adorno

For Adorno, music was much more. He was convinced that music could be so powerful it could force individuals to realize their existence is a product of social forces which can undergo change. Music can bring about a realization of truth.

He argued that popular music could be solely characterized by 'standardization'. In his famous paper 'On Popular Music', Adorno wanted to emphasise the dull nature of the verse-bridge-chorus structure of songs. This meant that nothing novel could be produced from popular music.

Adorno was highly critical of jazz and popular music, essentially viewing both as part of the prevailing culture industry. He saw the culture industry “as an arena in which critical tendencies were eliminated, as it produced and circulated cultural commodities through the mass media manipulating the population.

He argues that modern mass entertain- ment is manufactured under conditions that reflect the interests of producers and the market, both of which demand the domination and manipulation of mass consciousness.

Theodor Adorno describes expressionism in music as concerned with the unconscious, and states that “the depiction of fear lies at the centre” , with dissonance predominating, so that the “harmonious, affirmative element of art is banished.” Erwartung and Die Glückliche Hand, by Schoenberg, and Wozzeck, an opera by ...

Plugging has to do with making a song a hit by repeating it in the radio, cinema and so on until everybody knows it and recognize it. Adorno does not explore this vocabulary much in this text, but one cannot overlook the violence presupposed in terms of popular music, such as the hit and the beat itself.

Adorno argued, along with other intellectuals of that period, that capitalist society was a mass, consumer society, within which individuals were categorized, subsumed, and governed by highly restrictive social, economic and, political structures that had little interest in specific individuals.

Adorno reiterates that ideologies do not represent untruths in-themselves as they often reflect truth or at least parts of a truth but they become untruths through their relationship to reality. Adorno (1954: 11) emphasizes that 'actual ideologies become untrue through their relationship to existing reality'.

In addition, some scholars believe that Adorno believes that modern culture and art in capitalist society have been commercialized. Although this commercialized culture and art is popular and universal, in “popular culture,” art loses in “popular culture,” criticism, and negation function.

For Adorno, the answer is simple enough: the radical break between production and consumption, the collapse of this heart of late capitalism – soon to use Fascism to attempt to shore it back up, a use that failed both art and humanity brilliantly and horrifically – is precisely mirrored in the gulf between the art ...

Expressionist music aims to fully express these darker and often extreme emotions through equally extreme, disruptive, and sometimes even violent music that aims to provoke unsettled, disturbing responses from listeners. Some prime examples of expressionist music include: Elektra, Richard Strauss (1908)

to punch or strike transitive) slang. to punch or strike. 19. ( intr; foll by along, away, etc) informal.