In addition to displaying a remarkable capacity for integration that disturbs normative distinctions between “sacred” and “secular” music, the church’s incorporation of genres with such a multitude of cultural referents problematizes any division between “mass culture” and “high culture.”
This point seems particularly relevant, given the substantial body of literature aimed at locating the division between the sacred and profane, especially in the context of late capitalism. One author who approaches this issue in a roundabout way is Stephen A. Marini, whose book Sacred Song in America is largely occupied with the popularization of religious music, either in its relation to public performance, or, increasingly in the final chapters of the book, the production and commercialization of religious music.[1]
For Marini, this issue is significant because “the performance of sacred song plainly [sic] has the capacity to transform individuals and communities. This ability to convey believers from everyday consciousness into sacred experience is a defining characteristic of religion” (321-322). In other words, the mechanisms of global capitalism threaten the transformative potential of sacred song. Thus, gospel music “faces the challenge of maintaining religious and artistic authenticity in the face of ever-increasing influence from patrons, producers, and distributors,” while music composed by those trained in the conservatory “seems to escape the worst of Adorno’s culture industry afflictions…” because composers in the latter tradition “seem more stylistically free” and at the same time are more able to resist the normalizing forces of the culture industry (326). Marini’s use of Adorno to frame this argument is particularly fascinating, and in the following, I want to argue that Marini’s creative misreading of Adorno becomes a central component of his own thesis.
Earlier in the book, Marini effectively reduces Adorno’s writings on music and the culture industry to a simple, two-point argument. First, Marini insists, “Adorno understood the arts in the preindustrial world as expressions of individual freedom, human suffering, and cultural resistance to the dominant powers of society” (313), a claim that is then balanced by the following, complementary statement: “The heart of Adorno’s critique is his moral claim that commodified music has lost its capacity to inspire individual freedom and articulate human suffering in the face of ‘petrified’ social structures” (315). This misreading of Adorno is understandable, but it is nevertheless unacceptable because Marini fails to communicate the nuance of Adorno’s argument or situate Adorno’s thought in any kind of context. Rather, when it is phrased this way, Marini’s reading of Adorno seems to be modeled more on Marini’s own concerns that the commodification of sacred music is threatening to obstruct its transformative power than Marini’s reading elucidates Adorno’s culturally specific concerns.
NOTES
[1]
Stephen A. Marini, Sacred Song in America: Religion, Music, and Public Culture (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2003). In this and future posts, page numbers will be referred to parenthetically.
[2]
See Aesthetic Theory, trans. by Christian Lenhardt (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 221. For Adorno, art is “authentic” when it “engages the crisis of meaning” in in a critical capacity, while in “resigned” art, “the negation of meaning” merely “represents an adaptation to the status quo” without the crucial element of critical refection. Originally published in German in 1970, the year after Adorno’s death, Aesthetic Theory is Adorno’s final manuscript and represents the culmination of his modernist philosophy of art; it was incomplete at the time of his death and has been published in a lightly edited, fragmentary form.
[3]
See Max Paddison, Adorno, Modernism and Mass Culture: Essays on Critical Theory and Music (London: Kahn & Averill, 1996 [Rev. ed., 2004]), 51-52: “Although the book [Aesthetic Theory] is not exclusively occupied with modern art, it is nevertheless clear that the underlying theme is the dilemma of modernism, and that the extensive discussion of earlier art and aesthetic theories is conducted always in terms of the relationship to the position of the avant garde.” For Adorno, the dilemma of modernism is “the predicament of the artist caught between…the traditional demands of the art work for unity and integration” and “the loss of faith in any overarching unity on both individual and social levels in the face of the evident fragmentation of modern existence” (52).
