Another way to say the search for reality is to say the desire for completion. Clifford Odets
The centenary proceedings in celebration of T. W. Adorno’s birth in 2003 were a lugubrious display internationally, but most of all in Germany. There the event was headed up by a harness of three heavily shod biographies trudging in decade-long synchronization toward the publishing occasion, as if the goal were to make sure that no detail of Adorno’s life went untrampled. Even Adorno’s writing table and chair, in simulacra, were dragged into the Frankfurt ceremonies. Encased in a silicone cube, these mundane furnishings were established as a national treasure to be visited on Adornoplatz in hometown perpetuum. Suhrkamp Publishers and the Goethe Institute, working closely with a restaffed and now corporate-minded Adorno Archiv, distributed so absolute a mass of memento, chronology, and photograph – the known antipodes to Adorno’s philosophy itself – that even under scrutiny it was often hard to decide whether the topic was the writing of the Dialectic of Enlightenment or the framing of the Magna Carta. The jubilee successfully portrayed the life of the man as if in a single stride he stepped from crib to garlanded tomb, where the philosophy itself was put to rest. The biographical preoccupation, undermining the philosophy, finally undermined the biographical as well. Thus, one result of these centenary achievements is that now every next mention of Adorno’s life only helps steal away from the dictum that ‘Life does not live’ any sense that the apprehension ever troubled the person who made the dictum the frontispiece to Minima Moralia.
This bears directly on the intention of this essay to provide a first introduction to Current of Music. For, as is to be explained, Adorno left the manuscripts for this work in fragmentary condition; what is conceptually valuable in them now depends in part on reconstruction. An assumption of this reconstruction has been that, when a work is abandoned in fragments, reference to the life that left them behind can legitimately provide transitions to potentiate tensions of thought that, deprived of their final shaping efforts, would otherwise dissipate. Certainly this assumption might have been more naively pursued prior to the centenary year. The only alternative now – for this introduction in any case – is to look the situation in the face and acknowledge that what is biographical in the transitions established here to provision Current of Music with a degree of tensed coherence has recently been woven into something milled out by the mile, with no end in sight. Perhaps in this recognition, what is now lifeless, with the feel of having never lived, will at least half speak of this situation rather than further compound the recently achieved inertness.
In 1937, T. W. Adorno had been living in England for three years, having fled National Socialism. Although he was formerly a Privatdozent – an independent lecturer – in philosophy at the University of Frankfurt, the Nazis had deprived him of the right to teach, and the hardship of immigration had set him back to the status of a student at work on a dissertation, a critique of Husserlian phenomenology. He was obliged to hope that a DPhil, taken at Oxford, in addition to his PhD, would provide the over qualification that an immigrant would minimally need to secure a position at a British university.1 In October, however, a telegram from Max Horkheimer caused him to revise these plans. Horkheimer had for some time wanted to bring Adorno to New York City, and the telegram proposed the means if Adorno were interested in participating in the Princeton Radio Research Project, a study supported by a Rockefeller Foundation grant under the direction of the sociologist and Austrian émigré Paul Lazarsfeld.2 The next day Adorno wired back his readiness to accept the position, but the decision was hardly made without ambivalence.3 On one hand, Adorno saw that catastrophe was inevitable in Europe; he had no real expectation of securing academic employment in prewar England; and his wife, Gretel, who was ill, found the English climate hard to tolerate, and it was hoped she might recover in the United States. But now that his plans to depart had become reality and, ‘contrary to all expectation’, imminent, Adorno expressed in a letter of 27 November to Walter Benjamin what had all along weighed most against the decision. ‘Uppermost’ – Adorno wrote – were his thoughts on Benjamin himself, and in this one word he lodged his distress as poignantly as possible between two men who after a decade of close involvement still addressed one another formally, as Sie. If Benjamin would realize, Adorno continued – emphasizing this uppermost of their friendship with a circumlocution of the greatest urgency for anyone as utterly familiar as was Benjamin with what Adorno held dearest – that second on his mind was that parting meant ‘the real possibility of never seeing my mother again’, Benjamin would be able to ‘imagine how I feel about’ the decision to leave.4 But, Adorno explained, he could not refuse Horkheimer’s proposal. He had been assured that fully half his time would be devoted to the Institute for Social Research, then affiliated with Columbia University, and collaboration on projects that he and Horkheimer had long envisioned, most of all a study of dialectical materialism. By early January, Adorno had met in Paris with Lazarsfeld, and by late that month had submitted to him a lengthy memorandum outlining his research plans.5 On 26 February 1938, Adorno and his wife arrived on the steamship Champlain in New York City harbour. Adorno would remain in New York City until November 1941, when – without renewed funding for his position at the Princeton Radio Research Project – he would again be compelled to move in order to secure his proximity to Horkheimer, who had decided to go on to Los Angeles, where his own fragile health, and the institute’s finances as well, could be better maintained. Adorno would not return to Germany until 1949, having spent almost one-quarter of his life as a refugee, a portion of that as an American citizen. He did not embrace German citizenship again until 1955.
In his fifteen years as a refugee, T. W. Adorno wrote several major works, including Dialectic of Enlightenment (with Max Horkheimer, 1947), Philosophy of New Music (1949), and Minima Moralia (1951). Their dates of publication belie the years demanded by each of these seminal German texts that no doubt received Adorno’s most decisive conceptual energies. Yet, in addition to these and numerous other projects, Adorno in the same period also produced a substantial body of research written in English. The latter are distinctly secondary works from the perspective of the oeuvre as a whole but are nevertheless, in their own terms, of considerable interest. Among these writings in English are The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas’s Radio Addresses (1943) and The Authoritarian Personality (with Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford, 1950). Current of Music was the working title that Adorno proposed on various occasions for a volume that would have assembled the majority of the research that he completed during his first four years in the United States while affiliated with Lazarsfeld in New York City. The texts conceived under this title – comprising several thousand pages – constitute far and away Adorno’s most extensive work in English.
Yet Adorno did not succeed in his own lifetime in publishing this work whose topic and language were adopted under compulsion in the land to which its author fled. The study itself was rejected by a series of editors in the United States and was ultimately left incomplete among the many materials housed at the Adorno Archiv in Frankfurt. This essay intends to explain what Adorno meant to achieve in the book and why his efforts failed. It should be remarked at the outset, however, that this introduction in no way seeks pathos in defence of a work lost to history, as if deserving in reconstruction the rank of texte maudit or Bürgerschreck, for it is neither. If passages of Current of Music – both published and unpublished – did once antagonize and have the capacity to raise hackles again, it was not only ill will and happenstance that got in its way but just as much and more the work’s own deficiencies. It is in full cognizance of the limits of these writings that Current of Music is now to be imagined into existence. This requires broad recognition and explanation of the complex situation in which this work in its many parts was written. In alliance with its own thinking, however, this reconstruction is certainly not undertaken here with the intention of setting the past back on its feet like a Golem conjured to walk the streets of another millennium, but rather by wanting to spark what is significant in that past when it is known selfconsciously from the perspective of the present.
The current of Current of Music is electricity. In the 1920s and still in the early 1930s, electricity had yet to be used on a vast scale for the reproduction of musical sound. The technology of radio transmission had been developed during World War I in the United States by a government that, in need of reliable means of communication with its European troops, seized by eminent domain the patents and work of private inventors. Only in the following decades was this technology exploited for the literal capacity evident in Adorno’s electrical metaphor – the current that powers radio – to produce music in streams and even floods of sound across any quantity of space simultaneously.6 The desire to receive this current of music produced the early momentum in radio sales: where only ten thousand families owned sets in 1922, 27 million families – out of 32 million in the United States – owned sets by 1939.7
If it is easily imagined that the introduction of radio music would motivate the rapid distribution of the device, it is not as easily guessed that a large proportion of the music heard in the United States on those radios was art music of the European classical tradition. Many stations broadcast live classical music exclusively: in 1921, for instance, the Chicago station KYW broadcast ‘all performances of the Chicago Civic Opera, afternoon and evening, six days a week – and nothing else’.8 WQXR in New York City played classical music 80 per cent of the time and in the other 20 per cent talked primarily about it and the other arts. The more expensive radio sets were themselves advertised as having been built for distinguished music; they were fine ‘instruments’ that the listener faced as they ‘played’ and the listener was expected to be interested in its proper ‘tuning’. No less a figure than Leopold Stokowski gave instruction for bringing the equipment up to pitch: ‘In tuning-in on the wave length desired there is a central point of maximum clarity and truth of reception.’9 The skill of ‘perfect tuning’ was extolled as an optimal capacity, akin to perfect pitch. Radio stations that transmitted serious music portrayed themselves as conservatories: ‘A visit to station WMAQ [in Chicago] is like entering a music conservatory. You enter a reception room … then on into the studio … artistically furnished in brown tones … here and there, a large fern … and a Mason and Hamlin grand piano.’10
This image of early radio devoted in significant proportion to European art music might prompt an enduringly fixed and real resentment in contemporary American readers, as if that was a moment when high still thought it could lord it over low. But in the early and genuinely class-conscious decades of American radio, when questions of the equitable redistribution of wealth and privilege were actually discussed – as they now are not – and an end was sought to much openly acknowledged resentment, the broadcast of European art music was a model of possible democratization. Contrary to what might be guessed at today, the distinction between popular and classical was loosely synonymous with what in those decades was discerned as the distinction between light – or light popular – and serious music. In the manuscripts of Current of Music Adorno himself regularly deals with these two sets of categories as being easily interchangeable in the assumptions of the age. The significance of this is in what the now mostly forgotten pair light and serious music contributed to the synonymity. The distinction it drew indicates that the idea of amusement had not yet subordinated music entirely. Although the exclusivity of music as amusement was ascendant, a contrary seriousness of listening was commonly acknowledged as legitimate and valued. When high and low were invoked, the thinking involved was complex in a way that is now unfamiliar, since in the minds of many what was high was often valued as what ought to become the possession of all.
The evidence for this goes far beyond what can be derived from sets of terms. For the idea of culture itself had not yet suffered the catastrophic implication of World War II; culture was still thought to be a human privilege marked by, but no less distinguishable from, class privilege. When – for instance – Barnett Newman ran for mayor of New York in 1933, his manifesto was titled, ‘On the Need for Polit ical Action by Men of Culture’. If his candidacy stood in minority and beleaguered opposition, he all the same had enough support to write confidently that ‘culture is the foundation of not only our present society, but of all our hopes for all future societies to come.’11 This was characteristic of the expression of democratically minded individuals and institutions of various kinds and – in the ‘red decade’ – especially those many on the wide spectrum of the left who readily encouraged and fought for the broad distribution of art music. In Manhattan, for instance, the City Center for Music and Drama was established by the city government in alliance with trade union organizations to present symphony, ballet, and opera inexpensively to working-class audiences. The center was vigorously capable of supporting its own ballet and opera companies. In its own day, when the accomplishments of the City Center were discussed, its success was generally acknowledged not in terms of bringing high to low but in the fact that unlike the Metropolitan Opera, which was segregated, its opera house was not.12
Radio was acknowledged above all other institutions in this period as having the pre-eminent capacity to universalize performances of a human culture that was previously restricted to the wealthy. Its diffusion was civic policy. In 1937, New York’s mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, appeared on what was then the city’s proudly municipally owned radio station, WNYC – then under the directorship of the former head of the Socialist Worker’s League Morris Novik, whom La Guardia had appointed – to comment as a ‘music lover’ on Beethoven. The mayor provided ‘little stories about all the composers represented on the program and the music being played … He had the appearance of a man tackling an important job with great earnestness.’13 It only makes the same point to note here, with the mention of Morris Novik, that it was his office that two years later would engage Adorno in plans to present a lecture series as a citywide educational introduction to modern music on Sunday afternoons, the station’s most listened-to hours. Although those plans were only partly realized, their existence is representative of a forward-looking orientation to radio and music that could not now be conceived on a major American radio station.
In these first decades of radio, those who had hopes for it expected it to wipe away the stigma of class privilege borne by art music, and this expectation met with success. As one commentator observed, ‘Until the past few years such music was the rather expensive privilege of the inhabitants of a few large cities.’14 This observation was confirmed by statistics assembled in the late 1930s and reported in a 1938 article in Harper’s Monthly Magazine: for though quantitatively all economic classes listened more to light music than to serious music, as a result of radio a majority of Americans, African Amer ican and white, came to like and listen to serious music. Four-fifths of the homes in the nation heard at least one symphonic or operatic broadcast a week.15 Even in rural areas, where radio most dramatically changed life but where interest in classical music was predictably less than in cities, there were stations such as WOI in Ames, Iowa – much studied by the Princeton Radio Research Project – that combined farm news and market reports with its most popular programme, The Music Shop, a daily broadcast of short symphonic pieces, chamber music, and music education.16 These broadcasts were especially directed to ‘the farmer’s wife’, who, as Adorno mentions repeatedly in Current of Music, became a mythically invoked figure in discussions of radio’s democratizing cultural potential. The invention of radio, it was said, would enable her to go about her household chores while attending Carnegie Hall and the Philharmonic gratis alongside the well heeled and mink clad. And in some regions of the country this mythical intention found reality. A characteristic letter from a female listener to WOI reads: ‘The more I hear good music, such as you give us, the more I love it, and the more I hear that kind the more I dislike the other kind.’17 What rings of another age in this woman’s comment is the apparently naive desire for self-improvement to be gained through familiarity with music held to be objectively superior. It is to be emphasized that she figures here as part of a movement. A now discredited idea of culture implicitly provided individuals such as herself with a critical stance toward their own perceptions and directed them with substantial expectation toward the promise of radio. Again, in the voice of Harper’s: ‘Millions are haunted by such feelings of hunger for learning, for acquiring new arts, for self-improvement. And radio today makes an earnest effort to satisfy that hunger.’18
The Harper’s statement vividly insists on the power of radio to nourish an age urgently beset by the need for educational self-improvement. And to rid this hunger, radio institutions of several kinds had been established, including ‘schools of the air’ to which Adorno occasionally refers throughout Current of Music. It was possible, for instance, to obtain a ‘broad though simplified education in the arts and sciences … by sitting in front of your loudspeaker’ at WNYC’s School for Listeners or by following programmes at the University of the Air, broadcast by ‘The Voice of Labor’, the Eugene Debs memorial station WEVD. The latter presented complete classes in history, philosophy, labour, literature, and economics.19
But the single most significant pedagogical effort by radio in those decades, and in fact the most substantial pedagogical undertaking ever in the history of American broadcast media, the NBC Music Appreciation Hour, was a result of the success of radio in making European art music available nationally. It was a programme for the cultivation of musical knowledge and taste, and it is of specific interest here because in Current of Music Adorno devotes a lengthy essay to it and conceived the plan of his own educational broadcast in critical relation to it. For more than a decade, from 1928 to 1942, the programme was led by the conductor of the New York Symphony Philharmonic, Walter Damrosch. At its height it was heard weekly as required curriculum throughout the academic year in more than 70,000 schools nationwide, by more than 7 million students.20 Educational materials coordinated with the nationally broadcast concert season in New York City were printed in the hundreds of thousands and distributed to classrooms in yearly editions; teachers received accompanying pedagogical instructions and test blanks to administer. Reviewing the pedagogical achievements of Damrosch’s programme in the context of the reported demographics of national listening habits, even now it is easy to share spontaneously in the expectations widely sensed by many at the time that the interest in serious music produced by radio had led the masses of Americans to the verge of a cultural coming of age. In the words of Harper’s Monthly Magazine: ‘A sound and deep appreciation among the masses of our people is growing first in music and will draw after it, but more slowly, a love of the best in the other arts… . The American people, in the mass, are at the threshold of a cultural maturity.’21
This passage was built out of the rhetoric of high hopes, certainly, but was founded, too, on developments in technology and an analysis of listenership in a major segment of American society. The reality it carried compellingly in its own moment heightens the acuity of the statistical riposte it receives in its encounter with how things today have in fact turned out: in 2003 there were 14,392 ‘formatted’ radio stations in the United States – 50 per cent of which played the same songs – with 147 classical stations, 34 of them commercial.22 These statistics are not reported here as if they might reveal to anyone in North America or elsewhere what has occurred in American music. The world as a whole is in all things more familiar with the United States than the reverse, but its international presence has been foremost in the music it exports, up until very recently by means of radio as its primary vehicle of distribution. Any number of American songs named here might ineluctably provoke their playing in an inner ear that is worldwide. Since music is the most binding and involuntary form of neuro-cultural memory, every mind busy with this essay is obliged to acknowledge to itself that it is to some degree an artefact of what has transpired musically in the United States. If this seems provokingly self-evident, this is the feeling that the distinguished jazz historian, conductor, and composer Gunther Schuller touches on in his analysis of the situation of music as it had developed in the United States by the 1980s: ‘We have here an essentially victimized American population whose freedom of choice in matters musical is virtually denied them.’23
From Schuller’s perspective and the available statistics, then, the expectations of 1938 expressed in Harper’s Monthly Magazine would seem to have received a broadside from the historical development. But this is not the case, and, on second look, what that 1938 article presents turns out to have been more prescient than not as a harbinger of the situation Schuller portrays. For what carried the high hopes of 1938, the wave that can be felt coming up under its cultural anticipations, is perceptible as the statistical realities cited, themselves becoming statistics as reality. These depression-era statistics, in other words, not only reported a situation but increasingly became functional elements in the commercial manufacture of music; they participated in the elimination of music that owed its quality to having been made on another basis than in response to the needs and opportunities of industrial entertainment. Given the significance of the rise of radio market research for the history of music in the United States, therefore, it is of central importance for understanding the conflicts that would shape Current of Music to note that a preeminent institution for the development of market research in radio in the 1930s and early 1940s was the Princeton Radio Research Project, whose statistics, as it happens, the Harper’s Monthly Magazine article relied on.
Lazarsfeld himself initially provided the offices for the Princeton Radio Research Project in vacant factory space in Newark, New Jersey. The rundown, haphazard location was an implication of the fact that this was a privately held research venture that solicited contracts from public, commercial, and philanthropic sources. A brilliant statistician, single-mindedly pragmatic and by his own statement prepared to be ruthlessly so, Lazarsfeld developed a talent for transforming the practical problems of commerce and public interest into research projects undertaken in conjunction with university services, which he facilitated and supervised. His considerable significance in the history of sociology, beyond a group of skilfully conceived research projects, was for the invention in the late 1930s of an organizational structure that put the new science of sociology at the service of commercial interests. This innovation would complete his transformation from a young Austrian intellectual, passionately devoted as a Marxist activist to the implementation of ‘a psychology of imminent revolution’, to the author of a valuable study of unemployment, to a professor at Columbia University in Manhattan who in later life would be an academic tycoon.24
If the Princeton Radio Research Project was situated at the turning point in Lazarsfeld’s career, it was located at a significant moment as well in the history of the sociology of radio. Prior to its research there were few sources of information not only about the listenership of radio music but about all aspects of radio audition, including attention span, listening preferences and habits, general programme satisfaction and dissatisfaction, and local, regional, and national variables. According to the terms of its grant, under the title ‘The Essential Value of Radio for All Types of Listeners’, the Princeton Radio Research Project established itself as a major undertaking for the collection and analysis of radio audience information. It was to develop the tools for audience measurement along many parameters and demonstrate the usefulness of these measurements for the improvement of radio. By learning more about what audiences wanted and how radio succeeded or failed to provide for these needs, it would help make radio as valuable and useful to its listeners as possible. The philanthropic nature of this project would have been unmistakable in the decades when radio was not only looked to as a source of education and cultural good but lived in the national imagination as the voice of social cohesion itself, as the one ready means of society-wide communication and vigilance. In the iconography of the age, radio’s high, beaming towers radiated a masterful charisma and, especially during the war years, were as much beacons of safety as thought to be key targets for enemy plots. The broadcast industry itself, having won the privatization of the broadcast system and the right to advertise, in a series of much- disputed legislative struggles then still within living memory, was piously careful to emphasize radio’s performance of social services and its contributions to national moral integrity.
This context certainly emphasized the philanthropic claim of a project to research ‘The Essential Value of Radio for All Types of Listeners’. But if this title is held up to the light and examined a second time, it did once refract other potentials, and still does. It might well name an undertaking to assemble information about what listeners most valued in order to provide the data to some third party with heteronomous purposes for this ‘essential value’. Once this is noticed, it is hard to decide what the title was about. It could, of course, have carried both meanings, as seems to be the case, but, if so, this ambiguity does not need to remain cloaked in lasting obscurity. An otherwise rarely acknowledged hermeneutical device, a dinner party, is available in historical documentation to solve the question. This particular supper, an award ceremony scheduled for the night of 15 February 1940, elucidates the definitive kinds of alliances at work at the Princeton Project: Frank Stanton, soon to be the president of Columbia Broadcasting System, wrote to John Marshall, the grant supervisor at the Rockefeller Foundation, to announce with pleasure that on that February evening Paul Lazarsfeld would be honoured by the advertising industry as the individual who had revealed ‘the educational significance of radio programs’.25 But what does this mean? Lazarsfeld might be credited with some contribution to education and radio, but not for discovering the educational value of radio, for which radio had long figured so broadly in the social imagination. On the contrary, Lazarsfeld had been chosen as advertising’s man of the year in the area of research for having brought together people from commerce and academia and thus having succeeded at demonstrating the economic significance of radio’s educational potential for advertisers. The award read: ‘By integrating research efforts of individuals affiliated with both commercial and academic organizations, a significant beginning was made in 1939 to … interpret the social aspects of radio in terms of the economic pertinence to the commercial user of the medium.’26 The dates are coincidental, but it represents an actual convergence of realities that, within days of this announcement, further funding of Adorno’s position at the Princeton Radio Research Project was denied by John Marshall at the Rockefeller Foundation, and Lazarsfeld himself learned that he had been hired as a professor of sociology at Columbia University.
Deference to historical accuracy has required that the end of Adorno’s employment at the Princeton Radio Research Project be indicated prior to a word being said about his part in the project, for in every regard the alliance was over before it started. Initially, however, the collaboration did have certain plausibilities. Lazarsfeld shared with Adorno an interest in the development of the possibility for qualitative research and experimentation in sociological research. This collaborative concern resulted in the broad latitude of investigation granted Adorno when he was appointed the director of the Music Study division that, on the basis of its research, was to provide proposals for the qualitative improvement of the reception of broadcast music. This responsibility was among the foremost in urgency to any success of the entire Princeton project, since music comprised 50 per cent of broadcast time and, as already discussed, the programming of classical music in particular enjoyed indisputable national esteem. And here again, Lazarsfeld must have presumed Adorno’s willing participation in this goal of the project. Given the moment’s broad expectations for what radio broadcast of serious music might contribute to masses at the ‘threshold of cultural maturity’, Lazarsfeld would have assumed that, if anyone, Adorno would have affiliated himself energetically with the project’s stated aims as part of the cultural movement of the democratic left in the United States in seeking ways to ameliorate broadcast reception. As a Kulturphilosoph, as a distinguished music critic, as a composer and a musician, Adorno combined a devotion to serious music with the capacity for the technical musical discernments to address what was then the central problem of the reception of broadcast music: the divergence between the audition of live musical performance and its reproduction on radio.27
But if this approximates Lazarsfeld’s estimation of Adorno’s combined talents for the project, it was a complete misunderstanding. Adorno was not about to cast in his lot with a movement to spread musical culture. He carried no torch for culture, and least of all for musical culture. When he arrived in the United States what was fresh to his mind was the memory of a Bildungsbürgertum – the culture-prizing bourgeoisie – that was right at that moment to be found in the streets of the ‘homeland of culture’ carrying real torches. This capitulation of German culture had not been any kind of surprise to him. On the contrary, German culture had failed to ward off the worst just because, as Adorno once wrote, it had long been the ally of the worst. Adorno had seen disaster coming in the deep perspectives of the opposition to bogus culture of all radical art since Romanticism. The music with which Adorno was fundamentally allied, the idiom of free atonality in which he composed, was the direct heir of that jagged radical tradition in which artists rejected once and for all any claim to being of a kind with their own audiences and, almost as summarily, to attributing to their work any pragmatic emancipatory social function even at the insistence of their own political allies. It is in these terms that the concerts of the Second Viennese School found their own legitimacy confirmed in the outrage, catcalls, and whistlings brought down on them by audiences sworn to higher things. Adorno’s own account of trying to console Alban Berg after a concert premiere that had won direct, spontaneous public acclaim, of walking Berg through the streets of Berlin for much of an evening, may seem a charming tale of eccentricity until it is realized that, given what was on the horizon, Berg was right to be distraught – as he would be to this day. In the absence of a culture worthy of the name, culture for Adorno was what it was for Flaubert, namely, the power to resist it, and as such synonymous with art that is genuinely art.
Thus, in a catastrophic moment, the aims of the Princeton project could not have combined with the impulses of Adorno’s own thought in a more tense, austere view of culture. There is no sense trying to imagine anyone less ready than Adorno to be enthused by cultural boosterism of any kind. In the United States, he perceived no masses prompted by a new familiarity with great music to the verge of cultural maturity and, if he had, he would have found it a specious achievement. The woman in Iowa who wrote to WOI with an enthusiastic tale of self-improvement in a quest for the better things would not have thrilled Adorno; he would have wanted to study the event more closely. For Adorno, music, when it is music, is a power to shatter rationalizing visions of transcendence and the normative order of life that these rationalizations support. Music appreciation, inculcated by radio, to him epitomized all that he opposed as instilling the opposite of a capacity for musical experience. It would present important music as an object of worshipful illusions, rather than as the quintessence of a capacity to make ruins of illusion. Thus, alongside his later essays addressed to Stravinsky and Heidegger, his study of Walter Damrosch’s NBC Music Appreciation Hour (chapter 4 in this volume) is the most sustained, vituperative attack in the whole of his oeuvre and, like those other essays, perhaps hobbled by the intensity of the siege. And just as Adorno could not in any way value the largest effort of musical education in the history of the United States as a value of radio, Lazarsfeld had probably selected the person least likely to be of any plausible use to him in completing a study on improving radio reception. And indeed, in the letter that he would eventually write Adorno to bring his participation in the project to a close, Lazarsfeld would accuse him of having given him what ‘is definitely a black eye for me’.28 Just months into their association, Lazarsfeld already sensed his faux pas and that Adorno was a danger to the project. In December 1938, Lazarsfeld wrote Frank Stanton, to begin to register formally his disassociation from Adorno: ‘I have to decide: whether W. A. [Wiesengrund Adorno] has just a queer way of behaving of which he might be cured or whether he has a basically wrong attitude which might disqualify him in spite of his other abilities.’29
Lazarsfeld’s emphatic normality would have provided exclusively thin ice as grounds for cooperation with Adorno, both personally and intellectually. He could not have made any sense of Adorno’s conception of musical experience, in the post-Romantic tradition, as a potential for disintegrating and shattering the beautiful illusions of normality. Whatever Lazarsfeld had in mind for Adorno to do in the Princeton Radio Research Project had nothing to do with what was most on the mind of the newly appointed director of the Music Study. Whether the steamship Champlain had steered into dock in Tokyo or the Bay of Bengal, ‘uppermost’ for Adorno would have been exactly what it was prior to his departure from England: the pursuit of the conflictually dynamic group of ideas that had taken definitive shape for him in knowing Walter Benjamin. And at that moment of departure acute differences had emerged between them, most of all in Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1935). In this essay Benjamin had forced the self-antagonistic struggle in the concept of culture to its limit. In aggrieved opposition to the art-religion of an elite who held their eyelids shut tight under the consoling magic that art spread over a foundering society, he sought to demolish that glow, to tear art away from its spell-binding semblance and, at the price of art itself, achieve a societal-wide power of critical observation that would once again restore both art and the artist to its people under the red banner of the peuple. Benjamin’s messianically conceived essay was a programme for valuing art in its utmost subjugation to its industrial antagonist, the machinery of mechanical reproduction, as the one hope of an art that would achieve art’s aim in its utter self-renunciation.
Anyone half attentive to history’s pathos for the isomorphic, that paradox in which extremes do not just touch, but embrace and fuse as one, may already have noted that, however antithetical their reasoning, however opposed the asserted purposes, Benjamin’s thesis of the mechanical emancipation of art from art in the service of the masses and Lazarsfeld’s institution committed to the facilitation and measurement of broadcast culture in the service of a waiting nation were identical. Jointly, they presented a programme for the reproduction of art as an ideal. This convergence of views was self-evident to Adorno. To his mind, the United States broadcasting system, which Lazarsfeld was promoting, had effectively set out to put the cognate intentions of Benjamin’s essay to a nationwide test. In this context, Adorno conceived his work as the director of the Music Study division at the Princeton project as a responsibility to comprehend the ways in which the results of this test would criticize and require the transformation of every one of Benjamin’s theses. Adorno would use the results of this criticism to build a case for arguing strenuously and ingeniously against the plans that Lazarsfeld’s project embodied for the promotion of cultural treasures on radio. This double-edged critique, how Adorno would argue at once against Benjamin and Lazarsfeld and where this critique would lead in the development of Adorno’s thinking, is what is fascinating in Current of Music. It defines the terms in which the manuscript to this day continues to draw into itself, into its own thinking, the most contemporary issues of aesthetics, perception and politics.
It is, however, important to realize at this point, as much as it was emphasized at the outset of this introduction, that Adorno was not in any way determined to defeat Benjamin’s work. The alliance in the thinking of the two men was what motivated their conflict, and to the end Adorno’s work remained a devoted critical transformation of Benjamin’s thought in an effort to make good on it. If, all the same, a reader, having understood something of the complexity of this relationship, still needs to see what transpires in Current of Music as a tug of war unto death, there is a degree of truth to perceiving Adorno’s wanting to recover what was prodigious in Benjamin’s insights from its paradoxical entanglement in the social tendencies of which Lazarsfeld was the plenipotentiary.
It is also true that the examination to which Benjamin’s essay was involuntarily subjected by the American radio broadcasting system came at it from a tangent for which it was ill-prepared. Benjamin’s thesis that the mechanical reproduction of art would extract art treasures from the aura of their politically burdensome authority by demolishing their claim to being one-of-a-kind – by annulling the spell they cast from their perpetually sacred distance – had been conceived exclusively in terms of print media and the visual arts, most of all cinema and photography. The Music Study of the Princeton project, however, under Adorno’s directorship, examined the claims of Benjamin’s seminal essay with regard to the reproduction of music. And the results of this study illuminated it in an altogether new way. Adorno had observed in listening to radio music that the humanizing content of the music that he had spent his life composing, reflecting on, and studying had vanished. Radio music, to Adorno’s ears, was no longer that music. But, this was not because, as Benjamin had claimed, reproduction had made art music slough off its auratic cocoon. On the contrary, radio reproduction, Adorno would show, subjects the broadcast remnants of the artwork to a new spell; the remaindered husk becomes a new fetish. Mechanical reproduction does not destroy the primacy of the original, as Benjamin asserted, but rather it changes music into nothing but the search for an original to be possessed.
In terms of the development of his own thinking, this critical metamorphosis of Benjamin’s thesis would allow Adorno to import the model of the reproduction of art from the visual arts, as Benjamin had developed it, into the discussion of music on a compositional level. Previously, Adorno had only considered reproduction in regard to music in terms of the question of techniques of distribution.30 But his argument with Benjamin allowed him to incorporate the question of reproduction into the problematic of musical structure itself. This would provide him with a framework in which the entire modernist debate over the questions of abstraction and representational and non-representational forms could be developed in the analysis of music. Thus Adorno effectively carried out an exchange of aesthetic motifs with Benjamin, almost an exchange of sensorial capacities since, as any review of the topics chosen in his Collected Writings demonstrates, Adorno was least involved in and responsive to the visual arts. By acquiring for music the critical perspectives of the art form of the vanguard of aesthetic revolution, he wanted to introduce into Benjamin’s late aesthetics, which had nothing to say about music, the imagelessness of music as a fundamental critique of a theory of reproduction that, in its messianic espousal of the reproduction of art, had itself failed to grasp the radical content of aesthetic modernism in the visual arts. Thus, although Current of Music, the work in which he would carry out this thinking, would not be published, it did function as a kind of lens through which Adorno’s early thinking was focused and, transformed, projected forward.Looking through this reassembled lens even now, it is possible to discern for the first time in Adorno’s writings the cardinal ideas of the Philosophy of New Music and Aesthetic Theory.
Within months of arriving in the United States, along with finishing his monograph In Search of Wagner, Adorno had written a full-scale theoretical memorandum on radio broadcast music. In letters to colleagues and friends, he announced the completion of the memorandum. To Benjamin he wrote,
My major report on the radio research, in effect a small book, has also been completed in the meantime, and it has also been decided that the results of my work on music and radio should appear as an independent and probably substantial volume with Princeton University Press, and that means prominently too. In this connection I am also thinking of a shorter piece in German on the regression of listening and the fetish character in music.31
From the tone of this letter, Adorno – whose prolificness was reputed – seems to have impressed even himself with the more than 160-page single-spaced, marginless study, finished so soon after his arrival and written in English. The pace of the writing, however, in combination with work on the Wagner study, indicated not only an intensity of labour but also that, at such an early date, this focal involvement would have precluded almost anything beyond the writing itself. The manuscript on radio could hardly have been based on substantial experience of the United States, about which the immigrant had not known much to begin with. It was the result of a set of ideas that had taken shape substantially prior to immigration and long held in preparation to converge in the problem that Lazarsfeld’s institute presented to him. The memorandum that resulted, Music in Radio – drafted in two large sections, with an eponymously titled first part, the second part entitled ‘Radio in Music’ – would become the working manuscript for Current of Music.
As often happened in his work, Adorno began the study by completing a long draft that collected the material for the project. Much could happen to this draft: it could be radically condensed, reorganized, and sometimes expanded again as a final text. In the case of Music in Radio, however, the capacious manuscript was developed in several different directions, then broken up again and reworked in a group of overlapping variants. In the first stage of his plans for Music in Radio, as Adorno indicated to Benjamin in his letter, the text would be the primary source for the essay ‘On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening’,32 which would be written during the summer of 1938. Then, in response to a request from Lazarsfeld to summarize and clarify the long, initial memorandum, Adorno presented its central ideas to his colleagues at the Princeton project in a lecture-essay in January 1939 entitled ‘Music and Radio’.33 This essay once again reoriented and refocused the material of Music in Radio. The reconceived memorandum was then rewritten and much transformed during the following year in two drafts: as Radio Physiognomics34 and as Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory, Section II: The Radio Voice,35 a text for which no other sequentially numbered sections seem to exist. Adorno also prepared a much-transformed and abbreviated version of the latter text, titled ‘The Radio Voice: An Experiment in Theory’, dated 1 September 1941.36
Although the initial draft involved several permutations, Adorno carried through the central thesis of Music in Radio with complete consistency. From the outset, and with increasing distinctness, the text is a physiognomical study that seeks to decipher the general social tendencies in the phenomena of radio broadcast music. The tendency discerned in the phenomena is a mode of production that, Adorno shows, characteristically imitates nature rather than fulfilling its own productive potential. The aim of the study is to demonstrate in detail the depredations that music undergoes when it is subjected to this mode of production: when broadcast artifice endeavours to appear as pristine nature, when sonic copy lays claim to origin, when music on the air acts as the reproduction of an original.
Radio music in its early decades offered itself to such an interpretation in a way that it no longer does, or certainly not so insistently. Contemporary radio music today is almost exclusively the broadcast of recorded sound, and in popular music that sound is itself predominantly electronically sampled sound to start with. It is now the exception that radio music presents itself as the sound of an original, in the sense of the reproduction of live voices and acoustic instruments that are of a qualitatively different nature from the transmission itself. But prior to the early 1940s, the broadcast of recorded music on phonograph discs occurred only on avant-garde radio stations, and even then only by way of exception. Otherwise, all radio music presented performances of live vocal and instrumental music from either the studio or the concert hall. Radio, in other words, most of all staked its claim on the degree of its achieved ability to reproduce live music as natural sound, ostensibly every bit as immediately alive in the home as if the radio mechanism itself was transparent in transmission and played no part at all in the sound. But, as Adorno would meticulously demonstrate, radio sets in the 1930s could achieve this illusion only very imperfectly: they were limited to the reception of AM transmissions that excluded substantial parts of the upper and lower frequency ranges; they could not balance the instrumental sound that they did register; and monaural reproduction further diluted orchestral dynamics. To the attentive listener, this music seemed to have been projected against a broadly warped mirror of background noise from which it infiltrated with the hissing electricals of signal drift and vacuum tube. Adorno ingeniously named this ever-present background surface of sound, against which the performance seemed projected, the ‘hear-stripe’ – a kind of sound that is now hardly to be heard except in the split-second ionization when, for instance, a TV set is switched on.
Adorno’s own expert familiarity with the sound of vocal and acoustic instruments could not have been more exacting or self-conscious, and he, if anyone, could document with exactitude the divergence between live performance and broadcast music. But while Adorno was thorough in his critique of radio reception, his approach was the exact opposite of the finickiness of an audiophile. He had no doubt that the distortion impinged on the performance, and he demonstrated how it fragmented the work and undermined perception of the composition as a whole. Yet Adorno was not concerned to find ways to wipe out these degrees of distortion any more than he would have wanted to take paint brush in hand to set the eyes level in a Picasso portrait. In a sense, he was more the ally of the distortion than of ‘classical music’ transmission. And, in any case, he did not think that any degree of technical improvement would exclude the distortion of broadcast radio music. The distortion was implicit in the fundamental problem, that of the structure of broadcast itself, and it was this structure, not the distortion, that Adorno argued was directly opposed to the form of music. Music, he claimed, in utter disagreement with the aesthetic assumptions of Benjamin’s thesis, has no original. To exist, it must be performed. In the performance of music, origin truly is the goal – the last step, so to speak, not the first.
Radio broadcast, in contrast with a live performance, transforms music into a relation between original and reproduction. The original necessarily becomes a fetish that the reproduction seeks to achieve, but without possible success, for the original that has been posited is an illusory origin whereas the object of the musical performance, what it makes, what is there conceivably to experience, has vanished. Adorno was able to explicate just what could no longer be experienced by showing, in an analysis of a Beethoven symphony, that the form of music is the process in which it consumes its own extension in time. This process, he argued, is what was no longer audible in the broadcast of a Beethoven symphony, and not only because of the distortion and interference that damages the dynamic conflicts of the music but because, ultimately, in radio broadcast, music is spatialized. This spatialization is what is heard in the projection of the performance against the hear-stripe. The music thus obtains an image quality that puts in place of the consumption of its own musical time something akin to watching a movie. In broadcast reproduction, then, the music becomes an image, a picture of the music that is antithetical to the inherent imagelessness of its temporal dynamic. While the broadcast immanently lays claim to the sound of nature in the sense of providing what listeners presumed to be occurring behind the microphone, music necessarily surrendered its power over time and was no longer a Beethoven symphony. The depotentiated and fragmented object thus came to exist as an object of exchange, a standardized commodity that served as a reservoir of secondary, infantile satisfactions and magical authority, the very qualities that Adorno would show in other sections of Current of Music to be those of a conformist popular music. Adorno cast this argument with Benjamin as a fundamental criticism of the Princeton Radio Research Project’s assumptions of the cultural and educative value of broadcast music. If the music could not be experienced, in what sense could it be said that ‘cultural treasures’ had been brought to the masses? If the music in every sense failed to arrive in anyone’s home in such a way that it could be heard for what it is, how could this music fulfil the educative and humanizing aim that was said to be its content?
Adorno did not see any solution to this deficiency in radio reproduction. He assumed that there would be improvements to transmission, such as were soon enough brought about by FM and, later, stereo, but he held that ameliorations in one area would be paid for in other dimensions of sound. Contemporary experience confirms this: the superseding of the phonograph record by the compact disc intensified the clarity of sound but conspicuously simplified it; the compact disc circumvented the crackling background screen against which the phonograph performance was projected, but replaced it with a background screen that differs only by its total silence, without dissolving the image quality of the sound itself. This can be confirmed by walking around an acoustic piano in performance and comparing that sound with what comes out of any number of speakers.
But whether today the problem of musical reproduction has or has not been resolved, Adorno thought that the structure of the problem was insuperable. Since this knot could not be untied, it must be severed. The performance of music on radio would no longer struggle against the unnatural quality of faulty reproduction or the image quality of the hear-stripe if it surrendered the claim to being an imitation of nature in the first place. ‘Radio could succeed at this if, instead of broadcasting the reproduction of music, it played on the radio itself: The idea is that we should no longer broadcast over the radio but play on the radio in the same sense that one plays on a violin.’37 This would transform every dimension of radio: Freed from a delusive goal, technique would no longer be preoccupied with ameliorating transmission and consolidating the illusion that radio music is the broadcast of the pristine nature of an original performance; radio studios would not aspire to the conjuration of phantasmagorical conservatories filled with potted ferns; radio design would not have reason to imitate chassis in the likeness of acoustic instruments. Radio would become a musical instrument. Its technique would engage the full productive range of the instrument’s electrical phenomena. Distortion would not vie with normality of sound and the hear-stripe itself would become a compositional source. Instead of struggling to present itself as a transparent device of exchange and functioning to transform art into neutralized cultural goods, radio would explode the commodity relation and its shallow spell and present the human object of experience itself. Emancipated from the reproduction of an illusion of nature, radio music would potentially achieve the sound of a veridical second nature. Adorno cited the Theremin as an instance of a productive power that, when utterly emancipated from imitation, becomes the expression of a new nature: ‘A feature which should be remarked … is that the more the Theremin instrument emancipates itself from any instrumental models, the more it approaches the sound of the singing voice – certainly without trying to come to any vox humana effect.’38
The thesis of playing on radio rather than broadcasting over it is intriguing for itself, for its many implications, and not least of all because it would not turn out even if all nations banded together to work on the project. And then too, if it did somehow work, it would have the nightmarish quality of kitchen appliances swaying and singing to themselves. It is important to know, however, that, while Adorno pursued the logic of this speculation, he had no illusions such music existed and was plainly sceptical that such radio music could exist. Neither was he averse to the contradiction in his argument. On the contrary, he freely stated the need for such radio music even while debunking its possibility. Thus, in the lecture ‘Music and Radio’ of January 1939, after condensing the central ideas of Music in Radio, and restating the thesis that radio must emancipate itself from the reproduction of sound, he went on to say that even the relentless optimist could not be optimistic about the attempts that had so far been made to compose specifically for radio; the whole idea, in fact, of producing music to suit the construction of a tool was, in his words, ‘funny and paradoxical’: ‘We confess our utmost skepticism as far as the creation of so-called positive contents out of the tool is concerned.’39
But why would Adorno be both the proponent and so severe a sceptic of the thesis? If he did not think that radio could be the instrument of its own sound, if he saw a need to distinguish tool from spiritualized musical instrument – as, for instance, John Cage would not – why did he assert the thesis in Music in Radio, restate it in his lecture even while confuting it, and return to assert the idea of ‘playing on radio’ in the last complete draft that that text would take, Radio Physiognomics? The contradiction is not an oversight. It is a summary formulation of what Adorno undertook to demonstrate in the Princeton Radio Research Project but stated as radio’s antinomy. It expresses what radio must be and cannot be: the self-manifestation of its own content. No doubt the thesis, immediately coupled with its denial, bewildered his colleagues. The pragmatic Lazarsfeld would have thought Adorno ridiculous to present a plan and in the same breath dismiss its goal.
Adorno could have helped his colleagues make sense of his thesis had he provided the reasoning of the conundrum. But throughout his work at the Princeton project he hesitated genuinely to explain himself. This hesitation was not emotional but structural. As he wrote to Ernst Krenek right at the beginning of the project,
In the last few days I finished my large memorandum for the Radio Project (a small book), in which the concept of new music – in our sense – plays a substantial role, without of course my having been able in the framework of this memorandum to define exactly what I mean by that.40
Thus, the concept of new music itself, atonal music, defined the perspective of the memorandum in general and the antinomy of radio in particular. This concept was not included in the memorandum for the Princeton project because it took shape in opposition to radio music so completely that it would have effectively expressed Adorno’s actual non-participation in the goals of that project. It is not only – as Adorno wrote years later – that the work for the Princeton project ‘contained the core of the Philosophy of New Music that was completed only in 1948’.41 The Princeton project came to contain this core of the work in the philosophy of music that marks the boundary of Adorno’s mature aesthetics through the working out of an antagonism. The two developed in inverse relation to each other. Presented here in their actual antagonistic juxtaposition, the limit of the former is seen to carve out the boundary that defined what the latter sought to fulfil: the limit of radio music – its inability to be the self-manifestation of its own content – is in the latter work presented as the achievement of new music. As Adorno wrote in Philosophy of New Music, what made new music new, its revolution, was that it no longer reproduced human emotion but became the immediate deposition of its own impulse in corporeal shocks and traumas:
The genuinely revolutionary element in his [Schoenberg’s] music is the transformation of the function of expression. Passions are no longer faked; on the contrary, undisguised, corporeal impulses of the unconscious, shocks and traumas are registered in the medium of music.42
An enormous body of thought is condensed here. Adorno’s claim is that the atonal revolution in new music was fundamentally the critique of reproduction in the sense of the rejection of art as the imitation of subjectivity. And in the Philosophy of New Music, this formulation of the radical rejection of the replicative function in music derives from a comprehension of the history of the revolution of abstraction that had transpired in the visual arts. Just as painting was driven to non-representational forms under the pressure of photography, music is said to have become new music out of the need to defend itself against the commercial intrusion under the pressure of mechanically reproduced music:
That aversion of modern painting to figurative representation, which in art marks the same breach as does atonality in music, was an act of defense against mechanized art merchandise, primarily photography. In its origins, radical music reacted no differently to the commercial debasement of the traditional idiom. It was the antithesis to the spreading of the culture industry into its own domain.43
Had Adorno found place in this statement of the origin of new music in opposition to the ‘commercial debasement of the traditional idiom’ to have added that new music would need to continue to assert this resistance against radio broadcast technology, the camera of musical photography, he would have documented the route by which he developed his thinking in the first place. Philosophy of New Music would throughout present the ideas that first emerged in Adorno’s study of radio. In ‘Stravinsky and the Restoration’, for instance, the second part of Philosophy of New Music – a critique of neo- classicism – Stravinsky is shown to compose ‘music about music’, a duplicative and spatialized music that seeks authenticity by aspiring to the sound of the original, the first, the primordial, essentially the sound of ‘Stravinsky the great composer’ of masterpieces – rather than of music as the unfolding object of emphatic experience.
Current of Music is a sociological critique of radio broadcast music in terms of the question of the possibility of emphatic musical experience, and by that measure it is most of all an aesthetics. This sets it apart from almost the whole of media, communication and popular culture studies that are what universities primarily have to contribute to a situation, well characterized by Gunther Schuller, that hardly lets anyone, least of all students, catch a breath away from what is most of all for sale. Because Current of Music is keyed to aesthetic experience, it has something other to do than rake the loamy soils of industrial entertainment for traces of an oppositional culture that are hardly to be found there other than as reflections dramatized in a looking glass. As an aesthetics, Current of Music provides indications for shaking loose the kind of interest in its topics and the material it covers that otherwise broadly subordinates people to them. In the texts assembled here, Adorno listened in critical alertness for what was not to be found in radio music and industrial entertainment. This listening scrutiny was motivated on behalf of music in which he thought there was a great deal to be found. The most provocative aspect of his writings on music is his conceptualization of this distinction, one that he held ultimately concerns the question of art as knowledge.
It is worth momentarily putting the question of this distinction in the larger context of Adorno’s philosophy as a whole in order, after that, to be able to approach it again more closely. In this larger context the questions of reproduction, identity, mechanism, and spatialization as they arise in Current of Music turn out not to be independent critical motifs but rather to cohere in a single problematic. One way of stating the dialectic of enlightenment, approaching it specifically from the perspective of mechanism rather than, as Adorno would, in terms of the structure of the commodity, is to say that it poses the question of how it is possible to restore to nature a qualitative dimension that it surrendered in its spatialization. It was the development of mechanism in the domination of nature that translated nature into space by excluding as real any but quantitative determinations, faced by a dimensionless thinking self.44 It is simplistic, but nevertheless revealing, especially with regard to what was at stake in Adorno’s critique of Benjamin’s mechanism of messianic woes, to see that Adorno’s philosophy has nothing to do but seek to translate space back into nature. And it can only do this by somehow recovering the temporal dimension that mechanism – most of all, sociologically, the mechanism of the market – excludes by formulating identity between origin as the cause and all subsequent phenomena as reproductions of that origin. The assertion of this origin is the false authenticity that Adorno was concerned to criticize in radio music under Damrosch’s baton as much as in Stravinsky’s primordiality. Aesthetics becomes key in Adorno’s thinking, as throughout twentieth-century philosophy, because aesthetic experience condenses in itself the temporal dimension that is otherwise held out of mind in the mechanical mastery of space. Adorno’s approach is conceived as physiognomical precisely in opposition to mechanism, and this physiognomy is ultimately directed to art as the unconscious transcription of historical suffering. Art thus potentially mediates the translation of mechanical space into nature. This historical content constitutes the potential difference between having and not having the qualitative object of experience.
With this larger context in mind, the aesthetic question, as the qualitative differential itself, is seen to depend ultimately on the possibility of making qualitative distinctions between artworks: how they do or do not consume the time that is or is not stored up in them. This establishes, as Adorno understood it, the affinity between art and knowledge: it is what artworks know about us – critically know about us – that is more than we otherwise know ourselves. Other than in art we have no other way of experiencing ourselves on this level. If this seems intellectualistic, it is also the only alternative to intellectualism. It is just what anyone means in saying, ‘I love that song’, which insists on a sense of having been understood better than could have been imagined and predicates an object that can be entered as nothing else can be. Adorno held, however, that there is a difference between music in which one feels absorbed into its own interior likeness, and new music, music such as Schoenberg’s later compositions, in which this becomes an experience of being recognized by what comports itself explicitly as an object of knowledge and sloughs off any resemblance to the self. The critical question, then, that makes it possible to research aesthetic quality without any kind of dogma or conceit is research into the extent to which that understanding – music’s own – is feigned or real. This is the qualitative distinction that can be made in music between one work and another, though hardly in the sense of sitting down to single out the good ones from the bad ones; there is no such list anywhere in the whole of Adorno’s writings – and neither does he ever try to divide the true from the false as a difference between ‘popular music’ and ‘classical music’, a rigid categorization that he summarily challenges throughout the whole of his writings and that can only be found there, so to speak, in the eye of the beholder.45 But the discernment of the qualitative distinction in music is what would continue to define the direction of Adorno’s thinking as he left Current of Music behind for Philosophy of New Music. In this sense Current of Music is itself, perhaps for readers today, a prolegomenon to being interested in a great deal other than this volume’s own stated topics.
After losing his job with the Princeton Radio Research Project, Adorno wrote proportionately little specifically about industrial musical entertainment. It did not concern him compared to works that significantly engage the question of composition. But Adorno had other reasons as well for leaving Current of Music behind. He realized that the work was faulty in various regards. Not only had transformations in radio reception made several of its theses obsolete, not only was its theory of musical spatialization questionably conceived, but it lacked any adequate theory of listening. Adorno wrote,
The reason for this shortcoming may well have been that I did not succeed in making the transition to listener research. That transition would be absolutely necessary, above all else in order to differentiate and correct the theorems … It would be simply naive to presume an equivalence between the societal implications of the stimuli and the ‘responses,’ though, no less naive to regard the two as independent of each other.46
This is certainly a fundamental and overarching criticism. It is apparent, for instance, that, however intriguing Adorno’s claim that a Beethoven symphony could not be adequately heard on the radio, many did hear it and with some kind of comprehension. While limitations of radio reproduction were commonly acknowledged, and Adorno was after all brought onto the staff of the Princeton project to help find ways to improve reception, still a considerable number of people heard more in radio music than Adorno heard, even if, in important regards, they also heard considerably less than a composer whose auditory acuity would have been able to distinguish separately and recall twelve notes sounded simultaneously. And while there is no doubt that Adorno’s study of the degradation of acoustic musical experience through its electronic reproduction has much to teach and urgently deserves further study, and while meaningful listening cannot be presumed, still it cannot be claimed that those who were awestruck by symphonic music on the radio were all naive or duped with cultural goods and electrical fetish. One does not, for instance, have to go far in the memoirs of the age to come across the likes of musically sophisticated listeners, such as Clifford Odets, who rushed home on Saturday afternoon, 9 March 1940, to hear a broadcast of Figaro and later that afternoon was glad to be able to listen to the NBC Symphony – on just the kind of radio that Adorno held to be fundamentally deficient.47 Of the millions of others who were also listening to those Sunday broadcasts, many were probably edified by the heroic if crackly sound of ‘cultural treasure’, but they would not have kept listening if that was all they heard.
Adorno’s failure to understand the place of the listener in his work was, in part, correctly identified by Lazarsfeld and others in the objections they raised to his work: he claimed to know more than he did about technical aspects of radio acoustics and the structure of audition.48 Adorno, for instance, could have consulted the distinguished Sir James Jeans’s Science and Music (1937), which noted the technically common observation – partially familiar to anyone who has wondered at how air conditioners sing in their several voices – that even rudimentary radio speakers effectively transmit sound beyond their own frequency range because the ear itself produces the missing tones. Jeans wrote,
Many are designed deliberately to cut out all frequencies below about 250, the frequency of about middle C, and so transmit no bass or tenor tones at all. Yet we hear the double bass strings, the basses of the brass, and male voices with absolute clearness. The explanation is, of course, that all these sources of sound are rich in harmonics. Out of these our ears create the missing fundamental tones and lower harmonics as difference tones, and the combination of these with the higher harmonics, which come through unhindered, restores for us the tone played by the orchestra.49
Lazarsfeld would not be the last to criticize Adorno for asserting that he knew more than he did on a number of topics. However, the failures of Current of Music have a further source, probably not unrelated, but one that is reciprocal with every strength of Current of Music as an aesthetics of radio whose immanent measure was conceived as the most advanced music of the age. When held to the measure of music that longed for an ‘illusionless self-declaration’, radio became for Adorno the object of a radically modernist listening. The quality of this listening is illuminated by its comparison with Kandinsky’s decisive experience of seeing one of Monet’s haystacks turned upside down and, being unable to recognize the motif, for the first time perceiving the potential for fully non-objective painting; it is a kind of listening matched by the extraordinary acuity and locked focus of Giacometti’s eye when as a youth he sketched several pears set on a table across the room, and appalled his academically trained father with a drawing of three miniature pears – as miniature as are all things when deprived of the illusion of perspectival compensation. This radical aesthetic comportment, in its hostility to any illusion of meaning, seeks an object that is as illusionless as the thing-in-itself because it will tolerate nothing less than the thing-in-itself; it is a cultivated and dissatisfied stance that was once bewildering to everyday perceptions.
It was as an object of this kind of attention that the Beethoven symphony vanished from the audible in Adorno’s study of radio sound. Adorno approached the study of the radio listener as an immediate subsidiary of the thesis of the primacy of the object: ‘We are dwelling on the phenomenon [of radio sound] because it is actually the phenomenon which determines the reaction of the listeners, and it is our ultimate aim to study the listener’, he writes in Current of Music. While this logic can be followed, it is also a non sequitur. It is a statement of an approach that would circumvent the listener. An unexamined claim to an immediate primacy of the object functions to dismiss any real interest in the listener and, in its literalism, verges on a kind of behaviourism of the mind. Its own will to abstraction misconceives the primacy of the object by narrowing it to the factual radio phenomena, much of which is in any case fortunately indistinguishable to untrained ears and not necessarily significant compared with the importance, for instance, of what was actually in the experience of those ears as experience. Auditory experience itself shapes sound and compensates as much for its limitations in reproduction in radio as it does, for instance, in the objectively impoverished sound of a cell-phone voice. And it is just this experience of actual listeners that is missing, virtually on principle, from Current of Music. There is no mention, for instance, of what institutions of the day, such as the previously cited City Center for Music and Drama, provided to the listening experience of large segments of the radio audience in New York City. Neither is there any consideration of the kind of question that a historian would think to ask, for instance, of the proportion of American radio listeners for whom the listening tradition of European music was a familiar presupposition of radio perception since they were themselves of that origin. Instead of this audience research, and on the basis of little familiarity with the country to start with, Adorno effectively isolated himself with the radio, as if every aesthetic, psychological, and sociological dimension could be learned from its immediate sound.
A year before his death, thinking back on his radio studies in a lecture, Adorno concluded that the absence of any adequate theory of the listener struck fault lines that irremediably undermined his research. For this reason, he said: ‘I did not succeed in presenting a systematically executed sociology and social psychology of music on radio.’50 Adorno felt obliged to revert from German to English to capture his sense of regret that, instead of a completed theoretical statement, the best he could make of it was ‘a salvaging action’. From the substantial work he had accomplished, only individual sections could be rescued. In this effort, during his years in the United States, he succeeded at publishing three essays: ‘On Popular Music’ (in Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, 1941), ‘The Radio Symphony: An Experiment in Theory’ (in Radio Research, 1941), and ‘A Social Critique of Radio Music’ (in Kenyon Review, spring, 1945).
But while Adorno was critical of his work, there is no doubt that he valued it. From his first year in New York City he sought publishers for it through the Princeton project. Later, living in Los Angeles, he was gratified that his radio essays had begun to make a reputation for themselves, though it also pained him that it had taken almost ten years for even limited interest in them to develop.51 Right up to the months before his repatriation he sought contact with an American editor in renewed efforts to see the volume in print as a whole.52 On his return to Germany this philosopher – whose primary trait may well have been his faithfulness to whatever his life, intellectual or otherwise, had once touched on – did not forget about his radio studies. He succeeded in incorporating sections from the ‘Analytical Study of the NBC Music Appreciation Hour’ into ‘Die gewuerdigte Musik’53 [Appreciated Music], and parts of the ‘The Radio Symphony’ were adapted in the essay ‘Über die musicalische Verwendung des Radios’54 [On the Musical Utilization of Radio]. These essays became the first and last chapters of Der getreue Korrepetitur [The Faithful Repetiteur]. And the essay ‘On Popular Music’ was edited into Adorno’s Introduction to the Sociology of Music.55
Adorno did not have occasion to reconceptualize his New York City writings as a whole or to collect them, but there is every reason to suppose that students of these texts will find much to pursue in them. The more one becomes familiar with these writings, the more the conviction grows that a great deal is at stake in them that will find considerable contemporary attention both for their many achievements and for what can be learned from their stark limitations. And it has turned out to be possible to return to the ponderous files of Adorno’s research for the Princeton project and reconstruct something along the lines that the manuscript of Current of Music might have taken. This work is a second salvage. As a reconstruction, it is guided less by the intention of returning the pieces to where they might once have belonged – as an act of historical safekeeping, as if history were safekeeping for anything – than by the aim of collecting what Adorno himself prepared for publication and supplementing this body of work with writings and drafts that were abandoned in the convergence of many pressures.
The starting point for this reconstruction has been several letters in which Adorno described to colleagues in various detail his plans for the volume.56 All three letters were written after Adorno’s official relation with the Princeton project had broken off and he had turned to full-time though inadequately remunerated work with the International Institute for Social Research. Though some possibility for further funding through the Princeton project remained, and while Lazarsfeld felt a continued responsibility for Adorno’s welfare and financial support, Adorno no longer had expectations for the publication of a book under the auspices of the Princeton project and had begun to pursue publication of his work on his own. The most important of these three letters, the one that caused Rolf Tiedemann, the general editor of Adorno’s collected writings, to discover the existence of the project in the first place, is that of 17 May 1940 to Philip Vaudrin, an editor at Oxford University Press:
Dear Mr. Vaudrin:
In addition to the three sections of my book, Current of Music, which I have already sent you, I am listing below a provisional table of contents:
Adorno mentions here three sections of this work in progress that Vaudrin already had in hand, and these are identifiable. The first, described as ‘Introduction’, was a draft essay, ‘On a Social Critique of Radio Music’.57 This text was initially presented as a lecture on 10 October 1939 to an assembly of the Princeton project along with invited guests. Though the lecture’s thesis of the commodification of music on radio found some support in this audience, it was met largely with bewildered outrage and contributed early on and decisively to undermining Adorno’s hopes of continued funding from the Rockefeller Foundation.58 The second section of the proposed volume in Vaudrin’s hands would have been ‘The Radio Voice’, a text that has already been mentioned as the June 1939 draft, more fully titled, of Section II of Current of Music and perhaps had that title in conjunction with Vaudrin’s reading. The third text was the ‘Analytical Study of NBC’s Music Appreciation Hour’, the Damrosch study, which was complete by 19 December 1939.59
Vaudrin reviewed these materials and rejected the proposal. Though the correspondence has not survived, Adorno did mention in a letter to Hans Eisler that Vaudrin adjudged the book excessively ‘erudite’ for what narrow interest the topic might attract.60 That hardly begins to say it. What would even a sophisticated American editor have made of Adorno’s allergic critique of the lowbrow Damrosch programme, for instance, in a country where, without it, schoolchildren would otherwise never have heard the words string quartet – a country where knowing such words and their traditions might be something good, but hardly a highest good, the one perspective from which Adorno’s impassioned criticism is credible? The United States is, after all, a country that in its everyday imaginings knows its origins in Bible and Constitution, not in a poet, Homer; this nation would have its precious tunes, but never a body of music of an overwhelming dignity; neither would there exist in the United States – perhaps ever – a broadly sustained and deeply reasoned oppositional culture of any kind, least of all of the sort that Adorno himself represented, itself inextricable from the experience of the most advanced, radical art.
Glancing through the proposal, Vaudrin would have had so many reasons to reject it that there is no need to struggle at guessing what finally decided him. Adorno’s written English during his first years in America, though it could be more than brilliant by turns, generally ranged from adequate to capable. Even with the help of devoted assistants such as George Simpson,61 the early texts could still fail to slough germanism, anacolutha and solecism.62 The compromised style would have undermined the credibility of the uncompromisingly critical contents and impeded as well any editor’s effort to comprehend the coherence of the proposed volume. For the outline and sample chapters did not fit together in any convincing fashion. The designated ‘introduction’ did not sufficiently indicate the structure of the book, nor did it unify the other essays that had themselves been written for diverse purposes in the course of Adorno’s labours with Lazarsfeld. Though Vaudrin was probably well disposed toward Adorno, he would have needed to share Adorno’s own imagination to have guessed at how the writings could have been revised into a coherent whole. If Adorno was aware of this weakness in his proposal and thought he could rely on a contract to use a later opportunity to unify the book, that contract was not forthcoming. And Adorno, as we already know, was thus finally compelled to proceed in publishing the material piecemeal over the next few years as best he could.
Paradoxically, now, in the light of the massively accomplished remainder of his work, any eye generally familiar with Adorno’s writings can review the 1940 table of contents for Current of Music without feeling disturbingly at a loss as to how these contents might be related. The continuity of his work is so established that all the thousands of pages pertaining to Current of Music could be assembled here between heavy bindings, indexically, and still interested readers would finally sort them out. Much speaks for an edition of this kind. It would, however, be destructive to the whole of Adorno’s work if what was left behind as drafts and notes, written in a faulty English and abandoned decisively along the way as inadequate, was summarily restored to his published writings, to be quoted up alongside what was fully completed at the highest level. A philosophy keyed to the idea of a second nature, a critique of the primacy of first things, should not be undermined by editors enthused with the licence of returning all things to where they once came from. But helping something along to what it once wanted to be, to set it in relation to what, as such, it might once have become, seems legitimate. Had Current of Music been completed, it would have stood as the volume Adorno composed in uncertain English marking his years in exile from Germany, and the years of the Holocaust itself.
The solution to the implicitly divergent problems of these writings – the need to give the volume a perduring shape but without that shape being so determinate as to lay claim to being more than a collection of documents – has been to rebuild Current of Music using the 1940 outline addressed to Vaudrin as the infrastructure for presenting, rather than for wanting integrally to restructure, those materials that Adorno himself published in his own lifetime, as well as those affiliated posthumous drafts that close study has shown to be potentially fruitful for further study. This has provided Current of Music with a principle of selection for what is major in these manuscripts and at the same time allows the volume to contain much of what does not exactly fit but all the same deserves to fit somewhere – sometimes in substitution for sections that were planned for the Vaudrin table of contents but never written, sometimes in the large, subsequent division marked ‘Other Materials’.
An edition of this kind, incidentally, is not unprecedented. The ancient Greeks provided for the priestly restitution of a sacrificial animal by reconstructing it in miniature out of the remaining skin and bones of the offering.63 This reconstruction of Adorno’s Current of Music is a negation of every aspect of that ancient act. It is no ritual: it is soberly aware that here is only skin and bone, and it knows perfectly well that nothing has really been put back together again and that, historically, most of all, we are not capable of restitution. This book, in other words, for what it really does contain, its own historical experience which its pages are in no way capable of expressing on their own, is a legitimate reconstruction exclusively to the extent that a reader putting it together is just as much obliged, at every point, to realize that it is being taken in pieces. This volume could only be what it once wanted to be, in terms of the whole of Adorno’s thinking, as a critique of history itself as sacrifice.
With these editorial perspectives in mind, and reading from the 1940 letter to Vaudrin, the first text is: ‘Introduction (paper on the elements of a social critique of radio music)’. This essay, as mentioned, was initially presented as a lecture, ‘On a Social Critique of Radio Music’, and was later published in 1945 as ‘A Social Critique of Radio Music’, Vaudrin having had in hand the former. The reader is aware that this text was an inadequate introduction to the book to start with; but the later version, in the Kenyon Review, rightly edited out the remnants of this broader function so that it is even less useful for this purpose. Since it would be absurd and destructive of a finished text somehow to unravel it into an earlier draft to make it serve slightly better in an unwritten book, ‘A Social Critique of Radio Music’ has been displaced as the introductory essay to this volume and is now the second entry. The excised material of the initial draft, however, what Adorno edited out of the text in preparation for the Kenyon Review article, is provided in asterisked footnotes.
Current of Music now begins, instead, with ‘Radio Physiognomics’. This text is by far the most interesting and best written of the several main drafts drawn from Music in Radio, which, as mentioned earlier, was the source from which all the subsequent studies written for the Princeton project derived.64 As a result ‘Radio Physiognomics’ provides an overview of the radio theory as a whole and, if read first, will completely orient the reader to much of the rest of what follows in the volume. This organization may seem to exclude The Radio Voice, the second entry in the Vaudrin outline, but this is not the case. Adorno transformed the entire centre of that text into ‘The Radio Symphony: An Experiment in Theory’, and published it in 1941. That published text is presented here in full as the third section. This results in some unfortunate overlap with the contents of ‘Radio Physiognomics’. Tolerance of this repetition, however, was preferable to impinging on the integrity of the two texts, which are well completed each in their own terms.
The reconstruction of the next five sections of Current of Music posed few problems. The ‘Analytical Study of the NBC Music Appreciation Hour’, with which the reader is already familiar, is followed by ‘What a Music Appreciation Hour Should Be’, a text dated 13 March 1940. It is a fervently steadfast proposal for an extended sequence of radio programmes designed to be anything but a course in music appreciation. The essay was written as a memorandum addressed to Morris Novik, the previously mentioned director of WNYC,65 and presents a general statement of approach and procedures for the course along with an outline description of twelve broadcasts, to which Adorno intended to add two more, the entire sequence to be followed up by another series of radio classes.66 The sketches for the two additional classes do not seem to have been written and none at all were written for the second series.67 The programme was expected to address a Sunday afternoon audience estimated at 100,000 listeners, mostly between the ages of sixteen and forty, all of them serious concert-goers and radio listeners, 25 per cent of them music students, and largely lower middle and middle class; the younger group of listeners was said to have an ‘average musical awareness’ somewhere on the level of Schubert’s music.68
Novik accepted the proposal, in some fashion, but the course itself did not go beyond its first or perhaps second instalment. This must have been a considerable disappointment for Adorno, who had hoped that the radio programme would compensate for the income lost from the Princeton Radio Research Project. But although these plans for the memorandum were hardly fulfilled to the letter, Adorno was involved at WNYC on numerous occasions, both before and after the brief experiment with his course series.69 Along with transcripts of these programmes, his posthumous papers include his initial WNYC broadcast, given on 22 February 1940, as well as transcripts from a short series of concert introductions that was decided upon after the plans for the large music education programme were abandoned.70 Adorno wrote all of these programmes first in German and then – for most of the texts – did rough translations that George Simpson helped revise. For the purposes of this reconstruction of Current of Music, it was sometimes difficult to choose between these versions, since the German version was sometimes more complete and more interesting than the reduced English draft, which all the same had the importance of presenting the actual broadcast event. In the instance of Adorno’s first broadcast in his educational series, the Gordian knot was solved by embracing it. Both versions have been included, with the strange result, however, that in this edition there is an ‘α English version’ and a ‘β German version’, where it will be noted that this ‘German version’ – an epithet worthy of substantial reflection on the relation of languages and the nature of translation – is now in English.
As a group, these transcripts provide a series of situations in which it is possible to observe what Adorno thought music education on radio could and ought to be. There is a great deal waiting to be said about Adorno as educator, of music and otherwise. The radio transcripts are therefore included in this fifth section to provide further dimension to this otherwise schematic memorandum on music appreciation, a text that of course remains considerably less than a completed chapter. Note that the radio drafts and transcripts in this collection that are undated, including the final one marked ‘Draft’, were probably not broadcast. Readers will also be interested to know that, after he returned to Germany, Adorno remained an active presence on radio in interviews, lectures, and discussions and participated in at least one discussion (on Schoenberg) at the BBC.
In the Vaudrin table of contents, the entry after the writings on music education is ‘Likes and Dislikes in Light-Popular Music’. When Adorno submitted this proposal he was referring to an essay of 250 pages, ‘Listening Habits: An Analysis of Likes and Dislikes in Light Popular Music’, which he intended to edit down to seventy pages.71 The long draft no longer exists and the latter may never have taken the exact shape planned. But by 28 May 1940 Adorno did have a reduced 103-page draft of the study that he and George Simpson had worked on together.72 It is an entirely complete and consistent essay. From a note on the manuscript, this draft was submitted to the distinguished American Sociological Review, which rejected it.73 Adorno again edited the essay down for Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, the house organ of the Institute for Social Research, which published it as ‘On Popular Music’.74 The publication was well received and, in particular, Virgil Thomson, then the music critic for the New York Herald Tribune, excerpted from it admiringly and at length in his weekly column.75 ‘On Popular Music’ is the text that is included in this volume. However, since much of what was edited out of the first completed version is of substantial interest, and because Adorno clearly considered both texts publishable, the excluded material has been provided in accompanying footnotes.
‘Likes and Dislikes in Light-Popular Music’ was to be followed in Current of Music by a ‘Theory of Jazz’. Adorno mentions in a letter that in this section he planned to use an English translation of his 1936 essay ‘Über Jazz’ (‘On Jazz’).76 He speaks, however, in a later letter, of wanting to conjoin this essay with a substantial body of new research materials.77 For, while living in the United States, Adorno had become aware that what he had known of jazz in Germany, and as he presented it in his early essay, was limited.78 He was thus making research visits to Harlem and had sought assistance from experts such as the American composer Milton Babbitt – who would have nothing to do with him. But, in any event, Adorno never wrote anything new for this section. Still, ‘On Jazz’ might well have been used here in this section, but for complex reasons of the structure of Adorno’s Collected Writings it could not be made part of the German edition of Current of Music, and therefore could not be presented here in the English edition either.
Adorno envisioned a collection of studies of ‘popular hits’ for the ‘Hit Analyses’ section, but while he lived in New York City he wrote none. Yet, his highly public success with ‘On Popular Music’ rein-spired Lazarsfeld’s interest in Adorno and he encouraged him to make new proposals for possible project funding. In response, some eight months after he had moved to Los Angeles, Adorno completed for his former employer the musical analyses of two hit songs – ‘The Bells of San Raquel’ (Por ti aprendi a querer), written by Fred Wise and Milton Leeds (1934) and ‘Two in Love’, written by Meredith Willson (1941). Along the way, ‘Deep Purple’, an instrumental work by Peter de Rose (1934), is also discussed in detail. In these studies, Adorno wanted to demonstrate, in musical technical terms, how in modeling themselves one after another on a major hit, subsequent hit songs become increasingly mediocre. In these studies Adorno was pursuing, on a compositional level, a further aspect of his critique of aesthetic reproduction.
‘Program Making: The Future of Music on the Air’. Adorno wrote nothing for the section so entitled.
*
Other Materials. Essays, lectures and reports are collected here that deal mostly, though not exclusively, with questions of sociological research at the Princeton project. None of these texts have been published before, and, with the exception of ‘The Radio Voice’, they were not meant for publication in the first place. They are of various levels of conceptual completion and historical interest. Several texts document Adorno’s efforts to develop models of qualitative sociological experiment. There is necessarily limited detail to be provided of these mainly auxiliary and subordinate writings and reports; all that is known of them is given here.
A) ‘The Radio Voice’ is the exception in this group, since it is a major text. The reader will remember that Adorno whittled it down to ‘The Radio Symphony’. Here, however, is the full manuscript that Adorno finished in June 1939. It is so largely redundant of other texts in this volume, most of all ‘Radio Physiognomics’, and considerably less well written as well, that the editor would have included only selected sections and pages that had been dropped from ‘The Radio Symphony’. The Adorno Archiv, however, strenuously urged this text’s inclusion in the interest of completeness. To those readers, then, who wade into the essay wondering, ‘Haven’t I already read this a few times?’, the answer is ‘Yes!’ Close students of these texts will, however, find ways to make these many pages useful.
B) ‘Memorandum on Lyrics in Popular Music’. This memorandum was addressed to John Gray Peatman, a professor at the College of the City of New York, 27 October 1941. Adorno’s accompanying letter mentions that the note focuses on aspects of ‘On Popular Music’ and the question that he wanted to raise in that essay of ‘why popular music is popular’.
C) ‘Experiment on: Preference for Material or Treatment of Two Popular Songs’. Undated manuscript.
D) ‘The Problem of Experimentation in Music Psychology’ was presented on 2 March 1939 to the Psychology Department of Princeton University and was then substantially amplified and revised.
E) ‘Note on Classification’ is an undated manuscript.
F) Also undated is ‘On the Use of Elaborate Personal Interviews’.
G) ‘The Problem of a New Type of Human Being’ is addressed to Lazarsfeld, 23 June 1941. This essay, like the hit song studies, was an attempt by Adorno to propose a research project to Lazarsfeld that would bring further support from the Rockefeller Foundation. Nothing came of this extraordinarily interesting essay.
H) ‘Some Remarks on a Propaganda Publication of NBC’ is undated but was written prior to ‘Radio Physiognomics’. It examines closely a brochure published in 1938 by NBC, probably a piece of publicity, entitled ‘Musical Leadership Maintained by NBC’.79
I) ‘Theses about the Idea and Form of Collaboration of the Princeton Radio Research Project’ is dated 28 April 1938. Below the title is written: ‘(As a basis for discussion at a staff meeting.)’ This text may have been Adorno’s orienting research statement to his new colleagues. It is the only memorandum in these papers bearing Adorno’s own signature.
*
This edition and editorial notes: One division of Adorno’s collected posthumous writings, an edition projected to comprise more than twenty volumes, is made up of those works that remained fragmentary at the author’s death. Current of Music was first published as volume 3 in this collection. The archival nature of this volume requires that it remain unchanged in further editions, including this one. This restriction has had important implications for this volume, especially for the editorial notes, which had to be written for both sides of the Atlantic at once. The editor was aware that what would be informing for one side would be occasionally nonsensically familiar for others, and vice versa. There is nothing to be done about this other than for American readers, for instance, to find a level of sociological curiosity in being told what Aunt Jemima pancake mix is and who the Lone Ranger was, just as European readers of this volume have been made to think about why they are now supposedly learning who Ernst Krenek and Günther Anders were.
The mention of American mass culture indicates a further aspect of this volume. Given a work dealing mainly with industrial entertainment, the editor found himself obliged to provide learned notes for things that hardly anyone in the world really has any choice but to already recognize. Some notes may thus only identify what identity on a global scale is coercively obliged to derive itself from in the first place, and, if so, if taken with a grain of self-consciousness, these notes may become a reader’s aid to identifying the daily sensation of the glare of compulsory recognition; for the utopic minded, these notes perhaps also stand for a moment when many of these things may be so long gone that someone would need to check on what any of them were.
In general, editorial notes have been minimized. The volume is complicated enough as it is and, in any case, Adorno rarely provided citations for his own writings. Notes to persons of considerable renown, such as Gustav Heinrich Furtwängler, are usually meant to supply a detail of the person’s life or career that is relevant to the discussion at hand more than to offer a general introduction to that life. An effort has been made, however, to identify several generally unknown individuals of substantial interest who deserve further attention. Also, in this text potentially ambiguous surnames have generally been complemented with their forenames, contrary to Adorno’s habit.
Textual revisions: All that Adorno published in English while living in New York was carefully revised by secretaries and trusted colleagues. These meticulously completed essays are presented here just as Adorno saw them through to publication, sometimes with additional materials. Most of the texts that are being published here for the first time, however, even when they show the hand of assistants, did not go through a comparable editorial process of completion. These have here been spared blunders of English expression. Otherwise, the writings have been left as rocky as many of them are, which readers will find irritating, and which the editor regrets. But thorough editorial revision would have amounted to unacceptable editorial intervention; the volume would have been straightforwardly im proved, but discredited in the eyes of a prevailingly literalistic mentality. Alternatively the texts could have been denied publication, which would have protected Adorno’s work from the intrusion of second-rate formulations, but such restraint would have done no positive good either. Readers, therefore, are asked to bear in mind, when drawing on and quoting from this volume, that much of what is included here, and the volume itself as a whole, requires consistent discernment of its provisional status. It is nothing at all that Adorno himself would ever have published.
Editorial symbols: Editorial remarks are given at the end of the book to distinguish them from Adorno’s sparse notes, which were cast for the purposes of an intended American readership. Square brackets in the body of the text are Adorno’s.
* Asterisks are used in conjunction with Adorno’s footnotes to lead the reader to accompanying draft material at the bottom of the page. It must be emphasized that these passages are provided only as reference material and are not in any way to be construed as being incorporated into the text. They are not amendments. These passages conclude with a second asterisk to help distinguish them from footnotes as the reader returns to the initial detour. If these essays were not entirely secondary in the whole of Adorno’s writings, this intrusion of auxiliary drafts would not be legitimate.
These editorial techniques are admittedly cumbersome devices, but Current of Music is an unwieldy work in all regards, irremediably in fragments. Nothing more is claimed here than to have wrested its angular, misfitting parts back to shore and having set them out for study. Readers of this second salvage, it must be hoped, will come prepared for the same halting labour that was responsible in the first place for transporting them here.
There is no need to claim that on all matters the broad circle of colleagues who became involved in this project, which lasted more than a decade, always saw eye to eye. The claim, however, that does need to be asserted here, and happily, is that differences of mind and trivial matters did not keep this book from being completed. So it is with gratitude that the editor takes this occasion to appreciate Bernd Stiegler and Eva Gilmer at Suhrkamp Verlag; Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz at the Theodor W. Adorno Archiv in Frankfurt; Jan Philipp Reemtsma at the Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung; and Klaus Reichert at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität for the reasoned judgement, struggle for mutual understanding, restraint, patience, and, most of all, the good will that finally prevailed over the whole of this complex project. Other colleagues who contributed considerably more than their time are Kevin Sullivan, Richard Leppert, Thomas Huhn, and David Jenemann. Graduate students at Southampton College, Jane Anderson and Jerome Sperling, spent weeks and months confirming the archival accuracy of each of the reproduced texts. And if it is pure chutzpah for editors and translators to dedicate to family and friends the works of Aeschylus or Shakespeare on which they happen to have laid their hands, that objection will not be raised here in the dedication of this reconstruction of Adorno’s Current of Music to Rolf Tiedemann, the editor of Adorno’s Collected Writings. He supported this project without reservation, defending it resolutely, as if with his own body, against the interests of the day that might have scuttled it.
Wieland Hoban translated the several German texts that have been included in this initially largely English volume.
New York City, August 2007