ABSTRACT

According to Theodore Adorno (1976: 194), ‘[s]o far, what we know in musical sociology is unsatisfactory. It consists … in no small measure of unproven statements … every cognition rests upon analogy.’ He continues: ‘Sociological findings about music are the more assured the farther they are from’ the music; the more they immerse themselves ‘in specifically musical contexts they threaten to keep growing poorer and more abstract as sociological ones’ (Adorno, 1976: 195). The target of Adorno’s critique seems to be both mainstream positivist

sociologists and fellow-travelers in the Marxist sociology of art. In the ‘Preface’ to Introduction to the Sociology of Music he berates a sociology of music that treats its subject matter as ‘no more than cigarettes or soap in market researches’ (Adorno, 1976: xii). But he had equal scorn for a ‘dialectical-materialism [that] pummels into its followers’ the view that society and social structure are ‘realistically continued in works of art’ (Adorno, 1976: 203-4). So what kind of sociology of music could satisfy the high standards that

Adorno imposed on himself and on the discipline? Firstly, it would be one that doesn’t treat musical sounds ‘as a series of pictures’ that register within the individual as ‘an internal world theatre’ (Adorno, 1976: 211). Sound is sound and shouldn’t be reduced to something else. In this respect, Adorno could be seen as part of the post-Romantic discourse about music as a ‘language above language’ or a mode of communication beyond words and images. Adorno’s writing on music employs a discourse in which, as Carl Dahlhaus (1989: 115) tells us, Marxist Critical Theory and ‘Jewish theology’ (for e.g., the restriction upon ‘speaking the unspeakable’ or of trying to represent the divine) are predominant but ‘in which a faint echo of romantic aesthetics is [still] audible.’ Secondly, for Adorno the music-society relationship is never direct. The term he uses to describe the dynamic and nonrepresentational relationship between music and society is ‘mediation.’ Adorno (1976: 204) suggests that music in the modern era is an ‘autonomous activity’ that has ‘some distance from society; our job is to recognize and if possible deduce this distance, not sociologically to feign a false proximity of what is distant, a false immediacy of what is indirect.’ Thirdly, Adorno

prescribes dealing with ‘music as music’ and not reading the social implications through second-hand categories such as ideology, discourse or aesthetic style. He declares in a section ‘On Method’ in his famous Philosophy of Modern Music:

The dialectical method, and it is precisely the one which is placed squarely upon its feet, cannot simply treat separate phenomena as illustrations or examples of something in the already firmly established social structure … in this way dialectic declined to a state religion … A philosophical analysis of the extremes of modern music – which takes its historical situation as well as its chemistry into account – deprives itself in its very intentions of sociological responsibility just as fundamentally as from an autonomously applied aesthetic … Technical analysis is assumed at all times and often disclosed, but it needs to be supplemented by detailed interpretation if it is go beyond mere humanistic stock-taking … In an historical hour, when the reconciliation of subject and object has been perverted to a satanic parody … the only philosophy which still serves this reconciliation is one which despises this illusion of reconciliation … Knowledge, like its object, remains bound to the contradiction defined.