ABSTRACT
Adorno’s critique of jazz and of popular music generally is widely read and frequently criticized in abstraction from (and often in ignorance of) his more copious writings on so-called ‘serious’ music. This has inevitably distorted the reception accorded his arguments since the latter depend crucially upon his analysis of the social situation of modern music as a whole. For Adorno the characteristics of all varieties of modern music have been conditioned by the same social situation, whether the music is ‘light’ or ‘serious’. Hence his insistence, in a letter to Walter Benjamin, that ‘high’ and ‘low’ represent an integral totality with respect to the alienated condition of art in the modern world. Accordingly, it is not really possible to make sense of Adorno’s structural critique of popular music without considering it in the light of his attempt to theorize the social situation of all modern Western music.
