After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology

by Tia DeNora
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003
192 pp. illus. 12 b/w. Trade, £42.50; Paper, £15.99
ISBN:0-521-53724-X; ISBN: 0-521-83025-7.

Reviewed by David Beer
University of York and York St John College

david[dot]beer@britishlibrary[dot]net

The writings of Theodor Adorno often attract fairly firm criticism. His work is often dismissed on the grounds of its deterministic, curmudgeonly, or elitist nature. This criticism has perhaps snowballed as these dominant critical readings have become increasingly ingrained in contemporary social theory. With this in mind, it is perhaps surprising to find that in much of the recent literature on popular music, music technology, and, in the case of DeNora’s work, music in everyday life, the critique and application of Adorno’s work has taken centre stage in the development of new approaches and theoretical frameworks. We have now reached a point, as foreseen by DeNora, where a reappraisal of Adorno’s legacy has become near essential for the future of the sociology of music, and, more broadly, I would argue, for a sociology of technology and culture.

Often close readings of Adorno’s work uncover new dimensions and new intricacies that contradict both his own writings and these dominant readings of his work. The contradictions inherent within Adorno’s work, and between dominant readings of his work, make the construction of monological or totalising interpretations extremely problematic.

In this text DeNora is concerned with reconsidering Adorno’s work by formulating a detailed critique of his theoretical conceptualisations and then attempting to apply these within empirical research practices. The objective of which is to overcome the problems that DeNora identifies in Adorno’s work, which are, first, that he theorises on a level that is too general, and, second, that his work is abstract and does not attempt to access music in the everyday day lives of the listener. The angle that DeNora is adopting here could well have descended into an unconstrained celebration of Adorno’s failings. However, DeNora treats Adorno’s work with a great deal of care. Her critical evaluations of his work do not overly dwell upon the perceived problems. Rather Adorno’s work is used here as a point of departure for a reassessment of DeNora’s own research projects. The problem that DeNora inevitably encounters is that as she moves toward an analysis of her own data she tends to leave Adorno behind. As a result the text feels like it is constructed around two poles. On one side, we find the abstract, the theory, and the concept; on the other, we find the microscopic analysis, the case study, and the analysis of music in people’s everyday lives. I would suggest that this is an almost insurmountable problem, because, as it seems clear from a reading of DeNora’s text, Adorno did not intend for his writings to be used in this type of research. DeNora must, therefore, be offered a good deal of credit for facilitating such a successful empirical application of Adorno’s work, a practice that is tantamount to inserting a square peg in a round hole.

With this aside, and perhaps ignoring Adorno’s own attempts at empirical research——in his analysis of the symphony on the radio or the opera on the long playing record——DeNora has constructed a valuable text that, through the critical evaluation of Adorno’s writings, has created a pragmatic reference point for the study of music, and for the study of the ways in which music effects, either passively or actively, people’s everyday lives. This is not an easily obtainable objective. Music is one of those black boxes, those hidden elements, those concealed practices and cultural forms, that cannot be illuminated without small scale case studies of the type used by DeNora.

Overall, this is an interesting text that creates a variety of opportunities for future research. The development of further understandings of the ways in which music is appropriated in the reflexive stimulation of memory and emotions is one amongst a set of opportunities that emerge from a reading of this text. However, I would like to suggest that the next step requires a detailed critique of DeNora’s approach, and of the empirical techniques that form the foundation of the text, so that the strategy of critique and application adopted by DeNora is reflected back upon After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology.