But music - great music, at least - certainly does communicate something that is true, in addition to being "entertaining" - for which I read "moving". It communicates true emotions and is, at its best, an example of the greatness of the human spirit and of the human mind. At its absolute zenith, it communicates feelings of humanity's ability to rise up above mere life and to touch something greater than we can mentally comprehend. This is far beyond what you appear to be writing about, which appears to me as social or political comment. Of course, I may well have misunderstood and apologise if that is the case.

I am reminded of one of the finest poems I have ever read:

High Flight

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,
I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew -
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untresspassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.
 
by Pilot Officer Gillespie Magee
No 412 squadron, RCAF.  Killed in action on 11 December 1941

Music can do this, too, I think.

bws S-S!
 

Well, I have charles mingus on at the mo, Freedom,  which moves me, but it is probably an engaged subjectivity, engaged subjectivity that can interact with historically sedimented musical tropes blah blah blah blah

Can I say it moves me because he is black and he is talking about his brothers and sisters or is that too outrageous and non PC?

Of course, and he's responding to that fact at a particular historical moment, and making that manifest in his music. And he is using the language of jazz as it existed up to that point, but extending and developing it much further in a highly subjective manner.

Which album, incidentally? - [Delete that comment! - somehow I overlooked the word 'Freedom' I don't have a copy of that one, or else I would have shoved it into the CD player right now, in your honour!]

Ian, the Mingus is The Town Hall Concert, I think 1962, and when he talks about people being strung up and being burnt, then he urges stand fast, stand fast

It's not a question of "he's responding to that fact at a particular historical moment, and making that manifest in his music. "

It's a question of oppression and continuing oppression and no arty-farty nonsense phrases can deny the oppression

Should just add to that that while I'm saying that the oppression was a feature of that historical moment, that is in no sense to deny the continuing prevalence of racial oppression in the US today.

It's fine.

(from a fellow Mingus fan!)

Well, I should point out that I there are many areas in which I take issue with Adorno - I suppose where I'm coming from in terms of aesthetics and politics stems from an attempt to reconcile parts of Adorno, Benjamin, Brecht and Bourdieu (not easy to do!), with some other more distant influences from Deleuze and elsewhere, and other ideas of my own. And especially from a profound scepticism towards post-modernist ideologies. But overall, the tradition stemming from Hegel and Marx still has a lot to offer, IMO, more so than that of Anglo-American positivism. Adorno's thought in particular is often received with great scepticism in the English-speaking countries; some of that scepticism is certainly warranted, with respect to his dogmatism, his extremely monolithic view of the culture industry, and a certain obsessiveness deriving from his traumatised response to fascism (not that I'm blaming him for that, but I think some of his powerful attempts to view fascism as a historical phenomenon, which run right up to the Dialektik der Aufklärung, lost their way in the later years as Auschwitz came to assume a quasi-ontological role in his thinking). But I still think he was an absolutely brilliant and penetrating thinker, whose convictions on the role of the subject in artistic production, the relationship between popular culture and the aesthetics of commerce, on Wagner, on 'political art', on the domination of the subject under late capitalism, and on the deterioriation of Enlightenment principles into 'instrumentalised reason', science and rationality as a form of domination of nature which ultimately encompasses the domination of other human beings (as part of nature), are massively insightful and way ahead of their time.


There are a few good books on this subject. Max Paddison's two books - Adorno, Modernism and Mass Culture and Adorno's Aesthetics of Music - are both extremely good, the latter very involved and quite a strenuous read. Also the various extended commentaries by Richard Leppert in his large volume of Adorno's Essays on Music. Martin Jay's Fontana book on Adorno, and his The Dialectical Imagination, an intellectual history of the Frankfurt School, are also fine books. There are many others, in English and German, too numerous to list. Much other writing on music sociology in English, however, comes from a very different angle, essentially the post-modernist aesthetics that are characteristic of the New Musicology, which I argue constitute a reactionary, market-oriented ideology under the guise of identity politics. Quite a bit of this work does allude to Adorno, but usually from a highly superficial reading or misreading of the work, taking out of context a few choice phrases which actually form part of a dialectical constellation. The most read work of Adorno by musicians, at least until recently, was the Philosophie der Neuen Musik (I'd say the Introduction to the Sociology of Music, or various of the essays in the Leppert volume are a better place to start). This work was in what was widely agreed to be a very poor translation; happily a much better one (by Robert Hullot-Kentor) was published last year. But also, Adorno himself saw this book as an extension of the Dialektik der Aufklärung, and it is more difficult to read without some knowledge of the latter. Reading Adorno's musical writings in isolation is very tricky for those unfamiliar with the wider philosophical background from which he is coming (including the various concepts and terms from Marxist theory). What I've never yet seen is a book in English looking comparatively at German and Anglo-American music sociology, with a proper knowledge of both, and this is very much needed, I think. I taught a big course on Classical Music and Society last year, in which Adorno featured extensively, and may at some point (after finishing various other projects) try and write a book based on this course. My experience was that Adorno didn't have to be so impenetrable to students if they were primed about the basic ideas, concepts, and methodologies (very different to anything that one commonly finds in Anglo-American approaches) in advance.