Summary
For Adorno the habit of listening to long-range musical thought, in which themes are subjected to extended melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic development, is connected to the ability to live beyond the moment, to transcend the search for instant gratification, to set aside the routines of the consumer society, with its constant pursuit of the "fetish," and to put real values in the place of fleeting desires. Musical idioms don't come in sealed packets, with no relation to the rest of human life. [...] when a particular kind of music surrounds us in public spaces, when it invades every café, bar, and restaurant, when it blares at us from passing motor cars and dribbles from the open taps of radios and iPods all over the planet, the critic may seem to stand like the apocryphal King Canute before an irresistible tide, uttering useless cries of indignation.
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Extract
Music and Morality
THE WAYS OF POETRY AND MUSIC are not Changed anywhere without change in the most important laws of the city." So wrote Plato in the Republic (4.424c). Music, for Plato, was not a neutral amusement. It could express and encourage virtue-nobility, dignity, temperance, chastity. But it could also express and encourage vice- sensuality, belligerence, indiscipline.
Plato's concern was not so very different from that of a modern person worrying about the moral character, and moral effect, of Death Metal, say, or musical kitsch of the Andrew Lloyd Webber kind. "Should our children be listening to this stuff?" is the question in the mind of modern adults, just as "should the city permit this stuff?" was the question in the mind...See the full content of this document
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