Televised Music Is a Pointless Rigmarole (1968)
theparisreview.org
theparisreview.org
His aim wasn't to just give more people access to classical music with whatever means (a la "worse is better"), but to give more people the appreciation of classical music that refined educated listeners had. To treat them as capable for that, as opposed to needing "dumbing down".
Part of that was maintaining the primacy of music over unrelated attached things, like the televised image.
Given how songs could be made hits because of their video in the MTV era, this was still prescient for popular too.
I've never been a fan of the word 'problematic' because it says so little about what the problem actually is.
Regardless, he seems to have disdain for the tastes of the public, which doesn't quite jibe with the idea that he's treating the public as capable of appreciating music without it being dumbed down.
I see a lot of defense of his arguments in this discussion, and I don't have much to add, other than to say I really don't understand it at all. I think it's really just a blind spot in how I think about art, but asserting that a televised performance of an orchestra playing some classical music is 'pointless' doesn't make sense to me.
A 1983 Webster's Collegiate gives the definition of problematic as "1: a. difficult to settle or decide b. not definite or settled c. open to question or debate 2: expressing or supporting a possibility".
(Bold type, proffered synonyms, and examples omitted.)
The sense of "problematic" as in "you've got a problem" developed after 1968, perhaps after 1990.
So if I go back and reread the quote that I had posted, is the critique that the public's tastes are not fixed, and change across geography and time? I'm still not sure what he was really getting at, I guess.
This sentence scores as 'extremely difficult' or 'difficult' on most readability scores, and it's just unnecessarily flowery.
Basically, I think the point is that the idea of the 'taste of the public' is just a shorthand for 'something that appeals to lots of people with differing tastes'.
The author's key point (I think) is that 'engineering' music somehow makes it less artistic, and the 'problematic taste of the public' is a tangent which explores why sound engineers do what they do, rather than being part of the main argument.
It was written for the Paris Review subscribers of 1968. I imagine that they found little difficulty in understanding it.
Regardless, I think you're right, the target audience of this as it's written probably would not have issues understanding it.
Their "tastes" are not set in stone - and according to him they're not even consciously their own to begin with, in the sense that they arrived at them with knowledge of the possible options and/or after cultivating them. Just conditioning from the music industry and lack of education. Like a teenager who defaults to the current hits everybody listens to.
This is just one of these things where he wants to find some deep philosophical basis for his personal preferences.
Which is less than some definite objective final measurement (as it's not physics, it's culture, and it's impossible), but a lot more than "personal preferences".
the archetype I'm trying to follow is painting. when the camera was invented photorealistic paintings became usless and what followed was impressionism, which focused on what the cameras cannot do.
however I do not think music has reacted to reccording technology in the same way painting did (pretending for one sentence that 'music' and 'painting' are entities with agency). I don't think there's an "impressionistic" movement within music that arose as a response to reccording technology, at least not yet.
I don’t think that’s the real problem with the word “problematic”. So many other words have the same problem—“bad” doesn’t say anything about what the badness is, “difficult” doesn’t say anything about the difficulty, etc. “Green” doesn’t say anything about greenness.
I think the problem people have with problematic is that you’re taking a subjective claim and making it sound like a property of the object. If the taste of the public is “problematic” then it means that someone has a problem with it, but that someone is absent from the sentence.
The word “problematic” is, eh, fine. Writers and speakers shouldn’t be injecting subjects into sentences just because the sentences express opinion. There’s not necessarily any kind of clear subject to introduce. The author/speaker is usually better used as an implicit subject for subjective statements.
I have other problems in Adorno’s claims here but I have somewhat accepted the word “problematic”.
Kind of like "woke" and some others, perhaps "toxic", it's used as a placeholder for a feeling/idea that the speaker believes to be commonplace, but is often VERY ill-defined, and thus ends up muddying the discussion and/or leaving things unsaid that do deserve more consideration.
Words that are ill-defined and leave things unsaid are the norm. If you want clarity, you need sentences, paragraphs, and context. Those sentences will be filled with words that, individually, and stripped of their context, are unclear.
It seems like just the right word to use here, and in many places. I think some people just dislike the word “problematic” on an emotional level, and conjure up some justification for that emotional reaction.
This is an old discussion now, so I won't post too much more here, but in responding to this, I decided to do a bit of research on "problematic", and it seems (from Merriam Webster) that the first use was in 1609, and was indeed exactly the sense we use it today: "posing a problem: difficult to resolve or decide". https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/problematic
So let's say Umberto Eco's use of problematic was indeed in this sense (as I haven't heard a very compelling alternative). My point is that _he_ could replace problematic with what he's really trying to say, but of course I can't because I'm not the speaker and I don't know what he means. But I can take a few (bad) guesses:
1) The public's music taste is a problem for him because they don't appreciate the aspects of music that he thinks are most valuable. In this case, the phrase would be "congenial to the unsophisticated taste of the public".
2) The public's taste could be a problem because they want easy, convenient access to music via radio and TV, and Eco believes the true value of music can only be expressed live, where the listener has more agency. The phrase here would be "congenial to the convenience the public demands".
3) Maybe the public just doesn't like classical music, and like rock instead. Maybe ""congenial to the modern music taste of the public" would work here.
I could go on and on: the point is, if this were written instead of spoken, and I were the editor, and circle the work "problematic" in red and write in the margin "What are you really trying to convey here?" It would then be a discussion point with the author to dig into the real point so it could be conveyed clearly. But this is an (translated?) interview, so I don't think that bar is appropriate, but I still think there's ambiguity.
I don’t think you’ve articulated a reasonable or valid complaint against the word “problematic”.
Words convey very little in isolation. When somebody uses the word “problematic”, it’s only in a larger context—sentences and paragraphs, just to start with.
> …I still think there's ambiguity.
I don’t see how this complaint applies to “problematic” but not, say, your use of the word “ambiguity” here. What are you saying is ambiguous or unclear about the word “problematic”? Why are you saying it is ambiguous or unclear?
You are asking the reader to do some of the work and figure out what you mean by that. But that is ALWAYS true, in every sentence, with every word. I think you are basing your complaint against the word “problematic” on some imagined usage of it in a particular context, and without that context, the complaint just isn’t grounded.
Thus, they often should say more precisely what they are implying; often e.g. this person is racist, or a pedophile, or homophobic, etc.
I think you are just complaining about some specific usage of the word, and there are a lot of words which happen to be used poorly—like “dopamine” which people use to talk about the feeling of scrolling through social media. This isn’t a complaint about the word “dopamine” but a complaint against its misuse!
> And the issue is that it's kind of a cowardly word.
I think, at the core, complaints against the word “problematic” can be boiled down to emotional sentiments like this.
> Thus, they often should say more precisely what they are implying; often e.g. this person is racist, or a pedophile, or homophobic, etc.
Usage of the word “problematic” to describe people is somewhat minor, I think. I definitely didn’t think of this usage. I see the word “problematic” used to describe practices, processes, ideas, situations, etc.
Sometimes, a problem is complicated and multifaceted. You can’t boil it down to a single thing like “pedophilia”. The word “problematic” is there to say “there are problems with this, but those problems are many and don’t boil down to some simple, other word.”
We need both broad and specific words. The correct, specific word does not always exist.
I believe the most common example is probably "enjoying art made by someone who did ostensibly bad things," especially where the range of "bad" here is kind of broad.
Like, Dave Chappelle, JK Rowling, Kid Rock, Louis CK, R. Kelly, Woody Allen, Diddy etc. are all people who someone might say it's "problematic" to enjoy their art, but that's a WIDE range.
To use a metaphor, we're talking about the weather and you're saying technically true but useless things about climate.
I think the problem is that they didn’t produce enough culture. So, they had to stretch each bit out by pretending the process of sitting around and trying to figure out how to enjoy it was in and of itself enjoyable.
I dunno. I don’t like either of those artists, Swift or Minaj, but I’m sure they’ve brought a lot of joy into people’s lives. By what metric can we call them not good? Happiness provided? They score quite well. Some kind of complexity? Sure, not great… but if we pick that metric the high scores list will presumably be dominated by nonsense jazz inspired electronics artists with super fast drum machines, or something like that.
Clearly the only REAL way to experience music is in your private box at a grand symphony hall dressed in full evening wear.
Clearly is closer to the connection with the moment and the expression than in canned form.
You are being disingenuous and setting up a false dichotomy
Or he is taking the argument to an extreme to highlight the absurdity of its trajectory.
Or rather a parasite on the music, which killed the music for cool shots, "I'm badass" poses, and girls in bikinis.
I think you'll find that simply pointing to how TV enabled a whole bunch of new music videos that are fun and speak to a popular demand while ignoring the explosion of other music videos that push the boundaries of the art isn't actually that compelling an argument that new forms of art are bad. Music went from a luxury to something that soundtracks everyday people's everyday lives - there's more of everything and that's awesome.
Watching a symphony on a (maybe) 19" B&W TV as a probably grainy NTSC broadcast and listened to through a small tinny speaker... well, let's just say we're not talking the Met Live in HD on a home theater system. I know the person being interviewed here has other points to make. But it's probably also the case that classical symphonic and chamber music particularly probably translates less well to broadcast/"film" than other forms of art which are generally more dependent on the presentation than just the music itself.
> On the whole I believe that the very act of performing music on television entails a certain displacement that is detrimental to musical concentration and the meaningful experience of music.
I think this is largely correct, and I'd go further -- that even concert settings can be detrimental to the meaningful experience of music. Forget classical or pop music or jazz or whatever other style of music Adorno thought everyone should listen to. It's a frequent complaint of dance music enthusiasts and just music fans in general that crowds focus to much on looking at what the DJ is doing or taking pictures with their phone instead of _dancing_ and living in the moment. I mean everyone is free to take what enjoyment they want out of whatever experience they want, but I do think that music is primarily meant to be enjoyed through listening and (often) dancing, and anything that distracts from that makes the experience less about music as music and more about something else -- music as a mere soundtrack for spectacle or celebrity or whatever rather than something to be enjoyed on its own terms.
I don't agree with him but I think his concerns were/are valid.
Going into this piece knowing that probably changes the way it's read. In that light, Adorno is pulling his punches and being very well-behaved here.
It's more about having the choice of what to look at being decided for the viewer.
In that context his argument carries a lot of weight I think - the classical music culture was truly one that evolved for the medium of the live performance. We'd be making the same mistake he's making if we thought we were fully appreciating it through a recorded or visual medium, since in our cultural context it is easy for us to be as dismissive of the importance of the live aspect of classical music as it is for him to be dismissive of the recorded and visual aspect of televised music
Which is an assumption I would not make, and I suppose most people would not think that being inside their car was being outside, but I haven't surveyed for responses.
Man, this guy would have hated piano youtubers.
Is there any argument here other than "Adorno is an old git who hates change, young people, and popular entertainment"?
> Consequently, when the masses come into contact with it, they are no longer by any means coming into contact with the thing itself but rather with a predissected, cliché-ridden product of the culture industry, which gives them the illusory sense that they could become actively involved in culture.
"Once everyone likes it, it's no longer good"
It's a remarkably small-c conservative screed for someone who's normally classified as a left philosopher.
Yes, he makes several clear arguments.
Is there argument to your comment aside from the ad-hominem and the tired ageism / "old folks hate young people" cliche?
Of course there's also a context to his critique, which is not any naive "young vs old", or "change is bad/good" (he cites Alban Berg and was all for avant guarde developments, hardly someone against "change"), but related to a high culture with centuries of development.
It's like people talking about French cuisine, and someone comes in chiming how McDonalds is great and young people like it. Not the same cultural context. Of course the latter cultural context also doesn't believe there is any hierarchy of cultural contexts and practices besides "personal taste", so any discussion of particular practices and their merits or lack thereof is moot within it.
>It's a remarkably small-c conservative screed
Only for those conflating mass market populism, mass culture, and relativism as some kind of liberating concept.
He (and many others of the left and even some of the right) have written thousands of pages against that idea.
I think there is a very serious argument going on here. The nub of it is in this paragraph:
> I don’t think there’s any such thing as a pedagogical path to the essential that starts out by getting people to concentrate on the inessential. This sort of attention that fixates on the inessential actually indurates; it becomes habitual and thereby interferes with one’s experience of the essential. I don’t believe that when it comes to art there can ever be any processes of gradual familiarization that gradually lead from what’s wrong to what’s right. Artistic experience always consists in qualitative leaps and never in that murky sort of process.
Adorno is basically saying that the distortion of the experience of listening to music inevitably caused by dressing it up for mass broadcast results in a dilution of what is 'essential' in that music – roughly speaking, the capacity for revelation. The attempt to make the music more 'accessible', usually by cloaking it in cliché (what he calls here "the whole Salzburg phantasmagoria"), divests it of the potential to be revelatory. It actively lessens the chance of experiencing one of the "qualitative leaps" of understanding he's looking for in music—something beyond words, beyond discourse; an experience of the sublime, of something both absolutely beyond us and yet, afterwards, constitutive of us. Something that cannot be learned (no "pedagogical path"), but which can be known. It's obviously a high bar to set (almost insane, certainly irrational, to most people today) but it's worth engaging with, I think.
I think you're right that Adorno would despise most YouTube musicians. After all, there is hardly a better example of the fetishisation of technique, equipment, and process (not to mention the unquestioning habituation to cliché) than what you'll find on the average YouTuber's channel. (I say this as a regular watcher of many YouTube guitarists, some of whom I really like.) The idea, totally general on such channels, that you can follow existing patterns and paths to mastery (where the satisfaction comes from memetic reproduction of the already known) is obviously antithetical to the view of art and revelation outlined above.
Finally, I don't think there's anything conservative about Adorno's argument here. He is ultimately arguing against holding up what already exists (the Western classical tradition, in this case) as a fixed symbol of greatness, ready to bestow its gifts of historical authority and sophistication on anyone intelligent enough to encounter it. Adorno is saying the greatness of a work cannot be divorced from the nature of both its presentation and the audience's engagement with it. It is a sometimes subtle but I think fundamental difference of perspective to the conservative view of 'the canon'.
Any one who cares about experiencing art as a pastime can see that government subsidies of culture performances could be better spent anywhere else than TV. Surely the TV station will just game it so whatever appears on the screen is slop-adjacent, they never wanted a high-culture wing, they gain nothing from a critical thinking audience.
There's also this new world's largest modern concert organ that's a good piece of attraction. https://musiikkitalo.fi/en/organ/
Being there is certainly different (plusses and minuses). But, of course, things like world-class opera and ballet aren't widely available (and are expensive).
But there is something I learned eventually: I work deep in finance now, on a trading floor in HK, and all their cool documentaries about Finance feel to me, now, very populist and not very honest: so they probably have an agenda trending left wing at least in France. Which is fine, just need to know.
I think AI is BS, but if it could voice-translate to English most of Arte, maybe that'd be interesting enough.
Can you be more specific in your critique? Why were the documentaries not honest in your opinion? Which one(s)?
It’s probably natural, because (1) journalists only have a given amount of space to convey an idea, (2) need to capture a non-expert audience, (3) are usually working across a broad range of topics.
I don't agree that any reporting / media gets it overly / inherently wrong the deeper your knowledge is. There are plenty of great journalists out there that often have varied and deep backgrounds on topics and / or interface well with top experts for the given material they are publicizing.
There are some good stuff on Arte. But most of the stuff on Arte has got to deal with two major Arte problems:
- Arte's brain is so far left it fell out of its skull
- it is *the* perfect example "artsy fartsy"
It's objectively good that this gets government funded as cultural institutions and creators get highlighted.
As per one of the foremost analysts of a major airline I worked for many years ago:
"Europe is a cultural Disney Land"
I wouldn't underestimate the impact tourism has on EU economies.
The key thing is that it is a public service broadcaster though. I don't think it would be possible otherwise.
This is say that smaller (and less defined) television screens diminish on their own, compared to richer alternatives.
Not criticizing small video, just endorsing the more enveloping mediums.