Televised Music Is a Pointless Rigmarole (1968)

Evidently before television people used to go to classical musical concerts blindfolded - who knew!?

“Yes, one’s attention is drawn away from the essential things and towards the inessential ones, namely, away from the music as an end and towards the means, the manner, in which the keyboardists and wind players and string players are playing it. But I’d like to point out that these irritating practices are well established in the techniques of all forms of mechanical reproduction. In radio and in many gramophone recordings one also encounters a predilection for accentuating so-called principal voices or so-called melodies out of all proportion to their place in the musical fabric. This is the fault of the sound engineers, who subsequently engage in fundamentally quite unmusical procedures by surgically extracting these voices, which is quite in keeping with their—if I may say this—unartistic intuitions and is also congenial to the highly problematic taste of the public. … What results from this is that certain middle-of-the-road so-called euphony, that culinary seasoning of the sound at the expense of all the structural elements of the music.”

> Here the mass media—which precisely because they are technical media are duty-bound to forgo everything unseemly and gratuitous—are conforming to the abominable convention of showcasing lady harpsichordists with snail-shell braids over their ears who brainlessly and ineptly execute Mozart on jangly candlelit ancient keyboards.

Man, this guy would have hated piano youtubers.

Is there any argument here other than "Adorno is an old git who hates change, young people, and popular entertainment"?

> Consequently, when the masses come into contact with it, they are no longer by any means coming into contact with the thing itself but rather with a predissected, 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.

For his cultural goals he wasn't wrong.

His aim wasn't to just give more people access to classical music with whatever means (a la "worse is better"), but to give more people the appreciation of classical music that refined educated listeners had. To treat them as capable for that, as opposed to needing "dumbing down".

Part of that was maintaining the primacy of music over unrelated attached things, like the televised image.

Given how songs could be made hits because of their video in the MTV era, this was still prescient for popular too.

> Is there any argument here other than "Adorno is an old git who hates change, young people, and popular entertainment"?

I think there is a very serious argument going on here. The nub of it is in this paragraph:

> I don’t think there’s any such thing as a pedagogical path to the essential that starts out by getting people to concentrate on the inessential. This sort of attention that fixates on the inessential actually indurates; it becomes habitual and thereby interferes with one’s experience of the essential. I don’t believe that when it comes to art there can ever be any processes of gradual familiarization that gradually lead from what’s wrong to what’s right. Artistic experience always consists in qualitative leaps and never in that murky sort of process.

Adorno is basically saying that the distortion of the experience of listening to music inevitably caused by dressing it up for mass broadcast results in a dilution of what is 'essential' in that music – roughly speaking, the capacity for revelation. The attempt to make the music more 'accessible', usually by cloaking it in 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'.