An interesting piece about
the prevalence of music in contemporary culture: (Atlantic Monthly)
Adorno claimed in one of his most dated Marxist rants against the West's
commercialized culture. In this case Adorno was right. The appearance of a
huge industry seeking new products, trying to both predict and create shifts
in popular taste, gave rise to a wild acceleration of the cycle of
sophistication and rebellion. By now any musical form is overwhelmed by its
counterform before professional musicians have made more than a gesture at
giving the form real sophistication. ...
But even Adorno, the most culturally observant of the mid-century Marxists,
was too much of a traditionalist to guess that the stupidity of popular music
would make us not stupid but ironic.
Listening, say, to one of Byrd's sixteenth-century antiphons, do we actually
feel the intensity of religious mood felt by his Renaissance audience, who
shared a use for that mood? Do we actually feel as much as Beethoven's
Enlightenment listeners, for whom his thunder echoed in a landscape of
generally accepted ideas about God and man and nature? Certainly there is
pleasure to be taken in the elegant mathematics of Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's
Desiring." But you can sense something thinning in the twentieth century when
Frank Lloyd Wright changed the title to "Joy in Work Is Man's Desiring" for
his disciples.