Been reading Adorno all afternoon, and I cannot help but
say:
"background philology in from personal opposite going
position smiling unquestioningly young generation want
compositional that his incessantly academicism liquidation
mentality contemporary actually fetishism Hindenburg
characteristic article diammetrically twofold philosophy"
Or to quote Adorno alluding to Kierkegaard:
"one must read Hegel by describing along with him the
curves of his intellectual movement, by playing his ideas
with a speculative ear as though they were musical notes."
That "playing" firmly indicates to me learning an instrument
(not just playing a CD) at least basically, to animate
the words, their musical sense & acoustic.
Yet I wonder how much he played, weighed, all the notes
he uses in work on Stravinsky, or astrology.
There's very little close reading of Stravinsky, some
praise, a lot of weighing S against an assumed verdict on S,
and his relevance to history, as if Adorno were talking with
future historians he was sure would agree, share the
same overall dis-taste, as much as taste.
There's no analysis at all in his "stars fell down"
(sociologising the readership of astrology columns)
of the implications predictions might have
on each sign. He wants to show the bourgeois assumptions
in how astrology columns, specialist or not, are written
and consumed (all of which is interesting as a critique
towards a marxist or postmodern or better astrology) so
he treats all the pronouncements as all bourgeois, making
no analysis of how each sign's readership may be being
fed a cliche of their sign to keep them bourgeois.
Fair go, not his point, but then why name each extract
from columns by the star sign it is for? (Why does his
own, Virgo, uncredited, get the only page length extract?)
Is it his own sneaking interest, or a flattery to those
who will read things with star sign names in it? How is
either tactic not bourgeois in his own terms? I think
listening, playing the twelve signs, is as important
as the twelve tones, myself.
And his notes are odd on rhythm, not a dancer perhaps,
though someone who evidently took pleasure in music.
He praises Stravinsky "he was the first to use percussion,
not as a set of spotlights on harmonic perspectives, but
in response to its own sound significance"; this is
interesting, interesting praise of how the attack on a
sound may vary it so much that one needs a harmonics
of all notes' sounds; but this is still about
harmonic and melodic and structural analysis, not much
about the pleasure of rhythm, the body of rhythm. "It
is not for nothing that in Schoenberg the invention of
twelve-note technique goes hand in hand with the use of
non-developing dance forms". He seems against the frenzy
of the dance here, not just what he calls the false
improv-energy of jazz, actually within limits and quite
hyped by advertising-speak, but the body in dance. So
fair cop to Ken Bolton on that, I think.
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