"On Popular Music" - читать интересную книгу автора (Adorno Theodor W)

underlying, unabating time unit of the music--its "beat." To play rhythmically
means, to these people, to play in such a way that even if pseudo-
individualizations--counter-accents and other "differentiations"-occur, the
relation to the ground meter is preserved. To be musical means to them to be
capable of following given rhythmical patterns without being disturbed by
"individualizing" aberrations, and to fit even the syncopations into the basic
time units. This is the way in which their response to music immediately
expresses their desire to obey. However, as the standardized meter of dance
music and of marching suggests the coordinated battalions of a mechanical
collectivity, obedience to this rhythm by overcoming the responding individuals
leads them to conceive of themselves as agglutinized with the untold millions of
the meek who must be similarly overcome. Thus do the obedient inherit the earth.

[40] Yet, if one looks at the serious compositions which correspond to this
category of mass listening, one finds one very characteristic feature: that of
disillusion. All these composers, among them Stravinsky and Hindemith, have
expressed an "anti romantic" feeling. They aimed at musical adaptation to
reality--a reality understood by them in terms of the "machine age." The
renunciation of dreaming by these composers is an index that listeners are ready
to replace dreaming by adjustment to raw reality, that they reap new pleasure
from their acceptance of the unpleasant. They are disillusioned about any
possibility of realizing their own dreams in the world in which they live, and
consequently adapt themselves to this world. They take what is called a
realistic attitude and attempt to harvest consolation by identifying themselves
with the external social forces which they think constitute the "machine age."
Yet the very disillusion upon which their coordination is based is there to mar
their pleasure. The cult of the machine which is represented by unabating jazz
beats involves a self-renunciation that cannot but take root in the form of a
fluctuating uneasiness somewhere in the personality of the obedient. For the
machine is an end in itself only under given social conditions--where men are
appendages of the machines on which they work. The adaptation to machine music
necessarily implies a renunciation of one's own human feelings and at the same
time a fetishism of the machine such that its instrumental character becomes
obscured thereby.

[41] As to the other, the "emotional" type, there is some justification for
linking it with a type of movie spectator. The kinship is with the poor shop
girl who derives gratification by identification with Ginger Rogers, who with
her beautiful legs and unsullied character, marries the boss. Wish fulfillment
IS Considered the guiding principle in the social psychology of moving Pictures
and similarly in the pleasure obtained from emotional erotic music. This
explanation, however, is only superficially appropriate.

[42] Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley may be dream factories. But they do not merely
supply categorical wish fulfillment for the girl behind the counter. She does
not immediately identify herself with Ginger Rogers marrying. What does occur
may be expressed as follows: when the audience at a sentimental film or
sentimental music become aware of the overwhelming possibility of happiness,
they dare to confess to themselves what the whole order of contemporary life
ordinarily forbids them to admit, namely, that they actually have no part in