From Philosophy Lecturer to Advanced Student 199objections about reification. Indeed, it was thanks to reification that
‘an age-old, submerged and yet warranted relationship has been re-
established; that between music and writing.’^50 The phonograph deprives
music of its immediacy, but gives it the form of a new script that ‘will
one day become readable as “the last remaining universal language
since the construction of the tower [of Babel]”.’ Thus music relinquishes
its being as ‘mere sign’. He ended with the speculative question whether
works of art find their true language when the ‘appearance of liveliness’
has abandoned them.^51 In another article, on the ‘Crisis of Music Criti-
cism’, published in March 1935, an article he later repudiated, he argues
that the poor quality of music criticism springs from the fact that con-
temporary music critics lack the requisite education which neither the
study of music at a university nor a musical training at the conservatory
can provide. On the other hand, the crisis of music criticism reflects
‘the general fundamental fact of alienation’ that ensures that critic and
composer stand side by side without anything to bind them together.
This absence of a relationship cannot be made good by strenuous
efforts to build musical communities.^52
The critical motifs that surfaced in Adorno’s article ‘On Jazz’ can
be traced back to his deep-seated aversion to the formation of groups
and cliques among artists and those interested in the arts. He wrote the
article in his third year in Oxford, in spring 1936, and it was published
in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung under the pseudonym Hektor
Rottweiler – not a bad example in itself of the decline of music criticism
as a consequence of the critic’s own preconceived opinion.^53 Adorno
deserves credit, however, for refusing to dismiss the popularizing forms
of jazz, i.e., hits and dance music, merely as harmless entertainment and
hence to be ignored. Instead, he insists that jazz must be taken seriously
as a fait social.
Before Adorno, no one had undertaken a sociological analysis of
contemporary popular music; no one had thought that the musical struc-
ture of jazz had social significance, that it represented the precipitate
of social contradictions.^54 Moreover, Adorno did not presume to judge
jazz from an elitist standpoint, i.e., he did not condemn popular music
by comparing it unfavourably with classical music. He maintained that
turning his attention to ‘the dregs of the phenomenal world’ was an
unavoidable necessity. Popular music reflected a dialectical truth. To
regard popular music as of secondary importance was to fall into the
same trap as the listener who believes that the hit tune provides harmless
pleasure. If we think of popular songs as ephemeral products, as mere
entertainment and hence sociologically irrelevant, then we ignore the
possibility of discerning in the rubble of a declining culture the truth
about a society that manifests itself in all commercial products. Adorno’s
analysis of jazz places the emphasis on ‘its social determinants’. His
method was that of immanent analysis. He attempted to show that the
societal dimension of popularized jazz did not lie in the fact that it was