...A sensory pleasure turns into disgust as soon as it is seen how it only still serves to betray the consumer. The betrayal here consists in always offering the same thing. Even the most insensitive hit song enthusiast cannot always escape the feeling that the child with the sweet tooth comes to know in the candy store. If the charms wear off and turn into their opposite--the short life of most hit songs belongs in the same range of experience--then the cultural ideology which clothes the upper-level music business finishes things off by causing the lower to be heard with a bad conscience. Nobody believes so completely in prescribed pleasure. But the listening nevertheless remains regressive in assenting to this situation despite all distrust and all ambivalence. As a result of the displacement of feelings into exchange-value, no demands are really advanced in music anymore. Substitutes satisfy their purpose as well, because the demand to which they adjust themselves has itself already been substituted. But ears which are still only able to hear what one demands of them in what is offered, and which register the abstract charm instead of synthesizing the moments of charm, are bad ears. Even in the "isolated' phenomenon, key aspects will escape them; that is, those which transcend its own isolation. There is actually a neurotic mechanism of stupidity in listening, too; the arrogantly ignorant rejection of everything unfamiliar is its sure sign. Regressive listeners behave like children. Again and again, and with stubborn malice, they demand the one dish they have once been served.
A sort of musical children's language is prepared for them; it differs from the real thing in that its vocabulary consists exclusively of fragments and distortions of the artistic language of music...The regulated musical traffic is worthy of them. It cannot be compared with that in the streets. It swarms with mistakes in phrasing and harmony...One would like to blame them on the amateurs with whom most of the hit songs originate, while the real musical work is first done by the arrangers. But just as a publisher does not let a misspelled word go out into the world, so it is inconceivable that, well-advised by their experts, they publish amateur versions without checking them. The mistakes are either consciously produced by the experts or intentionally permitted to stand--for the sake of the listeners. One could attribute to the publishers and experts the wish to ingratiate themselves with the listeners, composing as nonchalantly and informally as a dilettante drums out a hit songs after haring it. Such intrigues would be of the same stripe, even if considered psychologically different, as the incorrect spelling in many advertising slogans. But even if one wanted to exclude their acceptance as too farfetched, the typographical errors could be understood. On the one hand, the infantile hearing demands sensually rich and full sonority, sometimes represented by the luxuriant thirds, and it is precisely this demand in which the infantile musical language is in most brutal contradiction with the children's song. On the other hand, the infantile hearing always demands the most comfortable and fluent resolutions. The consequences of the "rich" sonority, with correct treatment of voices, would be so far from the standardized harmonic relations that the listener would have to reject them as "unnatural."
Adorno, ibid
+ + + + +
Isn't life the process of sensual pleasures turning into disgust?
Isn't life the process of discovering how our sensual pleasures ultimately exist to betray us as consumers?
Isn't life the continual displacement of feelings into exchange-value?
Do only children demand the one dish that has been served to them?
+ + + + +
Speaking of children and their music, here's a story I'm going to tell poorly:
Back at certain all girl's drama factory in Southern Vermont, Bill Dixon once told the story of having to go to the local elementary school to talk with the teachers about his son who, at the time, maybe wasn't doing so good in music class.
So Bill went to the school and got a load of what constituted "music" at the elementary school level. Doing so thus concluded any worry Bill may have had that his son was the problem.
misquote: "He's been listening to my music all his life...how the fuck is he supposed to go into a classroom and do that nick-nack-paddy-wack-give-a-dog-a-bone stupid shit?"
+ + + + +
The regulated musical traffic is worthy of them. It cannot be compared with that in the streets. It swarms with mistakes in phrasing and harmony"in the streets"--now isn't that an interesting phrase? Makes me think that there are two separate, distinct musical realms: "street music" and "professional, arranged music" with our beloved improvisation as "street" and "regulated" commodity music as the other.
And really, can any discussion of directing traffic be complete without at least nodding to the crazy phenomena where the getting rid of traffic signs and lights make safer [i.e. more functional] roads?
+ + + + +
infantile hearing always demands the most comfortable and fluent resolutions
And on that note, along with the previous about safe roads, a little something we can all agree with.
0 comments:
Post a Comment