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my post-adolescent mind thrilled to the opulent negativity of adorno's proclamations, some of which i can still recite off the top of my head: "to write poetry after auschwitz is barbaric." "the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant." "every work of art is an uncommitted crime." "the whole is the false" . . . but he is not quite as solemn as he seems; he can be hilariously bitchy. here he is on the nascent american gym culture of the forties: "the very people who burst with proofs of exuberant vitality could easily be taken for prepared corpses, from whom the news of their not-quite-successful decease has been withheld for reasons of population policy." on young left-wing intellectuals: "to see them as renegades is to asses them too high; they mask mediocre faces with horn-rimmed spectacles betokening 'brilliance,' though with plain-glass lenses, solely in order to better themselves in their own eyes and in the general rat-race."a key concept in the lachenmannian weltanschauung is contamination . . . and goes back to schoenberg's epic epigram, "if it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art." the notion that popularity destroys the purity of art is so cherished in german-speaking lands—and, it should be said, on american college campuses—that it takes on the solidity of religious belief. but . . . every variety of dissonance, microtonal writing, and unpitched noise has been used in a hundred horror movies and suspense thrillers. and there is something creepy about the talk of "contamination" and "taint" . . . at the very least, hitler still casts a mysterious spell over the music scene: the project of writing according to his likes and dislikes gives him a power that should long ago have been denied.
- alex ross, "ghost sonata: what happened to german music?" the new yorker 24 march 2003
posted March 31, 2003 in art, music, print. 20042002