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

is still on a handicraft level and not literally an industrial one, conforms
pcrfectly to that necessity which is essential from the viewpoint of cultural
big business. If the individual handicraft elements of popular music were
abolished altogether, a synthetic means of hiding standardization would have to
be evolved. Its elements are even now in existence.

[23] The necessary correlate of musical standardization is pseudo-
individualization. By pseudo-individualization we mean endowing cultural mass
production with the halo of free choice or open market on the basis of
standardization itself. Standardization of song hits keeps the customers in line
by doing their listening for them, as it were. Pseudo-individualization, for its
part, keeps them in line by making them forget that what they listen to is
already listened to for them, or "pre-digested."

[24] The most drastic example of standardization of presumably individualized
features is to be found in so-called improvisations. Even though jazz musicians
still improvise in practice, their improvisations have become so "normalized" as
to enable a whole terminology to be developed to express the standard devices of
individualization: a terminology which in turn is ballyhooed by jazz publicity
agents to foster the myth of pioneer artisanship and at the same time flatter
the fans by apparently allowing them to peep behind the curtain and get the
inside story. This pseudo-individualization is prescribed by the standardization
of the framework. The latter is so rigid that the freedom it allows for any sort
of improvisation is severely delimited. Improvisations--passages where
spontaneous action of individuals is permitted ("Swing it boys")--are confined
within the walls of the harmonic and metric schcmc-. In a great many cases, such
as the "break" of pre-swing jazz, the musical function of the improvised detail
is determined completely by the scheme: the break can be nothing other than a
disguised cadence. Here, very few possibilities for actual improvisation remain,
due to the necessity of merely melodically circumscribing the same underlying
harmonic functions. Sincc thc-se possibilities were very quickly exhausted,
stereotyping of improvisatory details speedily occurred. Thus, standardization
of the norm enhances in a purely technical way standardization of its own
deviation--pseudo-individualization.

[25] This subservience of improvisation to standardization explains two main
socio-psychological qualities of popular music. One is the fact that the detail
remains openly connected with the underlying scheme so that the listener always
feels on safe ground. The choice in individual alterations is so small that the
perpetual recurrence of the same variations is a reassuring signpost of the
identical behind them. The other is the function of "substitution"--the
improvisatory features forbid their being grasped as musical events
inthemselves. They can be received only as embellishments. It is a well-known
fact that in daring jazz arrangements worried notes, dirty notes, in other
words, false notes, play a conspicuous role. They are apperceived as exciting
stimuli only because they are corrected by the ear to the right note. This,
however, is only an extreme instance of what happens less conspicuously in all
individualization in popular music. Any harmonic boldness, any chord which does
not fall strictly within the simplest harmonic scheme demands being apperceived
as "false," that is, as a stimulus which carries with it the unambiguous