http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=7738
Elizabeth Whitcombe
The Atlantic Recording Company’s history strangely parallels the Jewish-American elite’s cultural revolution after World War II. This elite promoted Frankfurt School teaching in a effort to weaken the middle classes — their political nemesis. Atlantic Records prides itself on plugging the same socially destructive behavior.
This article explores a possible connection between http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2987 and Atlantic Records. The connection: An unnamed German professor helped Atlantic Records devise its signature sound in 1947. When this professor could no longer work with Atlantic, he was replaced by a research assistant from the Manhattan Project. I argue that this professor was Theodor Adorno.
The significance of this connection is that Atlantic Records was one of the most influential recording companies during the sexual revolution, the Civil Rights movement, and era of immigration reform. A http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=7999’s music critic. His forte was analyzing the psychological and political impact of music on listeners. He was also interested in how new recording technology changed the listening experience. Of course the point of all this interest in the technical side of music was Adorno’s passion for finding out how to use music to achieve the Frankfurt School’s leftist political aims.
Adorno knew what made music intellectually challenging, as well as what made it appeal to the masses. Very broadly, popular music appeals to our expectations about what sounds should follow one another; intellectual music challenges those expectations.
In general leftist intellectuals during the 1930s and 1940s were hostile to mass produced culture, including all forms of popular music. Both the New York Intellectuals and the Frankfurt School saw mass culture as the result of manipulation by elites, whether it was in the Soviet Union, National Socialist Germany, or capitalist, bourgeois United States. According to Adorno, mass culture appealed to base pleasures, propped up the status quo, and led to a pervasive conformity which denied the individuality and subjective experience of the masses.
Adorno considered Jazz to be one of the worst forms of popular music. He though Jazz reconciled erotic urges with traditional Western Culture: that it transformed people into insects.
He was both right and wrong. Any music with a strong, steady beat tends to absorb the listener’s attention — the beat has a focusing effect on music. The jazz of the 1920–1930s was often made from traditional tunes played loudly with a syncopated beat — an easily produced commodity that wasted energy that Adorno thought should be spent in revolution. Everything about big-band music went against Adorno’s philosophy. Fun-loving jitter-buggers indulging in their base instincts were not good revolutionary material. Rather than expressing their individuality, they were doing little more than conforming to a cultural fad.
Adorno’s desire for a socialist revolution led him to favor Modernist music that left the listener feeling unsatisfied and dislocated — music that consciously avoided harmony and predictability. He believed that only discord could usher in what Herbert Marcuse would later describe as the “return of the repressed.” This is why Adorno endlessly praised the work of Arnold Schoenberg, his coreligionist and avant-garde composer.
A recent collection of Adorno’s music criticism, Essays on Music contains the essay Why is the New Art so Hard to Understand?, originally published in 1931. In his usual opaque style, Adorno explains why the general public instinctively rejects Schoenberg and “the new music”:
The difficulty of understanding the new art has its specific basis in this necessity of consumer consciousness to refer back to an intellectual and social situation in which everything that goes beyond the given realities, every revelation of their contradictions, amounts to a threat.
In other words, in order to understand this music, people had to get beyond their consumer consciousness and realize the contradictions of middle class life. The omniscient Frankfurters were very proud of their ability to reveal to “stupid” consumers the contradictions in the Western society and the psychological inadequacies of the middle class.
Plato thought that new art styles could trigger social revolutions. This is why Plato believed that the State should carefully censor the arts to make sure they preserve the values that society is based on. Adorno and the rest of the Frankfurt School wanted to use the “new music” to undermine Western middle class values, as described more fully in my essay, The Difficult Class.
Adorno’s goal was to present his political message as the solution to the feelings of dislocation that “the new music” invoked. Adorno thought that these feelings of dissatisfaction could be used against Western Culture: He wanted listeners to associate these negative feelings with traditional lifestyles, and look toward the Frankfurters for something “better.”
Adorno’s hopes for the revolutionary potential of Schoenberg’s music were dashed because very few people wanted to listen to it. Schoenberg’s music has never been popular outside of academic circles, partly because you have to be highly musically trained to find it even interesting, much less beautiful. Even if one can appreciate the studied discord of his pieces, listening to Schoenberg is hard work.
After World War II it became clear that Adorno’s hopes for Schoenberg’s work were unfounded. The most widely respected Frankfurt School historian, Martin Jay, says that Adorno had stopped publicly criticizing contemporary popular music by 1960. This suggests that he may have changed his mind on the revolutionary potential of popular music even before that time.
Atlantic Records was founded in 1947 by Ahmet Ertegun, a Turkish-American, and Herb Abramson, who was Jewish. Much of the growth of Atlantic occurred after 1953 when music producer Jerry Wexler, also Jewish, joined the firm.
The story about Atlantic’s first sound engineer is intriguing. Atlantic moved out of Washington, DC. and into a building at 234 W 56th Street in New York in 1947. There a “German Professor” helped the young businessmen record their first jazz albums.
Ertegun told this story many times, but no one ever found out who the “German Professor” actually was.
There are clues though.
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/Whitcombe-AdornoII.html