Adorno

From Philosophy Lecturer to Advanced Student 203

He not only retained his negative judgement on jazz but, if anything, he
intensified it. His attitude towards jazz now verged on the vitriolic. Thus
he could write, with revealing frankness:

I remember clearly the shock I felt on hearing the word ‘jazz’ for

the first time. It seemed plausible to think that it was related to

the German word ‘Hatz’ [= the hunt] and evoked images of blood-

hounds in pursuit of a slower prey. At any rate, the typographic

picture seems to contain the same threat of castration as the jazz

orchestra with the piano lid gaping wide.^69

It was evidently no more than a short step from here to establishing a
speculative link between jazz and pogroms. He thought that popular
jazz pieces contained a mixture of sentimentality and comedy and
inferred that this corresponded to ‘the reverse side of the fun that turns
to cruelty in a pogrom’.^70
Adorno’s essay ‘On Jazz’ represented his first return to the pages of
the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung after a break of four years. On this
occasion, too, it was a musicological study that succeeded, in Adorno’s
own view, in ‘effectively decoding jazz and defining its social function’.^71
He gave this confident assessment of his own work to both Benjamin
and Krenek. He regarded Krenek as someone ‘who has revealed know-
ledge concerning the most recherché aspects of music such as I have
hardly ever encountered in anyone before.’^72 Nevertheless, Adorno’s
various essays on jazz play no part in his correspondence with Krenek.
This is very striking because Krenek makes use of the idiom of jazz in
his opera Jonny spielt auf, and would have been the ideal person with
whom to discuss it. Although Adorno won’t hear anything said against
his essay, he seems to have kept quiet about his ideas about jazz in his
dealings with Krenek.

Setbacks...

As with the earlier essay on ‘The Social Situation of Music’, in this
instance too Adorno had chosen to appear in the Zeitschrift für
Sozialforschung with a contribution on the sociology of music. He was
particularly anxious to avoid being labelled as no more than an expert
on music, and so was very concerned to have a critique of Karl
Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge published, an essay he had revised
and improved a number of times during his last two years in Oxford. He
had hoped that this essay would establish him as a social theorist. His
Husserl studies should help him to obtain an English degree, but over
and above that they should demonstrate his qualifications as an academic
philosopher. He was therefore bitterly disappointed when Horkheimer
declined to print either the essay on Mannheim or a longer piece on