[HN Gopher] Televised Music Is a Pointless Rigmarole (1968)
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Televised Music Is a Pointless Rigmarole (1968)
Author : no_kill_i
Score : 38 points
Date : 2024-06-04 19:33 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theparisreview.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theparisreview.org)
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| Evidently before television people used to go to classical
| musical concerts blindfolded - who knew!?
| cwillu wrote:
| "[They are no longer by any means coming into contact with the
| thing itself but rather with a predissected, cliche-ridden
| product of the culture industry, which gives them the illusory
| sense that they could become actively involved in culture."
|
| It's more about having the choice of what to look at being
| decided for the viewer.
| vikramkr wrote:
| And about making clear that the proles who think they're
| enjoying music just because they're enjoying it aren't
| actually part of "culture" because they're not enjoying it in
| the "right" way. In a sense he's right - televised and
| recorded music didn't lead to people participating in his
| image of music culture. It created a new one that was
| massively more accessible, making music much more prevalent
| in everyday life than it ever had been, while unlocking new
| avenues of artistic expression unimaginable a few centuries
| ago.
|
| In that context his argument carries a lot of weight I think
| - the classical music culture was truly one that evolved for
| the medium of the live performance. We'd be making the same
| mistake he's making if we thought we were fully appreciating
| it through a recorded or visual medium, since in our cultural
| context it is easy for us to be as dismissive of the
| importance of the live aspect of classical music as it is for
| him to be dismissive of the recorded and visual aspect of
| televised music
| Almondsetat wrote:
| That's like saying that spending hours of your day stuck
| between two lanes of traffic in a gray highway is not bad
| because people went outside before cars.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| it seems to me that for that analogy to hold you must be
| assuming that being inside a car is a form of being outside?
|
| Which is an assumption I would not make, and I suppose most
| people would not think that being inside their car was being
| outside, but I haven't surveyed for responses.
| spazmoth wrote:
| Ted was _especially_ hangry that afternoon.
| cwillu wrote:
| "Yes, one's attention is drawn away from the essential things and
| towards the inessential ones, namely, away from the music as an
| end and towards the means, the manner, in which the keyboardists
| and wind players and string players are playing it. But I'd like
| to point out that these irritating practices are well established
| in the techniques of all forms of mechanical reproduction. In
| radio and in many gramophone recordings one also encounters a
| predilection for accentuating so-called principal voices or so-
| called melodies out of all proportion to their place in the
| musical fabric. This is the fault of the sound engineers, who
| subsequently engage in fundamentally quite unmusical procedures
| by surgically extracting these voices, which is quite in keeping
| with their--if I may say this--unartistic intuitions and is also
| congenial to the highly problematic taste of the public. ... What
| results from this is that certain middle-of-the-road so-called
| euphony, that culinary seasoning of the sound at the expense of
| all the structural elements of the music."
| pjc50 wrote:
| > Here the mass media--which precisely because they are technical
| media are duty-bound to forgo everything unseemly and gratuitous
| --are conforming to the abominable convention of showcasing lady
| harpsichordists with snail-shell braids over their ears who
| brainlessly and ineptly execute Mozart on jangly candlelit
| ancient keyboards.
|
| Man, this guy would have _hated_ piano youtubers.
|
| Is there any argument here other than "Adorno is an old git who
| hates change, young people, and popular entertainment"?
|
| > Consequently, when the masses come into contact with it, they
| are no longer by any means coming into contact with the thing
| itself but rather with a predissected, cliche-ridden product of
| the culture industry, which gives them the illusory sense that
| they could become actively involved in culture.
|
| "Once everyone likes it, it's no longer good"
|
| It's a remarkably small-c conservative screed for someone who's
| normally classified as a left philosopher.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Is there any argument here other than "Adorno is an old git
| who hates change, young people, and popular entertainment"?_
|
| Yes, he makes several clear arguments.
|
| Is there argument to your comment aside from the ad-hominem and
| the tired ageism / "old folks hate young people" cliche?
|
| Of course there's also a context to his critique, which is not
| any naive "young vs old", or "change is bad/good" (he cites
| Alban Berg and was all for avant guarde developments, hardly
| someone against "change"), but related to a high culture with
| centuries of development.
|
| It's like people talking about French cuisine, and someone
| comes in chiming how McDonalds is great and young people like
| it. Not the same cultural context. Of course the latter
| cultural context also doesn't believe there is any hierarchy of
| cultural contexts and practices besides "personal taste", so
| any discussion of particular practices and their merits or lack
| thereof is moot within it.
|
| > _It 's a remarkably small-c conservative screed_
|
| Only for those conflating mass market populism, mass culture,
| and relativism as some kind of liberating concept.
|
| He (and many others of the left and even some of the right)
| have written thousands of pages against that idea.
| maleno wrote:
| > Is there any argument here other than "Adorno is an old git
| who hates change, young people, and popular entertainment"?
|
| I think there is a very serious argument going on here. The nub
| of it is in this paragraph:
|
| > I don't think there's any such thing as a pedagogical path to
| the essential that starts out by getting people to concentrate
| on the inessential. This sort of attention that fixates on the
| inessential actually indurates; it becomes habitual and thereby
| interferes with one's experience of the essential. I don't
| believe that when it comes to art there can ever be any
| processes of gradual familiarization that gradually lead from
| what's wrong to what's right. Artistic experience always
| consists in qualitative leaps and never in that murky sort of
| process.
|
| Adorno is basically saying that the distortion of the
| experience of listening to music inevitably caused by dressing
| it up for mass broadcast results in a dilution of what is
| 'essential' in that music - roughly speaking, the capacity for
| revelation. The attempt to make the music more 'accessible',
| usually by cloaking it in cliche (what he calls here "the whole
| Salzburg phantasmagoria"), divests it of the potential to be
| revelatory. It actively lessens the chance of experiencing one
| of the "qualitative leaps" of understanding he's looking for in
| music--something beyond words, beyond discourse; an experience
| of the sublime, of something both absolutely beyond us and yet,
| afterwards, constitutive of us. Something that cannot be
| _learned_ (no "pedagogical path"), but which can be _known_.
| It 's obviously a high bar to set (almost insane, certainly
| irrational, to most people today) but it's worth engaging with,
| I think.
|
| I think you're right that Adorno would despise most YouTube
| musicians. After all, there is hardly a better example of the
| fetishisation of technique, equipment, and process (not to
| mention the unquestioning habituation to cliche) than what
| you'll find on the average YouTuber's channel. (I say this as a
| regular watcher of many YouTube guitarists, some of whom I
| really like.) The idea, totally general on such channels, that
| you can follow existing patterns and paths to mastery (where
| the satisfaction comes from memetic reproduction of the already
| known) is obviously antithetical to the view of art and
| revelation outlined above.
|
| Finally, I don't think there's anything conservative about
| Adorno's argument here. He is ultimately arguing _against_
| holding up what already exists (the Western classical
| tradition, in this case) as a fixed symbol of greatness, ready
| to bestow its gifts of historical authority and sophistication
| on anyone intelligent enough to encounter it. Adorno is saying
| the greatness of a work cannot be divorced from the nature of
| both its presentation and the audience 's engagement with it.
| It is a sometimes subtle but I think fundamental difference of
| perspective to the conservative view of 'the canon'.
| drewcoo wrote:
| Adorno was Frankfurt school. He opposed "culture industry." He
| loved Schoenberg's music because it was challenging. He hated pop
| music of any kind because it was the opposite - an easily
| pleasing pablum to sell to and control people.
|
| I don't agree with him but I think his concerns were/are valid.
|
| Going into this piece knowing that probably changes the way it's
| read. In that light, Adorno is pulling his punches and being very
| well-behaved here.
| coldtea wrote:
| For his cultural goals he wasn't wrong.
|
| His aim wasn't to just give more people access to classical music
| with whatever means (a la "worse is better"), but to give more
| people the appreciation of classical music that refined educated
| listeners had. To treat them as capable for that, as opposed to
| needing "dumbing down".
|
| Part of that was maintaining the primacy of music over unrelated
| attached things, like the televised image.
|
| Given how songs could be made hits because of their video in the
| MTV era, this was still prescient for popular too.
| vikramkr wrote:
| Given songs could be made hits because of their videos - that's
| arguably the opposite of prescient, because it turned out that
| the televised image was not actually unrelated but in fact a
| new core integral aspect of a new art form, the music video!
| ds_opseeker wrote:
| which killed the ...
| coldtea wrote:
| > _because it turned out that the televised image was not
| actually unrelated but in fact a new core integral aspect of
| a new art form, the music video!_
|
| Or rather a parasite on the music, which killed the music for
| cool shots, "I'm badass" poses, and girls in bikinis.
| vikramkr wrote:
| that's art too, and a pretty narrow selection of it. Music
| videos are _awesome._ Pretty good short video essay type
| deal that I think captures some of the highlights of what
| makes them tick:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FdMkgxOPlo
|
| I think you'll find that simply pointing to how TV enabled
| a whole bunch of _new_ music videos that are fun and speak
| to a popular demand while ignoring the explosion of other
| music videos that push the boundaries of the art isn 't
| actually that compelling an argument that new forms of art
| are bad. Music went from a luxury to something that
| soundtracks everyday people's everyday lives - there's more
| of _everything_ and that 's _awesome._
| LiquidSky wrote:
| Except in the opening question Adorno also dismisses radio
| music. This is just snobbish idiocy.
|
| Clearly the only REAL way to experience music is in your
| private box at a grand symphony hall dressed in full evening
| wear.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| >clearly
|
| You are being disingenuous and setting up a false dichotomy
| cheema33 wrote:
| > You are being disingenuous and setting up a false
| dichotomy
|
| Or he is taking the argument to an extreme to highlight the
| absurdity of its trajectory.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| It's not its extreme
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Clearly the only REAL way to experience music is in your
| private box at a grand symphony hall dressed in full evening
| wear._
|
| Clearly is closer to the connection with the moment and the
| expression than in canned form.
| rpdillon wrote:
| > This is the fault of the sound engineers, who subsequently
| engage in fundamentally quite unmusical procedures by
| surgically extracting these voices, which is quite in keeping
| with their--if I may say this--unartistic intuitions and is
| also congenial to the highly problematic taste of the public.
|
| I've never been a fan of the word 'problematic' because it says
| so little about what the problem actually is.
|
| Regardless, he seems to have disdain for the tastes of the
| public, which doesn't quite jibe with the idea that he's
| treating the public as capable of appreciating music without it
| being dumbed down.
|
| I see a lot of defense of his arguments in this discussion, and
| I don't have much to add, other than to say I really don't
| understand it at all. I think it's really just a blind spot in
| how I think about art, but asserting that a televised
| performance of an orchestra playing some classical music is
| 'pointless' doesn't make sense to me.
| cafard wrote:
| A quibble:
|
| A 1983 Webster's Collegiate gives the definition of
| problematic as "1: a. difficult to settle or decide b. not
| definite or settled c. open to question or debate 2:
| expressing or supporting a possibility".
|
| (Bold type, proffered synonyms, and examples omitted.)
|
| The sense of "problematic" as in "you've got a problem"
| developed after 1968, perhaps after 1990.
| rpdillon wrote:
| I had no idea, thanks for pointing this out! I'm mostly
| frustrated with the modern usage, usually when used in
| reference to someone or some entity's behavior. Every time
| I hear it I want to understand what exactly the issue is.
|
| So if I go back and reread the quote that I had posted, is
| the critique that the public's tastes are not fixed, and
| change across geography and time? I'm still not sure what
| he was really getting at, I guess.
| vundercind wrote:
| I don't recall encountering the latest usage until the
| mid-2010s.
| solardev wrote:
| I think the common modern usage of that word is kinda an
| euphemism for "yucky because they're not woke enough". I've
| never seen it used outside that context, personally...
| klodolph wrote:
| > I've never been a fan of the word 'problematic' because it
| says so little about what the problem actually is.
|
| I don't think that's the real problem with the word
| "problematic". So many other words have the same
| problem--"bad" doesn't say anything about what the badness
| is, "difficult" doesn't say anything about the difficulty,
| etc. "Green" doesn't say anything about greenness.
|
| I think the problem people have with problematic is that
| you're taking a subjective claim and making it sound like a
| property of the object. If the taste of the public is
| "problematic" then it means that _someone_ has a problem with
| it, but that someone is absent from the sentence.
|
| The word "problematic" is, eh, fine. Writers and speakers
| shouldn't be injecting subjects into sentences just because
| the sentences express opinion. There's not necessarily any
| kind of clear subject to introduce. The author/speaker is
| usually better used as an implicit subject for subjective
| statements.
|
| I have other problems in Adorno's claims here but I have
| somewhat accepted the word "problematic".
| jrm4 wrote:
| Nah, "problematic" as used commonly today is, well,
| problematic:
|
| Kind of like "woke" and some others, perhaps "toxic", it's
| used as a placeholder for a feeling/idea that the speaker
| believes to be commonplace, but is often VERY ill-defined,
| and thus ends up muddying the discussion and/or leaving
| things unsaid that do deserve more consideration.
| klodolph wrote:
| Kind of like the words "good" or "bad", or "smart", or
| "ugly", or a million other subjective, contextual ideas?
|
| Words that are ill-defined and leave things unsaid are
| the norm. If you want clarity, you need sentences,
| paragraphs, and context. Those sentences will be filled
| with words that, individually, and stripped of their
| context, are unclear.
| rpdillon wrote:
| I think of it like the writing advice that tells you not
| to use words like good, bad, and nice, since they are low
| information density. My general feeling is you could
| replace the word problematic with a much more specific
| word in every single context where it's used, and the
| message would be clearer.
| jrm4 wrote:
| No.
|
| To use a metaphor, we're talking about _the weather_ and
| you 're saying technically true but useless things about
| climate.
| ysofunny wrote:
| the way I've dealt with semi-related issues is to regard
| 'engineered music' as it's own artform distinct from live
| music
|
| the archetype I'm trying to follow is painting. when the
| camera was invented photorealistic paintings became usless
| and what followed was impressionism, which focused on what
| the cameras cannot do.
|
| however I do not think music has reacted to reccording
| technology in the same way painting did (pretending for one
| sentence that 'music' and 'painting' are entities with
| agency). I don't think there's an "impressionistic" movement
| within music that arose as a response to reccording
| technology, at least not yet.
| empath75 wrote:
| Would he have been out of place on any audiophile forum
| today?
|
| This is just one of these things where he wants to find some
| deep philosophical basis for his personal preferences.
| coldtea wrote:
| Rather one of the things based on the idea that "personal
| preferences" as in "everything is personal taste, bro, and
| as good as another, if you like it you like it", is a bad
| aesthetic and even moral default - backed by a certain line
| of development of culture and aesthetic ideas for a couple
| of millenia before the mass market era arrived (America,
| once it developed beyond barebones settles was almost
| always embedded in it like fish in the water -with the
| exception of some European leaning academics and such-, so
| ideologically can't even understand it could be any
| different to begin with).
|
| Which is less than some definite objective final
| measurement (as it's not physics, it's culture, and it's
| impossible), but a lot more than "personal preferences".
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Regardless, he seems to have disdain for the tastes of the
| public, which doesn 't quite jibe with the idea that he's
| treating the public as capable of appreciating music without
| it being dumbed down._
|
| Their "tastes" are not set in stone - and according to him
| they're not even consciously their own to begin with, in the
| sense that they arrived at them with knowledge of the
| possible options and/or after cultivating them. Just
| conditioning from the music industry and lack of education.
| Like a teenager who defaults to the current hits everybody
| listens to.
| bee_rider wrote:
| They really didn't know what they were doing back then. Art so
| obtuse you ned to be educated on how to enjoy it. Modern stuff
| is much better, you don't even need so much as an instruction
| manual. We've come quite far really.
|
| I think the problem is that they didn't produce enough culture.
| So, they had to stretch each bit out by pretending the process
| of sitting around and trying to figure out how to enjoy it was
| in and of itself enjoyable.
| coldtea wrote:
| Why, Taylor Swift and Nicky Minaj which you don't need any
| education to enjoy, is so much better than Mahler or even
| Bach.
| unraveller wrote:
| It's a fools errand to put elitist classical music and opera on
| TV to compete with the slop when mass TV dispersion is anti-
| elitism to the core, operating over the work week schedule not
| the broadway season.
|
| Any one who cares about experiencing art as a pastime can see
| that government subsidies of culture performances could be better
| spent anywhere else than TV. Surely the TV station will just game
| it so whatever appears on the screen is slop-adjacent, they never
| wanted a high-culture wing, they gain nothing from a critical
| thinking audience.
| musha68k wrote:
| Unless it's outright public broadcasting itself e.g. check
| fantastic European arte.tv as probably best of class (?)
| example.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| Hooray for public broadcasters. They do it in my country too.
| If you have good sound system connected to the TV it can be
| quite nice, though it's still not nearly the same as being
| there. And the recordings are available to be streamed.
|
| There's also this new world's largest modern concert organ
| that's a good piece of attraction.
| https://musiikkitalo.fi/en/organ/
| ghaff wrote:
| A lot of people (like myself) don't even get
| broadcast/cable TV any longer. But lots of stuff
| streaming/purchased if you want it.
|
| Being there is certainly different (plusses and minuses).
| But, of course, things like world-class opera and ballet
| aren't widely available (and are expensive).
| Gravityloss wrote:
| Public broadcasters offer the same content as live stream
| or on demand. You can watch with a phone if you want to.
| Some summer we watched football world cup with a friend
| while having beers outside.
| ghaff wrote:
| I don't really consider football world cup the same
| thing. There's a fairly limited amount of theater etc.
| available streaming.
| xwolfi wrote:
| But arte is clearly not good because of music. They do
| some,but what we watch it for are their mindblowing and
| regular documentaries they either produce or purchase. As
| well as their debate shows (I can spend a month watching
| their daily debates show C dans l'air).
|
| But there is something I learned eventually: I work deep in
| finance now, on a trading floor in HK, and all their cool
| documentaries about Finance feel to me, now, very populist
| and not very honest: so they probably have an agenda trending
| left wing at least in France. Which is fine, just need to
| know.
|
| I think AI is BS, but if it could voice-translate to English
| most of Arte, maybe that'd be interesting enough.
| seanhunter wrote:
| I don't know about that. The BBC have had great success with
| the Proms festival[1]. Tickets to go in person are cheap (if
| you're promming ie standing that is) although you have to queue
| to get them, and everything is broadcast on TV. The quality of
| the music is extremely high with a mix of new commissions,
| established works etc.
|
| The key thing is that it is a public service broadcaster
| though. I don't think it would be possible otherwise.
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/events/rfbp5v/series
| ghaff wrote:
| The date is probably also relevant.
|
| Watching a symphony on a (maybe) 19" B&W TV as a probably grainy
| NTSC broadcast and listened to through a small tinny speaker...
| well, let's just say we're not talking the Met Live in HD on a
| home theater system. I know the person being interviewed here has
| other points to make. But it's probably also the case that
| classical symphonic and chamber music particularly probably
| translates less well to broadcast/"film" than other forms of art
| which are generally more dependent on the presentation than just
| the music itself.
| gizajob wrote:
| And this man claims to speak for the proletariat...
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| My son saw a Don Hertzfeldt animation on the large screen and was
| struck (again. we had theater'd on it's release.) by how much
| more immersive and piercing it was on a large screen.
|
| This is say that smaller (and less defined) television screens
| diminish on their own, compared to richer alternatives.
|
| Not criticizing small video, just endorsing the more enveloping
| mediums.
| gnatman wrote:
| This was well after two of the most important televised musical
| performances of the 20th century, both on the Ed Sullivan Show-
| Elvis in 1956 and the Beatles in 1964. Of course, Professor
| Adorno probably wouldn't have regarded either of those as
| "music".
| empath75 wrote:
| Adorno is someone who frequently mistook his personal preferences
| for universal truths, but he is a very smart and observant person
| who is worth engaging with seriously.
|
| > On the whole I believe that the very act of performing music on
| television entails a certain displacement that is detrimental to
| musical concentration and the meaningful experience of music.
|
| I think this is largely correct, and I'd go further -- that even
| concert settings can be detrimental to the meaningful experience
| of music. Forget classical or pop music or jazz or whatever other
| style of music Adorno thought everyone should listen to. It's a
| frequent complaint of dance music enthusiasts and just music fans
| in general that crowds focus to much on looking at what the DJ is
| doing or taking pictures with their phone instead of _dancing_
| and living in the moment. I mean everyone is free to take what
| enjoyment they want out of whatever experience they want, but I
| do think that music is primarily meant to be enjoyed through
| listening and (often) dancing, and anything that distracts from
| that makes the experience less about music as music and more
| about something else -- music as a mere soundtrack for spectacle
| or celebrity or whatever rather than something to be enjoyed on
| its own terms.
| lizardking wrote:
| Ironically, MTV came to the same conclusion at some point.
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