ABSTRACT
The writings of the neo-Marxist philosopher, sociologist and music critic, Theodor Adorno, were both a rigorously dialectical analysis of, and a contribution to, the increasing polarity between ‘high culture’ and the ‘popular’ that became a defining feature of the twentieth-century cultural field. In his music criticism Adorno championed the atonalism and serialist techniques of Arnold Schoenberg with his ‘negation of illusion and play’ and thus identified modernist compositional procedures that in their sheer esotericism could resist the alienating forces of commodification and the ‘culture industry’.2 At the same time he argued that these forces found one of their most perfidious expressions in the field of organised spectator sport. Although modern sports ‘seek to restore to the body some of the functions of which the machine has deprived it . . . they do so only to train men all the more inexorably to serve the machine’.3 For Adorno musical modernism and sport occupied, or at least ought to occupy, diametrically opposite poles of the cultural field.
