A few scholars and theorists have been coming up, or probably will come up, frequently in these pages, so it is probably worthwhile to take a moment and briefly explain why I find their work so compelling. In some cases I like their work a great deal and in other cases I take issue with it, and I am more familiar with some than with others, but I find all of the following very stimulating to read.
Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (1903-1969)
German musicologist/sociologist/philosopher. Since I read his essay 'Types of Musical Conduct' (part of Sociology of Music) in my Masters year I've had an intense love-hate relationship with Adorno. He is known for different things depending on whom you ask: a musicologist will say that he is one of the most important theorisers of Modernism in music, while a sociologist will focus on his work in founding what is called the Frankfurt School of criticism. A philosopher will probably take note of his aesthetic theory, and a political scientist will see him as a major voice against fascism. For me, it's the way his Frankfurt School work illuminates his musical work that is most interesting. The Frankfurt School philosophers (who also include Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and tangentially Walter Benjamin) were pessimistic about what they called the Culture Industry: they thought that art had been commodified and transformed into an industrial product to be bought and sold, and which was then used unintelligently by its bourgeois purchasers. Adorno labeled jazz as the worst offender, but his ramblings against jazz are the weakest aspect of his thought: he simply didn't understand it and he made no effort to do so. He really just used 'jazz' as a label for most things that he didn't like, which was an awful lot of things. The constant pessimism is very grating, but Adorno writes in such a way that I find myself agreeing with him even though I don't want to. His parenthetical writing style is both frustrating and engaging, and I'm sure it has rubbed off on me to some extent. In addition to 'Types of Musical Conduct', where he creates an elaborate typology of people by the way they listen to music, I love his Wagner book, which must be the most brilliant hatchet job ever written. Adorno hated Wagner even more than he hated jazz, honing in on the principle of the Leitmotiv, which according to Adorno is music commodified, turned into nothing more than a jingle. Adorno's favourites were Beethoven (of course), Berg, and early Schoenberg (before he adopted the 12-tone method, which for Adorno was an aesthetic betrayal because it was too strict, an attitude captured by Thomas Mann in his novel Doktor Faustus). Pretty much any other composer was weak, at least most of the time. Eventually I plan on tackling his Aesthetic Theory and I still need to read Dialectic of Enlightenment rather than just reading about it. For the musically-inclined I would suggest Sociology of Music, even though it is out of print (libraries should have a copy). This is a series of posthumously-published lectures, and since they were originally delivered orally they are a bit easier to understand than his written works. Adorno is unavoidable in musicology, and even Richard Taruskin, who claims to want to leave him behind, comes to many of the same conclusions and mentions him frequently (they are very much on the same page when it comes to to the early music movement, which was just beginning when Adorno was working).
Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)
Like Adorno, another difficult writer with whom I often agree against my will. He was of course a playwright, probably the most influential of the twentieth century, but his more abstract theorising has been just as influential as the plays. Ever since his death theatre and opera production in Germany has been dominated by Brecht's principles. The much-hated (in the English-speaking world, at least) Regietheater stems directly from Brecht, though it is just as frequently a betrayal of his ideas as it is an exemplar. What Brecht hated most of all is what he called 'culinary' theatre, theatre that an audience consumes as they would consume a meal: without really thinking about what they were seeing. By forcing alienation (Verfremdung) via various devices such as projected titles, presentational acting styles, masks, and aggressively non-melodic music, Brecht gets his audience to think critically about what they are seeing. If you see The Threepenny Opera or Mother Courage and are moved by the characters' plights, you've seen a bad production, at least if the goal was to be Brechtian about it. Brecht's plays are extremely difficult to perform well, so strong is our will to identify with characters in the theatre or the cinema. When Brechtian techniques are applied to a play or opera by someone other than Brecht, it almost never comes off and, ironically, becomes culinary itself as the director ticks the Brecht-effects off his list. This is the problem with so much Regietheater: it becomes about how the director can force the text into the Brechtian orthodoxy rather than about a deep exploration of the text itself. Brecht isn't to blame for this; he himself wrote that Brechtian opera was probably impossible, and considered his own forays into the genre (Threepenny Opera, Mahagonny) to have missed the mark, though he blamed Kurt Weill for that rather than himself. He wasn't a very nice man, and he rarely gave credit where it was due: look carefully at the published scripts and you can often find 'Collaborator: Elisabeth Hauptmann' in very small type at the bottom of an introductory page. In the case of Threepenny Opera she was actually the translator and adaptor of the play, Brecht having only written the song lyrics, but he was happy to take credit for the whole, especially when it became a hit. His personality was so strong and compelling, and his self-mythologising so effective, that he was able to get away with it. They are fascinating plays no matter whether it was the empirical Bertolt Brecht who wrote them or 'Brecht' the author-function, but I much prefer the real 'Brecht' to his many latter-day imitators.
Next time I'll write about some Mediterraneans.
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