ADORNO Essays on Music pp. 659-660 (Moogist Commentary)

YouTube via timtsang3 | January 22, 2011 |

"In the most advanced and acoustically sensitive compositions today there is a yawning discrepancy between the blocks that have been joined together, layered, so to speak, and are often astonishingly through-composed in themselves, and the overall structure. It is as if there were no mediation connecting the unprecedented articulation of the details with the equally magnificently through-composed totality; as if the two things were joined together according to principles of construction, but as if these principles of construction were not capable of realization in living phenomena. Mediation is lacking in the banal, as well as in the strict sense. In the banal sense, links are lacking between the individual sounds, in which everything is concentrated. In the strict sense, the events in themselves do not want to transcend themselves; the structure remains largely abstract in relation to them. Until now, integration frequently has become impoverishment. One can observe, along with an extreme increase in compositional means, a kind of regression to homophony. As I described this, borrowing an expression of Boulez's, blocks are being added together, rather than lines being drawn. Hardly any harmonic tensions are created; hardly any complementary harmonies; hardly any monodic, much less polyphonic lines. This shrinkage is out of all proportion to the compositional expenditure of means and construction. It may have something to do with what one can call the preponderance of extras, of the extra-musical in the most recent music, which Schnebel identified as one of the most characteristic phenomena of its development. It is as if music, by using noise, bruitistic effects, and then optical, especially mimetic ones, wanted to make up part of what it is temporarily blocked from achieving in the way of immanent unfolding. Those actions, however, frequently have something aimless about them. Dada turns into l'art pour l'art, and this is hard to reconcile with the idea of dada. Frequently a music is assembled that actually doesn't want to go anywhere. Against this it is argued, above all by electronic composers, that it is a matter of providing materials. If I once said that electronic compositions sounded like Webern on a Wurlitzer, that is unquestionably out of date. But on the other side there is always some primitiveness of results that remains unmistakable in relation to the technical effort. In general, it is probably difficult to develop means independent of the purpose, the quality of what is composed with them. I would like to mention at least one symptom that struck me recently and that perhaps also has something to do with the complex of difficulties - the phenomenon of the restraining of impulses; that music is constantly moving, wanting to develop, but breaks off again as if under a spell. Whether this spell expresses the one that we live under, whether it, too, is a symptom of ego-weakness or compositional inadequacy, is something on which I would not like to pass judgement.

I only wanted to make you aware of all this; not to prophesy or postulate anything. Music today sees itself faced with an alternative, that between the fetishism of the material and the process, on the one hand, and unfettered chance, on the other. A statement by Christian Dietrich Grabbe occurred to me that once greatly impressed me: "For nothing but despair alone can save us." Everything lies with spontaneity, i.e., the involuntary reaction of the compositional ear, quand meme. But if one composes in deadly earnest, one must ultimately ask whether it is not all becoming ideological nowadays. Therefore, one must confront the possibility of its falling silent non-metaphorically and without the consolation that it cannot go on that way. What Beckett expresses in his dramas, and above all in his novels, which sometimes babble like music, has its truth for music itself. Perhaps only that music is still possible which measures itself against this greatest extreme, its own falling silent."

-Theodor W. Adorno
Essays On Music, pp. 659-660."