After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology

Qui Parle BOOK REVIEW Tia DeNora, After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 176 pages, $23 (paperback) "To speak of the sociology of music is to perpetuate a notion of music and society as separate entities" (131). Simply put, the sociology of music, and musicology as well, tend to view the relations between music and society in one of three ways: music is caused by society, society is reflected in music, or music determines social practice. In Tia DeNora's After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology, all three of these conceptions are critiqued. Her corrective is to propose a "dynamic" model of the socio-musical relation under the name of music sociology. And here is the rub: the forefather of this new music sociology is Theodor Adorno. DeNora's brand of music sociology, as evidenced in her last two books, Beethoven and the Construction of Genius, and Music in Everyday Life, with its heavy reliance on empirical research, transcribed interviews and first-person accounts, could not contrast more strikingly with Adorno's methods. One finds in DeNora none of the critical negation that makes Adorno's sociological essays (such as "On Jazz," or "On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening") so appealing to his supporters and so irritating to his detractors. Yet, the question remains, how can Adorno be the progenitor of DeNora's music sociology? The answer: by Qui Pade, Vol. 15, No. 1 Fall/Winter 2004 Published by Duke University Press Qui Parle 170 BOOK REVIEW plucking the methodological kernel, while discarding the husk. According to DeNora, Adorno made two great contributions to music sociology. First, Adorno articulated not only how social practices shape music, but how musical procedures (the specific ways in which music handles its materials) possess a moral dimension and become exemplary for praxis. This is just as apparent in Adorno's high esteem for Schoenberg's music, which provides "a contrast structure against which 'all the darkness and inclarity of the world' could be illuminated" (152), as it is in his critique of popular music mass produced by the culture industry. Second, Adorno's musically dynamic conception emphasized listener response, and not just the musical text: it embraced detailed analyses of Beethoven, Berg, and Mahler, and a typology of listeners. These contributions are balanced against two problems with Adorno's work: 1) its prejudicial dismissal of jazz, popular music, and Stravinsky, and 2) a high level of abstraction and generality, without a grounding in empirical research. DeNora chides Adorno for using examples to illustrate a theory, not to support one. With this methodology in place, DeNora develops her theory of musical affordance. Balancing and articulating the dynamic relation between music and society requires neither ignoring music's ability to shape its own reception, nor ignoring the creative and unique ways in which listeners appropriate music to their own ends. The "right level" of generality consists of a focus on music-as-practice, and music as providing a basis for practice. It deals with music as a formative medium in relation to consciousness and action, as a resource for — rather than a medium about — world building. Within this dynamic conception of music's social character, focus shifts from what music depicts, or what it can be "read" as saying about society, to what makes it possible. And to speak of "what music makes possible" is to speak of what music "affords." (46) The proviso is that musical affordances must be analyzed within Published by Duke University Press Qui Parle BOOK REVIEW the confines of specific environments, situations, and local conditions. Moreover, "music" can be anything from entire works, to fragments, to Muzak, to whistling while you work. "What is key here is how the music is, or comes to be, meaningful to the actors who engage with it, including such matters as whether the relevant actors notice it" (49). As an illustration what music affords, DeNora reprises an interview from Music in Everyday Life. Lucy, an amateur musician who sings alto in a choir, described to DeNora her attraction to certain "juicy" chords in Brahms' music because these chords contain middle voices, which afford Lucy an opportunity for self-knowledge. The middle voices are: Lucy: ... part of the background ... It's the sopranos and the tenors that carry the song, if you like, and the basses and the altos that fill out to make it a sort of — [she stops and looks at me questioningly] DeNora: A sonic whole? Lucy: Yeah. And I think that maybe that characterizes me in life, that I don't like being in the limelight, I like .. . being part of a group. And, you know, pressing forward and doing my bit but not — [pause] DeNora: Filling in, as it were, the needed middle? Lucy: Yeah. Seeing what needs doing and doing it but not being spotlighted and being "out front" sort of thing.' Glossing this dialogue, DeNora writes, "For Lucy, music provided a template or model against which self-knowledge could be fleshed out or mapped. And it is here that we can see how an individual's conception of some particular musical structure or set of musical properties comes to be projected by that individual as a grid or guide for the work of tracing out (articulating) awareness of some other realm" (67). Published by Duke University Press 171 Qui Parle 172 BOOK REVIEW The theory of musical affordance focuses on how actors appropriate music to their own ends, making connections, as Lucy puts it, between the "me in life" and the "me in music" (67). In Lucy's case, music affords "a map or model of who she is and also of who she wishes to be. . . . Lucy shapes up a form of understanding, produces knowledge (about herself in this case) against the structures of what she finds in music" (67). But how relevant is this fact? Perhaps the emphasis should not merely stress that music affords opportunities for self-discovery, but rather highlight the quality of this self-discovery. DeNora overlooks this point when she compares Lucy's musical affordances to Adorno's: "I described how Lucy found joy in hearing 'juicy' chords because within these moments she was able to 'see herself' or her role in life. So too, as Adorno put it with reference to Schoenberg, 'passions are no longer simulated . . . [but] are registered without disguise" (104). I must admit my puzzlement at this sentence. In this passage from Adorno's Philosophy of Modern Music, the claim is being developed that Schoenberg's works no longer make expression into a character-type, espressivo, which is contained as one trope among others mediated by musical form; rather, through a critique of musical form, Schoenberg brings immediate expression forward. In particular, Adorno is referring to the terse, explosive works of Schoenberg's free atonal period, works like the Five Orchestral Pieces and the Six Little Piano Pieces, whose aphoristic, highly condensed, musical form criticizes the merely rhetorical Romantic espressivo. "Schoenberg's espressivo . . . differs in quality from Romantic expression precisely by means of that intensification which thinks this espressivo through to its logical conclusion."2 Similarly, the model of critical theory that Schoenberg's music affords Adorno is different in quality from the reified "me in music" which Brahms' music affords Lucy. By plucking out the great "contributions" of Adorno to music sociology, while abandoning the negative component of his critical theory, DeNora is forced into converting Adorno's qualitative claims into merely quantitative norms. For example, in summarizing Adorno's project of negative dialectics, DeNora produces this Published by Duke University Press Qui Parle BOOK REVIEW misreading: "The [critical] task of reason was to accommodate, and through formulation as knowledge, arrange (without suppressing) complexity, diversity, heterogeneity — to hold as much 'material' as is possible within compromised consciousness" (10). It strikes me that it is not the quantity, rather the quality of the contradiction between "materials" which is significant to reason's critical task. The quantitative impulse also lurks behind DeNora's goal for music sociology: "Music sociology will have achieved its ultimate aim, in other words, when — in all realms of social life — we come to attend to the sounds that are all around us, to know these as our accomplices (and opponents) in the doing, being, and feeling that is social life" (157). The great aim of music sociology is total attentiveness to the manner in which we cause, reflect, and are determined, by music. But quantity and completeness of attention is not a substitute for a qualitative praxis. No light has been shed to legitimate the application of DeNora's musico-sociological method. In this age of trying to "absorb Adorno" in order to "get past him," one must remember that the critical negativity and the high level of generality and abstraction present in the author's music sociology are not blind spots of which he was unaware. Nor can they be wiped away with value-free, empirical sociology. Thus, "a sociology which is committed to the 'positive' is in danger of losing all critical consciousness whatsoever . .. but only a critical spirit can make science more than a mere duplication of reality by means of thought."3 Any music sociology which positions itself after Adorno has two options: either have the veracity to use Adorno's negative dialectical method against Adorno (and critique Adorno's claims from some distinct, interested perspective), or have the courage and confidence to set forth its own substantive, methodological principles, which can stand on their own against Adorno's findings without claiming a false patrimony. The sociologist who comes after Adorno must remember: "The given will only offer itself up to the view which negates it from a perspective of true interest." —Brian Kane Published by Duke University Press 173 Qui Parle 174 BOOK REVIEW 1 Tia DeNora, Music in Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 69. This passage is quoted again with some severe cuts in After Adorno, 67. 2 Theodor Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, tr. A. G. Mitchell and W. Blomster, (New York: Continuum, 1973), 38. 3 The Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, Aspects of Sociology, with a preface by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), 11. 4 Ibid., 11. Published by Duke University Press