We are quite worried by that "directly." The first person we thought of was Jean-Paul Satire the Frenchman and existentialist, Part Three of whose 1943 Being and Nothingness is entitled Being-for-Others. Therein we may discover, along with a great deal else, the reason why Hegel was not quite right (see the "Husserl Hegel Heidegger" section).

Going further back there was wild little Rimbaud was there not? strangely influential with his "JE est un autre."

Nor must we forget jolly old Friedrich Nietzsche even must we, although he had no formal philosophical training! "Something is thinking" is all he was prepared to admit in response to jolly old Descartes's Cogito.

It all counts! - although the decidedly unjolly John Stuart Mill does not travel well, and Emmanuel Levinas was very likely a little too late.

Here, for the record, is jolly old Hegel himself: "Self-consciousness is, to begin with, simple being-for-self, self-equal through the exclusion from itself of everything else. For it, its essence and absolute object is 'I'; and in this immediacy, or in this [mere] being, of its being-for-self, it is an individual. What is 'other' for it is an unessential, negatively characterized object. But the 'other' [das Andere] is also a self-consciousness; one individual is confronted by another individual."

The only way to be really direct, in fact, is to be INdirect. Absolutely nothing is as straightforward as it appears to be.

Perhaps just checking he still has his key to the savage parade...

Adorno is the thinker from the field of critical theory most often quoted in the context of musicology for what is surely a very simple reason - that, unlike most of the other fashionable figures, he wrote a substantial amount about music! There's always been a certain distrust of his work in English-speaking countries (though there are some extremely brilliant Adorno scholars there, especially Max Paddison), for lots of reasons (not least his intensity, but also his readiness to address questions of music and society in a way many there wish could be swept under the carpet), but there has been, and continues to be, a very large amount of post-Adorno work from the German-speaking world. The writings and thought of Metzger, Helms, Schnebel, and in different ways Lachenmann, Huber, and Spahlinger, would all be very different were it not for the influence of Adorno (despite the fact that all of them interact with his work in different ways, and often very critically); and his work continues to be highly influential to the present day (there were a whole four biographies of Adorno published to coincide with what would have been his 100th birthday, two of which have been translated into English (of those two, that by Stefan Müller-Doohm is way better than the more journalistic book by Lorenz Jäger)). Very little of this work, or whole tradition of thought, is known to English-speaking readers, and that is a great loss, I think (an essay like Metzger's Musikalischer Faschismus. Kritisches zur Jugend- und Schulmusikbewegung, from as early as 1956, would raise a few eyebrows here). And more broadly, arguably the most prominent and important living German philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, whilst taking issue with many aspects of Adorno's work (especially the Dialectic of Enlightenment), still comes very much from this tradition. Adorno was addressing issues to do with music's role in society in ways that were far ahead of their time (the whole body of critical work on Wagner, for example, was anticipated by his Versuch über Wagner, long before the other work started to appear), and he was addressing wide social questions in West Germany at a time when others wanted to blank out their own recent history. In terms of his diagnosis of the role of the culture industry in conditioning and constraining the possibilities for artistic subjectivity, what he described seems truer and truer all the time. There are many areas where one might take issue with some of Adorno's conclusions or methods (certainly I would), but in my opinion his work continues to be more rather than less relevant. Certainly the most important thinker on music sociology. The earlier work of Max Weber upon which he drew has been out of print in English for a long time (it was in a volume entitled The Rational and Social Foundations of Music); this, and also the work of Ernst Bloch on music, is also well worth investigating.

Thank you John. I was beginning to think I should go into Lurk'n'Learn mode until such time as I felt like less of a

Do try knowing it better (that goes for all those who like this extension of commonplace Kraut-bashing prejudices on here)

Constantly.

Adorno did not necessarily reject all aspects of popular culture; he was after all, interested in that folk music (if you can call that popular culture - Adorno did so, in his book on Mahler) that had not yet been so extensively taken up by the culture industry as to be rendered inert, and in particular celebrated the ways it was employed in Mahler, Bartók and Janácek. His position was fundamentally against the culture industry and the commercialisation of culture, seeing little potential in work that was first and foremost produced and controlled by big business for profit, believing this to force an irrevocable homogenisation and depersonalisation of the product in question. There are a large number of writers on popular culture (ones who are sympathetic to some of it) who find Adorno's model and diagnosis compelling, even if not differing with him on the extent of the effects of the culture industry. In particular, this has inspired some highly perceptive writing on jazz which traces the relationship between particular music in that genre and the processes that Adorno observed, especially in the Swing Era, noting how in the work of some (including Duke Ellington) the need for their work to be a commercial success, especially with white audiences, led to a degree of depersonalisation and anonymity, manifested through an essentially decorative approach. Post-1945 Bebop is now commonly believed to be a reaction against this whole process.

When I've talked to some people working in highly commercialised music (such as that for film, TV, adverts) and described Adorno's ideas to them, several have said that he captured the nature of things acutely in a way that definitely resonates with their own experiences, and been extremely impressed that he, in the 1930s, could see this. Also, when Adorno was walking in Princeton, during the war years, on a project analysing the workings of the radio and how it homogenised what it broadcast, fellow professors sometimes looked askance at some of his work, but the typists there approved strongly.

The real distinction is not so much between the 'classical' and the 'popular' as between the 'commercial' and 'non-commercial' (or at least less commercial). Adorno saw commercial music as controlled less by the artists than by the industry (consistent with theories of late capitalism, by which big businesses control most things and small relatively independent producers are either squeezed out or swallowed up). Now, the processes may not have been so absolute as Adorno thought at the time of writing (and arguably at other later times, such as the early days of rock music, there were possibilities for artist-driven music, albeit for a limited period), but in light of the conglomeration of the music industry (also of Hollywood and other forms of media production) into ever-more monolithic entities as we can see today, he was far ahead of his time. Pretty much any examination of popular music that ignores the role of the industry will not be very informative, and Adorno was the pioneer in this respect.

What has not been examined in anything like the same level of depth is the role of what one might call 'semi-commercial' institutions in conditioning musical production in contemporary times (this would include most festivals, concert halls, radio stations, which have to some extent to make profits or at least break even, but on the other hand have a degree of public money so as to make the commercial dimension somewhat less overwhelming), how the resulting music might be seen to be affected, how artists may have to forego some of their own ideals and subjectivity in favour of fashioning their work to the demands of these institutions, and so on. Many of Adorno's paradigms would also be of value here. Certainly it would be of interest to see a study of the recent trajectories of Radio 3 in this manner.

Well, in that context, Schoenberg's composition of the Three Satires might also be borne in mind.....  I doubt Stravinsky needs or needed defending, by Schoenberg or anyone else, then or now. I cannot imagine any more devastating or acute critique of Stravinsky than that offered by Adorno (for which the essay in ...quasi una fantasia... is more penetrating than that in the Philosophie der neuen Musik), nor have seen any convincing refutation of the essential points Adorno made - indeed few Stravinsky scholars (even Taruskin, whose work is more indebted to Adorno (and even more to Dahlhaus) than he would like others to believe, though his politics are very different) have been able to ignore them. More widely, Adorno's models and analyses of music, the culture industry, and social processes become more rather than less immediate in the contemporary era, in my opinion. His work remains problematic, certainly, for various reasons: (a) the influence of Freud, including upon his ideas of the authoritarian personality, important though they are otherwise, (b) his refusal to allow for the necessity of de-subjectivising, cathartic, forms of activity as a necessary escape under conditions provided by late capitalism, (c) a certain knee-jerk technophobia (though he did praise Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge). Some working in cultural/critical theory have suggested that he neglected issues of gender and other forms of identity politics; whilst this certainly was not his primary approach (and identity politics are themselves problematic) there are devastating observations on the situation of women scattered throughout Minima Moralia. The feminist writer Juliet Fower MacCannell writes that, in terms of the 'Woman Question', 'there is very little to find fault with in him, and much that we would today call 'political correctness', where woman is concerne. HIs critical theory is virtually gender-blind, his aphorisms about women are almost always proto-feminist.....Long before the woman's movement he assailed women's abuse, archaic as well as contemporary. While he mainly ascribed this abuse to the bourgeois social order...that drew his theoretical Marxist and personal antipathy, he also extended it to prehistory' ('Adorno: the riddle of feminity', in Maggie O'Neill (ed) - Adorno, Culture and Feminism), p. 143).