His aim wasn't to just give more people access to classical music with whatever means (a la "worse is better"), but to give more people the appreciation of classical music that refined educated listeners had. To treat them as capable for that, as opposed to needing "dumbing down".
Part of that was maintaining the primacy of music over unrelated attached things, like the televised image.
Given how songs could be made hits because of their video in the MTV era, this was still prescient for popular too.
> This is the fault of the sound engineers, who subsequently engage in fundamentally quite unmusical procedures by surgically extracting these voices, which is quite in keeping with their—if I may say this—unartistic intuitions and is also congenial to the highly problematic taste of the public.
I've never been a fan of the word 'problematic' because it says so little about what the problem actually is.
Regardless, he seems to have disdain for the tastes of the public, which doesn't quite jibe with the idea that he's treating the public as capable of appreciating music without it being dumbed down.
I see a lot of defense of his arguments in this discussion, and I don't have much to add, other than to say I really don't understand it at all. I think it's really just a blind spot in how I think about art, but asserting that a televised performance of an orchestra playing some classical music is 'pointless' doesn't make sense to me.
A 1983 Webster's Collegiate gives the definition of problematic as "1: a. difficult to settle or decide b. not definite or settled c. open to question or debate 2: expressing or supporting a possibility".
(Bold type, proffered synonyms, and examples omitted.)
The sense of "problematic" as in "you've got a problem" developed after 1968, perhaps after 1990.
I had no idea, thanks for pointing this out! I'm mostly frustrated with the modern usage, usually when used in reference to someone or some entity's behavior. Every time I hear it I want to understand what exactly the issue is.
So if I go back and reread the quote that I had posted, is the critique that the public's tastes are not fixed, and change across geography and time? I'm still not sure what he was really getting at, I guess.
> This is the fault of the sound engineers, who subsequently engage in fundamentally quite unmusical procedures by surgically extracting these voices, which is quite in keeping with their—if I may say this—unartistic intuitions and is also congenial to the highly problematic taste of the public.
This sentence scores as 'extremely difficult' or 'difficult' on most readability scores, and it's just unnecessarily flowery.
Basically, I think the point is that the idea of the 'taste of the public' is just a shorthand for 'something that appeals to lots of people with differing tastes'.
The author's key point (I think) is that 'engineering' music somehow makes it less artistic, and the 'problematic taste of the public' is a tangent which explores why sound engineers do what they do, rather than being part of the main argument.
It was adapted from an interview which took place with Der Spiegel, so I guess it was originally in German, although I haven't found the original. My guess would be there are less complicated translations, but I might be wrong.
Regardless, I think you're right, the target audience of this as it's written probably would not have issues understanding it.
I think the common modern usage of that word is kinda an euphemism for "yucky because they're not woke enough". I've never seen it used outside that context, personally...
Caricaturing progressive ideas as some linear scale of 0 - Not Woke, 10 - Wokest is such a lame way to avoid the real points being made on a given subject.
>Regardless, he seems to have disdain for the tastes of the public, which doesn't quite jibe with the idea that he's treating the public as capable of appreciating music without it being dumbed down.
Their "tastes" are not set in stone - and according to him they're not even consciously their own to begin with, in the sense that they arrived at them with knowledge of the possible options and/or after cultivating them. Just conditioning from the music industry and lack of education. Like a teenager who defaults to the current hits everybody listens to.
Rather one of the things based on the idea that "personal preferences" as in "everything is personal taste, bro, and as good as another, if you like it you like it", is a bad aesthetic and even moral default - backed by a certain line of development of culture and aesthetic ideas for a couple of millenia before the mass market era arrived (America, once it developed beyond barebones settles was almost always embedded in it like fish in the water -with the exception of some European leaning academics and such-, so ideologically can't even understand it could be any different to begin with).
Which is less than some definite objective final measurement (as it's not physics, it's culture, and it's impossible), but a lot more than "personal preferences".
the way I've dealt with semi-related issues is to regard 'engineered music' as it's own artform distinct from live music
the archetype I'm trying to follow is painting. when the camera was invented photorealistic paintings became usless and what followed was impressionism, which focused on what the cameras cannot do.
however I do not think music has reacted to reccording technology in the same way painting did (pretending for one sentence that 'music' and 'painting' are entities with agency). I don't think there's an "impressionistic" movement within music that arose as a response to reccording technology, at least not yet.
> I've never been a fan of the word 'problematic' because it says so little about what the problem actually is.
I don’t think that’s the real problem with the word “problematic”. So many other words have the same problem—“bad” doesn’t say anything about what the badness is, “difficult” doesn’t say anything about the difficulty, etc. “Green” doesn’t say anything about greenness.
I think the problem people have with problematic is that you’re taking a subjective claim and making it sound like a property of the object. If the taste of the public is “problematic” then it means that someone has a problem with it, but that someone is absent from the sentence.
The word “problematic” is, eh, fine. Writers and speakers shouldn’t be injecting subjects into sentences just because the sentences express opinion. There’s not necessarily any kind of clear subject to introduce. The author/speaker is usually better used as an implicit subject for subjective statements.
I have other problems in Adorno’s claims here but I have somewhat accepted the word “problematic”.
Nah, "problematic" as used commonly today is, well, problematic:
Kind of like "woke" and some others, perhaps "toxic", it's used as a placeholder for a feeling/idea that the speaker believes to be commonplace, but is often VERY ill-defined, and thus ends up muddying the discussion and/or leaving things unsaid that do deserve more consideration.
Kind of like the words “good” or “bad”, or “smart”, or “ugly”, or a million other subjective, contextual ideas?
Words that are ill-defined and leave things unsaid are the norm. If you want clarity, you need sentences, paragraphs, and context. Those sentences will be filled with words that, individually, and stripped of their context, are unclear.
I think of it like the writing advice that tells you not to use words like good, bad, and nice, since they are low information density. My general feeling is you could replace the word problematic with a much more specific word in every single context where it's used, and the message would be clearer.
Ok, could you replace Umberto Eco’s use of the word “problematic”?
It seems like just the right word to use here, and in many places. I think some people just dislike the word “problematic” on an emotional level, and conjure up some justification for that emotional reaction.
Ah, I wasn't clear; I was referring to the modern usage which seem to mean "a thing that I see problems with". I'm unfamiliar with the original definition and have never heard it colloquially, so I'm not sure how it's used.
This is an old discussion now, so I won't post too much more here, but in responding to this, I decided to do a bit of research on "problematic", and it seems (from Merriam Webster) that the first use was in 1609, and was indeed exactly the sense we use it today: "posing a problem: difficult to resolve or decide". https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/problematic
So let's say Umberto Eco's use of problematic was indeed in this sense (as I haven't heard a very compelling alternative). My point is that _he_ could replace problematic with what he's really trying to say, but of course I can't because I'm not the speaker and I don't know what he means. But I can take a few (bad) guesses:
1) The public's music taste is a problem for him because they don't appreciate the aspects of music that he thinks are most valuable. In this case, the phrase would be "congenial to the unsophisticated taste of the public".
2) The public's taste could be a problem because they want easy, convenient access to music via radio and TV, and Eco believes the true value of music can only be expressed live, where the listener has more agency. The phrase here would be "congenial to the convenience the public demands".
3) Maybe the public just doesn't like classical music, and like rock instead. Maybe ""congenial to the modern music taste of the public" would work here.
I could go on and on: the point is, if this were written instead of spoken, and I were the editor, and circle the work "problematic" in red and write in the margin "What are you really trying to convey here?" It would then be a discussion point with the author to dig into the real point so it could be conveyed clearly. But this is an (translated?) interview, so I don't think that bar is appropriate, but I still think there's ambiguity.
I don’t think you’ve articulated a reasonable or valid complaint against the word “problematic”.
Words convey very little in isolation. When somebody uses the word “problematic”, it’s only in a larger context—sentences and paragraphs, just to start with.
> …I still think there's ambiguity.
I don’t see how this complaint applies to “problematic” but not, say, your use of the word “ambiguity” here. What are you saying is ambiguous or unclear about the word “problematic”? Why are you saying it is ambiguous or unclear?
You are asking the reader to do some of the work and figure out what you mean by that. But that is ALWAYS true, in every sentence, with every word. I think you are basing your complaint against the word “problematic” on some imagined usage of it in a particular context, and without that context, the complaint just isn’t grounded.
Again, to jump in here -- I mean "problematic" as you usually see it on social media/pop culture today. And the issue is that it's kind of a cowardly word. The person wants to make a serious accusation without being too open/bold about it; they're implying, but not saying outright, something potentially damaging/devastating if true, but a bad look for the accuser if false.
Thus, they often should say more precisely what they are implying; often e.g. this person is racist, or a pedophile, or homophobic, etc.
You’re referring to some usage of the word “problematic” and you’re making an assumption that we have enough shared context that I can understand what you’re talking about—but honestly, no, no, I do not understand what you’re talking about.
I think you are just complaining about some specific usage of the word, and there are a lot of words which happen to be used poorly—like “dopamine” which people use to talk about the feeling of scrolling through social media. This isn’t a complaint about the word “dopamine” but a complaint against its misuse!
> And the issue is that it's kind of a cowardly word.
I think, at the core, complaints against the word “problematic” can be boiled down to emotional sentiments like this.
> Thus, they often should say more precisely what they are implying; often e.g. this person is racist, or a pedophile, or homophobic, etc.
Usage of the word “problematic” to describe people is somewhat minor, I think. I definitely didn’t think of this usage. I see the word “problematic” used to describe practices, processes, ideas, situations, etc.
Sometimes, a problem is complicated and multifaceted. You can’t boil it down to a single thing like “pedophilia”. The word “problematic” is there to say “there are problems with this, but those problems are many and don’t boil down to some simple, other word.”
We need both broad and specific words. The correct, specific word does not always exist.
Sure -- to refine even more: I mean "problematic" as it is used in pop culture, social media, today -- often among generally "liberal" leaning folks (which I'd include myself in) and again, I can tell you what they're trying to say is in reference to a public figure or situation that has the appearance of supporting a currently taboo person or subject. And when it's done, I find it to be the kind of thing that SHOULD have more discussion, but doesn't.
I believe the most common example is probably "enjoying art made by someone who did ostensibly bad things," especially where the range of "bad" here is kind of broad.
Like, Dave Chappelle, JK Rowling, Kid Rock, Louis CK, R. Kelly, Woody Allen, Diddy etc. are all people who someone might say it's "problematic" to enjoy their art, but that's a WIDE range.
I think "problematic" is more or less used a synonym for "bad", except the speaker wants to indicate "this isn't just not to my personal tastes, you are a wicked person if you don't agree".
They really didn’t know what they were doing back then. Art so obtuse you ned to be educated on how to enjoy it. Modern stuff is much better, you don’t even need so much as an instruction manual. We’ve come quite far really.
I think the problem is that they didn’t produce enough culture. So, they had to stretch each bit out by pretending the process of sitting around and trying to figure out how to enjoy it was in and of itself enjoyable.
I sort of assume any classical musician I’ve ever heard of would be regarded by somebody like Adorno as popular tripe.
I dunno. I don’t like either of those artists, Swift or Minaj, but I’m sure they’ve brought a lot of joy into people’s lives. By what metric can we call them not good? Happiness provided? They score quite well. Some kind of complexity? Sure, not great… but if we pick that metric the high scores list will presumably be dominated by nonsense jazz inspired electronics artists with super fast drum machines, or something like that.
Given songs could be made hits because of their videos - that's arguably the opposite of prescient, because it turned out that the televised image was not actually unrelated but in fact a new core integral aspect of a new art form, the music video!
that's art too, and a pretty narrow selection of it. Music videos are awesome. Pretty good short video essay type deal that I think captures some of the highlights of what makes them tick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FdMkgxOPlo
I think you'll find that simply pointing to how TV enabled a whole bunch of new music videos that are fun and speak to a popular demand while ignoring the explosion of other music videos that push the boundaries of the art isn't actually that compelling an argument that new forms of art are bad. Music went from a luxury to something that soundtracks everyday people's everyday lives - there's more of everything and that's awesome.
It also spawned groundbreaking artistic and creative videos such as those for “Take on Me” and “Money for Nothing,” so it wasn’t all dreck. Those videos are probably more widely and fondly remembered today than all the hair-band ones are.
Watching a symphony on a (maybe) 19" B&W TV as a probably grainy NTSC broadcast and listened to through a small tinny speaker... well, let's just say we're not talking the Met Live in HD on a home theater system. I know the person being interviewed here has other points to make. But it's probably also the case that classical symphonic and chamber music particularly probably translates less well to broadcast/"film" than other forms of art which are generally more dependent on the presentation than just the music itself.
Adorno is someone who frequently mistook his personal preferences for universal truths, but he is a very smart and observant person who is worth engaging with seriously.
> On the whole I believe that the very act of performing music on television entails a certain displacement that is detrimental to musical concentration and the meaningful experience of music.
I think this is largely correct, and I'd go further -- that even concert settings can be detrimental to the meaningful experience of music. Forget classical or pop music or jazz or whatever other style of music Adorno thought everyone should listen to. It's a frequent complaint of dance music enthusiasts and just music fans in general that crowds focus to much on looking at what the DJ is doing or taking pictures with their phone instead of _dancing_ and living in the moment. I mean everyone is free to take what enjoyment they want out of whatever experience they want, but I do think that music is primarily meant to be enjoyed through listening and (often) dancing, and anything that distracts from that makes the experience less about music as music and more about something else -- music as a mere soundtrack for spectacle or celebrity or whatever rather than something to be enjoyed on its own terms.
Adorno was Frankfurt school. He opposed "culture industry." He loved Schoenberg's music because it was challenging. He hated pop music of any kind because it was the opposite - an easily pleasing pablum to sell to and control people.
I don't agree with him but I think his concerns were/are valid.
Going into this piece knowing that probably changes the way it's read. In that light, Adorno is pulling his punches and being very well-behaved here.
This was well after two of the most important televised musical performances of the 20th century, both on the Ed Sullivan Show- Elvis in 1956 and the Beatles in 1964. Of course, Professor Adorno probably wouldn't have regarded either of those as "music".
“[They are no longer by any means coming into contact with the thing itself but rather with a predissected, cliché-ridden product of the culture industry, which gives them the illusory sense that they could become actively involved in culture.”
It's more about having the choice of what to look at being decided for the viewer.
And about making clear that the proles who think they're enjoying music just because they're enjoying it aren't actually part of "culture" because they're not enjoying it in the "right" way. In a sense he's right - televised and recorded music didn't lead to people participating in his image of music culture. It created a new one that was massively more accessible, making music much more prevalent in everyday life than it ever had been, while unlocking new avenues of artistic expression unimaginable a few centuries ago.
In that context his argument carries a lot of weight I think - the classical music culture was truly one that evolved for the medium of the live performance. We'd be making the same mistake he's making if we thought we were fully appreciating it through a recorded or visual medium, since in our cultural context it is easy for us to be as dismissive of the importance of the live aspect of classical music as it is for him to be dismissive of the recorded and visual aspect of televised music
That's like saying that spending hours of your day stuck between two lanes of traffic in a gray highway is not bad because people went outside before cars.
it seems to me that for that analogy to hold you must be assuming that being inside a car is a form of being outside?
Which is an assumption I would not make, and I suppose most people would not think that being inside their car was being outside, but I haven't surveyed for responses.
> Here the mass media—which precisely because they are technical media are duty-bound to forgo everything unseemly and gratuitous—are conforming to the abominable convention of showcasing lady harpsichordists with snail-shell braids over their ears who brainlessly and ineptly execute Mozart on jangly candlelit ancient keyboards.
Man, this guy would have hated piano youtubers.
Is there any argument here other than "Adorno is an old git who hates change, young people, and popular entertainment"?
> Consequently, when the masses come into contact with it, they are no longer by any means coming into contact with the thing itself but rather with a predissected, cliché-ridden product of the culture industry, which gives them the illusory sense that they could become actively involved in culture.
"Once everyone likes it, it's no longer good"
It's a remarkably small-c conservative screed for someone who's normally classified as a left philosopher.
>Is there any argument here other than "Adorno is an old git who hates change, young people, and popular entertainment"?
Yes, he makes several clear arguments.
Is there argument to your comment aside from the ad-hominem and the tired ageism / "old folks hate young people" cliche?
Of course there's also a context to his critique, which is not any naive "young vs old", or "change is bad/good" (he cites Alban Berg and was all for avant guarde developments, hardly someone against "change"), but related to a high culture with centuries of development.
It's like people talking about French cuisine, and someone comes in chiming how McDonalds is great and young people like it. Not the same cultural context. Of course the latter cultural context also doesn't believe there is any hierarchy of cultural contexts and practices besides "personal taste", so any discussion of particular practices and their merits or lack thereof is moot within it.
>It's a remarkably small-c conservative screed
Only for those conflating mass market populism, mass culture, and relativism as some kind of liberating concept.
He (and many others of the left and even some of the right) have written thousands of pages against that idea.
> Is there any argument here other than "Adorno is an old git who hates change, young people, and popular entertainment"?
I think there is a very serious argument going on here. The nub of it is in this paragraph:
> I don’t think there’s any such thing as a pedagogical path to the essential that starts out by getting people to concentrate on the inessential. This sort of attention that fixates on the inessential actually indurates; it becomes habitual and thereby interferes with one’s experience of the essential. I don’t believe that when it comes to art there can ever be any processes of gradual familiarization that gradually lead from what’s wrong to what’s right. Artistic experience always consists in qualitative leaps and never in that murky sort of process.
Adorno is basically saying that the distortion of the experience of listening to music inevitably caused by dressing it up for mass broadcast results in a dilution of what is 'essential' in that music – roughly speaking, the capacity for revelation. The attempt to make the music more 'accessible', usually by cloaking it in cliché (what he calls here "the whole Salzburg phantasmagoria"), divests it of the potential to be revelatory. It actively lessens the chance of experiencing one of the "qualitative leaps" of understanding he's looking for in music—something beyond words, beyond discourse; an experience of the sublime, of something both absolutely beyond us and yet, afterwards, constitutive of us. Something that cannot be learned (no "pedagogical path"), but which can be known. It's obviously a high bar to set (almost insane, certainly irrational, to most people today) but it's worth engaging with, I think.
I think you're right that Adorno would despise most YouTube musicians. After all, there is hardly a better example of the fetishisation of technique, equipment, and process (not to mention the unquestioning habituation to cliché) than what you'll find on the average YouTuber's channel. (I say this as a regular watcher of many YouTube guitarists, some of whom I really like.) The idea, totally general on such channels, that you can follow existing patterns and paths to mastery (where the satisfaction comes from memetic reproduction of the already known) is obviously antithetical to the view of art and revelation outlined above.
Finally, I don't think there's anything conservative about Adorno's argument here. He is ultimately arguing against holding up what already exists (the Western classical tradition, in this case) as a fixed symbol of greatness, ready to bestow its gifts of historical authority and sophistication on anyone intelligent enough to encounter it. Adorno is saying the greatness of a work cannot be divorced from the nature of both its presentation and the audience's engagement with it. It is a sometimes subtle but I think fundamental difference of perspective to the conservative view of 'the canon'.
It's a fools errand to put elitist classical music and opera on TV to compete with the slop when mass TV dispersion is anti-elitism to the core, operating over the work week schedule not the broadway season.
Any one who cares about experiencing art as a pastime can see that government subsidies of culture performances could be better spent anywhere else than TV. Surely the TV station will just game it so whatever appears on the screen is slop-adjacent, they never wanted a high-culture wing, they gain nothing from a critical thinking audience.
Hooray for public broadcasters. They do it in my country too. If you have good sound system connected to the TV it can be quite nice, though it's still not nearly the same as being there. And the recordings are available to be streamed.
A lot of people (like myself) don't even get broadcast/cable TV any longer. But lots of stuff streaming/purchased if you want it.
Being there is certainly different (plusses and minuses). But, of course, things like world-class opera and ballet aren't widely available (and are expensive).
Public broadcasters offer the same content as live stream or on demand. You can watch with a phone if you want to. Some summer we watched football world cup with a friend while having beers outside.
But arte is clearly not good because of music. They do some,but what we watch it for are their mindblowing and regular documentaries they either produce or purchase. As well as their debate shows (I can spend a month watching their daily debates show C dans l'air).
But there is something I learned eventually: I work deep in finance now, on a trading floor in HK, and all their cool documentaries about Finance feel to me, now, very populist and not very honest: so they probably have an agenda trending left wing at least in France. Which is fine, just need to know.
I think AI is BS, but if it could voice-translate to English most of Arte, maybe that'd be interesting enough.
Am not GP, but my experience is that the deeper I know a topic, the more uninformed and slanted any reporting / documentary / media article becomes.
It’s probably natural, because (1) journalists only have a given amount of space to convey an idea, (2) need to capture a non-expert audience, (3) are usually working across a broad range of topics.
Extrapolating from my specializations I can say that most documentaries on arte.tv - even while having to compress and simplify by necessity - had been pretty poignant actually. German and French documentaries for example also tend to be pretty "dry" from the edutainment perspective. I'd call that a feature.
I don't agree that any reporting / media gets it overly / inherently wrong the deeper your knowledge is. There are plenty of great journalists out there that often have varied and deep backgrounds on topics and / or interface well with top experts for the given material they are publicizing.
I don't know about that. The BBC have had great success with the Proms festival[1]. Tickets to go in person are cheap (if you're promming ie standing that is) although you have to queue to get them, and everything is broadcast on TV. The quality of the music is extremely high with a mix of new commissions, established works etc.
The key thing is that it is a public service broadcaster though. I don't think it would be possible otherwise.
“Yes, one’s attention is drawn away from the essential things and towards the inessential ones, namely, away from the music as an end and towards the means, the manner, in which the keyboardists and wind players and string players are playing it. But I’d like to point out that these irritating practices are well established in the techniques of all forms of mechanical reproduction. In radio and in many gramophone recordings one also encounters a predilection for accentuating so-called principal voices or so-called melodies out of all proportion to their place in the musical fabric. This is the fault of the sound engineers, who subsequently engage in fundamentally quite unmusical procedures by surgically extracting these voices, which is quite in keeping with their—if I may say this—unartistic intuitions and is also congenial to the highly problematic taste of the public. … What results from this is that certain middle-of-the-road so-called euphony, that culinary seasoning of the sound at the expense of all the structural elements of the music.”
My son saw a Don Hertzfeldt animation on the large screen and was struck (again. we had theater'd on it's release.) by how much more immersive and piercing it was on a large screen.
This is say that smaller (and less defined) television screens diminish on their own, compared to richer alternatives.
Not criticizing small video, just endorsing the more enveloping mediums.
His aim wasn't to just give more people access to classical music with whatever means (a la "worse is better"), but to give more people the appreciation of classical music that refined educated listeners had. To treat them as capable for that, as opposed to needing "dumbing down".
Part of that was maintaining the primacy of music over unrelated attached things, like the televised image.
Given how songs could be made hits because of their video in the MTV era, this was still prescient for popular too.