FAMST 192CT Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Theodor W. Adorno, Culture Industry, Musical Form
Document Summary
Adorno is interested in mid-20th century popular music"s social function. Throughout the essay, there"s the distinction between popular music and serious music. Readily incorporated any musical innovation or apparent deviation into its overall structure. Standardization is not a matter of highbrow vs lowbrow, or simple vs. complex, or good vs. bad. Not all lowbrow music is standardizing or bad. Not all serious music is good or complex. Popular music"s standardized nature can be discerned in the part-whole relationship. Emphasis on the matter of form: aesthetics are inseparable from social effects h . Adorno thinks an instrumental approach to the production of culture had resulted in films, books, magazines, and songs. Rationalized into component parts substitutable for each other (interchangeable cogs in a machine) Popular music is administered by the "experts" of the culture industry, whose means-ends approach churns out generic music in which "the formal elements have abstractly pre-formed by the capitalist requirement that they be exchangeable as commodities"
