ABSTRACT
The line between ‘serious’ and ‘popular’ music can be drawn in different ways. Serious music may be viewed as more complex or more difficult or more refined than popular music or as it may be seen as a spiritually higher form – highbrow as distinct from lowbrow. Adorno rejects all such categories as a basis for distinguishing between serious and popular music. Although he might well agree with the implications of some of them, others are plainly wrong. For example, to view classical music as more complex than popular music is in some respects untrue. He points out that all the works of early Viennese classicism were, ‘without exception’ rhythmically simpler than the most common arrangements of jazz. Melodically, the wide intervals of a good many hits (he offers ‘Deep Purple’ and ‘Sunrise Serenade’ as examples of the day) renders them more difficult to follow than most melodies of Haydn. ‘Harmonically, the supply of chords of the so-called classics is invariably more limited than that of any current Tin Pan Alley composer who draws from Debussy, Ravel and even later sources’ (Adorno 1990: 305).
