of Adalbert Stifter as examples of this ty
double register (pp. 33-34 [25-26], 138 [132], 374-76 [358-59]).
Adorno sometimes treats the heteronomy/autonomy duality as a ma
of degree, as when he says that there is an element of heteronomy in all
Because of this, no artwork achieves perfect aesthetic unity, although
typical of art to pretend otherwise (p. 160 [154]). On the other hand, i
complete absence of autonomy, art would altogether lose its power to
society (p. 335 [321]). Unfortunately, Adorno tends to harden the au
omy/heteronomy dualism when he turns to the topic of popular cultu
we shall see.
As with everything in his work, Adorno's account of truth is at once

suggestive and diffuse. Part of the problem is that if we ask what truthful
art says, we cannot get a direct answer, since such art is typically enigmatic
(pp. 182-205 [176-96], 337 [323], 342 [327-28]). Therefore, explicit social real-
ism is not a paradigm of artistic truth (pp. 336-37 [322]). The enigmatic char-
acter of authentic art is undoubtedly one reason why, although Adorno
gives plenty of examples in his main treatise on the topic-for example,
Beckett, Debussy, Proust, H61derlin-he doesn't use them as a basis for
forming a strict definition of truth. Roughly, truth has to do with the rev-
elation, by satisfying aesthetic means, of human needs and desires that tend
to be repressed by the institutions we live under. Truth in the fullest sense
would place such desires in the context of a global image of humanity.
Truth is not without social significance, obviously. Indeed, Adorno sug-
gests that the former is the real basis for the possibility of the latter (p. 360
[344]).
Adorno on Popular Culture 19
It is important for Adorno that while autonomous artworks may be true

in his sense, autonomy and truth are distinct concepts. In particular, an
artwork's truth often consists in its ability to challenge its own autonomy
and to cancel the very illusions it fosters as an aesthetic object (p. 197 [189-
90]). Thus "spiritual" art represents "an allegory of actual happiness" liber-
ated from the contradictions of real life, to which is "attached the fatal
rider" that the happiness in question "cannot be had" (p. 197 [189]). By con-
trast, weaker art will succumb to the temptation to bathe the world in a
false glow of happiness and harmony (p. 10 [21]).
Some of these issues are concretized in Adorno's Philosophie der neuen
Musik, in which Schonberg and Stravinsky are made to represent two main
paths. In spite of the abstract character of much of the former's work,
Adorno regards its atonality as expressing a truthful refusal to accept de-
ceptively easy reconciliations of social dissonance. At the same time,
Schbnberg's work can be seen as an aesthetic standard against which the
reality of life under late capitalism can be measured. By comparison,
Adorno sees Stravinsky's practice-in his so-called neoclassical period--of
recycling styles and forms from eighteenth-century music as evading the
conditions of modern life. Adorno also discerns in Stravinsky's earlier
works an invocation of an irrational v6lkisch culture that is not only equally
evasive, but is also suspiciously close to values promoted by Naziism.4
Stravinsky's positive view of ragtime and jazz music only makes things
worse.
However, as we saw earlier, it would be a misunderstan

position to conclude that works by Sch6nberg--or a
achieve an unqualified aesthetic success. For, as I have tr
very concept of an artwork for Adorno is a problematic
artwork possessing a transhistorical order of excellence
the most beautiful autonomous modern artwork is com
condition of the world that produces it and which it r
chooses to do so or not. Artworks make a promesse de bonh
delivered. To put these points together in the sort of pit
sometimes likes: aesthetic success would be the end of aesthetics as a dis-
tinct sphere (p. 124 [125]).
Popular Music
While the popular arts have many social functions, for example, entertain-
ment, escapism, imaginary ego satisfaction, and so forth, truth is not one of
them. The popular arts are essentially heteronomous. As a sheer commodity,
popular music is strictly subject to the pressures of fashion and conform-
ism. The formulaic quality of popular music shows how the very way we
20 Lee B. Brown
listen to it is pre-formed and dictated by the system.5 The goal of th

chinelike standardization of human reactions, Adorno believes, is to
audiences to "identify with the society they dread for having made
what they are" by indulging them in soothing fantasies of freedom a
dividuality.6 It is only within such a context that we can begin to
stand Adorno's pronouncements that pop music is a means by whic
technological system achieves "musical dictatorship over the masses."
Jazz too is a commodity.8 Its productions are, Adorno says, "as eph
eral as seasonal styles."9 People reject out-of-date jazz styles as "cor
"out," "uncool" as readily as they reject passing fashions in dress. Wh
idealizing view of jazz might celebrate it as an expression of rebellion
life of the black musician in jazz tells us another story. The jazz mus
Adorno claims, lives in hostile but compliant submission to the system
promotes the music. Indeed, the rebellious gestures within jazz are
sadomasochistic, for in them we can see how the jazz player chafes a
the father figure, while secretly desiring to emulate him and therefo
riving "enjoyment from the subordination he overtly detests."10 Pur
further psychoanalytic connections, Adorno describes the dancing th
companied swing music as mere "spastic" or "reflex" actions in whi
claims to perceive thinly concealed states of rage and self-hatred.11
Enough has been said to indicate that Adorno's general strategy i
lump all modern popular music together as a product of the culture
try. To be sure, many of his observations about grossly commercial
do have real bite. He interestingly scrutinizes the way in which such
serves the need to find a comforting and glamorous image of self. H
scribes how it conveys an illusory sense of private ownership by sugg
that "this music is for you."12 Such points are to his credit. Howev
simply taking jazz as just one more instance of popular music, he sm
out and ignores features that differentiate the popular music landsca
one were to step back into the early fifties, armed only with Adorn
count, one would expect to find bobby-soxers swooning over the mu
Charlie Parker or Thelonious Monk. Such a picture, of course, is absu
This is not to deny that the requirements of the culture industry do
jazz. Where the music is too complicated to be easily understood or
formed to suit market needs, it is ignored, with obvious financial effe
its composer and players. Indeed, Adorno could have cited even
damning evidence. One of the effects of the industry is the way the
attitudes of jazz musicians often play into the system. Just recently w
the shocking capitulation of Miles Davis to the banalities of the indu
fall from grace Davis insisted in celebrating as a form of success.13
Adorno might easily have piled up such stories. What needs to be
tored in, however, is that the consciousness of these very problems is
sistent theme in the jazz world. Ask any jazz musician playing jazz
postwar period, and you will hear a litany of complaints about the pres-
sures of the system.14 The position of jazz in the culture industry is simply
more complex than Adorno makes it out to be. On the one hand, there has
always been a fluid relationship between commercial music and jazz. On
the other hand, jazz is determined to prove that it is music for music's sake,
not an activity subsidiary to entertainment. Now this does not indicate that
a jazz/pop contrast should be understood in terms of Adorno's own rigid
version of the autonomy/heteronomy duality. Still, one is surprised that
Adorno does not, on his own terms, try to find some autonomy in jazz,
given the degree to which it does partly resist the influences of the culture
industry. That forms of jazz music are not mere passing fashions is borne
out by the fact that much of our classic jazz has acquired repertory status in
such concert halls as Lincoln Center. Adorno, however, is content to blur
the confections of jazz-flavored pop music with the real thing and to con-
nect jazz with record plugging and "star" packaging.15
Where Adorno sees jazz as suffering all the disabilities of commercial
popular music, a different view of the matter is expressed by the critic Max
Harrison, who sees similarities between jazz and the music of the Elizabe-
than lutenists.16 Jazz, he says, uses entertainment conventions to express
something deeper than entertainment. It would be far less interesting if it
could not liberate itself from run-of-the-mill commercial music.
Popular and "Serious" Music
Complementing his aggregation of jazz with all other popular music,

Adorno of course segregates the latter from "serious," that is, autonomous,
music. Here he applies the autonomy/heteronomy dualism rigidly. Con-
sider the terms in which he divides and labels the two spheres: the one is
"commodity," the other "art." The one is "serious," the other "popular."
The one is a realm of "life" and "individualism," the other of "standardiza-
tion."17
From a sociological point of view, the contrast could be challenged, of
course. While jazz players have a heightened awareness of the dangers of
commercialism just because jazz does lie alongside and use materials from
commercial popular music, the "serious" music world tends to be artifi-
cially insulated from many of the grosser aspects of the marketing system.
The result is that it may seem to occupy another, higher plane altogether.
The truth, however, is that opera houses, concert halls, and "good music"
broadcasting stations are subject to many of the pressures of the popular
culture industry. The serious music system creates a standardized kind of
listener no less than does the pop industry.18 If we examine the roles that
our "serious" art plays, we can see that it is compromised everywhere by
heteronomy. As we saw earlier, Adorno often admits the fact himself. Still,
22 Lee B. Brown
it does not cause him to moderate the severe "serious/popular" dualis

expounds.
Hidden Values
Adorno might say that far from undercutting his position, the brief jazz so
ciology I have presented really provides more evidence for his own claim
that the jazz musician lives in a "hostile but submissive" relationship to t
system. (Indeed, I would even suggest that this bitter struggle can som
times be heard in the music.) But are such players also submissive? Does
the term apply to the music of Charlie Mingus, for instance? To that o
Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, or John Coltrane? It hardly seems apt.
There is a deeper issue, however. We can get to it by considering anothe
way Adorno might respond to our argument. As noted in the first section, i
is impossible, in his opinion, to validate any sphere of cultural phenomen
by appeal to transcendent principles. No artwork can escape its inevitab
imperfection. (Indeed, the very practice of weighing cultural artifacts
against each other by appeal to absolute aesthetic principles begs for soci
economic analysis. Does it not presuppose an authoritarian society in whi
every sphere of cultural phenomena is required to justify itself?) So, h
might say that our criticism of his position is animated by an impulse
defend jazz on illegitimate, absolutist grounds.
The presuppositions of this countercharge are complex and cannot be
fully examined here. However, if the foregoing is to be Adorno's reply,
would have opened himself to an effective ad hominem, for he does not r
ally follow his own advice. On his account, there is something wrong wit
jazz that is not wrong with "serious" music. Now Adorno might explain
that he does not mean to measure jazz against serious music by some abso
lute aesthetic standard at all. He might say that while failure is built into th
very concept of an artwork, some artworks fail more interestingly than oth
ers. Sch6nberg's and Stravinsky's works are both revealing indices of soc
contradictions, while jazz is, by comparison, globally uninteresting.19 Ev
if qualitative differences can be found within popular music, such differ
ences are not interesting when contrasted to those revealed in compariso
of works of autonomous art.
The problem with this answer is that there is simply no good reason to
believe that jazz-or indeed popular music in general-will be a less valu-
able social gauge than "serious" music. Indeed, in spite of the crankiness of
parts of his analysis, the wealth of insight Adorno himself provides about
popular music strongly suggests otherwise. To be sure, Adorno does not
see everything there is to see. For instance, he misses the opportunity to de-
tail the way in which the black modernists of the postwar era managed to
one-up the white jazz establishment which, in the opinion of the "Young
Turks," had been looting black musical resources. The response of this
avant-garde was to develop forms of the music that were technically beyond
the white players who were not in on the new game. It is surprising too that
Adorno could fail to note how postwar black jazz gradually replaced the
happy music of a Louis Armstrong with the cold hostility of a Miles Davis.
Ralph Ellison has detailed this grim comedy of racial manners. The musi-
cians employed a "calculated surliness and rudeness, treating the audience
very much as many white merchants in poor Negro neighborhoods treat
their customers." The "white audience were shocked at first but learned
quickly to accept such treatment as evidence of 'artistic' temperament. Then

comes a comic reversal. Today the white audience expects the rudeness as
part of the entertainment."20 Adorno's successes draw attention to what he
was able to say, and his lapses to what more could be said. Together they
show that popular culture is not uninteresting, contrary to the hypothesis
under consideration. Indeed, it might be argued that cultural phenomena
with a more intimate relationship to the lebenswelt would be socially more
revealing than autonomous art. Let us try to understand why Adorno
might marginalize popular art.
Almost in the spirit of medieval hermeneutics, Adorno likes to mark off
various levels of content in cultural artifacts. However, his real interest is in
the deeper, more enigmatic revelations of autonomous art. By comparison,
he thinks the analysis of heteronomous art leaves us in the shallows. In
other words, the hermeneutic elitism rests on an elitism of aesthetic values.
Truth, for Adorno, is a fundamental aesthetic value. The point is not that
Adorno fails to acknowledge that his analysis is value loaded. Indeed, he
states that a value-free aesthetics is impossible (pp. 391-92 [371]). The point
is the striking way his valuations line up with traditional ones framed on
traditional bases. His analysis of art is obviously written in light of such
paradigms as I cited in the first section of this article. It is surely no accident
that his examples are all strong candidates for membership in a traditional
canonic list. The deeper point, though, is the conventional ground for
Adorno's high ranking of these works. While he has obviously put his own
sociological spin on the point, the fact remains that Adorno's privileged
works are great because they are deep. What could be a more traditional
ground for ranking artworks?
To be sure, we can find texts in Adorno that object to the idea of endur-
ing values in art (pp. 48-49 [41], 67-68 [60-61], 284-91 [273-79]). However, we
cannot but note how even in these texts Adorno's language gives away his
deeper convictions. Thus, he tells us that artworks resurrected from the past
sometimes show unexpected "deficiencies" (p. 68 [60]), but conversely that
great past art can sometimes be "actualized" again "through favourable
24 Lee B. Brown
trends and correspondences" with later art ([p. 611, the relevant pas
English only). But if artistic values are thoroughly historical, why
Adorno be either troubled or cheered by such thoughts?
How might we amend Adorno's view while preserving its o
spirit?21 The most hopeful prospect would be to emphasize those p
in Adorno that tend to soften the autonomy/heteronomy dualism. I
not the trend of postmodernism anyway? However, the problem of
salvage Adorno's approach against his own worse instincts is a com
one that cannot be solved quickly. As things stand, we would expect
the stricter version of Adorno's autonomy/heteronomy dualism ref
in his characterizations of the very elements of jazz music.
What Is Jazz?
The bits that go to make up a piece of popular music, Adorno tells u

mere cogs "in a machine."22 Their placement, he says, is fortuitous, "
of a 'logic' of musical progression,"23 while the elements of "serious
have a sense of inevitability. The implication is that bits of popular
and this includes jazz-can be shifted from one place to another wit
affecting their paltry significance. The elements of serious music, ho
will take on importantly different meanings in different contexts.
One must take exception, of course. Given that jazz is, if anything, a
of spontaneity, it seems odd to complain that the music does not exh
evitability. For if inevitability is meant to rule out unpredictability and
the concept is almost tailor-made to blind us to the most salient fea
jazz. If it is not meant to rule this out, then we need to hear more
what Adorno means by the concept. If it is only a bland label for th
that a given musical element works, the concept is so thin that applyin
jazz seems harmless. Andre Hodeir draws attention to how, in a fam
performance, Thelonious Monk gets a striking effect by following a ser
C's and F's with an F sharp.24 On the bland reading of Adorno's conc
"inevitability," we have no reason to withhold the description from s
example. If "inevitability" is intended to rule out the spontaneity of
sharp, however, then Adorno has insured in advance that he cannot
stand what makes for a jazz effect.
Adorno's Eurocentrism inclines him to understand this musical inevitabil-
ity almost entirely in terms of tonality and harmony. So when he says that jazz
does not exhibit a logical progression, he is tacitly complaining that it does not
exhibit the harmonic logic of certain categories of European music. This ap-
proach inclines him to imagine that in jazz, the simple tunes, isolated from
their jazz treatment, must somehow carry the whole load. It perversely ig-
nores what a jazz treatment of musical material is. In particular, it ignores the
way in which musical sense in jazz is a reflection of inflection and rhythmic
accentuation. In jazz distinctive ways of handling rhythm and timbre are

higher in the musical hierarchy than other musical elements. More generally,
the nature of jazz outruns the possibility of fully explicating it in Eurocentric
terms. Adorno is determined to understand it in such terms or not at all.
Adorno tells us that a simple underlying musical schema can always be

discerned through the superficial veneer of jazz elements.25 Such comments
do not appear to be the result of a mere theory. They seem to express the way
Adorno actually hears the music, that is, as a surface overlaying a musical
substratum that is familiar, European, but trivial. He hears it the way a person
might try to filter out a broadcast of a Schubert adagio from a bleed-through of
Rolling Stones music coming from another station. For instance, Adorno says
that in jazz the overlay of "syncopation" does not really disturb the "crude
unity of the basic rhythm."26 While it is barely possible to forgive Adorno for
not reckoning with innovations in jazz meter-Ornette Coleman's use of
"spread" rhythm in the early sixties, for instance27--his view that jazz rhythm
exhibits a "crude unity" is not even true of classic jazz. We can see this if we
consider the way Adorno misrepresents the view of Winthrop Sargeant to
support his own claim that there is nothing new in the music.28 Adorno mis-
understands Sargeant's attempt to show us how to identify the ingredients,
European and non-European, that go into jazz music. It was never Sargeant's
intention to reduce jazz to either of its sources. Indeed, he flatly asserts that in
jazz the sources combine to form "an entirely new contribution to the art of
music."29 Adorno does not understand that the peculiar rhythmic features of
jazz are neither African nor European phenomena, but vectorial resultants of
both.30 The "crude" metric unity of classic jazz is actually a framework with-
out which the distinctive polyrhythmic effects of classic jazz would not be
produced.
Analogous claims can be made about jazz tonality. It is hard not to con-
clude that Adorno was simply unable to regard it with any understanding.
For instance, Adorno believes that when we listen to jazz, we hear the
"worried" or "bent" notes that are characteristic of it as "exciting stimuli"
only because our ear is moved to correct them back to the right note.31 He
describes jazz as a popular song with "a few false notes squeaked by a clari-
net."32 In short, he hears the music as European scales and songs badly
played, as full of mistakes.
Although he doesn't say so, the "bent" notes of which Adorno speaks
typically reflect blues tonality. With its tendency to flatten notes at the
third, seventh, and possibly fifth intervals, blues tonality results from su-
perimposing the European tempered scale over an African tonality that
tends toward pentatonism. Now some jazz pieces exhibit blues tonality
throughout. Such tonality has an aural sense of its own, as do, say, certain
church modes. If so, it is certainly not the case that we mentally correct it in
order to give it musical sense. Of course, blue notes may also turn up in
26 Lee B. Brown
music that does not, as a whole, exhibit blues tonality-as in certain w

by Ravel. What such cases illustrate is that our hearing may be gover
something like the differential principle of structural linguistics. Trimm
its tendentious rhetoric, Adorno's description boils down to the ha
observation that in gathering the sense of any music, we tacitly co
what we hear with a range of possible alternatives. Now he might b
that the blue notes of jazz reflect the influence of an objectionably n
ropean tonality. In that case, he would have fallen back on a chauvi
tonal absolutism of the crudest sort. What, after all, constitutes "r
notes in a world in which our European tempered tonality is only one
native among many?
We have not considered the expressive qualities of jazz. While it l
the heaven-storming heroism of Beethoven's music, jazz does, of co
express hope, joy, despair, and anger. Above all, one can find in it an
ious but exuberant celebration of spontaneity. Does this suggest that
trary to Adorno's opinion, jazz could be true in his sense of the word
reason Adorno would probably not admit this is that he cannot hear
what he thinks he perceives in autonomous art generally, namely, a k
inner duality by virtue of which art is at odds both with itself an
world.33 Still, it seems that the chance of discovering Adorno's truth
would be about as great as finding it in the abstract music of Schonbe
Interestingly, one of Adorno's remarks about autonomous art act
reminds us of a famous description of jazz. Adorno says that in aut
mous art the "nonexistent" rises up as if real, inviting us into a sphe
satisfactions we cannot find outside the sphere of art (p. 129 [122]). A
lar leitmotif runs through Sartre's novel La Nausde, in the protagonis
scription of how, for him, an unreal aesthetic realm looms up whene
hears a certain scratchy old jazz record. Might we try to expand
Sartre's description so as to make it converge even more sharply with
Adorno says? It is difficult to decide the question because Adorno n
makes the concept of truth very clear. However, the fundamental con
ation that puts jazz music beyond the pale for Adorno is his jud
about the paucity of its musical forms and materials. He couldn't im
how such music could ever be true. This reinforces the conclusion that
Adorno's conceptualization of his subject matter is guided by rather con-

ventional Eurocentric norms.
Afropurism
For Adorno, as we saw, what we mistake for individualism in jazz is the

product of a standardizing machine. What we take to be spontaneity is re-
ally a construct out of prefabricated parts. It is an illusion that jazz is a
"break-through of original, untrammelled nature."34 The real business of

jazz, ironically, is to repress "every unregimented impulse" that the music
appears to express.35
The problem here is that in tacitly admitting that it is possible to speak of
jazz in some unadulterated form, Adorno undermines his position, for he is
granting the possibility of a type of music that would be free and spontane-
ous if the system had not done violence to it. This is what Adorno is as-
suming when he says that the repressive system has taken something,
housebroken it, made it scrub behind its ears-that the "original anima-
tion" of every form of jazz, whether manifested in swing or bebop, suc-
cumbs to "commercial requirements" and quickly loses its "sting."36 These
statements imply the possibility of jazz in an unspoiled form.
We must ask then where we might find the real thing. Since Adorno has
not thought through the implications of his position, he probably has no
ready answer. We might look for it as an endangered but still surviving
species of American music. If this is what the theory directs us to do, it col-
lapses back into a familiar story about how jazz, like the other arts, swims in
the dangerous waters of late capitalism. This story, however, is not the one
Adorno wanted to tell. He wanted to say that authentic art does not reside
in American jazz at all. He wanted to say that such music suffers from in-
herent defects that do not touch "serious" music.
Authentic jazz, it is often supposed, exists in its earliest versions. Indeed,

Adorno's language suggests that it is precisely in such forms that we find
the pure, "unruly" form of the music that the culture industry has de-
formed. However, this way of locating jazz on the cultural map would be
based on a misunderstanding, not only of jazz, but of its sources, as we can
see after a little reflection.
The brilliant critic Andre Hodeir made a point of refuting just the sort of
purism we are now considering.37 Such purists were convinced that not
only the "modern" jazz players of the forties and fifties, but even musicians
of the thirties had lost touch with the primitive, authentic form of the music
that was exemplified by such early black players as Johnny Dodds and Kid
Ory. In a reductio of this position, Hodeir argues that if the purists are to be
consistent, they must cast out the very jazz saints their position was meant
to protect, for those early players themselves must have represented a "cor-
rupt" version of even more original musical sources.38 A consistent purism
should tolerate only such uses of musical materials as are disconnected
from the entire logic of European tonal and metric practice. It should, for
instance, reject the blues as a corruption of what a player would play in the
absence of the interference of European tonality.
The irony is that when the purist is finally driven back to African music,
he will find his prize disappearing like smoke. We saw the reason in the
28 Lee B. Brown
previous section: the characteristic features of jazz cannot be identi

either with European or with African practice but represent a unique
action of both.
The point applies to Adorno's objections to jazz improvisation. He

plains that there are "very few possibilities for actual improvising" in
His views on this matter reflect a simplistic connection between social r
sion and musical repression. Since the former exists, so does the latter. H
genuine improvisation is impossible. However, there is no point in try
weigh Adorno's assumption that a society free from social repression
really be capable of "actual" musical improvisation, since he cannot m
clear what actual improvisation would be like. The suggestion we ar
considering, recall, is that such a thing might have been found in Africa
sic. However, when we try to apply the adjectives "free" and "untram
to African music, we get a thesis that is highly dubious. In African mus
lowable variations are hedged with definite do's and don'ts. They are not
and untrammeled. Unlike jazz, African music is not an individualistic
improvisatory spontaneity.40
Now Adorno did not trace out the alternatives we have just consid
It is possible that his norm of authentic jazz simply inhabits a conc
limbo. What he imagines jazz ought to be might be something it never
be. Again, Adorno's critique of what he says passes for real improv
suggests this. His description of it as prefabricated is a tendentious d
tion of a necessary condition of any improvisational practice that w
make musical sense-particularly on Adorno's own Eurocentric t
Stanley Cavell has beautifully detailed the conceptual impasse that m
improvisation runs into should it imagine itself liberated from any p
whatsoever.41
There are really two points here. First, the inflections and eccentric ac
of jazz improvisation would make no sense in the absence of what Ad
pejoratively calls harmonic and metric "walls."42 Second, all jazz mus
know that in order to gain the freedom they seek, they must build up a
toire of musical moves that take their cue from a preexisting practice
sure, an effective player will make music that goes beyond a sum of stoc
ures. There is no routine way in which individual players accomplish
Many options, however, find their place in a sequence that is genuine
velopmental--contrary to the opinion Adorno offers in one of his ess
Louis Armstrong's approach expands upon earlier ones, Lester Young'
resents a partial deflection away from Armstrong's, Charlie Parker's a
mentation of Young's, and so on. Adorno, however, will settle for nothi
than a form of pure improvisation that comes, literally, from nowhere. S
ideal is an empty dream. Obviously, it could not be borrowed from a
of what an improviser such as Beethoven might have done. By compa
with the "actual" improvisation Adorno assumes "untrammeled" jazz
exhibit, Beethoven's would be rule governed, "regimented." It would be

Apollonian rather than the Dionysian thing Hodeir tries to imagine.
Given Adorno's European elitism, we might expect him to regard the
sort of Afropurism we have ascribed to him as humbug. Surely we cannot
reconcile the demand for primitive wildness with the demand for musical
inevitability. But is it so surprising that extreme cultural chauvinism might
regard alternative cultural phenomena as alien, unintelligible--as other? Is
it surprising that such material might be the object of both fascination and
aversion? However we decide that question, it is certainly ironic that in his
thinking about what jazz ought to be, Adorno the critic of the culture indus-
try has made himself the victim of one of the original strategies of jazz mar-
keting. In its early years, the music's image as primitive, dark, and unfath-
omable was seen to have enormous economic potential. Mysterious black
music for white customers-a perfect economic match! It is curious indeed
that such a tenacious diagnostician as Adorno might have bought this
phony old idea.
NOTES
1. Relevant works by Theodor W. Adorno include his Einleitung in die

Musiksoziologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1962), trans. E. B. Ashton as Intro-
duction to the Sociology of Music (New York: Seabury Press, 1976), and Asthetische
Theorie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), herausgegebn v. Gretel Adorno and
Rolf Tiedemann, trans. and ed. C. Lenhardt as Aesthetic Theory (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984). Philosophie der Neuen Musik (Tiibingen: Mohr,
1949), trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster as Philosophy of Modern
Music (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), and Moments Musicaux (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp Verlag, 1964). Useful essays include "Uiber Jazz" (under the name of
Hektor Rottweiler), Zeitschrift ftir Socialforschung 5, no. 1 (1936); "Oxford
Nachtriige" (a supplement to the foregoing), in Dissonanzen: Music in der
verwalteten Welt (Frankfurt: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1956), "On Popular Mu-
sic," Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9, no. 1 (1941); "Zeitlose Mode. Zum
Jazz" ("Perennial Fashion-Jazz"), in Prismen: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft
(Frankfurt: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1963), trans. Samuel and Shierry
Weber as Prisms (London: Spearman, 1967). Where useful translations exist, En-
glish references will be in brackets in the text and in parentheses in these
endnotes.
2. Autonomy is probably incapable of noncircular definition. I have set aside this
problem here, as well as definitional problems that probably beset Adorno's
concepts of truth and of the aesthetic itself. Adorno seems at once to employ a
tacit definition of the aesthetic and to deny its possibility. See Asthetische Theorie,
p. 11 (3).
3. Adorno, Asthetische Theorie, pp. 92 (89), 33-34 (25-26), 374-76 (358-59). Subse-
quent references to this work will be indicated in the text by page numbers in
parentheses, with numbers for translations in brackets.
4. Noted by Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), p.
184. His reference is to Adorno, "Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik,"
Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung 1, nos. 1/2 (1932): 116.
5. Adorno, "On Popular Music," pp. 21-24.
6. Adomo, Prismen, p. 124 (126).
30 Lee B. Brown
7. Ibid., p. 124 (125).

8. Adorno, "Uber Jazz," p. 238.
9. Adorno, Prismen, p. 120 (122).
10. Ibid.
11. Adorno, "On Popular Music," p. 46. Adorno indulges in many curious psy
analytic speculations in the pages of these essays-that the saxophone is
androgynous instrument, that the short hair worn (not now!) by jazz playe
signifies castration, and so on.
12. Ibid., p. 37.
13. So judges Stanley Crouch in his "Play the Right Thing," The New Republic 2
no. 7 (1990): 30.
14. See, for instance, A. B. Spellman, Black Music (New York: Schocken Books, 19
for a vivid account of some of these problems.
15. Adorno, Prismen, p. 127 (128), for example.
16. Max Harrison, A Jazz Retrospect (London: 1976), pp. 8, 68.
18. While we still have endless performances of the old warhorses, there is evid
that the younger public is becoming tired of the diet. Consider the success
such groups as the Kronos Quartet.
19. Here I expropriate the argument presented on Adorno's behalf by Thom
Huhn in an unpublished response to an interesting lecture by Theodore Grac
("Adorno on Jazz"), presented at the meetings of the American Society for A
thetics in Austin, October 1990.
20. Cited by Crouch, "Play the Right Thing," p. 33.
21. Here, I am noting a possibility traced out by Lambert Zuidervaart in his es
"The Social Significance of Autonomous Art: Adorno and Burger," Journal
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48 (1990): 61-77.
23. Adorno, Prismen, p. 122 (125).
24. Andre Hodeir, Toward Jazz, trans. Noel Burch (New York: Grove Press, 196
177. The performance is Monk's solo on the Prestige recording of "Ba
Groove."
25. Adorno, "On Popular Music," p. 22.
26. Adorno, "Perennial Fashion-Jazz," p. 118 (121).
27. Adorno's Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie (of which the first chapter is a diatribe
against popular music) was published in 1962, Prismen in 1963.
28. Adorno, Prismen, pp. 119 (121-22). Adorno is referring to Sargeant's, Jazz Hot and
Hybrid (New York: Da Capo Press, 1976).
29. Sargeant, Jazz Hot and Hybrid, p. 264.
30. For a discussion of this point, see my own "The Theory of Jazz Music," The
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 49, no. 2 (1991): 116-27.
32. Adorno, Prisms, p. 126 (127).
33. It should be asked whether this is a feature of all "serious" music-of music by
Rameau, or Handel, for instance? The examples that guide Adorno's view of art
are mainly nineteenth- and twentieth-century works.
34. Adorno, Prisms, p. 119 (122).
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid., p. 118 (121).
37. The term "purism" is my own. The critics Hugues Panassie and Robert G
are examples. See the latter's Jazz from the Congo to the Metropolitan (New Y
Doubleday, 1944), for instance.
38. Andre Hodeir, Hommes et problemes du Jazz: suivi de la Religion du Jazz (Paris
Portulan chez Flammarion, 1954), trans. David Noakes as Jazz-Its Evolution
Essence (New York: Grove Press, 1956), p. 42.
39. Adorno, "On Popular Music," p. 25 (my emphasis).
40. Adorno obviously did not benefit from the massive scholarship of A. M. J
Studies in African (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959). For a shorter account
of the African sources of jazz rhythms, see Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz: Its Roots
and Musical Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 6-26.
41. Stanley Cavel, "Music Discomposed," Must We Mean What We Say? (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). The point may have no application
to so-called "free jazz." Like modernist art, it faces the impasse that results from
the rejection of all rules.
43. Adorno, "Perennial Fashion-Jazz," pp. 118-19 (121).

Adorno&#39;s Critique of Popular Culture - The Case of Jazz Music

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Adorno's Critique of Popular Culture: The Case of Jazz Music

Author(s): Lee B. Brown

Evaluating Theodor W. Adorno's version of the Frankfurt School analysi

A central concept in Adorno's aesthetics is autonomy.2 He likes to say that

Lee B. Brown is an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy, The Ohio

Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 26, No. 1, Spring 1992

As with everything in his work, Adorno's account of truth is at once

It is important for Adorno that while autonomous artworks may be true

However, as we saw earlier, it would be a misunderstan

tinct sphere (p. 124 [125]).

listen to it is pre-formed and dictated by the system.5 The goal of th

Popular and "Serious" Music

Complementing his aggregation of jazz with all other popular music,

it does not cause him to moderate the severe "serious/popular" dualis

quickly to accept such treatment as evidence of 'artistic' temperament. Then

The bits that go to make up a piece of popular music, Adorno tells u

accentuation. In jazz distinctive ways of handling rhythm and timbre are

Adorno tells us that a simple underlying musical schema can always be

music that does not, as a whole, exhibit blues tonality-as in certain w

Adorno's conceptualization of his subject matter is guided by rather con-

For Adorno, as we saw, what we mistake for individualism in jazz is the

"break-through of original, untrammelled nature."34 The real business of

Authentic jazz, it is often supposed, exists in its earliest versions. Indeed,

previous section: the characteristic features of jazz cannot be identi

The point applies to Adorno's objections to jazz improvisation. He

exhibit, Beethoven's would be rule governed, "regimented." It would be

1. Relevant works by Theodor W. Adorno include his Einleitung in die

7. Ibid., p. 124 (125).

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Adorno's Critique of Popular Culture - The Case of Jazz Music

Adorno's Critique of Popular Culture - The Case of Jazz Music