'Music' tag archive

Sebastian Truskolaski, Adorno and the Ban on Images (London: Bloomsbury, 2021). 232pp., £85.00 hb., £28.99 pb., 978 1 35012 920 7 hb., 978 1 35012 9 221 pb. These notes are from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in C Minor, written between 1804 and 1808. Even listeners who do not read music can easily recognise the melody. […]

‘There is no beginning and no end in music … Some people want it to end but it goes on’ Florian Schneider, 1975 Not long after the death of Florian Schneider was announced in May of this year, 1 I re-watched the 1979 film Radio On, directed by Chris Petit, and co-produced by Wim Wenders. […]

Fumi Okiji, Jazz as Critique: Adorno and Black Expression Revisited (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018), 160pp., £58.00 hb., £17.99 pb., 978 1 50360 202 1 hb., 978 1 50360 585 5 pb. During a public discussion to mark a 2018 career retrospective show at The New Museum in New York, John Akomfrah was asked a […]

[Music] itself must act upon time, not lose itself to it; must stem itself against the empty flood. Theodor W. Adorno 1 Music is our witness, and our ally. The ‘beat’ is the confession which recognises, changes, and conquers time.Then, history becomes a garment we can wear, and share, and not a cloak in which […]

A girl who wishes for the interesting becomes a trap in which she herself is caught. A girl who does not wish for the interesting believes in repetition. Constantin Constantius Like everyone else, I found out about the death of Mark E. Smith, singer and dominant force of the Manchester post-punk group The Fall, on […]

• The ImporlaDce of . SlockhauseD’s IINORl’ Gabriel losi2Qvici On Wednesday 23 Octob-e-r-I-=9=’=7=-4=–a-n-e-v-e-n-t-o-t-o-u-t-s-t-a-n-d—–t-~-:-‘o-n-s-t-o~b-e-u-n-de-r-t-a-k=–e-n-,-g-e-s-t-ur-e-s-t-o–b-e-ma-d-e-,-w-o-rds ing artistic importance took place at the London Coliseum: th~ first English performance of Stockhausen’s latest work, Inori, subtitled ‘Adorations for Soloist and Orchestra’. The soloist on this occasion was a mime, the extraordinary Elisabeth Clarke, and I am not sure whether […]

Commentary Backwoods musicology Roger Scruton’s aesthetics of music Ben watson Roger Scruton is a right-wing pundit regularly rolled out by the British media to voice ʻbravely unfashionableʼ points of view. After the march against New Labour organized by the Countryside Alliance, he published a book in defence of fox-hunting. However, unlike most backwoods right-wingers, Scruton […]

News Walls of theoryNOISETHEORYNOISE#1, Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University, 6 March 2004 ‘n oise is an unmapped continent, in comparison with which everything we recognize as music remains a parochial backwaterʼ, announced the organizers of this conference. Disdaining ʻpostmodern academicismʼs ostentatious displays of theoretical chicʼ, noise will invent its own theory. […]

COMMENTARYPhilosophizing post-punk Ben watson Philosophers are talking more about music than they did in the past. This is partly to do with the rise of Adornoʼs star in the philosophical firmament and the fact that over half of his writings are devoted to music. But it is also because a generation that imbibed punk in […]

Ben Watson assesses Beefheart's work as a protest against those who profit from the very separation of elite and mass music.