Current of Music by Theodor W. Adorno

By Theodor W. Adorno

Fleeing the Nazis, Theodor W. Adorno lived in ny urban as a refugee from 1938 till 1941. in the course of those years, he was once intensively interested in a research of ways the lately constructed recommendations for the nation-wide transmission of tune over radio have been remodeling the notion of song itself. This wide ranging radio learn used to be conceived as not anything under an research, in part empirical, of Walter Benjamin’s speculative claims for the emancipatory capability of artwork within the age of its mechanical replica. the result of Adorno’s undertaking set him decisively at odds with Benjamin’s theses and even as grew to become the physique of pondering that shaped the foundation for Adorno’s personal aesthetics in his Philosophy of latest Music.

Current of Music is the identify that Adorno himself gave to this examine venture. For advanced purposes, besides the fact that, Adorno was once unable to convey the different millions of pages of this large learn, such a lot of it written in English, to a last shape ahead of leaving manhattan for California, the place he may instantly start paintings with Max Horkheimer at the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Robert Hullot-Kentor, the prestigious Adorno student, reconstructed Adorno’s undertaking for the Adorno Archive in Germany and offers a long and informative creation to the fragmentary texts accrued during this volume.

Current of Music may be extensively mentioned for the sunshine it throws at the improvement of Adorno’s proposal, on his advanced dating with Walter Benjamin, yet so much of fascinated with the real views it presents on questions of pop culture, the track of commercial leisure, the heritage of radio and the social dimensions of the copy of artwork.

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For the purposes of this reconstruction of Current of Music, it was sometimes difficult to choose between these versions, since the German version was sometimes more complete and more interesting than the reduced English draft, which all the same had the importance of presenting the actual broadcast event. In the instance of Adorno’s first broadcast in his educational series, the Gordian knot was solved by embracing it. Both versions have been included, with the strange result, however, that in this edition there is an ‘␣ English version’ and a ‘␤ German version’, where it will be noted that this ‘German version’ – an epithet worthy of substantial reflection on the relation of languages and the nature of translation – is now in English.

To clarify the meaning of this type of phenomenon, and to show the fundamental structure within which every radio phenomenon is bound to take place is the purpose of our study. Here we must avoid a fundamental misunderstanding. We do not intend to discuss the expression or meaning of the material which radio gives us. We are not speaking about the expression of the voice of the singer, transmitted to us by radio; nor do we speak of the meaning of the words of the commentator to whom we are listening.

Other Materials. Essays, lectures and reports are collected here that deal mostly, though not exclusively, with questions of sociological research at the Princeton project. None of these texts have been published before, and, with the exception of ‘The Radio Voice’, they were not meant for publication in the first place. They are of various levels of conceptual completion and historical interest. Several texts document Adorno’s efforts to develop models of qualitative sociological experiment.

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