Adorno's Fetish Character in Music: A 1938 Critique of Musical Taste

In a 1938 text, Theodor W. Adorno examines the decline of musical taste, arguing that the concept of taste has been replaced by knowledge of harmony and disharmony, truth and falsehood. Pleasing and displeasing have become inappropriate terms; liking is now synonymous with recognizing. The root cause is the rise of standardized musical commodities, which oppose the spiritual in art that reveals itself only in the whole, not in isolated material moments. Adorno deploys a discourse of dual oppositions across political and aesthetic planes, at the intersection of Marxist and modernist theses, to denounce bourgeois culture and its power of banalization, focusing on modes of reproduction and diffusion of music and sound. All musical mediations—the musician, the record—are viewed as fetishes (stardom, ownership of melodies). This reification, though not unfounded, proves too reductive. For Adorno, music as commodity leads men to silence; it subjugates. This known thesis presupposes, from Marx to Debord, that the exclusion or alienation of the individual by the production apparatus also generates manipulation through belief. Yet, if there is a 'philosophical fetish' of the past century, it is precisely this supposed double ignorance. Adorno's theses, of undeniable historical interest and crossed by brilliant intuitions, have been partially contradicted by music itself.